Fabre in Sacheon’s Tang

“This is strange.”

“It definitely is. Seol, sister. They should have arrived by now.”

Gazing up at the gaping black ceiling of the cave, Seol and I exchanged puzzled looks.

It was strange, after all. The main group, led by my foster father and grandfather, still hadn’t reached this location even though two days had passed since our arrival.

By all logic, they should have been only an hour or two behind us at most.

When we descended through the hole, Yohwa had left a strand of her web to mark our path. Even accounting for delays, they should have caught up by now. Yet, after two full days, there wasn’t even the faintest sign of their presence.

“Yohwa? Do you still sense nothing?”

— Hiss!

In response to my question, Yohwa poked her head out from the darkness above and shook it.

Worried that the cave might be a labyrinth, Yohwa had spun an incredibly fine silk thread all along the path as we moved. When she climbed back up to check, she found that there were no vibrations at all.

Spiders have an incredibly sensitive ability to detect vibrations through their webs.

Back in my previous life, the Darwin’s Bark Spider was known to spin webs that stretched up to 25 meters—about 250 times its own body length. Despite its tiny size of barely a centimeter, it could detect the slightest tremor from an insect caught at the far end of its web.

Given Yohwa’s much larger size, her sensory range should be at least 2–3 kilometers. And since she was an enlightened creature, it was likely even greater.@@novelbin@@

If even she couldn’t detect anything, then perhaps they hadn’t even managed to enter the passage.

Thinking about it, the main group should have caught up with us before we even reached the end of the tunnel.

We had been moving as cautiously as possible, unable to see ahead. But Grandfather and my foster father knew we were in front of them. There was no reason for them not to have caught up.

“What could be the reason?”

“Hmm… Could they have missed the writing I left behind?”

“But I wrote it in two big places. It was on the wall. There’s no way they wouldn’t have seen it.”

As Seol and I puzzled over why the main group hadn’t reached us yet, Hwa-eun, who was perched on the coiled body of Cho, spoke in a cautious tone.

“Maybe…”