Azure-Spotted Centipede 3
BOOM!
CRASH-BOOM!
“What a goddamn mess…”
Earth-shattering noise tore me out of sleep in the middle of the night.
It was the fourth night since the guests had left on their search. From the distant rocky mountain came the grinding crack of boulders slamming into one another, followed by a rolling string of thunderous booms.
“I told them to take it slow and just look around—are they quarrying the place and tossing the rocks? Don’t these people know the first thing about environmental protection? You protect the habitat so the next guy can collect, too!”
Collecting was borrowing from nature for a little while. Habitats, above all, had to be protected. No matter how desperate they were for their daughter’s sake, a party of about thirty people looked ready to obliterate the entire habitat.
“Wait—do they even have gunpowder or dynamite out here?”
Ever since I woke up in the body of an orphan in a tiny village on Hainan Island, I had settled into the abandoned Taoist temple on this mountain and made a living catching and selling snakes. I knew next to nothing about the era I was living in. Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing—I figured it was one of those, and left it at that. So the sounds reaching me now were enough to startle me a little. These were crashes and detonations that nature alone could never produce. I was certain they were the kind of noises you simply could not make without gunpowder. When was gunpowder even invented in the Central Plains? The thought that I might not be all that far in the past from my previous life began to take root.
Of course, if there really were centipedes bigger than a man—the way those men had claimed—then this was another world entirely.
Somewhere in the middle of those thoughts I decided I would have to visit the habitat once daylight returned. I needed to see just how thoroughly they had wrecked the place. Someone who knew the habitat had to protect it; habitat conservation was probably still a distant concept for people of this age. And if even a small specimen was left… well, I would bring it back with me. Centipedes were fascinating creatures. They had said it was big enough to eat a man, but I was the guy who had gone looking for black mambas. I was not about to flinch at this.
Maybe an hour passed.
Shhhhhh—
A sudden cloudburst. Rain poured down, and the distant crashing and exploding gradually faded into silence. With the rain, they would not be able to use any more powder; that was probably why it had gone quiet. At last I could use the drumming of the rain as a lullaby and try for sleep again.
“Is it over?”
Chirp-chirp. Chirrrup.
Crickets began to sing from the jar where I kept them. I went back to my bed and settled in for some proper rest. Sleep claimed me almost at once, and the quiet mountain night resumed as if nothing had happened.
Huff… huff…
The warriors of the Tang Family lay sprawled in exhaustion. The survivors sprawled across the rocks, gulping rainwater as it poured over them. Heavenly Poison Scholar Dang Cheol-san was splinting his broken arm with a length of cut bamboo.
“Is the arm all right?”
The voice belonged to Dang Cheol-san’s father, the Myriad Poison Divine Lord. Dang Cheol-san smiled through the rain as he answered. His arm was broken, but they had finally taken the Azure-Spotted Centipede; the smile came from the hope that he could now save his daughter.
“Yes. It’s only broken.”
“To think a mere lower-grade Azure-Spotted Centipede would be this formidable. If the rain hadn’t come midway and slowed the beast, every one of us would have lost our lives.”
At his father’s words the smile faded. The old man was right. Blinding speed. Monstrous strength. The ability to pinpoint the warriors’ positions even in the black of night. And a venom so potent that wherever it brushed, flesh melted away. The Secret Annals of the World’s Poisons listed it as lower grade, yet the Azure-Spotted Centipede was a venomous creature that made a mockery of that ranking.
Despite every warning, two of the family’s warriors had failed to adapt to its speed and crossed over to the underworld. Three more had been poisoned. Fortunately the three survivors had been purged of the toxin with realgar and his father’s poison arts, but if the battle had dragged on any longer, those three—and everyone else—might have shared the same fate. He had thrown himself in front of a warrior who was about to be ambushed mid-fight; even wrapped in protective qi, his arm had snapped clean through in a single blow. The Tang Clan’s hidden blades and secret weapons had bounced harmlessly off the creature’s iron-hard carapace. Only when its body finally grew sluggish had his father crushed its head and somehow managed to kill it.
“Still, we caught it. That is what matters. Now let us see how solid the inner elixir that will save our Hwa-eun truly is.”
Beyond the exhausted warriors of the family, the Myriad Poison Divine Lord smiled as he approached the enormous centipede that lay overturned on the rock, its legs still twitching faintly.
Shhhhhh—
When I woke the next morning the rain still had not stopped. From several years of observation I knew this was the rainy season, when showers could dump themselves without warning and rain could fall for days on end. The downpour that had begun the night before looked as though it meant to stick around. The sky was packed with dark clouds, and the rain was falling in thick, heavy strands. That meant I would have to postpone my plan to check the habitat.
I had intended to look over the wrecked habitat right after breakfast, but when rain fell like this it was best to stay put. Living alone, if I caught a cold I would be laid up for days, and then who would feed my little darlings? Breeders had to take care of their own bodies. A breeder was someone who took responsibility for the creatures they raised.
Two more days passed.
Tap. Tap.
An unknown tropical bird was singing beautifully from the roof of the ruined Taoist temple, and water droplets were beading and dripping from the broken eaves. For the first time in a while the sun had broken through the clouds, and birdsong and the chirping of insects filled the morning. I had been itching to visit the habitat; this was perfect. A new species! An adventure to find the centipede they called the Azure-Spotted Centipede, the one with blue spots on its body. Today looked possible.
I had not simply been idle for those two rainy days. I had prepared thoroughly. First I had set a relatively intact small jar into a pouch woven from straw rope so I could carry it on my back. I had also twisted straw into cord, packed a fire-striker, and fashioned two torches from wooden sticks. There was always the chance I would have to go into a cave.
The Amazonian giant centipede—also called the Peruvian giant centipede—Scolopendra gigantea had been one of the largest centipede species on Earth in my previous life. One of its known habits was climbing cave ceilings to snatch birds and bats, which was exactly why I had packed rope and torches. I figured a giant centipede here might share similar tendencies.
“Everything’s ready. Time to head out.”
I slung the jar onto my back and set off at once toward the rocky mountain to the west. After fording several streams swollen by the rain, I reached a modest rock peak. Much of the trail had been washed away, but the moment I arrived at the foot of the mountain I could see exactly what those people had done to the habitat.
One section of the mid-slope looked as though it had taken a bomb from a distance. Boulders had tumbled all the way from the middle of the mountain to the base, a great scoop had been torn out of the hillside, and muddy water was still pouring down the slope from the wound.
“Aigoo! They went and put on a full-scale construction project.”
The ground was still slick, so I climbed carefully to keep from slipping on the rocks. Even if the new species came later, I needed to see how thoroughly they had destroyed the habitat. After about thirty minutes of climbing I reached the mid-slope—and a shudder ran through me.
Wedged in a crevice was something bright scarlet. I pulled it free. It looked unmistakably like a centipede’s leg. Roughly forty centimeters long, thick as a hundred-won coin. A truly enormous leg. I-it was real?!
Honestly I had half-doubted the claim that it was big enough to eat a man. It was common knowledge that insects and arthropods needed high oxygen concentrations to grow large. Only in high-oxygen ages like the Carboniferous of the Paleozoic could you get mayflies the size of sparrows, cockroaches the size of cats, or dragonflies the size of eagles. The oxygen levels of this era did not seem especially high—fires burned much the same as they had in my previous life. But the leg made everything clear. If the legs were this size, the creature was more than big enough to swallow me whole. The sheer scale raised gooseflesh along my arms. How massive must a body with legs like these actually be?
Gulp.
Should I turn back? New species or not, the size alone made me seriously consider leaving. After a moment’s hesitation, though, I decided that since I had already come this far I ought to at least check whether any smaller ones remained. Raising one would be impossible, but even if I could not catch it, I wanted to see it alive and moving at least once. Today was probably the best chance I would ever get.
Centipede cuticles have little water-repellent film; when rain falls their body surfaces get thoroughly wet, and a soaked centipede struggles to breathe. That meant the gentlest, safest moment to look for one was right after the rain stopped—now.
I spent a long time searching the torn-up ground around the place where I had found the leg. After a while I discovered, beyond a collapsed heap of earth inside the excavated pit, a hole large enough for a person to crawl into.
“This has to be it…”
I stood in front of the burrow and wrestled with myself for a good while. Centipedes are usually solitary. They hold territories and fight when they meet. But not every species is the same. The Korean giant centipede was an exception—those could often be kept together with little fighting. So if the owner of the leg I had picked up had come from this burrow, there might be other centipedes inside… or it might be completely empty.
Empty was no problem. A little disappointing, but I already had a leg as a souvenir. If there was another centipede inside, though… that would be a little dangerous. No—very dangerous.
My hesitation did not last long.
Heh.
I found myself pulling out the fire-striker and lighting a torch. Even in my previous life I had died chasing the ten most venomous snakes on the planet; clearly I still had a long way to go before I developed any sense of self-preservation. This damn curiosity. No—this dead man’s curiosity.
Whoosh—
I lit the torch and carefully crawled into the hole, holding the flame out ahead of me and hoping that would be enough. I wormed my way through the damp earth tunnel for maybe five meters. The passage widened. Then a cavern opened up, thick with the dank smell of mold.
I rose to a crouch and checked the ceiling first, half expecting a centipede to drop on me. My legs were already trembling, to be honest. Once the ceiling looked clear I thrust the torch forward and lit up the interior of the cavern.
Far ahead, piled in the very center of the chamber, was a heap of something yellow, each piece about the size of a handball.
“Jackpot!”
The exclamation burst out of me before I could stop it. Glossy, smooth, perfectly round. Those handball-sized spheres could only be the eggs of the giant Azure-Spotted Centipede.