About forty miles out of Stone Claw City - Night, Full Moon
’And you two are sure this where we can find those corpses?’
=We have never steered you wrong before, why would we start now?=
’Fair enough. You good Frosttusk?’
Zhen Liu was currently riding on Frosttusk’s back while constantly feeding the mammoth kaijin a steady supply of fire aether.
While the icy kaijin would normally use fire, boiling water and other sources of heat to get energized, Zhen Liu discovered that channeling fire aether via his {Aether Mask} skill worked as well. Granted the effect was significantly more temporary so it wasn’t exactly a battle skill, but for the purposes of travel, it worked.
’Thank the heavens Frosttusk can run about as fast as car when empowered , otherwise it would take me days to get there and back,’ Zhen Liu mused as his eyes watched the rolling desert landscape.
Normally, Zhen Liu would bother Tiny and Mini for this kind of thing, but the two of them were sleeping and he didn’t want to disturb them.
’Why is that bullshit magic tombs or whatever are only accessible at night?’
=Milord, you know why in this case.=
’Yeah, yeah...,’ Zhen Liu griped as he recalled the history lesson he was given prior to making this trip.
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Before there is a "frontier", there is a "wilderness", and the Wasting Sands was no exception to this rule.
Long before the first pioneers established the settlement that would become known as Stone Claw City, as well as name the desert surrounding it the "Wasting Sands", this desert used to be a hoodoo wonderland of death that was known by a very, very different name: The Spider’s Purgatory.
Several centuries ago, give or take a couple decades, the Spider’s Purgatory was once under the dominion of an incredibly powerful eighth tier aether beast, the equivalent to an Aether Saint, known as the Infernal Wolf Spider Queen.
This was a bit unusual, given that most Infernal Wolf Spiders only ever reach the fifth tier in their life times, which lead to the warriors and scholars of that time period speculating that the Spider Queen was the result of a weird body constitution or a chance encounter with a particularly powerful natural aether treasure.
Whatever the truth was, the Spider Queen took over the hoodoo formation with her literal army of children, and made it nigh impossible for anybody or anything to pass through or live there without the queen’s permission.
And the only things she allowed into her territory were other spiders(her children, lovers and subjects), and prey(everyone else).
Many who visited the region or had the misfortune of living there were under the impression that the Spider Queen would rule the area until the end of time, until another giant insect-like aether beast known as the Cataclysmic Wind Storm Lacewing, made the conscious decision to fly through the territory without the queen’s permission...and also annihilating several hundred of her children in the process.
Enraged by this intruder’s transgression, the Infernal Wolf Spider Queen made it her personal quest to annihilate this bothersome flying pest.
What followed was a devastating battle between titanic insects that lasted weeks and was so destructive that the two of them wrecked the Spider’s Purgatory so thoroughly that it went from rock spire littered wasteland to a sandy desert of incredibly fine sand.
At the very climax of the fight, both the Infernal Wolf Spider Queen and the Cataclysmic Wind Storm Lacewing released their strongest attacks in an attempt to annihilate the other and end the battle once and for all.
[Wind God’s Barrage!]
The two attacks, both strong enough to end entire kingdoms, collided with one another and caused a massive explosion that caught both the Spider Queen and the Lacewing in the blast radius.
When the dust settled and the smoke clear, both combatants were nowhere to be found, with the only proof of this battle ever happening being a blown out crater, covered in blackened glass.
As a funny little coincidence, that crater of blackened glass happened to be near Stone Claw City...and was also an incredibly dangerous location that no one except the insane, the powerful or the incredibly suicidal ventured due to the creatures that took up the massive hole as residence.
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[Minn Jarl, I think I can see the crater from here,] Frosttusk rumbled as he began to slow his pace from a gallop to a brisk walk.
Notification given, Zhen Liu took his eyes off the scenery and stared at the direction Frosttusk was facing.
A grimmace formed on his face as he saw where they were headed.
’On the one hand, it makes sense that the final resting place for a giant insect and spider to be here...that doesn’t mean I have to like it being here,’ Zhen Liu thought to himself as he saw the crater’s edge approaching.
Even from this distance, he could hear the skittering, screeching and buzzing of millions and millions of insects, coming from the crater before him.
’Insect Hell, here we come...
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Time waits for no one, and as time went on, that blackened glass crater and it’s surroundings changed with the flow of time...and claw.
With the Spider’s Purgatory essentially nothing but sand and dust now, and it’s hegemon being dead or missing, many other opportunistic aether beasts and warriors made moves to pick up the scraps and claim the former territory of the Spider Queen for their own.
"Move move move, if we don’t stake a claim soon, the fucking Jade Leopord Tribe will claim the area as theirs first!"
"I’ve been eyeing that oasis for years, and now it belongs to Fire Manes!"
"Die you eight legged freaks!"
The Spider Queen’s children and subjects did their best to protect their territory, but they could not stop the unrelenting, coordinated effort of these invaders and slowly but surely had to give up territory after territory.
"Flee, flee, flee! The hunting grounds are safe no more!"
"Where can we go? How can we hide?"
"We need the queen mother! To the crater! To the crater!"
The spiders were eventually forced to shelter in the blasted crater that served as their queen’s final resting place.
Several miles wide and several miles deep,the burial ground for their queen mother was the perfect place for the remnant spiders to weave themselves a sanctuary to hide away from the invaders and opportunistic hunters.
"Haha! I guess now ends the age of the Spider Queen! Good riddance."
"Should we not pursue them any further? Won’t they just regroup and reclaim everything we took from them?"
"With this many of us out here? Just leave them! They’ll starve out in that little hole of theirs eventually."
"Maybe they’ll start eating each other!"
Evidently, that wouldn’t be the case.
Locked within their new sanctuary, the spiders knew they couldn’t hide in there forever, but to venture out and hunt would also attract more danger than what it was worth. But as they wallowed in their pity, as if by divine intervention, a simple idea came to them: dig.
The spiders dug through the blackened glass and made the crater deeper, not wider as to attract the attention of outsiders, but deeper and deeper until they could go wider.
It took many years, and people on the surface had eventually forgotten the name of the Spider Queen relegating her to be a myth, but during this time, the spiders carved for themselves a massive, underground forest to call their own and filled it to the brim with all sorts of plants and insects.
When wider civilization eventually found this sinkhole forest, they called it Insect Hell, a name the natives detest since they preferred to call it the "Queen’s Burial Forest".
But...I just call it home.
-A passage from the memoirs of Elias Spiderson, a spider who became human by pure happenstance and lived on to become a historian.
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At the very edge of the pit that was known as Insect Hell, Zhen Liu, Nepherage, Frosttusk and Hurricroak leaned over to see what exactly this B-grade danger zone entailed.
Looking downward, the quartet could see massive suspension bridges made of spider webs that crisscrossed the pit walls, being used by all sorts of giants spider species.
Several other species of insects could be seen resting on the walls, fluttering and buzzing about the airspace, with several unlucky little bastards getting caught in the webs and promptly eaten.
And at the very bottom of the pit, a massive humid rainforest could barely be seen, obscured by mist and cyclic rain clouds formed by the pit’s strange artificial geography.
"Well...that’s unnerving."
"I think it’ll make a good challenge."
The sound of Hurricroak’s growling stomach prompted everyone to look in her direction, a look of shocked curiosity on their faces as they noticed the drool coming from her mouth.
"I am a giant frog woman who is also part hornet and fox, what do you want from me?," Hurricroak defended while wiping away the drool.
Accepting her answer, they decided to move on to the next matter of business.
"So...how do we get down there?"