Chapter 41: Serpent (Two-in-One)

I took a step forward.

The air around me, suddenly plummeted in temperature.

My vision went black.

The next second, the misty, humid forest underbrush before me was replaced by a bare stone wall.

“Ah…”

Pain, dizziness.

It was like missing a step on a staircase, the momentary panic causing my exhausted body to give out.

I let out a pained murmur and collapsed onto the ground.

With my last ounce of strength, I propped open my eyelids and glanced around.

Seeing no immediate danger, I succumbed to the overwhelming tide of fatigue and pain, closing my eyes.

I didn’t know how much time passed.

Hiss—

A cool, slimy sensation brushed my cheek, faintly accompanied by the writhing of muscles beneath a hard surface.

I slowly opened my eyes.

“What the hell!”

I jolted upright, flinging a reddish-brown snake that had somehow crawled onto me to the ground.

An iron-gray glint flashed in the dim air.

The snake’s head was severed, its long body writhing and twitching.

Using the tip of my sword, I flicked the head into a corner, finally letting out a breath.

Leaning against the stone wall behind me, I gripped the beheading longsword tightly.

Only now, after the frantic escape and brief dizziness, did I have the chance to carefully observe my surroundings.

This was a sealed cave.

There was nothing noteworthy—just bare, gray stone walls filling nearly every inch of my vision.

Occasionally, strange glowing fungi clung to the rock surfaces, their faint blue light turning the otherwise pitch-black cave into its current “dim” state.

For some reason, despite the lack of distinct features, staring at the lifeless gray stone wall gave me an instinctive sense of unreality, as if it didn’t belong in this world.

It felt like a chunk of mountain from another world had been forcibly embedded here.

It was exactly like the carriage, wooden tower, and courtyard I’d seen along the way.

Moreover, I had just been fleeing from the petrifying lizard in the Mist Forest, only to be transported here in an instant, as if I’d fallen into some trap.

A thoughtful expression crossed my face.

I didn’t act rashly.

As my senses gradually returned, I confirmed the area was temporarily safe.

The first thing I did was check my physical condition.

My legs were the least injured, with only a few scratches on my calves from thorns during my escape—minor abrasions that had already stopped bleeding.

A sharp pain came from the left side of my chest and abdomen, more noticeable when breathing, but still bearable—perhaps a broken rib?

The worst was my right forearm.

Enduring the pain, I lifted the padding beneath my leather armor and found the ulna near my wrist swollen and bruised purple.

During my escape, my focus had dulled the pain.

Now, waves of aching, tingling, and swelling radiated from it, making even opening and closing my fingers or gripping the sword hilt excruciatingly difficult.

And to think, to regain mobility, I had downed half a bottle of healing potion.

One gulp, 25 gold!

It stung, but I didn’t regret it.

Without that lifesaving potion, I wouldn’t have made it this far—I’d have been turned to stone and crushed in the lizard’s jaws.

A life for 25 gold? I’d pay 2500 gold!

Sighing inwardly, I didn’t stop moving, struggling to retrieve the “medical toolkit” I’d bought before setting out from my backpack.

A standard-quality healing potion could keep you alive in a crisis, heal most minor injuries, and alleviate pain.

But for injuries like broken bones, it didn’t have immediate effects.

It required the adventurer to handle it themselves.

“Rip!”

Clumsily, I used the toolkit’s splint to stabilize my forearm, then wrapped it tightly with a bandage using my left hand, biting off the excess with my teeth.

According to the [Adventurer’s Handbook], for a forearm injury, I should ideally use a sling to keep the arm elevated to prevent worsening.

With limited conditions, this was the best I could do.

My fingers, still aching, flexed slightly; the grayish petrification marks on my fingertips had eased under the potion’s effect, regaining some sensation.

I pondered:

I vaguely recalled seeing a petrification antidote in the alchemy shop, though I couldn’t remember the price. At least it gave me hope for recovery.

River Valley Town had a church that offered healing services for adventurers after missions—I could check it out upon returning.

Speaking of which, during the fight with the rust monsters, I saved Hai’an’s life, earning his debt and a promise to help me find a combat skill mentor.

Yet in the chase just now, Hai’an returned the favor, buying me precious time to escape the petrifying lizard.

In this back-and-forth, I actually ended up owing him.

So, if Hai’an needed help in the future and I could lend a hand, I wouldn’t mind doing him a few favors.

Of course, that was assuming I could get out of this damned place.

I shook my head, clearing my mind of thoughts irrelevant to the situation.

After tending to my injuries, I checked my equipment.

Beheading longsword—barely drawn during the escape, so it was intact;

[Deadline] ring—its “Deflection Force Field” was on its 24-hour cooldown, leaving me one less trump card;

Healing potion—half a bottle left;

Leather armor—ruined.

I winced as I touched the custom leather armor I’d bought for a “whopping” 10 gold at Barn’s shop.

It looked fine from the front, just stained with blood and grass.

But the back, after the lizard’s impact, was completely wrecked, full of dents and cracks, clearly unusable.

Returning to town would mean another big expense.

“Sigh.”

I sighed, slipping the tattered armor back on.

Standing up, I gazed into the cave’s depths.

Having been teleported here, I may have escaped the lizard’s pursuit, but that didn’t mean I was safe.

Without my teammates’ support, I could only rely on myself.

My chest rose and fell, my breathing growing steady and resolute.

Sidling along the wall, gripping the iron-gray longsword, I cautiously moved toward the cave’s only path.

…

“Crunch.”

My thick leather boots stomped down, crushing two thumb-sized black scorpions.

A pale, bloodless skull was picked up from the ground by a hand stained with mud and blood.

I was now in a deep, shadowy corridor.

I didn’t know how it was carved, but the stone walls on both sides were rough and uneven, showing no signs of human craftsmanship.

Compared to the open cave earlier, this tunnel was littered with pale bones.

Leaning close to the wall, using the faint blue glow from the fungi, I carefully examined the skull in my hand.

Before transmigrating, as a non-medical professional, I could never have held a human skull so casually.

But after so many life-and-death crises, mere bones no longer stirred my emotions.

“Human… another human.”

I noted inwardly.

Along the way, I had examined every bone I could identify with my current knowledge.

All were human.

In another world, this might not be surprising.

But in this fantastical world, with dwarves, elves, and numerous mixed-bloods, a place filled with the corpses of intelligent beings should not contain only humans unless it was a targeted massacre.

Combined with the cave’s alien, unreal aura and the countless strange buildings I’d seen, I began to form a vague guess—

Perhaps I had been teleported to an area from another world?

Placing the skull back, I continued forward cautiously under the faint glow.

Then, a dead end.

A cold, pitch-black wall blocked my path, cutting off all routes.

My expression seemed calm, but a flicker of unease stirred in my dark eyes.

This was the only path in the entire cave!

If the tunnel didn’t lead outside, it meant that, after narrowly escaping the monster, I would truly die here.

“Huff…”

I took a deep breath, trying to suppress the flood of negative thoughts.

Stepping forward, I ran my hands over the wall, searching for any possible door or switch.

The wall was jet-black, not stone, colder to the touch than the stone walls, as if made of metal, with countless fine, scale-like textures that felt slightly sharp when brushed against.

The threat of death made me inspect it meticulously, from top to bottom, left to right, tracing every texture with my fingertips.

Finally!

As I crouched, feeling the lower right corner of the black wall, a faint glimmer caught my attention.

The same blue glow as the cave’s fungi, but it came from a crack in the rock at the wall’s corner!

“Could it be…”

A spark of excitement flashed in my eyes.

I bent down, prying away loose rocks with my hands.

For tighter gaps, I drew the dagger from my waist, using all my strength to lever the stones.

After about twenty minutes, a half-person-high hole appeared at the corner of the black wall.

The blue glow grew brighter.

Alone, unconcerned with appearances,

I crawled through the opening, following the light.

Surprisingly, the hole wasn’t deep.

After just a few steps, the narrow passage opened up.

A vast space, echoing with multiple reverberations, appeared before me.

Dense fungal clusters clung to the surrounding walls, illuminating the area brightly.

Crawling out of the hole, I instinctively turned to look at the black wall that had blocked the tunnel.

Buzz—

Time seemed to freeze in that instant.

Sweat dripped from my forehead, leaving a small puddle on the cold floor.

I remained frozen, still in the act of turning back, stunned in place.

Motionless.

My gaze locked onto the direction I came from.

Black wall?

No, it wasn’t a man-made wall.

The metal-like coldness, the fine scale-like texture…

It was a massive serpent’s body, thick as a train, filling the entire tunnel!

Words could hardly describe my experience in that moment.

It was like waking up at midnight, seeing a snake’s body in the moonlight on your bed.

Your first reaction might be to leap up in panic, but at the same time, almost instinctively, your eyes would trace the snake’s body, searching for its head to determine if it had slithered into your covers or was merely passing by the bed’s edge.

In my shock, my gaze instinctively followed the enormous, indescribable serpent’s body upward.

The floor, the walls… the ceiling!

“What the hell!”

A chill shot from my spine to my skull, goosebumps erupting across my body.

A terrifying snake head, large enough to swallow an elephant whole, loomed above me, its cold, savage slit pupils staring unblinkingly.

The overwhelming pressure from its sheer size made me abandon resistance with a single glance, instinctively closing my eyes.

One second, two seconds, three seconds…

My body stood rigid, the pain in my chest with each breath reminding me I was still alive.

I slowly opened my eyes.

It was still that colossal, shocking serpent.

But… equally motionless.

“Gulp.”

My throat bobbed as I swallowed.

Sensing something off, my gaze followed the long serpent’s body upward again.

Sure enough!

At the highest point of the cave’s ceiling, a brown stone spike, from who-knows-where, pinned the serpent to the rock like a thumbtack.

Right at its vital seventh inch.

The serpent’s seemingly cold, menacing eyes had long lost their luster.

Its train-like massive body had become, like the countless bones outside, a lifeless corpse with no chance of revival.

I let out a small breath.

Only then did I have the chance, and the ability, to closely examine the serpent’s appearance while still alive.

Its body was pitch-black, covered in cold, hard, metallic scales, its thick, long form coiling and climbing through the cave, its length impossible to gauge;

its facial scales were snow-white, without a hint of impurity, making its jade-green eyes, deep and lusterless, stand out like emeralds;

and at the center of its head, suspended in midair, were a few shimmering golden scales, like a crown adorning its brow.

For some reason, gazing at this terrifying serpent,

a fleeting image crossed my mind—cutting off goblin ears, extracting rust monster venom glands.

A bold yet entirely reasonable idea began to take shape in my heart.

As an adventurer, taking some trophies back…

That’s pretty normal, right?

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