"Yuumi, have you found Norra's scent yet?"
Caleb was worried. If this place really connected to the Void, then monsters could come pouring out of it at any moment.
Still, if Rek'Sai was intelligent enough and wanted exclusive control, then she probably would not have connected her tunnels directly to the Void itself.
More likely, she would have left a thick layer of earth in between, enough to keep other Void creatures that could not burrow from coming through so easily.
In truth, this territory probably really belonged only to Rek'Sai and the Xer'Sai.
For Void creatures, feeding was a desire, not a necessity.
After all, they came from an entirely different plane.
And different Void creatures naturally had different needs when it came to what they consumed.
The one constant was that, to one degree or another, they all brought destruction to the world.
Take another creation of the Void, Kha'Zix the Voidreaver.
Compared to Rek'Sai's "reproduction," he was more driven by the thrill he felt after a successful hunt.
Void creatures were always starving.
Which meant their feeding would never end.
"I smell it, but it's the same scent from the ceramic cup I dug up before, and it's really faint."
Yuumi was frowning too.
Her master had left without saying goodbye, and had even torn out those pages from the Book of Thresholds.
That place had to have been so dangerous that she had needed to destroy the portal route immediately.
After all, curiosity could do more than kill the cat, it might destroy the whole world.
"It's really quiet in here..."
"Shh!" Yuumi raised one paw very seriously and slapped it over Caleb's mouth.
Then she pointed with the other paw toward the tunnel on the left.
The passages underground stretched in every direction, so the group could only rely on Kai'Sa's instincts about the Void and Yuumi's sharp senses to keep moving deeper.
The others outside had brought plenty of food this time, and there was also a whole field of corpses that needed to be dealt with.
Especially when Yaanogel's spearhead had blazed with light at the end, nearly every Xer'Sai had burst up out of the ground and rushed toward the center of that light without a second thought.
Unfortunately for them, it still had not delayed Queen Rek'Sai's death in the slightest.
"More to the right."
Even without Yuumi's warning, Caleb could hear those faint little rustling sounds now.
Kai'Sa landed lightly on the ground. They still had no idea what was ahead, and after exploring for this long, it was time to be ready for a fight.
"Uh..." Caleb looked blankly at the way both Kai'Sa and Yuumi were staring hard at him.
It was not until a sharp pain shot through his hand that Caleb finally, and very reluctantly, let go and raised his bow.
The two of them moved with feather-light steps, even holding their breath.
When they turned past the final passage, a mass of densely packed insect cocoons came into view.
"Oh my God..."
Even Caleb, who did not have trypophobia, felt his scalp crawl at the sight.
The cocoons were not just writhing. Tiny Xer'Sai were stretching their sharp feeding mouths out from the top, straining upward.
And above the cocoons, they could vaguely make out a human-shaped figure.
"Please don't tell me that's a person..."
Come on. Even if it was a person, after hanging there this long, those larvae should have sucked them dry already.
And yet, under the frantic feeding of the larvae, the human-shaped figure hanging from the earthen wall actually twitched twice.
"They're still alive?!"
Caleb was dumbstruck, but he still forced himself forward through the revulsion.
He had no way to judge how weak that person was, so he did not dare let Kai'Sa solve it with a burst of Icathian Rain.
Fortunately, his longbow could split into twin blades, so Caleb carved his way forward like that instead.
"I mean, sure, but why does this feel both disgusting and weirdly guilty at the same time..."
Helpless, Caleb glanced at the figure on the wall, who by now no longer seemed to be moving at all.
Kai'Sa brought Yuumi with her, stepped onto Caleb's shoulder, and carefully took the hanging figure down.
"Yuumi."
Caleb kept striding forward, cutting off the mouths protruding from the cocoons with one slash after another.
This was real filthy work. He had to deal with those long insect feeding tubes while shrieks rang all around him.
The fluid spraying out from their bodies splattered all over him until he was nearly soaked in it.
On the way back, there was probably no chance of staying pressed up against Kai'Sa like before.
At this rate, he might really have to crawl back on his own.
At that thought, Caleb let out a sigh.
Meanwhile, Yuumi was bouncing over and over on top of that human-shaped lump.
Calling it human-shaped was generous. The body was in such horrific condition that it was impossible to tell whether it was male or female.
At a glance, all anyone could really say was, this was probably a person.
Then again, there was no guarantee they could still be saved.
For all Caleb knew, Yuumi might just have been indulging one of her old favorite hobbies, rolling around beside a corpse.
"What is this?"
Crimson spread over Caleb's left eye and left ear again.
"Do you not have eyes of your own... oh, right, looks like you don't. Never mind, then."
Seeing a "mouth" grow out of the left side of his own face, Caleb could not help throwing out a dry comment.
Then, with a backhand slash, he split the last larva in half.
"You're not about to tell me you know this person, are you?" Caleb stared at the figure, barely still humanoid and hanging on by a thread.
"What a coincidence, I actually do."
Yaanogel's voice carried emotion, surprise, regret, and disbelief all at once.
"..."
Caleb fell silent at once, like he had just taken a full-force Decisive Strike from Garen.
"What about behind that wall?"
He looked toward the one "wall" in this whole tunnel network that stood out from everything around it.
It looked like a massive boulder, abruptly lodged in the middle of the earth.
"I can feel it. The Void is behind that."
Kai'Sa's eyes were serious too. Under normal circumstances, she came to the surface from the Void breach in Icathia to replenish her plasma.
That breach was extremely small, barely large enough to let any big monsters out.
So even though the Void breach had remained open all these years, Shurima had still stayed relatively peaceful.
But this tunnel made by the burrowing beasts was different.
The reason no large, or even gigantic, creatures had come through was probably just that they could not tunnel.
And Rek'Sai had taken advantage of that to breed hundreds of offspring here.
If the surface land had not been so vast and sparsely populated, or if they had been here longer, then the number of Xer'Sai lying in wait here would have been far more terrifying.
"These larvae are completely different from the adult Xer'Sai."
Caleb's eyes were serious too.
"From the different cross-sections I just saw, it looks like they sensed the queen's death."
"So if we hadn't come, these larvae would've used the tunnels and this... sacrifice to regroup and mature?"
Kai'Sa was as sharp as ever, she understood almost immediately.
"That's right."
Caleb nodded slowly, deep in thought.
...
Under the starlit night, the group waiting for Caleb had already pitched their tents.
Not long after they started the fire, a figure shot out of that huge hole at top speed.
Caleb grabbed the rim of the opening and vaulted up in a single motion.
In Kai'Sa's arms, there was vaguely the shape of a person.
"Listen first."
Before anyone else could ask anything, Caleb cut them off at once.
"Bleed yourselves, but not enough to seriously affect your condition."
Sivir looked at Renekton and Taliyah in confusion.
Then she gritted her teeth and used her crossblade to slice open her arm.
She had done something like this before when summoning Azir.
Taliyah and Renekton acted almost at the same time.
For the last several days, Caleb's own body had practically been running nonstop to replenish blood, so right now he could not help much.
As the blood of the two humans and the Ascended slowly dripped into the sand, the figure in Kai'Sa's arms became much clearer as she walked closer.
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