Chapter 41: The Snake

Taking a single step forward, Xia Nan only felt the temperature of the air surrounding his body plummet sharply.

His vision suddenly went black.

In the next second, the dense forest bushes that had been filled with damp mist just moments ago were replaced by a bare stone wall directly in front of him.

“Ah…”

Pain and dizziness washed over him.

It felt like stepping into empty air while walking down the stairs; the sudden panic made his exhausted body unable to hold on any longer. A groan of pain instinctively escaped his mouth, and he slumped directly onto the ground.

He only managed to use the last of his strength to prop open his eyelids and scan the surroundings. Seeing no obvious danger, he closed his eyes once more amidst the wave of surging fatigue and pain.

He had no idea how much time had passed.

Hiss—

A cold, slimy sensation traveled from his cheek, and he could faintly feel the squirming of muscle beneath a firm texture.

Xia Nan slowly opened his eyes.

“Holy crap!”

He leaped up violently, flinging the long, reddish-brown snake that had crawled onto his body at some point onto the ground. A flash of iron-grey cold light zipped through the dim air.

The snake’s head was severed, and its long body writhed and twitched on the floor.

He used the tip of his sword to pick up the snake’s head and toss it into a corner before finally letting out a slight sigh of relief.

Leaning against the stone wall behind him, Xia Nan gripped the Beheading Longsword tightly with both hands. Only now, after experiencing a brief dizziness following his chaotic escape, did he have the chance to carefully observe the environment he currently found himself in.

This was a sealed cave.

There was absolutely nothing noteworthy here; bare, featureless grey stone walls occupied nearly every corner of his vision. Occasionally, strange, fluorescent fungi grew along the rock surfaces, and it was only because of the ghostly blue glow they generated that the cave, which should have been pitch black, was illuminated into its current “dim” state.

For some reason, even though there were no distinct physical characteristics present, just looking at the dead-grey stone wall before him gave Xia Nan a profound sense of illusion that felt entirely incompatible with the real world.

It was as if a small piece of a mountain from another world had been chipped off and forcibly embedded into this one.

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

Coupled with the fact that he had been in a fierce pursuit with a basilisk in the Mist Forest just moments ago, only to be transported here in an instant as if he had stepped into some kind of trap, a thoughtful expression emerged on his face.

He didn’t make any reckless moves.

Once his sanity gradually returned to his body and he confirmed that his current location was temporarily safe, the first thing Xia Nan did was check his physical condition.

His legs had sustained the lightest injuries; only the side of his calf had been scraped a few times by thorns in the jungle during his escape—ordinary scratches that had already stopped bleeding.

A stabbing pain radiated from the middle-left side of his chest and abdomen, becoming more pronounced when he breathed, but it was still bearable—perhaps a broken rib?

The most severe injury was his right forearm.

Enduring the pain, he lifted the padding beneath his leather armor and found that a large, purplish-blue swelling had formed on his right arm, on the ulna near the wrist.

While escaping earlier, his concentration had been entirely focused, so he hadn’t felt much. But now, waves of numbing ache and swelling pain radiated from it, making it exceptionally difficult even to open and close his fingers to grip the hilt of his sword.

One had to remember that before this, in order to regain his mobility, he had chugged a full half-bottle of healing potion.

One sip was 25 gold pieces!

He felt a twinge of heartache, but he didn’t regret it. If not for that life-saving sip of potion, he wouldn’t have even lasted until now; he would have long since been turned into a stone statue by the lizard, crushed, and swallowed into its stomach.

Trading a life back—never mind 25 gold pieces, he would be willing even for 2500 gold pieces!

While sighing emotionally in his heart, Xia Nan’s hands did not stop. With some difficulty, he retrieved the “Medical Toolkit” he had purchased before his departure from his backpack.

An ordinary-quality healing potion could preserve one’s life in a moment of crisis, heal the vast majority of minor injuries, and alleviate pain, but it did not have an instantaneous effect on injuries like fractured bones. It required the adventurer to treat it themselves.

“Rip!”

Inexperiencedly, he used the splint included in the toolkit to immobilize his forearm, then used his left hand to wrap the bandage tightly around it for several turns, finally using his teeth to bite off the excess bandage.

According to the treatment methods recorded in the Adventurer’s Handbook, if the forearm was injured, it seemed one should also use a sling to suspend the arm to avoid aggravating the injury. Given the limited conditions at hand, this was the best he could do.

He slightly opened and clenched his five fingers against the swelling sensation. Although there were still some pale grey traces of petrification at his fingertips, they had eased considerably under the effect of the healing potion, and a shred of sensation had returned.

Xia Nan pondered in his heart:

He seemed to have seen petrification-cleansing antitoxins in the alchemy shop before. Although he couldn’t remember the price, at least there was a hope of recovery. There also seemed to be a church in Riverbend Town that provided healing services for adventurers after missions; he could go check it out after this return trip.

Speaking of which, during the initial battle with the Rust Monsters, Xia Nan had saved the half-elf’s life, causing him to owe a favor, and they had agreed that he would help contact a combat technique instructor as repayment.

Yet during the pursuit just now, the half-elf had also returned a life to him, stalling the basilisk for Xia Nan and leaving him precious time to escape.

With this back-and-forth, he actually ended up owing the other party once more. Therefore, if Haian had a need in the future and he could be of help, he wouldn’t mind lending a hand.

Of course, the premise was that he could get out of this damn place.

Xia Nan shook his head, brushing away the thoughts unrelated to his current situation. After treating his injuries, he checked the status of his equipment.

Beheading Longsword: Kept primarily in its scabbard during the escape, so it remained intact.

“Dead Line” Ring: The “Deflection Field” had entered its 24-hour cooldown; he was temporarily down one trump card.

Healing Potion: Half a bottle remained.

Leather Armor: Ruined.

Xia Nan touched the specialized leather armor on his body with heartache—a “massive investment” of 10 gold pieces purchased at Barnes’s shop.

Although the front looked fine, merely stained with some blood and grass clippings, the back had been completely smashed to pieces under the impact of the basilisk. It was filled with dents and cracks, clearly no longer usable.

Once he returned to town, this would be another hefty expense.

“Sigh.”

Uttering a sigh, Xia Nan slipped the tattered leather armor back onto his body. Standing up, his gaze pierced into the deeper parts of the cave.

Although he had been teleported here and had escaped the pursuit of the basilisk because of it, it did not mean he was safe. Without the support of his teammates, the only thing he could rely on was himself.

His chest heaved, and his breathing gradually became steady and resolute. Keeping his body slightly pressed against the wall sideways while holding the iron-grey longsword, he began to grope his way step by step along the only path inside the cave.

…

“Crunch.”

A thick leather boot came down hard, crushing two thumb-sized black scorpions to pieces. A pale skull devoid of any flesh was picked up from the ground by a palm stained with soil and blood.

The location Xia Nan currently found himself in was a deep, elongated corridor.

It was unclear how it had been excavated; the stone walls on both sides of the corridor were rough and uneven, completely lacking any signs of artificial craftsmanship. However, compared to the entirely vacant cavern from before, many pale bones had appeared along both sides of the tunnel.

Approaching the wall, he used the ghostly blue light emitted by the fungi on it to carefully discern the identity of the skull in his hand.

If this had been before his transmigration, Xia Nan, who did not come from a medical background, could never have examined the skull of a fellow human in his hand so calmly. But now, having experienced so many crises of life and death, mere bones were far from enough to reach the threshold of causing his emotions to fluctuate.

“Human… human again,” he remarked to himself.

Along this path, he had already inspected every single bone whose identity could be distinguished based on his current scope of knowledge. All of them originated from humans.

In another world, this might not be considered an astonishing discovery. But right now, he was in a fantasy world that tangibly possessed distinct races like dwarves and elves, as well as a large population of half-breeds.

If a place was truly filled with the corpses of intelligent beings, unless it was a massacre purely targeting a specific race, it was absolutely impossible for only a single species like humans to appear.

Combining this with the illusionary, contrasting sensation the cave itself gave him, along with the countless peculiar buildings on the road before, a faint guess began to form in Xia Nan’s heart—

Could it be that he had been teleported into a region that likewise originated from another world?

Placing the skull back in its original position, he continued to explore forward step by step with extreme caution against the dim light.

And then, he hit a dead end.

A cold, pitch-black wall blocked his path directly ahead, cutting off all ways forward.

Xia Nan’s expression appeared calm and composed, but a slight tremor surfaced in his pitch-black eyes. This was the only path within the entire cave! If the tunnel could not lead to the outside world, it meant that after managing to escape the pursuit of the magical beast with great difficulty, he would truly die here.

“Pheeww…”

Xia Nan took a deep breath, trying his best not to expand upon the countless negative thoughts in his mind. He actively stepped forward, groping the wall with both hands in an attempt to find a potential switch or mechanism for a door.

The wall was pitch black throughout and was not made of stone. Its texture felt even colder than a stone wall, as if it were crafted from some kind of metal. Its smooth surface possessed countless fine, flake-like textures distributed in layers; running his hand against the grain even felt a bit sharp.

The threat of death caused Xia Nan’s inspection to be incredibly meticulous at this moment—from top to bottom, left to right, he traced every single texture with his fingertips.

Finally!

As he crouched down and felt around the bottom right corner of the black wall, a highly faint fluorescence caught his attention. It was the same ghostly blue light unique to the fungal plants inside the cave, but its source was a crevice in the rocks at the corner of the black wall!

“Could it be…”

A look of pleasant surprise flashed through Xia Nan’s eyes. He abruptly bent his body down and tossed aside those loose rock fragments with his palms. Encountering areas where the gaps were narrow, he drew the dagger at his waist, exerting the strength of his entire body to pry the stones loose.

About twenty minutes passed.

At the corner of the black wall, a half-man-high small hole appeared before Xia Nan’s eyes. The ghostly blue light grew increasingly bright.

Alone, and completely unconcerned with his posture, he used both hands and feet to crawl inside along the light.

Unexpectedly, the small hole was not deep. After crawling just a few steps, the originally narrow passage suddenly opened up. A vast space capable of producing multiple echoes subsequently appeared before his eyes.

Fungal clusters densely covered the surrounding stone walls, illuminating the entire space as bright as day.

Xia Nan, who had crawled out of the small hole, instinctively turned his body around to look at the black wall that had intercepted the tunnel horizontally.

Buzz—

Time seemed to freeze at this exact instant.

Sweat dripped from his forehead, leaving a small puddle on the cold ground. Xia Nan remained frozen in the action of turning his head back, his entire being instantly stunned in place.

Motionless.

His gaze stared dead at the direction he had come from.

A black wall?

No, that was not some artificially manufactured structure.

The metal-like cold texture, the fine flake-like patterns…

That was a section of a colossal snake’s body as thick as a train car, more than enough to completely fill the entire tunnel!

It was difficult to describe Xia Nan’s experience at this moment in words. It was like waking up in the middle of the night and suddenly seeing a section of a snake’s body on your bed under the moonlight. Your first reaction might be to leap up in panic, but at the same time, your eyes would instinctively follow the snake’s body to look for its head, judging whether it had crawled into your blanket or was merely wrapping around the edge of the bed.

Amidst the shock of his mind, Xia Nan’s gaze instinctively followed that unimaginably massive snake body all the way up.

The ground, the walls… the ceiling!

“Holy crap!”

He only felt a chill rush straight from his tailbone to the crown of his head, and goosebumps erupted all over his body.

A terrifying snake head capable of swallowing an entire elephant was directly above him, staring down at him unblinkingly with its cold, tyrannical vertical pupils.

That immense pressure born from a disparate disparity in physical size caused him to abandon resistance almost at a single glance, instinctively closing his eyes.

One second, two seconds, three seconds…

Xia Nan stood stiffly in place, the stabbing pain radiating from his chest and abdomen with every breath reminding him that he was still alive.

He slowly opened his eyes.

It was still that massive, shocking giant snake. But… it was likewise completely motionless.

Gulp.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed a mouthful of saliva. Xia Nan faintly detected that something was amiss, and his line of sight continued upward along the long snake body.

As expected!

At the very top of the cavern’s dome, a brown stone stalactite from God-knows-where pinned the giant snake firmly to the stone ceiling like a thumbtack. It pierced right through its fatal seven-inch spot.

The giant snake’s eyes, which looked cold and sinister, had actually long since lost their luster. Its train-car-sized body, just like the countless white bones outside the cave, had been reduced to a carcass with absolutely no possibility of rebirth.

He let out a slight sigh of relief.

Only under these circumstances did Xia Nan have the opportunity, and the ability to remain in a living state, to carefully examine the appearance of this giant snake.

Its entire body was pitch black, covered in ink-colored scales that felt as cold and hard as metal. The thick, long snake body coiled and climbed within the cave, making it impossible to judge its exact length.

The scales on its face were snow-white without a single impurity, highlighting its jade-green snake eyes that resembled green jasper, though the pupils were deep and devoid of light.

And right in the middle of the crown of its head, suspended high in mid-air, were several pure golden scales flashing with golden light, adorning the back of its head like a headdress.

For some reason, looking at this terrifying giant snake before him, the images of cutting off goblin ears and gouging out the poison glands of Rust Monsters suddenly flashed through Xia Nan’s mind.

A bold yet exceptionally reasonable idea gradually brewed within his heart.

As an adventurer, taking back some trophies… should be completely normal, right?

(End of Chapter)