The Yellow River Plain, normally a tapestry of gold and green under the Song sky, was screaming. Not with human voices, though those too could be heard in ragged prayers and choked sobs, but with the sound of a million million chitinous wings rubbing together, a relentless, deafening drone that vibrated in the bones and scraped the nerves raw. This was the heartland of the empire's granary, a region known as Hengzhou Prefecture, now reduced to a desolate, quivering grey-brown wasteland under the assault of the sky-fallen plague.

  Xuanzhen had been travelling south from the capital, heading towards the warmer climes of Jiangnan, when he first encountered the edge of the devastation. Miles out, the air grew thick with an acrid, unfamiliar stench – a mix of crushed vegetation, decay, and something unnervingly chemical. Then came the refugees, a ragged stream of humanity fleeing eastward, faces etched with a terror that spoke of more than just lost crops. They spoke of locusts, yes, but not the familiar swarms that occasionally plagued the land. These were different. Demonic.

  He pressed onward, against the flow of desperate people, his Taoist robes stark against the tide of misery. The drone intensified, becoming a physical pressure against his eardrums. And then he saw them.

  The sky was not blue, but a roiling, churning mass of insects, so dense they blotted out the sun, casting the land below in a perpetual, sickening twilight. They weren't the typical brown or green of grasshoppers. These creatures shimmered with an oily, metallic lustre, greens and blues shifting like colours on a beetle's carapace, but on a scale that felt profoundly wrong. They were larger than any locust Xuanzhen had ever seen, some nearly the size of a man's thumb, with wicked, serrated mandibles that clicked audibly as they devoured everything in their path.

  Fields that should have been heavy with ripening grain were stripped bare, leaving only gnawed stalks protruding from the earth like broken bones. Trees stood skeletal, their leaves and even bark devoured. Livestock lay dead in the fields, not just starved, but sometimes showing strange, blistered wounds where the locusts had swarmed them, their venomous spittle – a viscous, greenish fluid – seemingly capable of sickening or killing animals that ingested the tainted vegetation or were directly attacked.

  Villages stood eerily silent, doors barred, the inhabitants huddled inside, listening to the ceaseless drone and the dry rustle of the swarm blanketing roofs and walls. Occasionally, a desperate sortie would be made for water, only for the person to return shrieking, covered in crawling insects, sometimes bearing the painful, blistering stings that seemed to burn like fire. The local militia, dispatched by the prefectural governor, had proven useless. Arrows disappeared into the swarm with no effect, fire merely consumed small pockets before being smothered by sheer numbers, and the soldiers themselves became targets, their morale shattering against the unholy tide. Panic reigned.

  Xuanzhen entered a village that seemed marginally less overwhelmed than others, perhaps sheltered by a low ridge. He found the local magistrate, a man named Fan, hollow-eyed and trembling in his makeshift office, surrounded by terrified clerks and weeping village elders.

  "Master Taoist," Magistrate Fan gasped, clutching at Xuanzhen's sleeve as if he were a lifeline. "Heaven has abandoned us! These are not locusts; they are demons sent to punish us!"

  Xuanzhen gently disengaged his arm. "Panic serves only the plague, Magistrate. Tell me what you know. When did it begin? From where did they come?"

  Gathering accounts from the magistrate and the elders, a disturbing picture emerged. The plague had begun abruptly, three weeks prior, not gradually building from the west as locust swarms often did, but seemingly descending from the sky in the central part of the prefecture, near the old, sparsely populated Black Wind Hills. The locusts' behaviour was erratic – they moved in strange, swirling patterns, sometimes bypassing one field entirely only to utterly annihilate the next. Their metallic sheen and venomous spit were unlike anything known.

  "The Black Wind Hills?" Xuanzhen frowned. That area was considered barren, almost cursed land, avoided by locals. Ancient tales, dismissed as superstition, spoke of strange energies and buried things best left undisturbed.

  His Taoist senses, finely tuned to the flows of qi, picked up more than just the despair and fear radiating from the land and its people. Beneath the chaos, there was a deep, thrumming dissonance, an imbalance in the natural energies of the earth, strongest towards the direction of those hills. It felt like a wound torn in the fabric of the world, leaking something ancient and uncontrolled.

  "I must go to the source," Xuanzhen declared. "The swarm is but a symptom. The disease lies in the Black Wind Hills."

  Magistrate Fan gaped. "Go there? Master, that is the heart of the swarm! It's suicide! The hills themselves are said to be haunted…"

  "If the source is not addressed, Hengzhou will become naught but dust and bones," Xuanzhen stated simply. "Prepare what provisions you can spare. I will need a guide familiar with the paths leading towards the hills, at least until the swarm becomes impassable."

  A young, wiry farmer named Guo, whose family fields bordered the cursed hills and who had lost everything, volunteered. His face was grim, but his eyes held a spark of desperate resolve. "If there's a chance, any chance, Master Taoist… I know the old trails."

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Their journey towards the Black Wind Hills was a descent into hell. The drone of the locusts became an all-encompassing roar. They moved through a landscape stripped bare, the ground crunchy underfoot with crushed insect bodies and desiccated husks. The air was thick with the metallic insects, forcing them to wear veils and wrap their limbs tightly. Even so, the creatures crawled over them, their sharp claws catching on cloth, their clicking mandibles unnervingly close. Xuanzhen used calming incense and focused breathing techniques to keep the worst of the swarm at bay, creating a small bubble of relative peace around them, but it was exhausting work.

  They examined some of the dead locusts Xuanzhen managed to isolate. Up close, they were even more disturbing. Their carapaces weren't just metallic in sheen; they felt strangely hard, almost mineralized. Their internal structure seemed… incomplete, almost crudely formed, lacking some of the complex organs of natural insects. And the venom sacs near their mouths pulsed with a faint, sickly green light.

  "These are not creatures born of nature as we know it," Xuanzhen murmured, carefully prodding one with a twig. "They are… echoes. Distortions."

  As they neared the foothills, the ground began to change. Strange, obsidian-like rocks, smooth and cool to the touch despite the oppressive atmosphere, protruded from the earth. The qi disturbance intensified dramatically, becoming a nauseating throb. Guo grew increasingly agitated, pointing towards a dark, forbidding valley nestled between two jagged peaks – the heart of the Black Wind Hills.

  "We go no further, Master," Guo stammered, his face pale. "That valley… the elders say it's where the earth sleeps uneasily. Strange lights are seen there sometimes, even before the plague."

  "Your courage has brought us far enough, Guo," Xuanzhen said kindly. "Return to the village. Tell the Magistrate… tell him I seek to mend what is broken."

  Alone now, Xuanzhen advanced into the valley. The locust swarm was thickest here, a blinding, roaring vortex. He chanted protective mantras, his hands forming mudras to channel his qi into a shield against the physical and psychic assault of the swarm. The ground beneath his feet vibrated.

  At the valley's centre, half-buried in the earth, was something that did not belong. It was a structure, or perhaps the capstone of one, made of the same seamless black material as the strange rocks. It resembled a massive, intricately carved seal, easily ten paces across, covered in symbols that were neither Han script nor any known pictograms. They felt ancient, potent, and deeply alien. Cracks spiderwebbed across its surface, and from these fissures pulsed the sickly green light he had seen in the locusts' venom sacs. The locus swarm emanated from these cracks, pouring out like smoke, coalescing into the metallic insects that then flew out to join the devastation.

  This was the source. Not a nest, not a 'mother entity', but a broken containment. An ancient seal, perhaps placed millennia ago to hold back… something. Not necessarily evil, perhaps, but a raw, chaotic energy incompatible with the current age, an energy that, when leaked and interacting with the life force of the land, warped it, spontaneously generating these plague locusts as a grotesque manifestation of imbalance.

  Repairing the seal seemed impossible. The energies pulsing from it were immense, chaotic. But Xuanzhen understood that Taoist principles often involved redirection and harmonization rather than direct confrontation. The seal wasn't just leaking energy; it represented a broken balance between the deep earth forces and the surface world.

  He began to work. Clearing a space around the seal, he used consecrated chalk to draw a complex bagua array on the ground, aligning it with the cardinal directions and the flow of qi he could sense. He placed carefully chosen stones and talismans at key points, not to block the energy, but to channel and soothe it. He didn't have the power to fully mend the ancient structure, but perhaps he could help restore a semblance of balance, to coax the chaotic energy into a less destructive pattern, starving the locust manifestation at its source.

  He sat in the centre of his array, directly before the largest fissure in the seal, ignoring the locusts crawling over him, their venomous spit sizzling harmlessly against his protective qi shield. He entered a deep meditative state, his consciousness reaching out, not to fight the energy, but to understand its rhythm, its nature. He poured his own qi into the array, not as a dam, but as a conduit, guiding the chaotic pulses, aligning them with the natural cycles of the earth, harmonizing the wild thrumming with the steady heartbeat of the world.

  It was like trying to calm a tsunami with whispers, yet slowly, painstakingly, something began to shift. The violent, erratic pulsing from the fissures softened. The sickly green light dimmed slightly. The rate at which new locusts poured forth lessened. Xuanzhen poured all his will, all his energy, into the effort, sweat beading on his brow, his robes plastered to his skin by the crawling insects and the sheer exertion.

  Hours passed. The twilight deepened into true night, the only light the eerie glow from the seal and the cold light of the stars, barely visible through the thinner parts of the swarm above. Gradually, the overwhelming drone began to lessen in intensity. The locusts emerging from the cracks became fewer, slower, some even seeming malformed and unable to fly, collapsing into dust shortly after emerging.

  By dawn, the flow had slowed to a trickle. The ground around the seal was littered with the dust of failed locusts. The massive swarm still raged over Hengzhou, but its source was being choked off. The sky seemed fractionally brighter. Xuanzhen, utterly drained, finally collapsed the array, knowing he had done all he could. The seal was still broken, a potential threat for the future, but the immediate hemorrhage of chaotic energy had been staunched.

  He stumbled back out of the valley, weak but resolute. The journey back was arduous, but marked by a growing sense of hope as he saw the density of the swarm slowly, perceptibly thinning over the following days. The remaining locusts, cut off from their unnatural source, began to die off more rapidly, their metallic bodies decomposing quickly into harmless dust.

  Hengzhou Prefecture was saved from utter annihilation, though the scars would remain for generations. Xuanzhen didn't wait for thanks, slipping away quietly once he saw the tide had truly turned. He carried with him the unsettling knowledge of the broken seal, a reminder that the world rested upon ancient, slumbering forces and fragile balances, and that sometimes, the greatest horrors were not born of malice, but of imbalance, of things broken that were meant to remain whole. The sky over Hengzhou would clear, but the memory of the metallic swarm, born from a wound in the earth, would linger in his mind, another dark thread woven into the complex tapestry of his journey.