Adelaide woke to a sound like surf rolling through stone.

Before she could pry her eyes open, a dull ache flooded her, bones feeling unstrung like a scattered necklace. She coughed, mind fogged, and almost blurted the Dream’s favorite national curse.

“woca…”

The foreign syllable snagged hard in her throat. Not right. She was Adelaide von Douglas; she wouldn’t spit something that crude.

No, she wasn’t that loser from the Dream.

The thought struck clean as a bell and steadied her breath. She lifted her lids, pupils slow to drink in the dark like a cat at dusk.

Darkness wasn’t absolute. Twisted vines coiled along the walls, each strung with small fruits that glowed a pale green, like jade beads floating in mist. By that weak light, she forced the landscape into shape.

She stood on something like a plain. Behind her lay a broad pond, black as an ink well; left and right, the dark drew out like a curtain; above, a ceiling of rough rock, the hole she fell through already swallowed.

So—what now?

She thought for half a minute, then pinned it down.

She’d fallen into the caverns beneath the Sarman Empire, same as the heroine did.

Not just that. She’d dropped straight into an underground river, ridden its cold spine all the way down.

First time for a mess like this. A bad premonition gnawed like a rat behind her ribs.

In the Dream, Jiaqi had read plenty of arcs where a transmigrator triggered the flags for the protagonist. Adelaide didn’t want that; the script was her sharpest blade, and if the future drifted, half her plans would turn to smoke.

No. She had to leave before the hero-and-damsel scene ever queued up.

Crisis tightened her focus. She fished a small Magic Crystal Stone from her chest and rapped it twice. Soft light bloomed like milk poured over night. Issued by the academy so students wouldn’t get lost after dark, it was now the brightest thing under the earth.

By that shine, she pulled an opaque little vial from her skirt pocket and spoke a clipped, strange syllable. A faint red flicker winked, then died; she tossed the bottle aside with a careless flick.

Next heartbeat, she rose in one smooth, coiled motion that erased the school’s porcelain-sick vice president in a blink.

Anyone watching would’ve dropped a jaw to the floor. She didn’t care. The soaked long dress clung heavy and cold, sticky as swamp weed; she frowned, then nicked the hem with a small knife—skrit—and freed her legs, white thigh-highs gleaming like moonlit porcelain.

Better.

She snapped the torn cloth away and lifted the light to push on through the dark.

By script, this underworld sprawled almost as wide as the Sarman Empire, with precious few mouths to the surface. It wasn’t deep; some places lay under only a thin plate of stone.

Find the highest ground. Punch through the rock. Touch daylight. Simple.

Walking, she began to notice something off.

To avoid circling blind with no beacons, she aimed for a rock wall and meant to keep a hand on it. When she found it, she saw red powder strewn along the foot of the wall.

Red powder could be iron rust, shed from ancient veins. Problem was, it didn’t scatter. It ran in a thin, unbroken ribbon from beyond her light, then kept on, a vein that bled into the next slice of dark. She walked a long while and still couldn’t find the end.

Bits from the Dream floated up. The heroine had found a trail like this after falling underground. That foreshadow never paid off, at least not in the part Jiaqi played.

Adelaide crouched, pinched a little dust, raised it to her nose. A faint, metallic tang. Rust, sure enough.

Scrapped setting?

Probably, she thought, and shrugged it off.

Leaving mattered more. She cut the thread of thought and moved.

The underworld stretched larger, and dropped deeper, than she’d guessed. The more ground she covered, the less it felt like a deadland of glow-plants.

She passed mushrooms in a hundred shapes and colors, caps like lanterns and umbrellas. Patches of ground lay carpeted in dry moss like a silent prairie. Pale insects crept everywhere, pure white and eerily voiceless, like snow that learned to walk.

None of these sat in the imperial field guides; any specimen here would fetch good coin. Shame she didn’t have Darwin’s itch today.

She walked for an hour and change, and still couldn’t find height enough to kiss the ceiling. Irritation brushed hot as nettles, and a wrongness she couldn’t name swam slow circles in her head.

The longer she pushed, the heavier her steps. Her legs burned, and even the hand holding the Magic Crystal Stone sagged like a tired wing.

“Two nails still aren’t enough… should’ve asked Hazel for five.”

She muttered the gripe, then suddenly lifted a finger, a wicked thought sparking.

“No, next time, I’ll just take a whole foot~”

A few seconds later, her joke rolled back as a thin echo through the still cave.

No one laughed. No one answered.

“Right. If someone did, that’d be the scary part.” She sighed and tried to step.

Her knee didn’t move.

“Eh?”

She felt it, that off texture under her shoe. The ground clung with springy glue, like stepping into a vat of non-Newtonian sludge mixed with industrial adhesive.

She glanced down and saw white threads.

…

She eased the Magic Crystal Stone toward the direction the threads ran. Light climbed a vast web, spun from floor to ceiling, a harp strung for nightmares.

In the web’s heart hung a cocoon of white silk, big enough for two people, bulging like a pale gourd.

The wrapping wasn’t finished. One leg stuck out, fur patchy and bare in spots. One look, and she knew it.

The sand wolf that fell with her.

And with that, the wrongness in her head snapped into focus.

Sound.

She and the sand wolf hadn’t fallen far apart. In a sealed cave like this, if it still had enough fight to twitch, she should’ve heard echoes like stones thrown in a well.

On the way here, she’d heard nothing but her own steps.

A sand wolf wasn’t a terror by itself, and this one was wounded before the fall. But for it to make no sound at all, only two things fit.

A clean, silent kill from the shadow. Or a hunter that could hush the world around its prey.

Clues locked like teeth. Adelaide’s pupils shrank hard, because one monster matched both.

No. No. She had to get out.

If the sand wolf wasn’t fully wrapped, then the hunter had been here moments ago—

“—ugh.”

Something hit her like a battering ram. She slammed into rock; the Magic Crystal Stone skittered and clacked away, light pinwheeling across stone. Impact knocked a grunt from her chest, then blood rose iron-hot and she coughed a scarlet thread.

Worse than the blow, she couldn’t move. Silk clamped her from the neck down, white and tight as a shroud.

A voice breathed out of the dark, androgynous and velvet-sweet.

“What a rare guest. A human, down here…”

Pale arthropod limbs uncurled from shadow, sliding into the shifting light.

One. Then another.

More limbs drifted forward, and the voice’s owner stepped from the shade.

A slender shape. A beautiful, snow-fair neck. Hands cut like jade.

A youth too lovely to be real—until you saw the four pairs of eyes, two large and six small, braided across that face. Until your gaze slipped down to the spider abdomen that made up its lower half.

Adelaide’s worst fear stood true.

The Dreamfeast Spider.

Legend said it lived in darkness, waiting until the moment a guard dropped to bind its prey. It didn’t kill at once. It watched at kiss-close range, its eyes reflecting its victim’s deepest obsessions and desires. It lured them into dreams so soft they went quiet, then opened their throat and sipped their last fear like a fine vintage.

By rights, a thing that wicked was born only where blood hung in the air like fog—on battlefields. So why here?

“You look very afraid. It’s fine. I promise…”

The Dreamfeast Spider drifted closer, step by soft step. Adelaide shut her eyes and dragged a breath down like cold river water.

“Next, it won’t hurt at all—”

“No—AAAAAAAH!!! Aaaaah—yaaaah—aaah!”

Its honeyed voice shattered under Adelaide’s raw scream. She tore and writhed, body jerking inside the silk like a caterpillar fighting a pin. Fresh blood streaked the white in a bright red line.

“I still have so much left to do! I can’t die here!!!”

“It’s all right. Open your eyes. I’ll help you get it all, little cutie—”

“Uwaaah—aaah—I clawed my way to today! I hate you! Let me go, let me go!”

Twice interrupted, all eight eyes narrowed to slits.

Her scream cut off clean. A thin scratch opened on her cheek, and pinpoint blood beaded like crushed berries.

“Call out again, and I seal that mouth.”

“(Uu—uu—)”

She flinched, fear folding her voice into small, hiccuping whimpers, broken with strange little sounds.

“(Uu-ao… I don’t want to die… uu-uu—yawa…)”

The Dreamfeast Spider listened to those sweet, edible sobs and finally nodded, satisfied. It slid closer, then bent with decadent grace to lick the blood from her cheek.

“Mm?” Surprise flickered across its face. “Your blood… delicious.”

It smiled, greedy light rising, and lifted her chin with a white foreleg.

“Come now. Be good. Open your eyes. I’ll be gentle.”

She tried to turn her face away, but its voice worked like a spell in warm wine. Resistance fell away; her lids trembled, breaths shallow, eyes about to bloom open. Excitement flared red in all its eyes, a feast about to begin.

Before that moment, a pale hand came to rest on its foreleg.

“Got you~”