Chapter 41 Snake

One step.

That was all it took.

The instant Xia Nan stepped forward, the temperature around him plunged.

His vision went black.

Then, in the very next second, the damp mist and dense undergrowth of the Misty Forest vanished.

A bare stone wall stood in front of him instead.

“Ah…”

Pain.

Dizziness.

It felt like missing a step on a staircase. That split-second plunge of weightlessness and panic was enough to snap the last thread holding his exhausted body together.

A pained groan slipped from his lips, and Xia Nan collapsed onto the ground.

With the last of his strength, he forced his eyelids open and swept his gaze around him.

No obvious danger.

That was enough.

The crushing exhaustion and pain surged over him like a tide, and his eyes closed again.

He had no idea how long he was unconscious.

Hiss…

Something cold and slick brushed across his cheek.

Beneath the hard surface, he could faintly feel muscles shifting and writhing.

Xia Nan slowly opened his eyes.

“Holy shit!”

He shot upright and flung the reddish-brown snake that had somehow crawled onto him to the ground.

An iron-gray flash cut through the dim air.

The snake’s head dropped away.

Its long body twisted and thrashed across the stone.

Xia Nan used the tip of his sword to lift the severed head and toss it into a corner. Only then did he finally let out the breath caught in his chest.

He leaned back against the stone wall, both hands clenched tightly around the Decapitating Longsword.

After the desperate chase, the sudden transport, and his brief collapse, this was the first chance he had to properly look at where he had ended up.

It was a sealed cave.

There was almost nothing worth looking at.

Bare gray stone walls surrounded him on every side, filling nearly his entire field of vision.

Only a few strange fungi and grasses clung to the cracks in the rock. They gave off a dim, ghostly blue glow, turning what should have been complete darkness into a murky twilight.

Yet even with so little to see, Xia Nan felt something was wrong.

Deeply wrong.

Simply staring at those dead gray walls gave him an inexplicable sense of unreality, as though this place did not belong in the world he knew.

It felt like someone had chipped a piece off a mountain in another world and forcibly wedged it into this one.

The feeling was exactly the same as the strange carriages, wooden buildings, and courtyards they had encountered on the way here.

And just moments ago, he had still been fleeing for his life through the Misty Forest with a basilisk right behind him.

Then, in the blink of an eye, he had been sent here as though he had triggered some hidden trap.

Xia Nan’s expression turned thoughtful.

But he did not move recklessly.

As his mind gradually cleared, he first confirmed that there was no immediate danger.

Then he checked his injuries.

His legs were the least concerning.

Several scratches ran along the sides of his calves where thorns had caught him during the chase, but they were only ordinary abrasions. The bleeding had already stopped.

A sharp pain throbbed in the left side of his chest and abdomen. It grew worse whenever he breathed, but it was still bearable.

[Broken rib, maybe?]

The real problem was his right forearm.

Grinding his teeth against the pain, Xia Nan peeled back the padding beneath his leather armor.

The ulna near his right wrist had swollen into a large bluish-purple lump.

During the chase, fear and adrenaline had drowned most of the pain out.

Now that he had stopped moving, waves of soreness, numbness, swelling, and stabbing pain rolled through the arm one after another.

Even opening and closing his fingers was difficult.

Tightening his grip on the sword hilt was worse.

And that was after he had already swallowed half a bottle of healing potion just to regain enough mobility to escape.

[One gulp. Twenty-five gold.]

Just thinking about it hurt.

Still, Xia Nan did not regret it.

Without that mouthful of life-saving potion, he would never have made it this far.

The basilisk would have turned him into stone, bitten him apart, and swallowed him before he had any chance to complain about the price.

For his life?

Forget twenty-five gold.

He would pay 2,500.

While silently mourning his money, Xia Nan kept working.

With some difficulty, he pulled the medical kit he had bought before setting out from his backpack.

A common-quality healing potion could save a life in an emergency. It could also heal most minor wounds and suppress pain.

But broken bones were another matter.

For injuries like that, an adventurer still had to deal with them personally.

“Rrrip!”

Working clumsily with one hand, Xia Nan fixed the splint from the kit around his injured forearm.

Then he wrapped the bandage tightly around it several times with his left hand before biting off the excess with his teeth.

According to the [Adventurer’s Handbook], an injured forearm should also be supported in a sling to keep the damage from worsening.

Unfortunately, his current situation did not exactly offer ideal medical conditions.

This would have to do.

He slowly flexed his fingers.

Soreness and swelling still lingered, and faint gray-white traces of petrification remained on his fingertips, but the healing potion had already reduced them considerably.

Some feeling had returned as well.

Xia Nan thought for a moment.

He vaguely remembered seeing antidotes for petrification in the alchemy shop.

He could no longer remember the price, but the important part was that such medicine existed.

There was hope.

Rivervale Town also seemed to have a church that offered healing services to adventurers returning from missions.

Once he made it back, he could go take a look.

That thought reminded him of Hai’an.

During the battle against the rust monster, Xia Nan had saved the half-elf’s life. Hai’an had owed him a favor afterward and agreed to help him find a combat technique instructor.

But during the chase just now, Hai’an had returned that favor.

The half-elf had stayed behind to hold off the basilisk, buying Xia Nan the precious time he needed to escape.

After all that, Xia Nan somehow ended up owing him instead.

If Hai’an ever needed help in the future, and Xia Nan was capable of giving it, he would not mind returning the favor.

Of course…

That assumed he could get out of this damned place first.

Xia Nan shook his head and pushed the useless thoughts aside.

After treating his injuries, he checked his equipment.

Decapitating Longsword – barely drawn during the escape, so it was still intact.

[Deathline] ring – Deflection Field had entered its twenty-four-hour cooldown, which meant one of his trump cards was temporarily gone.

Healing potion – half a bottle left.

Leather armor…

Ruined.

Xia Nan ran a pained hand over the custom leather armor he had bought from Barn’s shop for the “massive sum” of ten gold.

From the front, it still looked acceptable.

A little blood.

A few pieces of grass.

Nothing serious.

The back was another story.

The basilisk’s charge had smashed it almost completely. Deep dents and cracks covered the leather, and there was no question that it could no longer be relied on.

Once he returned to town, that would be another large expense.

“Sigh.”

Xia Nan reluctantly put the battered armor back on anyway.

Then he stood and looked deeper into the cave.

Being transported here had saved him from the basilisk.

It had not made him safe.

His teammates were gone.

From here on, he could rely only on himself.

His chest rose and fell slowly.

His breathing settled.

His gaze hardened.

Keeping one shoulder close to the wall, Xia Nan gripped the iron-gray sword and carefully advanced into the cave’s only passage.

…

Crunch.

A thick leather boot came down hard.

Two thumb-sized black scorpions vanished beneath the sole.

A dirt-and-blood-stained hand reached down and lifted a pale skull from the ground.

Xia Nan had entered a long, dark corridor.

He had no idea how the tunnel had formed.

The stone walls on both sides were rough and uneven, without any obvious traces of tools or human construction.

Yet unlike the empty cavern behind him, this passage was littered with white bones.

Xia Nan moved closer to the wall and held the skull beneath the ghostly blue glow of the fungi.

Before transmigrating, he had never studied medicine.

Back then, there was no chance he would have calmly held another human’s skull in his hands and examined it up close.

Now?

After so many brushes with death, bare bones were far below the threshold required to disturb him.

[Human…]

He turned the skull slightly.

[Another human.]

Every set of remains he had been able to identify along the way belonged to the same race.

Human.

In some worlds, that would not have meant much.

But this was a fantasy world where dwarves and elves genuinely existed.

Mixed-blood races were common as well.

If this place had truly been filled with the remains of intelligent beings, it should have contained more than one race unless the dead had been deliberately targeted.

That made the complete absence of anything but human remains strange.

Very strange.

When Xia Nan combined that with the cave’s unreal atmosphere and the bizarre foreign buildings they had encountered earlier, a possibility began to form in his mind.

[Could this place also be from another world?]

He returned the skull to the ground.

Then, under the faint blue glow, he continued deeper into the passage one careful step at a time.

Until he stopped.

Dead end.

A cold, pitch-black wall blocked the entire corridor.

Xia Nan’s expression remained calm, but a faint tremor passed through his eyes.

This was the cave’s only path.

If this tunnel did not lead outside…

Then after barely escaping the basilisk, he might truly die here.

“Ha…”

He took a deep breath.

There was no point letting his thoughts spiral.

Xia Nan stepped forward and began feeling along the wall, searching for any sign of a hidden door or mechanism.

The entire surface was black.

It was not stone.

It felt even colder than the surrounding rock, almost like metal.

Countless fine patterns covered its smooth surface in overlapping layers. When he ran his fingers against their direction, the edges were sharp enough to sting.

With death hanging over his head, Xia Nan searched with almost obsessive care.

Top to bottom.

Left to right.

Every ridge.

Every line.

Every gap.

Finally…

Something caught his eye.

Near the lower-right corner of the black wall, an extremely faint glow leaked through the darkness.

The same ghostly blue glow as the fungi in the cave.

But this light was coming from a narrow crack between several rocks.

[Could it be…]

Xia Nan’s eyes lit up.

He immediately crouched and began pulling the loose stones away with his hands.

Where the gaps were too narrow, he drew his dagger and jammed the blade between the rocks, using his full body weight to pry them loose.

About twenty minutes later, he stepped back.

A small opening had appeared at the corner of the black wall.

It was only about half a person’s height.

But beyond it, the blue light was noticeably brighter.

Xia Nan did not care what he looked like.

He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled toward the light.

Unexpectedly, the opening was shallow.

After only a few steps, the narrow passage suddenly opened wide.

A vast chamber appeared before him, large enough for even the smallest sound to echo several times.

Dense colonies of luminescent fungi covered the surrounding walls.

The entire cavern glowed blue.

Xia Nan crawled out of the opening and instinctively turned to look back at the black wall that had blocked the tunnel.

Buzz…

For an instant, time seemed to stop.

A bead of sweat slid down his forehead.

It struck the cold stone floor and left behind a dark spot.

Xia Nan froze halfway through turning.

Completely still.

His eyes locked on the path he had just crawled through.

Black wall?

No.

That was not a wall at all.

The metallic chill.

The fine layered patterns.

The sharp edges…

It was a section of an enormous snake’s body.

A body as thick as a train.

Large enough to fill the entire tunnel.

For a moment, Xia Nan could not even process what he was seeing.

It was like waking in the middle of the night, seeing a section of snake stretched across your bed in the moonlight, and realizing that before you could even panic properly, your eyes had already begun following its body.

Searching.

Where was the head?

Had it crawled beneath your blankets?

Was it coiled beside you?

That same instinct took over Xia Nan now.

His gaze followed the giant snake’s body.

Across the ground.

Up the wall.

Higher…

Higher…

To the ceiling.

“Holy shit!”

A blast of cold seemed to shoot from his tailbone straight into his skull.

Every hair on his body stood on end.

A colossal snake head hung above him.

It was large enough to swallow an elephant whole.

Two cold, violent vertical pupils stared directly down at him.

The difference in scale was so overwhelming that Xia Nan’s body reached a conclusion before his mind did.

There was no point fighting.

He shut his eyes.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three…

Xia Nan stood rigidly in place.

His ribs still hurt when he breathed.

His heart was still beating.

He was still alive.

Slowly, cautiously, he opened his eyes.

The giant serpent was still there.

Still staring.

Still unmoving.

“Gulp.”

Xia Nan swallowed.

Something was wrong.

His gaze shifted past the hideous head and followed the serpent’s body farther upward.

Then he saw it.

At the highest point of the cavern ceiling, a brown stone spike had pierced through the serpent and pinned it against the rock like a thumbtack.

Right through its vital point.

Those terrifying eyes were not watching him.

They had simply remained open in death.

The immense body, thick as a train, had long since become the same thing as the white bones scattered throughout the outer tunnel.

A corpse.

A very large corpse.

Xia Nan finally exhaled.

Only now, with the certainty that the thing was dead, could he properly study it without wondering whether he was about to be swallowed whole.

Its body was pitch-black.

Ink-colored scales covered it from head to tail, each one cold and hard like metal. The enormous body coiled through the cavern in loops so vast that Xia Nan could not even estimate its total length.

The scales across its face were pure white, spotless as snow.

That contrast made its jade-green eyes even more striking.

They resembled polished emeralds, beautiful despite the lifeless darkness at their center.

At the crown of its head, several pure golden scales gleamed faintly, arranged almost like a decorative headdress.

Xia Nan stared at the horrifying creature.

Then, for some reason, two memories surfaced in his mind.

Cutting ears off goblins.

Removing a venom gland from a rust monster.

A reckless thought began taking shape.

And the more he considered it…

The more reasonable it sounded.

[I’m an adventurer.]

[Bringing home some loot is perfectly normal, right?]