The cannibals of Huang'e had always been a nightmare hanging over people's hearts. On Huang'e there was an unwritten rule: when people were doing important work, the cannibals' name was never, ever to be spoken, for fear it would bring bad luck.
And it wasn't only during work. Even in ordinary life people avoided the word cannibal as much as they could — which showed just how afraid of that name they were.
What exactly the cannibals were, old Lane had once explained: they were a kind of mutated bioconstruct. They had human bodies, but their skin was covered in insect-like carapace. These bioconstructs had three rows of saw-tooth teeth, top and bottom, in their mouths; someone had tested it — stuff a hard chunk of volcanic rock in there, and they could grind it to powder in an instant.
No one knew where the cannibals came from. Lane had once speculated that these creatures were very likely humanoid weapons secretly developed by scientists of the Great Star Circle, and that somehow they had ended up here on Huang'e, where over several hundred years they had bred into an enormous tribe.
By now the cannibals had seized more than eighty percent of Huang'e's beaches, and the rich fish of the primordial seas were their most important food.
And today, Wuchang — that fellow who never played by the rules — had actually dared to threaten Adu with the cannibals. This was beyond bearing. To defend his dignity, Adu went for broke.
The bloody fight in the mine shafts grew fiercer and fiercer. Adu's strategy of splitting his force handed Wuchang a perfect chance to ambush: all four squads were made up of the most ordinary killers, and counting Adu there were only three dan-ranked martial artists in all. Against Wuchang, a man who had mastered close-quarters combat, that little bit of strength was nothing but a pack of trash.
Wuchang's keen hearing always caught distant footsteps first, and the dark mine shafts gave him perfect cover. In barely half an hour, another seven-man killer squad died at his hands; the killers' desperate resistance bought them nothing except a shallow graze on Wuchang's shoulder.
The smell of blood in the air grew thicker and thicker. Nail Fist was too brutal a technique: one punch and the enemy's internal organs would rupture over a wide area; the skin might show only bruising, but blood would come gushing from the mouth and nose. Air barely moved in the narrow shafts to begin with, and with the fierce geothermal heat rising off the rock, the stench of blood hung there and would not disperse.
Standing before the seven corpses, Wuchang, as was his habit, pressed his palms together and prepared to send the dead on their way with a Buddha's name. But just as he was about to speak, a warning suddenly rose from the bottom of his heart.
Before Wuchang could react, two black shadows came rushing at him along the two sides of the shaft at forty-five-degree angles.
People — they were people, two men crawling up the rock walls like geckos. Just as Wuchang had ambushed the killers, these two had defied gravity as well: their whole bodies stuck to the roof of the shaft upside down, shooting straight at Wuchang like a pair of geckos launching a sneak attack.
In that instant every hair on Wuchang's body stood on end, and cold sweat poured out of him like a spring. Enormous danger had closed over him.
Triple Nail Fist — assault. As the shadows swept past, Wuchang's Nail Fist slammed hard into a dark figure, and what came back through his knuckles felt like punching an alloy wall.
"What the hell is this thing? Armor?" Wuchang threw himself into a lazy donkey's roll, tumbling four or five meters forward, and as he came up he drove two portable mine lamps into the rock wall.
When the light came on, the two black shadows were finally clear.
"Fuck. My luck. They really are cannibals..."
Wuchang could have kicked himself. He never should have used the cannibals as a scare tactic on his enemies; now the curse hadn't landed on them — it had landed on him.
The cannibals' bodies gave off a glossy black sheen, the luster of carapace. Wuchang's fist had just now landed on that hard shell, which was why it had done nothing.
Wuchang had no time to check whether a cannibal's mouth really held three rows of sharp teeth. The two ambushers were charging again, and this time they came at him in a well-drilled, coordinated attack formation.
When enemies meet on a narrow road, the brave win. Wuchang's kung fu was not practiced for nothing: the cannibals had shells to protect their bodies, but they had nothing like Wuchang's exquisite footwork, and as he twisted and shifted aside, his Nail Fist drove straight at their weak points.
The seams between carapace plates, the armpits, the back of the skull, the base of both ears — wherever Wuchang judged the flesh to be thin, that was where his Nail Fist ran wild.
Amid the flurry of blows the two cannibals squealed and screeched, and to Wuchang's ears the noise sounded a little like monkeys.
The cannibals did have intelligence. After taking a hard beating, they understood that the fellow in front of them was no easy prey; after one exchange they stopped in their tracks and came no further, and a look of retreat actually appeared in their eyes.
Wuchang could certainly read that look, and he hoped these two would back off while the going was good. He wasn't fool enough to make a blood feud with the cannibals: once that bizarre species gathered in numbers, no one short of the army could beat them.
Under the assault of Wuchang's razor-sharp glare, the two cannibals edged back a little, their feet giving ground inch by inch. Just as Wuchang let out half a breath of relief, a vicious gust of attack came at him from behind.
"Oh no—" The rest of the sentence never left Wuchang's mouth. A pair of enormous arms had already shot through his armpits and locked his arms dead, and then a gaping bloody maw clamped down hard on his shoulder, blood spraying everywhere.
"Aagh!" Roaring, Wuchang put all his strength into flinging off the cannibal that had ambushed him, but he had underestimated the attacker's power. This was a warrior among the cannibals — just from his size he stood more than a head taller than the two from before, his whole body packed with bulging muscle, the carapace over that muscle thicker and heavier still, and there were even barbs growing out of it.
A cannibal warrior like this was no weaker than a third-dan powerhouse like Seven, and could even give a fourth-dan powerhouse like Ye Fei a run for his money. That already put him on Wuchang's own level, and with strength evenly matched and the cannibal striking first, breaking free was not going to be easy now.
The two of them locked together into a single fused ball of flesh. As each strained against the other's strength, the ball crashed back and forth along the shaft — now Wuchang's face smashing into the wall, now the cannibal's back slamming into the rock — leaving the whole tunnel a wreck.
The two cannibal grunts watching the show hopped up and down, squealing with excitement, and every so often they would snatch a chunk of meat off the ground and stuff it into their mouths: the corpse scraps of the seven killers who had just died.
Wuchang saw all of it, and he had no wish to become cannibal food. But this attacker's strength was simply too great, and after fighting on and on he was already somewhat fatigued. A full ten minutes of struggling, and he still had not shaken the enemy off.
Worse still, the cannibal's mouth was already clamped onto his shoulder, and the blood gushing into that mouth had become its most delicious drink.
As the blood flowed out, the strength drained from Wuchang's body. His lips were already turning a little white.
Am I going to die? Am I really going to die here? It hasn't even been a month since I transmigrated, and my life is over? Was all of this really just a dream?
Wuchang's awareness was growing hazy. From the corner of his eye he watched the two cannibal grunts feasting, watched them tear a whole dead man's arm off and crunch it in big bites like a chicken drumstick. And in that moment Wuchang finally saw the three rows of sharp teeth, top and bottom.
They really are like saw blades. Looks like not even my bones will go to waste — no need to make bone broth, they'll just chew them right up...
Just as Wuchang's consciousness was blurring, he had no idea that the blood from his shoulder — apart from the part the cannibal drank — had in large part run down inside his collar, flowing over that strange black diamond necklace.
The blood ran down the silver chain, and when it reached the black diamond it soaked in with startling speed. As more and more of that chilling blood seeped in, the black diamond slowly softened, turning back into the ever-shifting black sphere it had been at the very beginning.
Perhaps nourished by the blood, the black sphere suddenly gave off a faint black mist, wisps of it drifting into the air. Strangely, the mist was not affected by the air currents at all; like something alive with a will of its own, it made straight for the cannibals' eyes and bored in.
The three cannibals watched the black mist enter their eyes. Gradually their awareness dulled, and looks of bewilderment came over their faces.
The two grunts stopped eating; the severed arms dropped from their hands and they did not even bother to pick them up. The cannibal warrior stopped sucking blood too, released his jaws, and lifted his head to stare blankly at the air.
He could not tell how long that bewilderment lasted — maybe only three or four minutes. Wuchang had already realized that the pressure on his shoulder was gone: the cannibal still had his shoulder locked, but only as a posture; there was no strength in it at all.
A once-in-a-lifetime chance — if he didn't run now, when would he? Wuchang burst out with all his force, knocking the cannibal warrior back more than a meter, and then, without a care for anything, he ran like hell.
The cannibal stared stupidly after the fleeing Wuchang, then seemed to realize something; squealing through his mouth, he drove off his legs and shot after Wuchang's figure.
The two grunts behind him were not to be outdone either; shrieking at the top of their lungs, they gave chase as well.
Amid the three cannibals' cries, pairs of bright eyes appeared in the darkness of the shaft, and dark figures emerged one after another. Following in the warrior's steps, they raced off in the direction Wuchang had fled.
In less than a quarter of an hour, more than sixty cannibals — no one knew where they had crawled out from — came howling after Wuchang.
Wuchang was running, but he had never stopped taking stock of his surroundings, and when the footsteps behind him grew denser and more numerous, he finally understood: he had stirred up a whole nest of cannibals. They had turned out in full force, and clearly they would not rest until they had him boiled into soup.
Straight ahead of Wuchang's flight, north along the same shaft, the main body of killers led by Adu was advancing cautiously. Adu studied the surroundings carefully; he already knew that Wuchang was a martial artist of no small rank, and his preliminary estimate was that the man was somewhat above his own. Against an enemy like that, one could never be too careful.
The twelve killers behind him were careful too. After all, this place was far too close to cannibal territory, and there wasn't a man present who wasn't afraid of the cannibals.
They were all creeping forward when a clamor suddenly came from the front of the shaft, followed by a clatter of footsteps — someone was closing on them at high speed.
"Ready yourselves—" Adu never finished the order. Wuchang, blood spraying wildly from his shoulder, had already burst into their field of view, glaringly obvious in the light of the mine lamps.
"Run! Everybody run! The cannibals are right behind me..."