The next day, before the sun had even considered making an appearance, I was up and knocking on Suna’s door. It took a while, but eventually, she opened it, looking about as thrilled as a cat being given a bath.“What?” she grumbled.“The island’s sinking,” I said, getting straight to the point. “We need to move. Harvest the red fleece from the spiders, just the abdomens. If we have time, we can grab some lumber.”She just nodded and shut the door.By the time we reached the shore, the sky was starting to lighten. As we waded through the shallows, a thought occurred to me. If we found an island in the arctic seas, we’d freeze to death before we even made it to the beach.“We need a raft,” I decided. I could whip one up with a few logs and the last of my spider silk.The plan was simple. We’d head to the main nest first. That’s where the highest concentration of spider corpses was, including the Queen. We’d need to haul her body out together. After that, we’d split up. She’d take the area closer to the ship, I’d take the far side. We had to get it all done today.We reached the nest. The smell was… ripe. And there were ants. Millions of them. Tiny, rice-sized ants, swarming over the glowing mushrooms on the ceiling and the spider carcasses on the ground.“Probably ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) a rival faction,” Suna theorized, after a brief, and in my opinion, completely unnecessary examination of a few of the ants. “With the spiders gone, this place is their paradise.”We got to work, a grim, two-person harvesting team. The fleece came off easily, a quick scrape with a knife. We even found a dead, curled-up giant fleece spider in one of the side tunnels, a nice little bonus for the gacha machine.We pushed on, eventually reaching the cavern where I’d seen the… decorations. The room full of dried, human limbs. We didn’t linger. We just scraped the fleece off the dead spiders and moved on. We entered the egg chamber, the heart of the nest. The great statue was now a pile of rubble. The place was teeming with newly hatched spiders, who were immediately being swarmed and devoured by the ants. Suna, ever the scientist, immediately started gathering a few of the intact eggs. I, on the other hand, was trying to figure out how in the ever-loving hell we were going to move a ten-meter-long spider corpse. Her abdomen alone was three meters in diameter.And then, of course, the ground started to shake. Another earthquake. We huddled under a large slab of rock as the cavern trembled around us. And then, I noticed something. The ceiling wasn’t shaking. At all. It was unnaturally still. And on its surface… there were patterns.“Is that… some kind of writing?” Suna squinted, trying to make it out.Her vision was good, but mine was better. I took off my eyepatch and looked with my third eye. And I saw it.It was text. An ancient, alien, and deeply, deeply wrong text. The kind of writing that bypasses the learning part of your brain and just… downloads itself directly into your soul. To see it was to understand it. And to understand it was to go mad.The knowledge hit me like a physical blow. A torrent of alien information, of cosmic horror, of a philosophy built on the sanctity of the limb. My head felt like it was going to explode.[You have gazed upon the strange text. Sanity -50][You have finished reading the Book of Limbs. Sanity -100][You have learned Limb Magic. It can be viewed on your panel.]I collapsed, gasping for air, my head feeling like it had been scooped out and replaced with a nest of angry hornets. Blood, mixed with what looked disturbingly like brain tissue, poured from my nose.“Yang Yi, what’s wrong?” Suna’s voice was a distant echo.“Don’t… look… up,” I managed to gasp.“What did you see?”I couldn’t answer. There were no words. The things I had seen, the concepts I now understood… they were too big for human language. “Just… check my Sanity,” I told her.She did. And I could hear the manic excitement in her voice when she saw the number. “It’s at one! What did you see?”“A spider,” I said, the image of the text, when viewed all at once, forming the shape of a great, hideous, and utterly malevolent arachnid, burned into my mind. “A very, very ugly spider.”I couldn’t talk about it anymore. I just wanted to get out of there. I took my sword and, with a series of precise, practiced cuts—a side effect of the new, horrifying knowledge I now possessed—I dismembered the Queen’s corpse.We rolled her massive abdomen out of the nest, a gruesome, ten-ton bowling ball of guts and chitin. We got her back to the shore, which had, of course, sunk even further, and then, after a brief and unpleasant swim, we got her and ourselves back on the ship.We didn’t rest. We just dropped our haul and went back. There were more spiders to harvest.Later, alone, I checked my stats.Yang Yi (Mortal)Extraordinary Path: Corruption [Depth 7%] / Book of Limbs(Book of Limbs: Having read the Book of Limbs in its entirety, you have learned Limb Magic. No incantations are required. If under the effects of the Spider's Kiss, the Mana cost is reduced by 2.)And then, the spells. [Limb Enhancement]. [Limb Restoration]. [Limb Detonation]. And the last one, [Summon the Mother of a Million Limbs], a spell that required you to sacrifice all of your own limbs for a chance to summon her shadow.“Shouldn’t it start with, like, a fireball or something?” I muttered to myself. This was not the kind of magic I had been expecting. And I had a sinking feeling that using any of it would come at a very, very steep price.The rest of the day was a blur of harvesting. My new three-eyed perspective made the work go faster, but the constant switching between my normal and "extended" vision was giving me a splitting headache. By the time Suna was done, I had already finished my section, found another giant spider corpse, and built us a raft.As dusk settled, the island gave one last, final shudder. And then, a full quarter of it just… slid into the sea.

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