Chapter 36: Evolution

Barry could hear two men talking behind him, so he quickened his pace.

He could tell they were cultivators from their conversation and way of speaking and after being scammed by a Winterwrath bastard back at the mines. The last thing Barry wanted right now was to be robbed in the middle of a forest for his few silver crowns.

Barry rounded a corner in the path, but he could still hear them loudly talking, "Hey John, did I tell you an Elder informed me that Evergreen peak had fallen to the Voidmind family earlier this morning?"

Barry then heard the other man chuckle, "Well, that was only to be expected with our Grand Elder away from home—not like it matters anyways. Any news on Winterwraths old peak?"

"Mhm, I guess it doesn't matter since it's all mined out, but it still stings, you know? The Voidmind family is so small that losing to them feels like an insult." The cultivator loudly sighed, "As for news on Winterwarth's peak... only some rumors, but I think Redclaw have their eyes set on it."

As Barry hastened his pace, he was only half listening to the cultivators talk. Just like all mortals, he hated everything about cultivator politics.

Barry had been born in the Blood Lotus sect five thousand miles from here, near the frost lands, and the same exact thing had happened back then when he was a child. A sudden change in leadership, rampant wars, and a reduction in earnings. It was all signs of an incoming beast tide.

Barry remembered his parents arguing at the dinner table about how they couldn't afford the ticket aboard the airship to the new sect as the beast tide was coming. Barry thought about how his father had stayed behind because he hadn't saved up enough, and the tickets' price doubled last second.

He still vividly remembered clutching the railings of the airship's deck with his tiny hands and looking down at a sea of people left behind—including his father. The old man had been waving to him with tears in his eyes while Barry's mother silently wept at his side. His five brothers and sisters that were older had consoled his mother while he had just started in shock.

At the time, Barry hadn't understood all the fuss about this beast tide, but as he'd cast his gaze to the horizon... it was pitch black. Then, as it got closer, Barry saw that it wasn't just a wave of nothingness but a dense collection of beasts. The old Blood Lotus sect was swarming with beasts within the hour, but they were far away by then.

Barry gritted his teeth as he kept marching on. He wouldn't let his family face the same fate. Barry silently swore he would mine for 20 hours a day if he had to. There was no way he would let his large family become fragmented due to the cultivator's greed. Why couldn't they just build more airships? Or take more people? Bastards, the lot of them.

Silence.

Barry's steps slowed. The cultivators had stopped talking as he had been lost in his thoughts. He cast a glance over his shoulder, but there was nothing. 'Weren't they right behind me?'

A breeze went by, rustling the golden leaves of the forest. An eerie silence sent a shiver down his spine. Barry stopped for an entire minute, but the cultivators never caught up to him. 'Is there another path through the forest? I assumed they were heading to the wall for guard duty...'

Barry loathed cultivators, just like everyone else. But he hated cultivators that slacked off from their jobs even more. Especially with the sudden change in leadership, Barry had recently noticed a disturbing lack of guards on the walls and didn't feel his family was safe.

In response to this, the Elders of Winterwrath and Evergreen had offered a monetary reward if a villager reported any incidents of younger cultivators slacking on their duty. Barry paid taxes, after all, and deserved some level of protection.

If a monster snuck up on the wall and jumped over, the villagers would be helpless to resist it. Only a cultivator has the strength to fight off a beast from the wilderness.

"Useless bastards," Barry muttered as he strode back down the path. He planned to catch a glimpse of their faces, so he had some details to describe to an Elder so he could collect the reward money.

The golden leaves that had covered the path crunched underfoot as he walked. He looked left and right, scrutinizing the surroundings for a sign of the cultivators.

Nothing.

Barry scratched his head in confusion as he saw the entrance to the forest he had entered just minutes ago. Had they really just turned around and left? Barry was about to go back, but something caught the corner of his eye.

A blood-stained leaf. Barry approached it and picked it up, twirling it in his hand. He found it odd that there was just one leaf with blood on it—and then something dripped onto it.

'Water droplet? Has it even rained...' Barry inspected the droplet and noticed it was scarlet. Blood.

Barry froze as another drop of blood hit the leaf. He slowly looked up as he heard a branch creak. A large shadow moved, and eight red eyes the size of dinner plates glared at him from above.

It was quietly chewing, and Barry could see four legs sticking out from the monster's mouth. As his eyes wandered from the beast's face, he could see the vague outline of legs that were longer than he was tall.

The memories of that beast tide flashed through his mind. Is this what his father had seen before his death? Hundreds of thousands of monsters like this surging over the frozen plains at a speed no mere mortal could hope to match?

Barry slowly walked backward, one step at a time, never breaking eye contact. He winced as the crisp leaves crunched underfoot. As he backed up and got more of the picture, he could tell the monster was definitely some kind of ash-colored spider, but it was bigger than any boar he had ever seen.

The spider kept happily munching on the cultivators without showing any sign of moving. Barry could feel the sun's warmth on his back. The exit was near, was it letting him go?

***

Ashlock watched everything from the sky. Listening to the cultivator's conversation taught him more about the beast tides and their destructive power. Currently, the incoming beast tide was Ashlock's greatest concern, as being a tree limited his options for running away.

"I need to work harder on my {Deep Roots} and creating tunnels throughout the mountain." Ashlock had focused some of his resources on his roots, but he had been more focused on furthering his cultivation recently and trying to communicate. "I wish someone would mention how long a time scale I am working with here. Is the beast tide coming this year? Next year? I have no idea."

Ashlock focused back on the situation occurring two mountain peaks away. The car-sized spider had seemed uninterested in Barry and let him pass below peacefully. Ashlock wondered why... was it because he was a mortal without Qi? Did Larry not even see the man as a worthy snack?

Ashlock knew he had very grey morals when it came to death. His human mind had lacked empathy in the first place, and now after becoming a tree, they were dulled even further.

However, Ashlock would feel bad if Larry ate the dude. "Good job Larry!" Ashlock knew the spider couldn't hear him, but maybe the emotion would get across, "Now eat those cultivators!"

Some may call Ashlock a hypocrite, but he disliked cultivators for a simple reason. They were all a threat to him. No matter how hard they tried, mortals wouldn't be able to chop him down, whereas a cultivator could annihilate him with a single ability if they were powerful enough, like the Grand Elders.

If the beast tide came and wiped all the cultivators out while leaving him alone, that would be ideal.

Ashlock had long accepted that this was a dog-eat-dog world where the ones with power killed each other for more.

He just felt the mortals going about their daily lives should be left out of the conflict, and therefore he would feel bad if Larry went around slaughtering random villagers.

Ashlock watched as the two talking cultivators entered the forest. Larry seemed interested as he slowly crept along the branches toward them like a stalking cat. Luckily, both were too busy talking to each other to notice the monstrosity above them.

"Do they not have a spiritual sense?" Ashlock was used to cultivators having extraordinary senses of their surroundings. How could they not notice Larry right above them?

Both of them stopped talking at the same time and looked up.

Now Ashlock had wondered what the possible evolutionary advantage to being such a massive spider could be... but now he had his answer.

Since Larry was the size of a car, his mouth easily engulfed the two men's bodies and crunched down. The two Evergreen cultivators didn't even have a chance to fight back before they were chomped in half and dragged back up into the canopy of the trees.

Apart from a short gasp and a crunch, the entire thing was done in complete silence. Ashlock then saw Barry come back and, after picking up a blood-soaked leaf, came face to face with Larry.

As Ashlock expected, the giant spider didn't even care about Barry, not seeing him as a threat or a potential meal. "Larry, you know humans are social creatures, right? So if you let that dude go, he will return with many cultivators..."

Alas, Larry couldn't hear him and seemed to lack the intelligence to recognize that letting such an insignificant prey escape was a terrible idea.

***

A day passed, and Ashlock decided to eat his words. Larry wasn't foolish. In fact, the spider was a tactical genius. After munching on a few more cultivators that came to investigate the patch of forest, Larry had bundled a few bodies up in silk and happily moved onto the next patch of forest. Never staying in one area for too long.

He always let villagers see him and then let them escape, alerting the cultivators, which then came to the forest to die. However, Larry was far from weak. Even when caught out due to larger groups, he could summon a storm of ash that blanketed the entire area and disrupted formations, just like Diana's mist ability. Which he then used to assassinate the cultivators one by one.

After a week, Larry finally decided to head home to Red Vine peak, likely before he got too ahead of himself and the actual powerful cultivators came. The spider hauled a sack of silk on its back containing around ten bodies, and it scared the shit out of Diana when it peaked its head through the hole in the training wall.

"Holy shit, that thing is back!" Diana shouted as she raised the blade she had been practicing with. Ashlock swore he saw Larry roll his many eyes as he just walked past Diana, climbed over the wall, and sat happily on Ashlock's branches.

"Larry, are those bodies for me?" Ashlock asked the spider through the tether of black Qi, and the spider responded by lowering the sack of bodies to the ground right next to the bench that Stella was sleeping on.

Ashlock was over the moon to finally have some human corpses to experiment with, but Larry did something he wasn't expecting. The spider climbed over his branches and perched himself up against his trunk, and then a prompt appeared in Ashlock's mind.

[Ash Spider {Larry} wishes to evolve]