The Inner World, Star Dou Forest.
The damp scent of rotting leaves gradually faded, replaced by a rich surge of life-aspected soul power.
The Thousand-Year Blue Silver Spider used its eight long legs to push aside the last patch of dense ferns, then stopped in its tracks.
Before it lay an entirely different forest.
Countless tough, blue-silver webs bound together the towering ancient trees for miles around. The canopy, once open to the light, was almost completely sealed by thick webs. Sunlight could only refract down the translucent threads, bathing the entire forest in a cold, spectral blue-silver glow.
At the very center of this webbed forest hung an enormous mother network. Sprawled upon it was a massive Blue Silver Spider covered in golden markings-A-Dong.
The trunks and branches around the mother network, and even the piles of dead leaves on the ground, crawled with densely packed Blue Silver Spiders of every size. Rather than a corner of Star Dou Forest, this was a fortress belonging solely to the Blue Silver Spider clan, an absolute paradise.
The instant the Thousand-Year Blue Silver Spider, still wrapped in metallic threads across its back, entered this domain, its eight long legs began trembling violently beyond its control.
It could not even take another step forward. Its front legs buckled, and it prostrated itself in the mud.
If those few metallic spider threads on its back, originating from Qian San in the Surface World, were an enforced control based on martial soul suppression, then the reverence and submission seeping from its very bones as it faced the mother network at the center of this forest were its most heartfelt instincts.
For the enormous spider sprawled on the mother network was the true emperor of this world's Blue Silver Spider clan.
In the void