The Locust Plague
It woke in the dark.
Spring rain softened the frozen earth and seeped downward, and water began to rise through the underground hollows. Driven by the instinct that it would drown if it did not escape, it worked its hooked forelegs with tireless haste and bored a passage toward the surface.
All around it, brothers and sisters already crowded the open ground, having forced their own way up through the soil.
No sooner had its still-soft shell hardened under open air and the faint light than a terrible hunger struck it.
Hop. Hop.
It leapt. Compound eyes that could tell green from everything else guided it straight to food. The short grasses of the steppe vanished in an instant.
More siblings kept hatching without end, and already there was not enough to eat. Faced with starvation, its body began to change. Sturdy legs wasted away to spare strength; wings lengthened for long flight. As it grew larger, the better to hold its own in the scramble for prey, its fine green camouflage turned to the dusty yellow of barren land. Wherever they went became wasteland, and green no longer served any purpose.
So the metamorphosis ended. The grasshoppers—no, the locusts—rose as one.
Buzzzzzz—
In a single breath the sky darkened, and an immense noise swallowed the world. The shadow cast by the swarm felt like a storm cloud hanging over the future of the Central Plains itself.
Far off, a man of the Oirat watched from horseback and clicked his tongue.
“…Well. At least they didn’t fly west. Small mercies.”
Another man answered.
“What’s left to scavenge here? The crops are already ruined. Let them go east to Gyeong.”
“Hm. So the plan to raid Gyeong for grain is finished, then?”
“Didn’t you hear what the chieftain brought back from the great council? Hitting the Central Plains is years off—maybe a decade. We still have to crush the Mongol remnants and unite the steppe. Once the tribes are one, those dirt-grubbing Central Plains dogs won’t frighten anyone.”
“Hah. Yuan leftovers. A few years and we’ll strip them clean like shearing sheep.”
He snorted and turned his horse’s head.
“Come on. Hard luck for the Central Plains folk, but that’s life. If they’d farmed well, they should have shared a little with their neighbors. That’s how the world works.”
“Haha!”
True to their raider blood, they rode west, laughing. Behind them an endless storm cloud of locusts streamed on.
The swarm that rose on the lower edge of the Tibetan Plateau never crossed the plateau or the Kunlun range. Those that steered into the Kunlun’s tundra heights could not endure the knife-winds that scoured the mountains; they fell onto the eternal snows and died in heaps.
But only a fraction had chosen that path. The great mass swung south through the warmth and pressed steadily east. Rounding the southern flank of the Kunlun, the locusts first met Yunnan Province—the remotest southwestern reach of the Central Plains.
“Hey… there’s a storm cloud coming over the mountains?”
A sentry on the walls of Lijiang in Yunnan Province muttered at the black mass rising beyond the ridges.
“…We almost never get weather rolling in from that side.”
Yunnan was humid tropical and subtropical country; the inland highlands of Tibet to the west were dry. Dry west winds usually blew, and moisture-laden air from Yunnan drifted the other way. A rain-cloud fighting against that flow carried a strange, crawling dread.
And then—
“…There’s no wind. Why is the cloud moving so fast?”
While the thought still hung in his mind, an old farmer straightening his back among newly planted paddies froze solid.
“Ah—aah…!”
He shook as if seized by malaria, stared at the cloud beyond the mountains, then collapsed to his knees and screamed.
“L-Locusts!!!”
Buzzzzzz—!!!
As if to smother the cry, the swarm crested the ridge in a single wave and smashed into Lijiang.
“W-What do we do?! What do we do?!”
The farmers stamped in panic. Starved by the mountain crossing, the locusts had turned savage; they devoured every plant they touched. The hungriest even chewed people and livestock—not from true appetite so much as the pure reflex of a body that had nothing left but hunger—but a full-grown ox reduced to bone in moments remained a full-grown ox reduced to bone.
Yunnan’s Provincial Administration Commissioner and Regional Military Commissioner drove every soldier and government slave they could seize into the fields.
“Wave torches! Burn the locusts!”
“Pour oil on the dikes!”
“Beat them with flails!!”
Thousands, tens of thousands of troops, clerks, and laborers fought the swarm, yet it was like trying to hold back a tidal wave with men. They burned and crushed thousands, tens of thousands—and millions, tens of millions poured in behind them.
History recorded that a single Rocky Mountain locust swarm of twelve hundred million had once been found beneath eternal snow. How many now flooded Yunnan was a number only Heaven could know.
Paddies vanished as if evaporated. Even Yunnan’s famous jungles were left as bare skeletons of branches. Helplessness was the only word that fit. The authorities were powerless; so was the martial world. The Jeomchang Sect’s Sun-Shooting Sword Art that claimed to pierce the sun itself, the Southern Savage Beast Palace’s monstrous strength and animal speed—none of it mattered.
Only the abnormal heat and humidity of the far south finally checked the locusts’ southward push. The damage therefore concentrated on Yunnan’s inland districts. In a mere three days the green province held nothing but yellow. Trees stripped of every leaf stood like bare bone and began to wither; thickets turned to dust-blown wasteland.
“Aaaah… aaaaah….”
Stunned survivors could only sit among the corpses that carpeted what had been fields and weep.
Having scoured Yunnan, the locusts turned east again. Next lay Sichuan and Guizhou.
Here the swarm split. Those that flew east struck Guizhou; those that flew north reached Sichuan.
Geographically nearer, Guizhou became the first sacrifice. Yunnan was still reeling from shock and chaos, too busy clearing the nightmare to spare a single dispatch rider to neighboring provinces. The ruined fields were only the beginning: leave the mountains of dead locusts and plague would follow; leave the bodies choking the wells and the water itself would rot.
So Guizhou, unlucky, walked the same road as Yunnan. Its one small mercy was that the swarm had already halved, and the half that remained were somewhat fed, and therefore slower.
“Sulfur! Bring every scrap of sulfur you have!”
Guizhou’s Provincial Administration Commissioner and Regional Military Commissioner emptied every store, piled the sulfur around the fields, and set it alight. Poison smoke thick enough to drop men like flies sent locusts raining down in sheets—yet it was still like trying to stop a cloudburst with a basket. The toxin was strong, but the supply was small, and the men who burned it risked their own lives; wide use was impossible.
In the end Guizhou sacrificed roughly two-thirds of its paddies before it finally blunted the swarm.
And while Guizhou still thrashed to escape the locust plague, on the land of Sichuan—
Buzzzzzz— The wingbeat of the swarm rolled toward Sichuan like distant thunder, and the first to answer were the insects of the forest.
A locust plague turns forest into desert; to every insect it is catastrophe. Sensing doom by instinct, they waved antennae, sprayed direction-pheromones, and spoke in frantic haste. Flying things fled east and north. Ants raced to carry every scrap of food they could. Mice and rabbits, reading the same signs, began to run as well.
To human ears the forest seemed quiet; underneath it howled.
Skritch-skritch-skritch-skritch!
Wriggle-wriggle-wriggle-wriggle!
Whirr-whirr-buzz-buzz!
Chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp!
Tweet-tweet! Tweet-tweet!
Chi! Chirrr! Chi! Chirrr!
The forest was in uproar.
And certain people noticed.
“What is this… something’s wrong.”
They were herb-gatherers working the woods of Sichuan. Lee Cheol had once been a collateral herbalist under the Pharmacy Branch of Lee Gyu-chan’s line; even after that branch returned to the newspaper trade, old habits died hard, and he had never stopped walking the mountains. Years of treating Sichuan’s ranges as his own backyard told him at once that the quiet was false.
“…This is just like…”
An old memory woke—days when he was still a boy and the forest had cried exactly this way. A sky black with locusts. People and beasts alike clutching empty bellies, withering into death. The hell of that lean year snapped his eyes wide open.
“They have to be told!”
He ran for Seongdo at once, praying his fear was only an old man’s empty fretting.
At a wayside inn where he stopped to wet a dry throat, the words he spilled—
‘The forest isn’t right.’
‘It’s exactly as it was thirty-three years ago, right before the locusts came.’
—became an intelligence slip in minutes and raced through Minjeongwon’s web straight to Ye-eun.
She read the report, fell silent a moment, then looked west toward the far sky. For an instant her eyes took on a rainbow sheen like a mirage; then it was gone. She murmured under her breath.
“So it’s coming after all…”
She rose in one motion and ran to Hwiyeom.
“Young Master, Young Master—urgent report.”
“What is it?”
“Locusts appear to be approaching.”
“….”
Hwiyeom froze for a heartbeat, then closed both eyes and let out a long breath.
“So the thing we knew would come has finally arrived.”
“….”
“Call a council. I’ll report to Father myself. How much time do we have?”
“If the outer mountain districts of Sichuan are already sensing the change, there isn’t much. Two days at the absolute most—more likely half a day…”
“Then we move now. From this moment, every department under me—including Innovation Hall—shifts to emergency response.”
“Yes!”
Like a kicked beehive, the Tang household burst into furious motion.