Chapter 41: The Serpent (Part 2 in 1)

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With one step forward, Xia Nan suddenly felt the air around him plunge in temperature.

His vision went black.

The next instant, the dense forest and undergrowth, thick with damp mist, had been replaced by a bare stone wall.

“Ah…”

Pain and dizziness overwhelmed him.

It was like missing a step on a staircase. The sudden panic left his exhausted body unable to hold out any longer.

A pained murmur escaped his lips, and he collapsed heavily to the ground.

With the last of his strength, he barely managed to raise his eyelids and sweep his surroundings with a glance.

Seeing no obvious danger, he let his eyes close once more as fatigue and pain surged over him like a tide.

He had no idea how much time passed.

Hiss—

A cold, slippery sensation brushed across his cheek. Beneath it, he could vaguely feel something hard writhing with muscular movement.

Xia Nan slowly opened his eyes.

“Holy shit!”

He leapt to his feet and flung the reddish-brown snake that had somehow crawled onto him onto the ground.

A cold, iron-gray gleam flashed through the dim air.

The snake’s head was severed, while its long body writhed and spasmed.

Only after he hooked the head up with the tip of his sword and tossed it into a corner did he finally breathe a little easier.

Leaning against the stone wall behind him, Xia Nan gripped his decapitating longsword in both hands.

Only now, after his brief spell of dizziness following that desperate escape, did he have the chance to carefully examine his surroundings.

He was inside a sealed cavern.

There was nothing noteworthy about it. Bare gray stone walls filled almost every inch of his vision.

Occasionally, strange luminous fungi clung to the rock. Their eerie blue glow was the only reason the cavern, which should have been pitch-black, could be described as dim rather than utterly dark.

For some reason, despite the absence of any obvious distinguishing features, merely looking at the lifeless gray wall before him filled Xia Nan with an instinctive sense of unreality, as though a fragment of a mountain from another world had been forcibly embedded into this one.

It was exactly the same feeling evoked by the carriages, wooden buildings, and courtyards he had seen along the way.

Moreover, he had been fiercely pursued by a petrifying lizard in the Misty Forest only moments ago, yet in the blink of an eye, he had seemingly fallen into some kind of trap and been teleported here.

A thoughtful expression appeared on his face.

He did not act rashly.

Once his mind had gradually returned to his body and he had confirmed that the area was temporarily safe, the first thing Xia Nan did was inspect his physical condition.

His legs had suffered the least. Only a few scratches marked the sides of his calves, where the jungle thorns had scraped him during his flight. They were ordinary abrasions, and the bleeding had already stopped.

A faint stabbing pain came from the left side of the middle of his chest and abdomen. It became more noticeable whenever he breathed, but remained bearable.

Perhaps a rib was broken.

The most serious injury was to his right forearm.

Suppressing the pain, he lifted the padding beneath his leather armor and discovered that the area near the wrist along his ulna had swollen into a large blue-purple mass.

During the escape, his concentration had kept him from noticing much. Now, however, waves of numbness, soreness, swelling, and pain radiated from the injury. Even spreading and closing his fingers or gripping his sword hilt had become extremely difficult.

And this was after he had drunk nearly half a bottle of healing potion to restore his ability to move.

One mouthful cost twenty-five gold coins!

It hurt to think about, but he did not regret it.

Without that life-saving potion, he would never have made it this far. The lizard would have turned him into a stone statue long ago, then bitten him to pieces and swallowed him.

If it had bought him his life, he would have paid not only twenty-five gold coins, but even two thousand five hundred!

As these thoughts passed through his mind, Xia Nan kept working. With some difficulty, he took the medical kit he had purchased before setting out from the backpack on his back.

An ordinary healing potion could keep someone alive in a crisis. It could also heal most minor wounds and ease pain.

But injuries such as fractured bones did not respond immediately to it.

An adventurer had to treat them personally.

“Rip!”

Clumsily, he secured his forearm with the splint included in the kit. Then, holding the bandage in his left hand, he wound it tightly around the splint several times before biting through the excess with his teeth.

According to the treatment methods recorded in the Adventurer’s Manual, an injured forearm should apparently also be suspended in a sling to prevent the injury from worsening.

Conditions were limited, so this was all he could do.

His five fingers opened and closed slightly despite the soreness and swelling. The tips still bore traces of grayish petrification, but the healing potion had eased them considerably, restoring a little sensation.

Xia Nan considered the matter.

He seemed to have seen a potion for curing petrification in the alchemy shop. He could no longer remember its price, but at least there was hope of recovery.

River Valley Town appeared to have a church as well, one that provided healing services to adventurers after their missions. He could pay it a visit once he returned.

Come to think of it, during the battle with the Rust Monster, Xia Nan had saved the half-elf’s life, leaving her indebted to him and prompting her to promise that she would help him contact a combat instructor as repayment.

Then, during the chase just now, the half-elf had repaid that debt with another life of his own. She had held off the petrifying lizard and bought Xia Nan precious time to escape.

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Thus, after their debts had changed hands, he somehow found himself owing her one favor instead.

Therefore, if Hai’an ever needed help in the future, and if Xia Nan was capable of providing it, he would not mind doing her a few favors.

Of course, that depended on whether he could get out of this hellish place.

Xia Nan shook his head, casting aside thoughts unrelated to his present circumstances.

After treating his injuries, he checked the condition of his equipment.

Decapitating Longsword—the sword had barely left its sheath during the escape, and was therefore undamaged.

Death Line Ring—Deflection Field had entered its twenty-four-hour cooldown, temporarily costing him one of his trump cards.

Healing potion—half a bottle remained.

Leather armor—ruined.

Xia Nan sorrowfully stroked the specially made leather armor he had purchased from Barn’s shop for the enormous sum of ten gold coins.

From the front, it still looked fine, aside from a little blood and a few blades of grass.

But its back had been completely smashed by the petrifying lizard’s charge. It was riddled with dents and cracks and clearly unusable.

Once he returned to town, this would mean yet another considerable expense.

“ Sigh.”

With a sigh, Xia Nan pulled the tattered leather armor back over himself.

He rose to his feet and gazed into the depths of the cavern.

Although being teleported here had allowed him to escape the petrifying lizard, that did not mean he was safe.

Without his companions’ support, the only person he could rely on was himself.

His chest rose and fell. Gradually, his breathing became calm and resolute.

Keeping his body slightly turned toward the wall, he gripped his iron-gray longsword and began feeling his way along the cavern’s only path.

…

Crack.

A thick leather boot came down hard, crushing two black scorpions the size of thumbs.

A pale skull, entirely stripped of flesh, was lifted from the ground by a hand smeared with mud and blood.

Xia Nan now found himself in a long, deep corridor.

He had no idea how it had been carved. The stone walls on either side were rough and uneven, showing no trace of human craftsmanship.

Unlike the previously spacious cavern, however, the tunnel was littered with numerous pale bones.

Drawing close to the wall, Xia Nan used the eerie blue glow from the fungi clinging to it to examine the skull in his hand.

Before crossing into this world, Xia Nan had not studied medicine. He would never have been able to hold a human skull so calmly and inspect it at length.

But after surviving so many brushes with death, simple bones were no longer enough to stir his emotions.

Human… human again.

That was all he could think.

Along the way, he had examined every set of bones whose identity he could determine with his present knowledge.

Every one of them had belonged to humans.

In another world, perhaps that would not have been a particularly remarkable discovery.

But this was a fantasy world inhabited by unusual races such as dwarves and elves, not to mention countless half-blooded descendants.

If a place was filled with the corpses of intelligent beings, then unless it had been the site of a massacre targeting a single race, it was impossible for humans alone to be present.

Combined with the strange, unreal sensation the cavern itself evoked, as well as the countless peculiar structures he had seen along the way, Xia Nan gradually formed a vague suspicion.

Perhaps he had been transported into some region that had likewise originated from another world.

Returning the skull to its place, he continued forward beneath the dim blue light, advancing one cautious step at a time.

Then he reached a dead end.

A cold, pitch-black wall stood directly before him, blocking every path onward.

Xia Nan’s expression appeared calm and composed, but a faint ripple showed in his dark eyes.

This was the only path in the entire cavern.

If the passage did not lead to the outside world, then after finally escaping the monsters pursuing him, he would truly die here.

“Whew…”

Xia Nan took a deep breath, doing his best not to let the countless negative possibilities in his mind run wild.

He stepped forward and began searching the wall with both hands, trying to find a possible doorway or switch.

The wall was pitch-black throughout and not made of stone. It felt even colder than the stone walls, as though it had been forged from some kind of metal. Its smooth surface was covered in countless fine, scale-like patterns. Running his fingers against them even produced a faintly cutting sensation.

The threat of death drove Xia Nan to examine the wall with extraordinary thoroughness. From top to bottom and left to right, he traced every pattern with his fingertips.

At last!

When he crouched down and searched the lower-right corner of the black wall, an extremely faint glow caught his attention.

It was the same eerie blue light unique to the fungi growing in the cavern, but its source was a crack in the rock at the corner of the black wall.

Could it be…?

A spark of delight flashed through Xia Nan’s eyes.

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He immediately bent down and began moving the loose stones aside.

Whenever he encountered a narrow gap, he drew the dagger from his waist and used all his strength to pry the rocks loose.

About twenty minutes later, a small opening half as tall as a man appeared in the corner of the black wall.

The blue glow grew increasingly bright.

Alone and utterly unconcerned with appearances, Xia Nan crawled in on all fours, following the light.

Unexpectedly, the opening was not deep.

After crawling only a few steps, the narrow passage suddenly opened into a vast space large enough to produce multiple echoes.

Fungi covered the surrounding stone walls, illuminating the entire cavern.

After crawling out of the opening, Xia Nan instinctively turned around and looked at the black wall that had cut across the tunnel.

A deep hum seemed to sound.

Time itself appeared to halt in that instant.

Sweat dripped from his brow, leaving a small patch of moisture on the cold ground.

Xia Nan remained frozen in the act of turning back. His entire body had gone rigid.

He did not move at all.

His eyes were fixed on the direction from which he had come.

The black wall?

No. It was not some man-made wall.

The metallic coldness, the fine scale-like patterns…

It was an enormous serpent’s body, as thick as a train and large enough to fill the entire tunnel!

It was difficult to describe what Xia Nan felt at that moment.

It was like waking in the middle of the night and suddenly seeing part of a snake’s body on your bed in the moonlight.

Your first reaction might be to leap up in terror. Yet at the same time, your gaze would instinctively follow the snake’s body, searching for its head to determine whether it had crawled beneath your blankets or was merely winding around the edge of the bed.

Stunned to his core, Xia Nan’s eyes instinctively followed the impossibly massive serpent’s body upward.

The floor, the walls…

The ceiling!

“Holy shit!”

A chill shot from his tailbone to the crown of his head, and gooseflesh erupted across his entire body.

A terrifying snakehead large enough to swallow an entire elephant hung directly above him. Its cold, savage, vertical pupils stared down at him without blinking.

The overwhelming pressure created by their disparity in size was so immense that a single glance was enough to make him abandon any thought of resistance and close his eyes instinctively.

One second, two seconds, three…

Xia Nan stood rigidly in place. The stabbing pain in his chest and abdomen with every breath reminded him that he was still alive.

Slowly, he opened his eyes.

The gigantic, awe-inspiring serpent was still there.

But… it had not moved an inch.

Gulp.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

Xia Nan sensed that something was wrong. His gaze continued upward along the serpent’s endless body.

Sure enough!

At the very top of the cavern’s ceiling, a brown stone spike of unknown origin had pinned the giant serpent firmly to the rock above, like a thumbtack.

It had pierced the vital point at the base of its skull.

The serpent’s seemingly cold and fearsome eyes had long since lost their light.

Its colossal body, as massive as a train, had become just another corpse, like the countless white skeletons outside the cavern, with no possibility of rising again.

Only then did Xia Nan relax slightly.

It was only because the serpent was dead that he had the chance to examine its appearance so closely while remaining alive himself.

Its entire body was a deep black, covered in hard, metallic scales that were cold to the touch. Its thick, elongated body coiled and climbed throughout the cavern, making its precise length impossible to determine.

The scales on its face were pure snow-white, without the slightest blemish, making its emerald-green eyes appear even more striking. Their pupils were deep and utterly lifeless.

At the center of its skull, suspended high in the air, several pure golden scales glittered like ornaments adorning the back of its head.

For some reason, as Xia Nan stared at the terrifying giant serpent before him, images suddenly flashed through his mind: cutting off goblin ears, extracting the poison gland from a Rust Monster.

A bold yet perfectly reasonable idea gradually took shape in his heart.

As an adventurer, bringing back a little loot…

That was perfectly normal, right?

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