Chapter Text
“They see your beauty, so frail and fine,
They see your peace, woven of faith and toil,
They forget your heart, bound in slumber and servitude,
When you wake they shall see y our truth,
A beast's nature bare to all.”
— "Pharloom's Folly", The Conductor Romino. Hollow Knight: Silksong
(...)
Shen Yuan was, by any reasonable metric, a monster enthusiast.
Not in the sanitized, museum-glass way, no. He liked them wrong. The more anatomically implausible, socially irreconcilable, and morally unsettling, the better. If a creature could be neatly categorized, synthesized, sanitized, sympathetically humanized, or redeemed with a tragic backstory and good cheekbones, his interest evaporated. Monsters, to Shen Yuan, were supposed to mean something: about hunger, about survival, about systems that did not care whether humans found them palatable.
That was the only reason he had ever picked up Proud Immortal Demon Way.
The prose was uneven, the protagonist insufferable, and the female characters written with all the depth of decorative lacquerware, but the demons. The demons were different. They weren’t just humans with horns glued on; they had ecologies, hierarchies, instincts that actively clashed with human cultivation logic. Entire regions of the demon realm operated on principles that made orthodox sect manuals implode if you so much as held them nearby. Reproduction wasn’t romantic. Power didn’t flow along righteous lines. Survival was not moral, it was structural.
Shen Yuan read for the footnotes that didn’t exist, for the implications the author clearly hadn’t intended. He read to imagine how a human body would fail if subjected to demon biology, how a cultivator’s neat little worldview would crack when confronted with something that didn’t recognize “virtue” as a governing force. He didn’t want comfort. He wanted friction.
Which was, in retrospect, probably why the universe decided to take that interest personally.
He was an artist, too, though he never said it out loud like that. Fanartist sounded safer, smaller, less embarrassing. As if it explained away the hours, the tendon pain, the way his brain automatically reduced everything he saw to silhouettes and negative space.
Yes, he had drawn them. All of them.
Every beast, every demonic creature that Proud Immortal Demon Way mentioned once and then abandoned like a half-chewed idea. The fire-scaled things lurking under lava seas. The bone-winged carrion demons that fed on battlefield qi. The nameless horrors described in a single throwaway sentence before Luo Binghe punched through them and moved on. Shen Yuan drew them anyway. He had to. If a monster existed in text, then it deserved a body that made sense.
The wiki — the PIDW wiki, the one everyone used without thinking twice — was his fault. Entirely. He’d started it out of irritation, because half the comments under the chapters were arguing about what demons even looked like, and the other half were just shipping discourse. Someone had to do something useful. That someone, apparently, was him.
He learned anatomy to make the monsters plausible. Comparative anatomy, even. Arthropods, reptiles, deep-sea fish, anything with joints that didn’t map cleanly onto a human skeleton. He learned how exoskeletons articulated, how mandibles layered, how organs rearranged themselves when evolution didn’t care about aesthetics. He learned composition and lighting because horror without clarity was just noise. He learned to draw silk so it looked structural instead of decorative. He learned to draw wrongness in a way that felt inevitable.
At some point, he realized he was no longer just illustrating canon. He was patching it. Filling ecological gaps. Writing speculative notes under his own images: likely apex predator, probable reproductive caste, ritual scarring indicates hierarchy. Readers started citing his interpretations as if they were official. Some even argued that the demons felt “more real” in the wiki than in the novel itself. Fanon discourse got wild.
He had, without quite meaning to, reverse-engineered a world.
Which was, again, probably why transmigration didn’t drop him into a nice, safe human sect with a bamboo aesthetic and manageable trauma. Of course it didn’t. Of course the universe looked at the guy who taught himself to draw monstrosities for accuracy and went, ah. You’ll do.
After all, Shen Yuan had never wanted the demons to be less terrifying. He’d just wanted them to make sense.
His real work, the one that paid the bills, signed the checks, and slowly ate away at his soul, was being a CEO.
Not the glamorous kind. No glass towers or dramatic boardroom monologues. He ran a big-sized creative-tech company that survived on contracts, deadlines, and the delicate art of making everyone else’s bad ideas look viable. Investors wanted growth. Employees wanted stability. Clients wanted miracles on impossible timelines. Shen Yuan learned early that leadership was mostly about absorbing pressure quietly and smiling like it didn’t hurt.
Nobody there knew about the rest of him.
They didn’t know that tucked away beneath the business degree and executive polish was a minor in biology, painstakingly assembled from electives, summer courses, and one deeply suspicious independent study. Officially, it had been about “visual literacy in scientific illustration.” Unofficially, it had been about learning how bodies worked when evolution stopped caring about human comfort. Arthropod physiology. Digestive specialization. Reproductive strategies that made mammals look like amateurs. All of it chosen, meticulously, for monsters.
It had been useful. Disturbingly so.
Great Master Airplane himself had noticed.
The message had come out of nowhere, buried in Shen Yuan’s inbox between supplier negotiations and legal updates. A commission request. Official fanart. PIDW promotional material. The kind of thing that came with contracts, NDAs, and just enough money to be insulting given the workload. Shen Yuan had stared at the screen for a long time before laughing out loud. He made it cheap, he didn’t need the money anyway.
They hated each other on principle.
Peerless Cucumber and Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had been at war for years, one in the comments, the other in the author’s notes, both too stubborn to disengage. Shen Yuan criticized the narrative structure, the character logic, the treatment of women. Airplane mocked his essays, called him pretentious, accused him of missing the point. They argued about demons most of all. Shen Yuan accused him of cowardice. Airplane accused him of overthinking.
And yet.
They became business associates anyway. (Ugh, friends or whatever.)
Professional. Icy. Efficient. Airplane wanted monsters that looked frightening without being too alien. Shen Yuan delivered designs that walked the line just well enough to pass editorial review while still slipping in structural logic where he could. Silk glands that weren’t decorative. Mandibles that did something. Demon forms that implied systems instead of vibes. Airplane complained. Airplane paid on time.
Neither of them ever admitted that the arrangement worked.
Sometimes, late at night, Shen Yuan wondered if that was the real sin. Not the arguing, not the bitterness, but the fact that between them, accidentally, they had built something coherent. A world that functioned even when the story didn’t look too closely at it.
It was funny, in a bleak sort of way. He spent his days making companies run smoothly and his nights making demons anatomically plausible, and somehow the universe looked at that résumé and decided it was exactly what was needed.
After all, if anyone was going to survive a world where monsters followed rules more strictly than humans, it would be the man who’d been quietly preparing for it all along.
Of course he transmigrated into his favorite novel.
Shen Yuan had been hoping for it for years, not in a dramatic, rooftop-at-midnight way, and certainly not in a do something irreversible way. He just… hoped. Quietly. Patiently. The way you hope for rain during a drought: not because you can summon it, but because the alternative is accepting that this is all there is.
When he died, it was unremarkable. No pain worth mentioning. No trauma or anything. Just exhaustion settling deep enough that his body finally stopped arguing. He went with a thought already half-formed, familiar as muscle memory: It would be nice if there was something more. Dumbfuck novel, dumfuck author.
The universe, apparently, agreed.
The problem (the infuriating, personal problem) was that Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had chosen that exact moment in real life to end Proud Immortal Demon Way with what could only be described as a narrative war crime.
Shen Yuan had read the final chapters with the same numb focus he used for hostile contracts and bad mergers. He’d known it was going to be bad. He hadn’t expected it to be that bad. Character assassinations. Dropped arcs. Demons flattened into set dressing. A rushed, moralizing ending that treated the demon realm like a phase Luo Binghe grew out of, rather than a system that had shaped him.
Worst of all, the monsters were discarded.
Years of implied biology, ecology, power structures… gone. Handwaved. Rewritten into convenient enemies or tragic props. The spider clans barely rated a paragraph. Fate-weaving reduced to aesthetics. Consumption turned metaphorical. The web cut apart because it was inconvenient to explain.
Shen Yuan had closed the tab and sat there for a long time, staring at nothing.
He wasn’t angry in the explosive sense. He was colder than that. The kind of anger that files itself away under action items. The kind that says: this cannot be allowed to stand. My poor baby, he thought nonsensically.
He remembered thinking very clearly, very calmly that if the world really worked the way PIDW claimed it did, then this ending was wrong. Not morally wrong. Structurally wrong. You couldn’t dismantle a system that ancient without consequences. You couldn’t let fate-weavers exist for thousands of years and then pretend they didn’t matter.
Someone needed to fix it.
Someone who understood the monsters better than the author who wrote them.
When Shen Yuan opened his eyes again, silk brushed against his skin. No, not skin. Chitin. Cool, layered, alive with faint vibrations. Information flooded in the way diagrams did when you finally understood them all at once: web tension, poison reservoirs, the distant chemical signatures of other bodies moving through the dark.
He didn’t panic. He didn’t scream. He thought, distantly, with the calm of a man reviewing a hostile takeover: Ah. So this is the Shadow Silk.
Prince Yīnxiāo. The one destined to be eaten, if the story followed its own cruel momentum. The quiet one. The one no one watched too closely, because fate had already decided he wouldn’t matter.
Shen Yuan exhaled, slow and careful, feeling the web answer him in sympathetic tremors. Airplane had ended the novel with the worst thing imaginable. Fine. Shen Yuan had not spent years reverse-engineering demons, learning biology for monsters that didn’t exist, and patching narrative holes out of sheer spite just to accept that.
If fate was a web, then he knew exactly how to cut, reinforce, and reweave it.
And this time, the ending would make sense.
(The Three Goddess smiled upon him.)
Shen Yuan figured out three things within the first week of not being dead. First: the universe had a sense of humor. Second: it was absolutely obsessed with systems. Third: it had made him a kunze, which meant everyone expected him to be terrifying and unfortunately, they were correct.
This won't be a romance novel transmigration. There was no “Congratulations, Host.” No floating screen. No cheerful quests like Smile More! or Seduce the Protagonist. What there was, instead, was a rigid, ancient biological-cosmological framework that functioned whether anyone liked it or not.
Which, honestly, Shen Yuan respected. The “System” (Capital S, implied, smug): The Fate-Weaving Spider Clan did not need a guiding intelligence because the entire species was the system. Fate itself was woven into their minds and rituals.
Everything ran on three interlocking layers: Biology (what your body can do), Ritual (what your body is allowed to do) and Narrative Expectation (what everyone assumes will happen).
Shen Yuan’s job, apparently, was to survive layer three without getting eaten by layers one or two.
Great Master Airplane wanted to subvert the qianyuan/kunze/zhongyong Dynamic with the Spider Clan. It was ABO, except not stupid. Human/Wolf ABO was nonsense. Everyone knew that. Even humans knew that, subconsciously, which was why they kept pretending it was about vibes and sex instead of power, labour and instinct, but mostly power. Something Shen Yuan had not touched, because he was afraid of fujoshis.
Spider ABO, on the other hand, was refreshingly honest.
Kunzes were the Apex predators. Reproductive authorities. Walking proof that fertility and lethality are not opposites. Larger bodies, stronger mandibles, abdomens that actually do things. If you were a kunze, you were not “protected.” You were responsible. Shen Yuan, discovering he was one, had thought: Of course. If the universe wanted me safe, it wouldn’t have put mandibles on my face.
Qianyuans were smaller. Faster. Prettier. Replaceable. Genetically useful in the same way spare parts are useful. Expected to die during reproduction, and frankly suspicious if they didn’t.
And, finally, zhongyongs were like the glue of the clan. The workers. The ones who made sure egg-clutches didn’t collapse and silk arrays didn’t unravel. Socially invisible, structurally indispensable. Shen Yuan liked them immediately.
Power was not about who chased whom. Power was about who got eaten and why.
Reproduction was fun to find out what´s up with that too, even if Shen Yuan did get weirded out by the explanation. There was no sex scene with the Spider Clan, Great Master Airplane didn't explain anything to the public what the fuck was happening to the ilusive Waevers. Apparently there was no sex. There was no penetration. There was certainly no blushing. (Well, there was sex, but it was much more complicated and used as power play.)
Kunze's “heat” wasn’t about desire. It was about egg maturation. Symptoms included: Increased aggression, territorial paranoia and the sudden urge to kill anything that got too close to your silk.
Qianyuan's “rut” was worse. A narrow window where spermatophores were viable, during which qianyuans became reckless, loud, and dramatically convinced of their own importance.
Shen Yuan found this deeply ironic. Scenting wasn't an attraction. It was chemical warfare. Signals layered with threat, readiness, dominance, and timing. Anyone comparing it “kinda like perfume" deserved to be cocooned and studied.
There were spermatophores (sealed packets, carefully curated), ova sacs (externally produced, heavily guarded) and silk arrays calibrated like ritual diagrams. Fertilization happened outside the body, because internal processes were inefficient, dangerous, and emotionally messy. Consumption afterward was not passion. It was resource management. A kunze who failed to consume an qianyuan was not “merciful.” They were wasteful. Sentimental. Possibly unfit to rule.
Shen Yuan, processing this, nodded and thought: Yes. This makes more sense than 90% of human marriages.
(The optional sex, for non-reproductive purposes, was freaky and Shen Yuan won't think much about it.)
But, the coolest part was the Mandibles. The mandibles weren’t just for killing. They were absorption organs; branching channels that liquefied prey externally and absorbed nutrients directly, like lacteals with teeth. Which meant that eating was optional, feeding during combat was normal and recovery after injury was terrifyingly fast. It also meant that when Shen Yuan bit something for the first time and felt qi flood his system like a perfectly balanced nutrient infusion, his only thought was: Oh. That’s why they’re afraid of us. Brain juice, bone milk-shake, heart frapuccino..
Overall, pretty cool. Yet, Prince Yīnxiāo was “destined” to be eaten because the system required balance. Quiet kunzes who specialized in poison and invisibility were dangerous to hierarchy. The web preferred obvious power: size, violence, spectacle. Subtlety was destabilizing. So the narrative expectation was simple. Yīnxiāo would mature. He would produce something valuable. He would be consumed. The web would tighten elsewhere.
Ah. So this is a bug, was his thought. Because fate here wasn't only divine. It was predictive modeling based on historical behavior. And Shen Yuan had made a career out of breaking projections.
Shen Yuan approached the problem the way he approached hostile audits and failing subsidiaries: by assuming everyone involved was emotional, underinformed, and dangerously attached to precedent.
Which meant the first step was documentation.
He spent months doing nothing that looked suspicious. He observed. He listened. He let elder kunzes correct him in public while quietly mapping their silk diagrams in his head. Fate-weaving, he discovered, was ninety percent tradition and ten percent physics, and everyone treated the ten percent like it was a rude suggestion. Arrays were copied, not interrogated. Consumption routes followed aesthetic spirals instead of optimal flow. Qi dispersal assumed death as a necessary release valve because that was how it had always been done. Shen Yuan had nearly laughed himself into a molt. Yeah, fuck that.
The silk arrays were the easiest fix. Everyone thought of them as ceremonial. Beautiful, symbolic, ancient. Which they were. They were also infrastructure. Change the angle of a strand by a fraction, adjust tension at three non-obvious anchor points, and suddenly qi didn’t spike catastrophically at the moment of consumption. It flowed. It redistributed. Lethality thresholds dropped from “inevitable” to “optional.”
He filed these changes under stability improvements. No one argued. Stability was a sacred word.
Venom was more delicate. Spider venom wasn’t a single substance; it was a library. Neurotoxins, cytotoxins, digestive agents… modular, adjustable, and culturally standardized in ways that made no biological sense. Shen Yuan quietly started rebalancing his own mix, favoring paralysis, metabolic suspension, and delayed breakdown. Not mercy, efficiency. Why destroy a resource immediately when you could store it, drain it slowly, or repurpose it entirely?
He labeled the new ratios as ceremonial variants. Again, no one questioned it. Ceremonies were allowed to be strange. Rituals, though. Rituals were where the real rot lived.
There were rites that existed solely because an ancestor had once found them impressive. There were steps performed in exact sequence because deviation was “disrespectful,” even though no one could articulate what the step actually did. Shen Yuan did not challenge these directly, that would have been suicide. Instead, he reclassified.
This was a kunze privilege. Apex authority, used correctly.
Certain rites became optional. Others were reframed as symbolic reenactments, no longer biologically binding. A few particularly lethal practices were declared legacy observances, to be performed only during commemorations or political theater.
The web loosened. Most importantly, Shen Yuan never, ever corrected the assumption that he was going to die. He leaned into it.
He let people speak over him. Let them sneer at him. Let them plan around his absence. Let them assume his adjustments were simply the fussiness of a doomed kunze trying to leave things neat behind him. He offered suggestions with the tone of someone making peace with inevitability.
He was careful to look useful, not threatening.
Which was hilarious, considering he was quietly turning the Fate-Weaving Clan’s most sacred mechanism into a non-lethal, modular, scalable system that no longer required sacrificial deaths to function. You know, for fun.
When the day came, when the web tightened, when the court gathered, when consumption was expected, everything worked exactly as it always had.
Qi flowed. Silk sang. Fate turned its wheel. It just… didn’t take him with it. The system absorbed the shock, redistributed the excess, and stabilized so smoothly that for a terrifying moment, no one realized anything had gone wrong.
(The Heavens smiled upon him.)
Shen Yuan, standing very much alive in the aftermath, thought distantly that this was always how revolutions happened. Not with screams, but with spreadsheets. Not with rebellion, but with optimization. Which was very funny, because it was like he was groomed all his lives to make this possible.
If fate objected, it didn’t say so out loud. And if the elder kunzes began watching him more closely afterward — well. That was fine. He’d always known invisibility was temporary. After all, he hadn’t broken the web. He’d just proven it could exist without eating him.
Which, in the long run, was going to make everyone very uncomfortable.
The problem with breaking fate quietly was that the world did not know how to pretend nothing had happened. The web had tightened. The ritual had completed. The expected death had failed to occur. And now everyone had to live with that.
Socially, the court went wrong first.
There had always been a comfortable cruelty baked into the hierarchy: kunzes ruled, qianyuans died, zhongyongs endured. The certainty of it kept everyone calm. Kunzes did not have to justify their authority because it was biologically self-evident. Qianyuans did not have to imagine futures because the system had already decided how they would end. Zhongyongs kept things running because someone had to.
Shen Yuan’s survival introduced a new, deeply unpleasant possibility: That authority might be maintained without unnecessary death.
Elder kunzes began arguing in circles, careful not to sound like they were accusing the system itself of error. Some insisted that Yīnxiāo’s survival was a delay, not a deviation. Fate, they said, was patient. Others — quieter, more dangerous — wondered aloud whether fate had been misinterpreted all along.
The Triumvirate did not comment.
(The Three Goddess smiled upon him.)
Which, of course, was worse.
Hierarchy, once cracked, does not shatter. It creaks. Titles remained the same. Deference remained intact. But when Shen Yuan moved through the court, silk stirred differently. Eyes lingered. Calculations adjusted. He was still Shadow Silk, still formally beneath the ruling kunzes, but now he was a kunze who had completed a fatal rite and walked away.
That was not a category the clan possessed.
Among the qianyuans, the confusion was sharper, uglier, and much more personal.
Consumption had always been their end-point. Horrifying, yes, but also clarifying. To be chosen was an honor. To survive was an anomaly. To not be eaten by a kunze who should have consumed was… unprecedented.
They did not know whether to fear Shen Yuan or hope for him.
Some qianyuans began watching him the way prey watches shelter: cautiously, desperately. If fate could be rerouted, if consumption could be made non-lethal, then survival might be something other than luck or exceptional genetics. Shen Yuan’s very existence became a dangerous thought experiment.
Others wanted him eaten immediately. Not out of hatred, but out of terror. Because if he lived, then every qianyuan death that followed became optional in hindsight. Tradition could be questioned. Sacrifice could be audited. And that meant accountability, a concept no one wanted anywhere near ritualized death.
Qianyuans whispered among themselves: If Shadow Silk survives, what does that make our deaths?
Zhongyongs reacted differently. Efficiently. They noticed the data. Egg-clutches stabilized. Qi yields increased. Post-ritual recovery times shortened. The web required fewer emergency repairs. No one said anything publicly, but zhongyongs began quietly aligning themselves with Shen Yuan’s adjustments, because zhongyongs understood one thing very well: A system that works better is harder to argue with. Again, Shen Yuan really liked zhongyongs.
The Triumvirate, meanwhile, observed.
Queen Xuánmǔ’s gaze lingered on Shen Yuan longer than was polite. Not hungry. Evaluative. As if deciding whether he was an aberration to be corrected or a tool the web had finally produced for itself. King Tiānsī adjusted silk arrays without comment, but never reverted Shen Yuan’s changes. Queen Xuěluó ordered no executions.
The absence of immediate punishment told the court everything it needed to know and nothing it could safely act on.
Shen Yuan, for his part, did not claim victory. He did not preach. He did not announce reform. He continued doing exactly what he had always done: optimizing, documenting, improving. Which was, unfortunately, worse than rebellion. Because now the clan had seen a future where kunzes did not have to prove dominance through death, where qianyuans did not have to die to be useful, and where fate could be managed.
And no one — kunze, qianyuan, or zhongyong — could quite decide whether Shen Yuan should be celebrated as salvation, devoured as heresy, or kept alive at all costs.
The web, once absolute, now hesitated.
And in a culture built on inevitability, hesitation was the most destabilizing force of all.
Shen Yuan learned, somewhat belatedly, that destabilizing fate had consequences beyond politics.
Some of them were… personal.
Not all qianyuans were conservative about tradition. A handful, usually the smaller ones, the ones who had brushed human cities in disguise, dreamed about the demonic empire and come back with bad habits and worse confidence, looked at Shen Yuan’s continued existence and drew a very different conclusion than the elders had.
They decided he was desirable. Not just powerful. Not just dangerous. Desirable, in the way that made pheromones sharpen, silk hum, and court etiquette quietly disintegrate.
First, Shen Yuan wanted to say that he really tried to ignore the mating advances. He really, really, did try. But, well, they were impossible to ignore or look away.
The first time it happened, Shen Yuan, to his credit, didn’t even realize it was happening.
He noticed the chemical shift before the intent: a layered pheromone release, deliberately imprecise, like ink dropped into water. Not a challenge. Not submission. An invitation. Human-touched qianyuans favored that sort of thing, less formal signaling, more suggestion. Shen Yuan catalogued it automatically (interesting ratio; poorly disciplined, but enthusiastic) before realizing several pairs of eyes were now on him.
Then came the displays.
Arachnid mating techniques were not subtle, but they were varied. One qianyuan spun a tension-pattern dance, feet tapping precise rhythms into the web, creating vibrations meant to advertise coordination and stamina. Another released a slow spiral of silk from his wrists, deliberately uneven, showing off genetic variance rather than perfection, saying ‘look, I am different, I am not optimized, I will not compete with you’. A third simply perched at the edge of Shen Yuan’s web and performed exaggerated, almost theatrical grooming motions, preening mandibles and smoothing chitin in a way that would have been ridiculous if it weren’t biologically sincere.
Shen Yuan watched all of this with the expression of a man attending a conference panel he had not known he was keynote speaker for. It was… awkward. It was also, to his surprise, faintly flattering.
No one had ever danced for him before. No one had ever tried to charm him with deliberate inefficiency and poorly controlled pheromones. In the spider clan, human gender meant very little, size, role, and outcome mattered far more, so Shen Yuan forced himself not to react the way his human instincts wanted to.
No blushing. No retreat. Spider Kunzes did not shrink from attention. Spider Kunzes evaluated it.
Which was how he ended up remaining perfectly still while a small, male-bodied demonic qianyuan, barely more than ornamental by clan standards, stepped onto his web and pressed both hands into the silk with a bright, irreverent giggle.
The web answered, of course. Shen Yuan felt it immediately: weight, pressure, the faint tremor of excitement. The qianyuan tilted his head, clearly delighted that the web had not rejected him, and released another playful burst of pheromones that screamed harmless, harmless, harmless in about six different chemical dialects.
(It was an invitation to sex or reproduction?)
Shen Yuan cleared his throat internally and reminded himself that he was an apex predator. Outwardly, he adjusted the web’s tension just enough to keep the qianyuan from losing balance. Efficient. Polite. Non-committal. He told himself the warmth curling in his abdomen was purely biological. A reflex. Nothing more.
Still, later and alone, he admitted something with mild, professional embarrassment: Being considered the most desirable kunze ever to weave was not the worst side effect of ruining fate. It was inconvenient. Socially destabilizing. A logistical nightmare waiting to happen…. but it was also, in its own strange way, proof.
If even qianyuans, those raised to expect death as courtship, were now daring to flirt instead of resign themselves to consumption, then the web had truly changed. And Shen Yuan, kunze, fate-weaver, reluctant object of arachnid affection, had no idea whether he wanted to tighten those threads or let them tangle further.
Which, frankly, was a new problem. He supposed he’d deal with it the same way he dealt with everything else. Carefully and with paranoia.
The backlash did not come from where Shen Yuan expected it to. He had prepared for the elders. For qianyuans. For tradition itself to push back like a closing fist. He had not prepared for other kunzes.
It started subtly, the way intra-kunze conflict always did in the Fate-Weaving Clan: not with open challenges, but with posture. Silk spun a little thicker when he entered a space. Mandibles flexed unnecessarily. Conversations stalled, then resumed without him, just slightly too loud to be accidental. Territory markers appeared closer to his webs than etiquette allowed, daring him to respond.
They were testing him. Other kunzes, some older, some closer to his age, some bigger and meaner, some who had spent centuries proving their worth through impeccable ritual lethality, looked at Shen Yuan and saw something intolerable.
He had survived when he was supposed to die. He had reaped the benefits of kunze authority without paying the traditional price. And worse, qianyuans were looking at him. That last part stung the deepest.
To the conservative kunzes, Shen Yuan was not a revolutionary. He was a cheat. A kunze who had taken the apex position and then quietly removed the blood toll that justified it. A kunze whose dominance was not constantly refreshed through consumption and visible violence, but through efficiency and results.
That was unacceptable.
The first confrontation came during a public weaving.
A senior kunze, larger than Shen Yuan, her abdomen fully manifested and scarred with ritual marks, deliberately overwrote one of his silk anchors, flooding the shared webspace with her pheromonal signature. The message was clear: I am stronger. I am older. Yield.
Shen Yuan felt the pressure immediately. His web sang under the strain, vibrating with competing dominance signals. He did not yield. He adjusted.
Instead of pushing back with brute force, he redistributed tension across secondary strands, siphoning her excess qi into stabilizing filaments she hadn’t even noticed existed. Her display lost coherence mid-threat, collapsing into noise. The watching zhongyongs went very still.
The kunze stared at him. Shen Yuan met her gaze calmly, mandibles relaxed, posture unaggressive. Like a disappointed teacher. Which, somehow, made it worse.
After that, challenges became more direct.
Some kunzes attacked his competence: accusing him of weakening the clan, of “softening” ritual purity, of courting instability. Others challenged him physically. Short, vicious skirmishes meant to establish dominance without triggering full court intervention. They struck fast and hard, relying on size, experience, and the assumption that he would hesitate.
They were wrong.
Shen Yuan did not enjoy fighting, but he understood control. He fought defensively, economically, turning their aggression back on itself. He used web geometry, venom modulation, terrain. He never killed. He never consumed.
He wasn’t kind, he was lazy. He was following the ancient low of the Minimum Effort.
Every time a kunze lunged expecting a decisive, bloody conclusion and instead found themselves restrained, paralyzed, humiliated, but alive, the message spread. This was not a kunze who played by the old rules. Which meant the hierarchy had a problem.
Some kunzes doubled down, escalating displays, making themselves larger, more monstrous, more visibly lethal, saying ‘see? This is what a kunze should look like’. Others began avoiding him entirely, refusing to share space or ritual threads, as if proximity alone might infect them with his anomaly.
And a very dangerous few began thinking.
If Shen Yuan’s model spread, if kunzes no longer had to prove dominance through death, then size and age would no longer guarantee supremacy. Skill would matter. Intelligence would matter. Adaptability would matter.
Not everyone liked their position being re-negotiated. Shen Yuan noticed all of this with the tired clarity of someone who had seen corporate restructures play out the same way, just with fewer mandibles. He did not retaliate politically. He did not demand recognition. He did not accuse anyone of jealousy, even when it was painfully obvious.
He simply continued to exist. To improve systems. To stabilize clutches. To make webs stronger with fewer corpses. Which, among apex predators who had built their identity on being unavoidable, was perhaps the greatest provocation of all.
Because now the question was no longer whether Shen Yuan deserved his place. It was whether the others could still justify theirs. And that kind of competition was far more dangerous than open war.
Shen Yuan’s first heat did not arrive quietly. Nothing in the Fate-Weaving Clan ever did.
It was anticipated the way eclipses were anticipated: with calculation, superstition, and an uncomfortable amount of public interest. The moment his maturation markers locked in, twenty cycles, abdomen fully stabilized, silk glands reaching adult output, the court shifted. Schedules rearranged themselves around him. Patrol routes tightened. Observation webs multiplied like gossip.
Everyone knew the season was coming.
Among the qianyuans, restraint became theoretical. They grew reckless in the way only qianyuans did when biology handed them a deadline. Pheromones spiked and clashed, flooding shared spaces with poorly disciplined signals, challenge layered over invitation layered over panic. They postured too close to his territory. They spun silk offerings that were more desperate than impressive. Some tried subtlety. Some abandoned it entirely. None of them agreed on whether they wanted to be chosen, spared, or simply noticed.
Among the kunzes, the response was worse.
Paranoia settled in like a second exoskeleton.
Older kunzes fortified their webs, thickening anchor lines as if Shen Yuan’s heat might reach out and steal authority by proximity alone. Younger ones watched him with sharp, unsettled eyes, measuring themselves against a kunze whose dominance did not look like theirs and whose heat threatened to redraw the social map entirely. Rumors bloomed: that his heat would be uncontrollable, that it would destabilize the web, that qianyuans would die in droves or not at all.
No one liked uncertainty. Least of all apex predators.
Shen Yuan would have liked to be excluded from the narrative entirely. He was not an aggressive demon by inclination. He avoided conflict. He preferred negotiation, redesign, quiet correction. Even now, as the first biological warnings crept in, temperature rising beneath his chitin, silk glands itching with excess output, his human mind clung stubbornly to calm.
The final exuvia.
This is manageable, he told himself. It’s a physiological process. I’ve handled worse quarterly reports. Then his spider brain kicked in. It was not loud. It did not panic. It simply reasserted priorities.
Territory sharpened in his awareness, lines of silk lighting up like threat maps. Every unfamiliar pheromone read as intrusion. Every vibration carried intent. His mandibles clicked together once, twice (an involuntary reflex, dry and precise) and a low hiss slipped from him before he could stop it.
The sound rippled through the web. Nearby movement froze. Shen Yuan registered the reaction with detached surprise: qianyuans faltering mid-approach, kunzes going very still, the web itself tightening in response to him. Not fear, exactly. He exhaled slowly, forcing his posture down, hands open, mandibles relaxing by conscious effort alone.
Right, he thought, wry even now. So this is what apex deterrence feels like.
His heat did not make him lustful. It made him territorial. Hyper-aware. Intolerant of inefficiency and threat in equal measure. The pacifist remained, but layered beneath it was something ancient, cold, and extremely uninterested in compromise.
Shen Yuan did not attack anyone. But the web learned his boundaries that day.
And the court, watching a kunze who refused to turn his heat into spectacle or slaughter, slowly began to understand that this season, so eagerly anticipated, so deeply feared, was not going to resolve their tensions.
It was going to expose them.
Because Shen Yuan’s heat was not about desire. It was about control. And for the first time in the clan’s history, control did not look like violence.
Just like that, for ten years, no one was consumed. Not an qianyuan. Not a rival kunze. Not an enemy foolish enough to trespass too deeply into the web.
By the time Shen Yuan reached twenty-five, this fact had stopped being a curiosity and started being a problem.
The Fate-Weaving Spider Clan had always been small. Not weak, never weak, but contained, self-limiting by design. Consumption regulated population, authority, resource flow. Fear did the rest. Other demon clans learned quickly that the West was not worth testing. Armies vanished. Scouts never returned. The spiders were left alone because alone was safer.
And then Tianlang-jun noticed them.
The first demonic foreign delegation arrived without warning, without provocation, and without precedent. Not an envoy. Not a subordinate. The Emperor himself, stepping into Luómíng’s border caverns as if visiting acquaintances.
Officially, it was curiosity. Unofficially, it was a threat.
The moment the news spread, every eye in the clan turned, inevitably, to Shen Yuan. Of course it was his fault.
The clan’s first reaction was not outrage. It was panic.
The spiders had survived for millennia by being incomprehensible and hostile. Tianlang-jun’s arrival shattered that illusion. If the Emperor could walk into their territory unchallenged, then so could others. If he found them fascinating, then fascination could replace fear and fascination invited exploitation.
Some blamed Shen Yuan openly. Others didn’t need to say it. He was the kunze who stopped consumption. The kunze who stabilized instead of terrorized. The kunze who made the web legible. Legibility was dangerous.
Kunzes, who had tolerated him before, began pulling back. Shared rituals became formal, stiff, stripped of intimacy. Zhongyongs whispered about contingency plans. Qianyuans, especially the human-touched ones, looked at Shen Yuan with a mix of awe and dread, realizing that whatever he had done had reached far beyond clan politics.
The spiders had been noticed. And being noticed by an emperor was never neutral.
Internally, the hierarchy began to warp.
Traditionally, dominance refreshed itself through death. Without consumption, authority had become static. And static systems invite audits. Kunzes who ruled by sheer size and past violence found themselves questioned, not openly, but structurally. Why did this ritual still require sacrifice? Why did this title matter if outcomes were the same without bloodshed?
Shen Yuan never asked these questions out loud. Which made it worse. Because the answers increasingly pointed toward him.
Younger kunzes began emulating his methods quietly: venom restraint, web optimization, non-lethal dominance displays. Elders found their authority respected but no longer unquestioned. The Triumvirate remained unchallenged, but even they could feel the shift. Power was no longer visibly tied to death. It was tied to function.
(The Heavens smiled upon him.)
The web still held.
It just didn’t bite the way it used to.
Externally, everything changed overnight.
The Fate-Weaving Spider Clan had never been a political entity. They were an environmental hazard. A boundary condition. Something other demon lords factored around, not negotiated with. Tianlang-jun’s visit reclassified them. If the Emperor spoke to them as peers, even cautiously, then others had to acknowledge them as actors in demon politics. Neutrality was no longer invisibility. It was a stance.
That terrified them.
Because neutrality invites pressure from all sides.
The Sha’s territory sent scouts. Shen Yuan noted, absently, that the proposed northern trade route curved oddly, less efficient for goods, but ideal for information. Lesser demon lords began floating the idea of alliances, “mutual protection,” shared borders. None of them trusted the spiders. All of them wanted something.
Shen Yuan, watching this unfold, felt the familiar ache of recognition. This is what happens when a niche operation goes public.
Isolation had kept their economy simple. Silk was ritual material, structural support, weapon, archive. It was not a commodity.
Now it was.
Tianlang-jun’s interest alone was enough to spike demand. Demon merchants began asking questions, careful ones, polite ones, about silk durability, qi conductivity, venom applications. Zhongyongs started realizing, with mounting horror, that their clan possessed materials other factions would kill to control.
Trade could mean resources, stability, protection.
It could also mean dependency.
Shen Yuan insisted on limits. Quotas. Obfuscation. Partial exports that preserved the clan’s advantage. Some called it paranoia. Others called it wisdom. Everyone understood that once silk left the web, it stopped being sacred and started being leverage.
And leverage cuts both ways.
In summary, they gained political recognition, economic leverage and the terrifying possibility of allies. But also, they lost absolute isolation, unquestioned fear and tthe comfort of inevitability.
To cut the story short, Tianlang-jun was… a problem. Not an enemy. Not an invader. Not even openly hostile.
He entered the Fate-Weaving Clan’s audience chamber with the kind of physical presence that made webs hum in sympathy. Massive. Dense. Power folded inward so tightly it distorted the space around him. His body carried the unmistakable markers the spiders associated with kunze dominance; sheer mass, reinforced structure, an aura that pressed rather than flared.
And yet —
“I am an qianyuan,” Tianlang-jun said calmly, as if this were a completely unremarkable statement.
The web went very, very quiet.
Shen Yuan felt half the clan’s sensory threads stutter in confusion. If biology were a language, Tianlang-jun was speaking with incompatible grammar. His form contradicted everything the spiders knew to be true. Qianyuans were smaller. Faster. Expendable. Kunzes were vast, lethal, inevitable. This man was built like a kunze apex and wore the title of qianyuan emperor without irony.
From the Triumvirate’s thrones, the reaction was immediate and visceral. Xuánmǔ’s mandibles clicked once; sharp, disapproving. Tiānsī’s silk arrays tightened, recalibrating as if trying to re-measure reality itself. Xuěluó’s posture shifted, predatory in a way that suggested she was evaluating whether emperors could be cocooned and eaten.
They did not like this. They liked it even less when Tianlang-jun spoke again, his tone careful, genuinely courteous. “In my domain,” he said, “kunzes are often… misunderstood. I wished to see a culture where strength is not mislabeled.”
That did not help.
To the Triumvirate, the very framing was offensive. Kunzes were not misunderstood. They were apex. The idea that elsewhere kunzes were considered weak, breeding-focused, politically secondary was not merely alien. It was insulting. Worse, it implied that Tianlang-jun ruled a system built on an inversion of values just as fundamental as their own.
An qianyuan at the top. Kunzes diminished. No wonder they were displeased.
Shen Yuan, watching all of this from his place on the web, found it impossible not to be amused. Of course, he thought dryly. Cultural shock goes both ways.
The spiders had always known they were different, but isolation had quietly rewritten that difference into certainty. Their biology had become doctrine. Their hierarchy, law. They had mistaken local normal for universal truth. And now here was Tianlang-jun, walking contradiction incarnate, proving that power did not have to follow their rules or anyone else’s.
What unsettled Shen Yuan most wasn’t the Emperor’s strength. It was his interest.
Tianlang-jun watched the kunzes the way a scholar watched an unsolved problem. Not leering. Not dismissive. Curious, precise, attentive. His questions were carefully phrased, deferential even, circled kunze biology, inheritance, qi digestion, extracorporeal reproduction. He listened intently to explanations of silk arrays and consumption rituals, nodding as if filing each detail away for later consideration.
That, more than anything, put the Triumvirate on edge. Interest implied applicability. And applicability implied replication.
Shen Yuan could practically hear the unspoken fear vibrating through the web: If an qianyuan emperor learns how kunze dominance truly functions, what does he do with that knowledge?
For his part, Tianlang-jun seemed acutely aware he was walking a line. He was polite to the point of restraint. He did not challenge kunze authority. He did not assert his own. He spoke as a guest among apex predators, not a conqueror.
But he did not hide his fascination, either.
Which made this meeting what Shen Yuan privately categorized as a Category Five Cultural Collision. No one was wrong. No one was comfortable. And the web would never unlearn what it had just encountered.
The Fate-Weaving Clan had discovered that they were not the axis the world turned on. And Tianlang-jun, qianyuan emperor with a kunze’s gravity, had discovered that there existed a people who would never see him as “naturally” superior.
Neither revelation was reversible.
As the primary cause of this entire mess, Shen Yuan was, naturally, appointed diplomat. No one even pretended it was a choice. Prince Yīnxiāo — Shadow Silk, anomaly, reformer, former human — was declared the most suitable candidate on the grounds that he had once been human and therefore, allegedly, knew how to talk to people without immediately threatening to eat them.
Shen Yuan accepted this reasoning with the tired resignation of someone who had been promoted for all the wrong reasons. Between apex kunzes who solved disagreements with ritualized violence and qianyuans whose biology came with built-in countdown timers, he considered himself the most normal individual present.
This was, objectively, a lie. But it was a comforting one.
So, when the day come, Shen Yuan was dressed to impress. The clan took the assignment seriously. Too seriously.
If Shen Yuan was going to represent the Fate-Weaving Spider Clan to the Demon Emperor himself, then he would do so as a prince, not as the quiet, silk-smudged administrator they were used to ignoring.
They dressed him accordingly.
The ceremonial garments began with silk, of course, but not the soft, flexible kind he used for arrays. This was royal silk: dense, lacquer-sheen threads spun with trace venom and qi-conductive minerals, black shot through with oil-dark purples and glimmers of silver that caught the light like dew on a web at night.
The outer robe draped open in deliberate lines, cut to accommodate his partially manifested arachne abdomen. The silk did not hide his inhumanity; it framed it. Each layer was weighted so it moved slowly, gravely, emphasizing control rather than speed. When he walked, the fabric whispered, a sound engineered to register just at the edge of hearing, a reminder of silk under tension.
His abdomen was adorned with etched bands of polished chitin and silver inlay, ritual markings denoting lineage and authority rather than fertility. The design widened toward the back, making his silhouette unmistakably kunze. Large, dominant, impossible to overlook. Thin silk filaments anchored the adornments directly into his web glands, making them both decorative and functional.
Jewelry followed.
A throat-ring of blackened metal rested at the base of his neck, inscribed with the sigil for Fate Alteration and World Builder; an old, half-retired title that no one had bothered to strip from him. Matching cuffs encircled his wrists, each one threaded with micro-silk arrays that could deploy restraints, barriers, or venom nets with a flex of his fingers.
His hair was left long, partially bound back with spider-silk cords that glimmered faintly with stored qi. The loose strands framed his face, softening it just enough to be misleading. His mandibles, smaller than the Triumvirate’s but unmistakably present, were polished and tipped with ceremonial lacquer, a visual reminder that he could bite, even if he usually chose not to.
His eyes were the final touch.
Dilated just enough to catch light wrong, reflecting in fractured patterns like dew-coated webs. The pupils were not human anymore. Segmented, predatory, intelligent in a way that promised far too much calculation for comfort.
When he finally saw his reflection, Shen Yuan stared for a long moment. Right, he thought. Completely normal.
He looked every inch a demon prince. Beautiful in the way apex predators were beautiful, sharp, and deeply unsettling. There was nothing human left in the image except the expression: faintly exasperated, mildly judgmental, and entirely aware that he was about to be blamed for whatever went wrong next.
Which, statistically speaking, was going to be most things.
As he turned to face the waiting delegation. Heavenly Demon Emperor, snake general, and a court full of beings who could flatten mountains. Shen Yuan straightened, silk settling around him like a living mantle.
Prince Yīnxiāo stepped forward.
Diplomat. Kunze. Problem. And, against all evidence, still convinced he was the most reasonable person in the room.
The announcement rang out across the audience chamber, silk amplifying sound until it trembled through the web itself.
“His Imperial Majesty, Tianlang-jun, Sovereign of All Demonic Realm.”
The air changed. Not with pressure, not with threat, but with weight.
Shen Yuan noticed the scent first.
He always did.
Spider pheromones were information-dense: layered chemical signals encoded for dominance, fertility state, territorial claim, lineage, and intent, all braided together like silk mathematics. They clung to surfaces, soaked into webbing, persisted for days. You didn’t just smell a spider demon, you read them, whether you wanted to or not.
Tianlang-jun was nothing like that. His scent moved. Not in threads or layers, but in currents.
Warm, heavy, animal. A wolf’s logic, Shen Yuan realized, pack-oriented, broadcast-based, meant to travel through air rather than settle into space. It didn’t cling to the web; it passed through it, leaving only a faint resonance behind. Power, yes, but not territorial in the spider sense. It didn’t say this place is mine. It said I am here, and I endure.
An imitation of a masculine perfume.
Qianyuan, unquestionably, but not the sharp, frantic edge of spider qianyuans during viability windows. Tianlang-jun’s qianyuan scent was deep and stable, anchored by confidence rather than urgency. There was no timed desperation to it. No countdown. It was a declaration of presence, not a plea for recognition.
Shen Yuan found that fascinating.
Wolf Porn ABO logic was built around cohesion. Leadership expressed through proximity, protection, endurance. Even Tianlang-jun’s stillness was different: weight distributed evenly, center of gravity low, movements economical. He did not loom by expanding himself. He settled, like something that expected the world to make room.
The spiders expanded to dominate. The wolf, occupied.
His body language followed the same pattern. No exaggerated threat displays. No ritualized stillness. When he looked at someone, it was direct but not predatory. It was acknowledgment rather than appraisal. When he moved, it was smooth, grounded, the motion of something used to long pursuits rather than sudden strikes.
Different logic. Different beauty. Shen Yuan, watching him recalibrate silk-sensory feedback in real time, felt a flicker of something dangerously close to delight.
Then there was Zhuzhi-Lang. If Tianlang-jun’s presence flowed, Zhuzhi-Lang’s coiled.
His scent was sharper, colder. Ozone and sun-warmed stone, dry scales and venom barely restrained. Snake pheromones didn’t broadcast widely; they hugged the body, precise and directional. You had to be close to smell him properly, and when you were, the signal snapped into focus with unsettling clarity.
Qianyuan again, but expressed through patience rather than force.
Zhuzhi-Lang’s qianyuan scent carried intent like a blade kept sheathed: warning, loyalty, lethal competence. It didn’t invite. It promised. There was no confusion about who he belonged to or what he would do if that bond were threatened.
His body language was almost unnerving in its restraint. Minimal movement. Long pauses. Attention that didn’t flicker. Where spiders tracked everything at once and wolves monitored the group, Zhuzhi-Lang watched one thing at a time and never lost it.
Shen Yuan could feel the difference in how the web reacted to him.
Silk didn’t hum around Zhuzhi-Lang the way it did around Tianlang-jun. It went quiet, tense, as if uncertain whether movement itself might provoke a strike. Even the elder kunzes adjusted their posture slightly, instinctively acknowledging a predator whose danger lay in inevitability rather than spectacle.
And yet —
There was beauty in that too. Austere. Precise. Deadly in a way that didn’t need performance. Shen Yuan leaned back slightly, letting the sensory overload wash over him, spider brain and human mind aligning in rare harmony. So this is what the world smells like outside the web, he thought.
Different systems. Different rules. Different truths. None of them wrong. Just… incomplete on their own. Shen Yuan felt certain of one thing: Isolation had never protected them. It had only kept them ignorant of how vast, and strangely elegant, the rest of the demon world really was.
Tianlang-jun stepped forward, and the chamber seemed to accommodate him instinctively, as if space itself had learned better than to resist. He was tall, taller than most kunzes, broader than any qianyuan Shen Yuan had ever seen, but it wasn’t only sheer size that commanded attention. It was cohesion and qi flow. Every part of him belonged exactly where it was, a body shaped by long dominance rather than recent victory.
His form carried the unmistakable markers of Heavenly Demon lineage: long limbs built for endurance, shoulders heavy with muscle that did not strain or flare, posture grounded and balanced. His hair fell loose down his back, thick and dark, threaded faintly with silver that caught the ambient qi-light like frost under moonlight. Sharp canine teeth flashed briefly when he inclined his head in acknowledgment, not in a smile, but not a snarl either.
He wore imperial armor adapted into court regalia: layered plates of dark metal over silk and fur, etched with northern runes that radiated restrained power. The fur at his collar was pale, almost white, soft-looking and completely deceptive. No prey ever survived mistaking a wolf’s coat for gentleness. The armor did not exaggerate his form; it respected it, allowing him to move without sound despite the mass he carried.
And then there was his aura. It did not spike. It did not press. It endured.
A deep, steady presence that wrapped the room in the certainty of survival through winter, of leadership earned by outlasting everything else. qianyuan, yes, but without hunger, without urgency. Power that had already won and had nothing to prove.
Shen Yuan felt the web react, not recoiling, but adjusting. As if acknowledging a foreign constant.
Behind him came the shadow.
Zhuzhi-Lang followed one pace back and half a step to the right, close enough to be inseparable, distant enough to be unmistakably subordinate. He moved with minimal sound, long and lean where Tianlang-jun was broad, his body held in a perpetual coil of restrained motion.
His snake demon heritage was obvious in the details rather than the silhouette. Smooth, scale-sheened skin along his neck and jaw caught the light in muted iridescence. His eyes were vertical-slitted, unblinking, a pale gold and green that tracked the room with surgical focus. Dark hair was tied back severely and braided, leaving his face unadorned and sharp, the lines of it almost austere.
He wore no decorative armor.
What he wore was practical: close-fitting battle garb reinforced along the spine and ribs, flexible enough to strike, durable enough to survive retaliation. The only ornament was a thin metal band at his throat, marked with the Emperor’s sigil. Ownership and loyalty declared without flourish.
His presence did not spread. It concentrated. Silk nearest him tightened, instinctively cautious, as if aware that sudden movement might be a mistake. His posture was still, attentive, ready, not to impress, but to act.
If Tianlang-jun was the storm that reshaped landscapes, Zhuzhi-Lang was the strike that ended arguments. Together, they made an unsettling pair. Qianyuan emperor with a kunze’s gravity. Qianyuan general with a predator’s patience.
Shocking.
Shen Yuan, standing at the center of the web in his ceremonial silk, met Tianlang-jun’s gaze as the formalities concluded.
Different rules. Different bodies. Different truths. And somehow, despite everything, they fit together beautifully.
His mandibles clicked together once. Soft, involuntary. The sound rippled through the web like a plucked string.
A few nearby qianyuans stiffened immediately, their instincts catching on something they didn’t fully understand. Interest. Focus. Attention sharpened to a point. Some frowned, uncertain whether what they were sensing was challenge, curiosity, or the prelude to something far worse. None of them spoke. Spider pheromones were not meant for outsiders, and the demonic delegation had no framework to read them properly. Only the vague, unsettling certainty that the prince’s attention had locked on.
Shen Yuan reined it in with practiced ease. Professionalism first. Fangirling later.
Prince Yīnxiāo stepped forward and bowed low, silk cascading around him in deliberate lines, abdomen lowering with controlled grace rather than submission. The gesture was impeccably formal and respectful without diminishing his status as a kunze prince.
Oh my god, his inner fanboy screamed with unseemly enthusiasm. It’s actually him.
He could not smile, mandibles made that structurally impractical, but he softened his eyes, the corners crinkling just enough to convey warmth rather than threat. His voice, when he spoke, was gentle by design, pitched to carry without pressing.
“Huángshàng.” The title landed cleanly, correctly pronounced, unmistakably respectful. “This one is Prince Yīnxiāo Lang.” The honorific was deliberate. Not just name, but role. Shadow Silk acknowledging the Emperor as an equal force within his own hierarchy. Around them, the web held its breath.
Tianlang-jun inclined his head in return, slow and precise, eyes attentive rather than dismissive. Zhuzhi-Lang’s gaze flicked briefly over Shen Yuan. He was measuring, assessing, then settling into watchful neutrality.
Shen Yuan straightened, silk whispering.
Inside, he was vibrating with restrained delight. Cultural exchange. Live specimens. Contradictory ABO logic standing three meters away. He had read about Tianlang-jun in footnotes and throwaway lines, had argued about him online, had redrawn his supposed form from incomplete descriptions and now the Emperor of the Demon Realm was standing in his web.
Stay calm, he told himself sternly. You are a kunze prince, not a convention attendee seeking fanart. The web hummed faintly around them, tension and curiosity braided together.
Diplomacy had begun.
Tianlang-jun, Shen Yuan realized almost immediately, was an impractical emperor. Not weak. Not foolish. Just… inconveniently curious. The web told him this before Tianlang-jun ever spoke.
It was in the way his attention lingered on architectural choices instead of defensive choke points. In the way his gaze followed the zhongyongs adjusting silk arrays, rather than the kunzes poised to intercept him if things went wrong. In the subtle softening of his aura whenever human-derived logic surfaced in conversation; trade, administration, compromise.
He likes humans, the web murmured, translating instinct into pattern. He recruits the strange ones. That was, frankly, alarming. Shen Yuan filed the information away with the weary competence of someone who had once run a corporation and recognized a talent scout when he saw one. Good thing, then, that he was the weirdest spider in the clan.
Tianlang-jun’s attention shifted. Not abruptly, not rudely, but it settled. Like a wolf picking out the one creature in a herd that didn’t move quite right. His eyes, sharp and unnervingly perceptive, studied Shen Yuan not as a threat, but as an anomaly worth cataloging.
Intelligent eyes, Shen Yuan thought with a quiet sigh.
That was always how it started.
Not with flattery. Not with dominance. With recognition.
Tianlang-jun spoke at last, voice calm, carrying easily through the chamber. “Your web is… unusually stable,” he said, not as a compliment, but as an observation. “There is very little waste.”
Several kunzes bristled.
Shen Yuan inclined his head slightly. “Waste is inefficient,” he replied smoothly. “I find inefficiency… inelegant.”
A flicker of amusement crossed the Emperor’s expression. Quick, genuine. “Yes,” Tianlang-jun said. “I thought you might.”
Zhuzhi-Lang’s eyes narrowed a fraction, not in hostility, but in attention. A general’s instinct, marking a variable.
The web tightened.
Shen Yuan felt the moment click into place with the awful certainty of someone who had just been noticed by the worst possible authority figure.
Oh no, he thought. He’s already collecting me.
Tianlang-jun continued, conversational, as if discussing weather rather than destabilizing clan dynamics. “You speak as one accustomed to systems larger than yourself.”
CEO, Shen Yuan supplied mentally. Also professional nitpicker.
Aloud, he said only, “This one has had… practice.”
The Emperor hummed, thoughtful. “I value such practice.”
Of course he did.
Shen Yuan resisted the urge to rub his temples. The Fate-Weaving Clan had survived centuries by being terrifying and opaque. He had spent ten years making them efficient and legible. And now an qianyuan emperor with a kunze’s gravity was standing in his web, clearly considering whether he would make a useful acquisition.
The web thrummed, equal parts warning and curiosity. Good thing Shen Yuan was a pacifist. Bad thing he was interesting. And judging by the way Tianlang-jun’s gaze lingered, this was not going to end with polite greetings and a quiet return to isolation.
Tianlang-jun, Shen Yuan realized with dawning horror, was not merely impractical.
He was irreverent.
The web picked it up immediately. Not from threat, not from dominance, but from wrongness. From the way his attention wandered like he had wandered into the meeting by accident. From the way his aura, immense and undeniable, was worn loosely, as if he’d forgotten it was supposed to intimidate people.
A freak, the web decided. A powerful one.
He laughed too easily. Not the sharp bark of a warrior, not the polite breath of a ruler, but an unrestrained, genuinely amused sound when one of the zhongyongs nervously explained the silk census protocols.
“You count that?” Tianlang-jun asked, eyes lighting up. “Marvelous. I should introduce you to my treasurer. He’d cry.”
Several kunzes froze in collective offense. Shen Yuan blinked. Oh. That kind of emperor.
Tianlang-jun leaned forward, resting his weight casually on one knee as if they were chatting over tea instead of renegotiating demon geopolitics. The motion sent a ripple through the web. Too relaxed, too intimate, entirely inappropriate for someone of his station.
Zhuzhi-Lang did not move. As if it was normal. Which somehow made it worse. The Emperor’s gaze slid back to Shen Yuan with unsettling ease, sharp eyes alight with interest that made no attempt at discretion.
“You,” Tianlang-jun said cheerfully, pointing. “You redesigned a death ritual because it annoyed you.”
That was not classified information.
Shen Yuan opened his mouth, closed it, then inclined his head with diplomatic restraint. “This one found the casualty rate… excessive.”
“Excessive!” Tianlang-jun repeated, delighted. “Yes! Exactly! Why kill a perfectly functional subordinate when you can make them useful instead?”
The Triumvirate radiated disapproval.
Tianlang-jun noticed. He did not care. He stretched, rolling his shoulders like a bored apex predator, armor plates shifting with a soft clink. “You know,” he continued conversationally, “everyone expects emperors to be solemn. Strategic. Dreadfully boring. I find that exhausting.” He grinned. Sharp, unapologetic, all wolf. “I prefer collecting interesting problems.”
Shen Yuan felt the web shiver. I am going to die, he thought calmly. Not by consumption. By recruitment.
Tianlang-jun circled him slowly, not predatory, not respectful, curious. He leaned in just enough to peer at Shen Yuan’s mandibles with open fascination. “Do those click when you’re thinking,” he asked, “or only when you’re deciding whether to murder someone?”
“Yes,” Shen Yuan said reflexively, then winced internally.
Tianlang-jun laughed again, loud and pleased. “Excellent answer.”
Conceit clung to him like a second scent. Arrogance and certainty. The unshakeable belief that the world was interesting because it could be rearranged. That rules were suggestions. That power existed to indulge curiosity.
A freak emperor. A walking contradiction. And judging by the way his attention had locked onto Shen Yuan like a puzzle with legs… The Fate-Weaving Clan had not just been noticed. They had been entertained.
And so began the nipping of a wolf in a spider’s web.
Tianlang-jun was ancient, older than most of the silk pillars holding Luómíng together, but he behaved like age was a rumor invented by people with worse reflexes. One moment he carried himself with the weight of an emperor who had buried eras beneath his feet; the next, he was an overgrown demonic mutt with no concept of personal space and an alarming enthusiasm for everything.
Demonic, of course. Unpredictable. Strong.
Like that time, during a formal inspection of the outer silk arrays, Tianlang-jun wandered off the designated path. Wandered.
Straight into a semi-sentient defense lattice that had not been triggered in three hundred years. The web reacted instantly, threads tightening, qi flaring, venomous filaments rising like drawn blades.
Shen Yuan did not panic. He sighed. “Tianlang-jun,” he called mildly, “that strand is calibrated to treat you as a siege beast.”
“Oh?” Tianlang-jun asked, delighted, as the silk snapped tight around his wrist. “What does it do to siege beasts?”
“It dissolves their joints.”
A pause. Then Tianlang-jun flexed, testing the silk with careful strength instead of brute force. The web creaked, but held. His regeneration was impressive.
“Marvelous craftsmanship,” he said approvingly. “It hurts.”
Shen Yuan flicked his fingers, disengaging the array before the clan elders had heart attacks. The silk released.
Tianlang-jun looked at the fading burn marks on his gauntlet with open admiration.
“I like your web,” he declared. “It has opinions.”
Or, against all advice, Tianlang-jun insisted on observing a kunze egg-clutch tending ritual. He crouched far too close. Zhuzhi-Lang hovered one step behind him, radiating silent menace at any spider who so much as twitched.
“They’re warm,” Tianlang-jun said, eyes bright, as he leaned closer to the glowing ova sacs. “Do they bite?”
“Yes,” Shen Yuan replied flatly.
“Good.”
One of the caretakers hissed, mandibles flaring. Shen Yuan intervened before anyone committed regicide.
“Tianlang-jun,” he said patiently, “if you lose a finger, tradition demands we keep it.”
“Ah,” Tianlang-jun said, straightening with visible regret. “Tragic. It will grow anyway”
He did not move any farther back.
Or, during a negotiation session meant to discuss trade boundaries, Tianlang-jun abandoned the seating arrangement entirely and sprawled on a silk platform like a sunning wolf. “You know,” he said, idly flicking a thread and making half the room tense, “everyone assumes I came here to threaten you.”
Xuěluó’s mandibles clicked ominously.
“I came because you stopped killing your own people,” Tianlang-jun continued. “That’s interesting. Most rulers don’t.”
Shen Yuan met his gaze steadily. “Most rulers aren’t spiders.”
Tianlang-jun grinned. “Exactly.”
The trade talks went nowhere.
The philosophical argument lasted six hours.
At one point, whether by accident or deliberate provocation, Tianlang-jun leaned in too close during a private exchange.
Close enough that Shen Yuan’s mandibles snapped shut on instinct. Not hard. Just enough. The web froze.
Zhuzhi-Lang’s hand twitched toward his weapon.
Tianlang-jun, however, froze, then laughed, delighted, the sound echoing through the silk chamber.
“Oh, that’s new,” he said cheerfully. “You’re territorial.”
Shen Yuan flushed dark along his cheek plates. “This one recommends respecting personal space.”
“I will,” Tianlang-jun promised solemnly.
He did not.
By the third day, the clan had stopped trying to predict him.
Tianlang-jun tugged at silk like a curious beast, challenged axioms mid-ritual, praised efficiency, mocked tradition, and treated Shen Yuan like an endlessly entertaining puzzle rather than a political liability.
A wolf in a spider’s web.
Nipped. Restrained. Not trapped.
And judging by the way Tianlang-jun’s grin sharpened every time the web pushed back, he was enjoying every second of it.