"Kuk......"
The scales beneath me groaned.
A place where consecutive long-distance space-foldings had been cut short. I tried to uncoil, but my muscles lagged behind by a beat.
Thud, thud.
It was the price of forcibly folding space and creating a massive illusion. Several dead scales that could no longer endure my scorched meridians fell powerlessly to the ground. Cold air from the surface passed through the gaps of exposed bare flesh like a blade.
I circulated Dao power inward once. The flow slipped before barely catching itself. Spiritual power was even slower than that.
I lowered my body close to the ground.
Yellowish-gray fog burrowed stickily between my scales. It was acrid to the extreme. The stench of soot and metallic powder, with something fishy clinging beneath. Each time I breathed, grating powder settled inside my lungs.
It accumulated faster than Dao power could filter it out.
Still, it wasn't bad. Having my vision blocked was rather a blessing when one was being pursued.
I slithered three or four times before stopping.
Something tapped against the tip of my head. It was a dried husk.
It had been a contaminated creature. Once. Similar to the kind of rat seen in sewers. Flesh and skin were nowhere to be found; only parched bones and shells remained, weathered away.
The insides of the skull were filled with black powder that was neither soil nor ash, and beyond that, husks of the same shape were lined up at regular intervals. Traces as if something had been scattered along the path.
Things frozen with mouths agape, or stopped mid-twist of their backs. The poses of those who had tried to flee like mad until the very moment of death.
I sent a thin stream of Dao power into one nearby.
It couldn't be read.
Even the faint traces of aura that normally remain after death were hollowed out, as if completely scraped away. Meaning they had been sucked dry down to the marrow.
.......
A foul stench pierced the tip of my nose.
A foul stench pierced the tip of my nose. Yet it was terrifyingly familiar. The warm heat felt at the border of light had not been the product of purification. It was merely disgusting artificial heat that had roasted and washed away the rotten energy of this bottom floor at high temperatures.
I shook my head once. This wasn't the time to dwell on it.
I moved my heavy body again.
Boom.
An explosion burst from afar. The thick fog swallowed the sound, making the distance hard to gauge, but the direction was clear. Behind my back, from where I had fled.
Boom. Kwaang.
With two consecutive thunderous roars, the entire air lurched downward once.
Gravity. That man hadn't finished yet.
My scales stood on end all at once. It wasn't a conscious reaction. My body remembered first that overwhelming crushing pressure, the one where the oxygen in my lungs transformed into glass shards tearing at my throat.
I had to widen the distance further.
I tried to read the flow, but unlike usual, I couldn't grasp it in a single breath. Metallic powder in the fog snapped and chewed through the strands of energy, and viscous soot covered over them. Even the ground wasn't soil or stone, but dead, hardened debris, so the flow of space didn't connect.
I gritted my teeth.
Boom.
Once more. This time it seemed a bit farther away. It should have been a good sign.
But my mind became clearer instead, clear to the point of chilliness.
The red-eyed silence slowly turning its head with a dagger lodged in its throat. That bizarre sound of the dagger bouncing away as if striking metal.
That man would be crushing someone back there now. One by one, very slowly, in order.
When that ended, it would be my turn next.
I lowered my head. Pressed my scales flat against the ground.
I don't know how far I slithered. Then something appeared beyond the fog.
A massive black outline jutting out at an angle. It was a collapsed statue. Its head had broken off and rolled far away, and the torso lay on its side in a bizarre pose with one arm reaching into the air. The rubble of a collapsed building beside it created a deep, dark shadow.
Instinct turned my body toward it first.
Reason warned a beat too late. A hiding place that fit this perfectly couldn't just be lying around in the middle of the ruins.
I knew. Still, I went in. If this body overexerted itself even once more right now, it would stop dead.
I pushed my serpent tail into the shadow.
It was chilly. The fog grew thin. I coiled my body once to curl up.
I stopped mid-coil. The ground that should have supported beneath my head had shifted.
Rumble.
The world fell away beneath me.
It wasn't a simple collapse of ground. It was a dizzying fall, as if a giant maw had opened to swallow me whole.
"Ugh......!"
The acceleration of gravity crushed down as if to pour my entrails out through my mouth. Rough wind surging upward scraped cruelly at the bare flesh where scales had been stripped away, like a beast's claws.
Instinctively, I raised Dao power to fold space. Space-folding.
Snap.
The energy extending into the air scattered futilely like a torn net. The meridians already overloaded to their limits couldn't endure it and bounced back screaming. It was a failure.
The darkness grew longer. Far, far deeper than expected.
Instead, I spread Dao power thin and wrapped it around the outside of my scales. It was a last desperate handful of struggle to divert the impact of the plummeting fall.
Thud.
The Dao power barrier shattered to pieces, and the cold floor struck my body. The gaps between my scales throbbed as if tearing, but fortunately no bones were broken.
Cold floor. Sticky moisture. And faintly trembling air.
The air itself here was completely different. Even the soot and metallic powder from above couldn't settle down here. Instead, the emanations of something damp and living filled the hollow space to the brim.
There were too many.
Vision accustomed to darkness revealed a massive outline a beat too late.
An enormous, high cavern whose ceiling couldn't be seen. Tiny protrusions densely embedded across the entire wall glistened faintly, and their surfaces all inclined to one side. Toward where I had fallen.
They were things with too many legs.
Chitinous joints glistening in the darkness. Where heads should have been, clusters of bizarre eyes squirmed. Hundreds of gazes pinned me down simultaneously.
The nearest one dropped from the wall with a tap.
The sound of its eight legs touching the floor as it approached was silence itself, to a disturbing degree.
"Grrrr......"
My spiritual power bristled as a beast's warning burst from my throat.
The thing leaped first.
I twisted my body to barely evade, but in that recoil, the torn muscles beneath my scales screamed. Not missing that fleeting gap, I drove my fangs into the thing's joint.
Crack.
The hard shell shattered, and black liquid burst out.
An acrid, foul stench pierced my nose. The exact same smell as that yellowish-gray fog above, chillingly so. The husks of rats sucked dry to the bone flashed through my mind again.
The moment that certainty took hold, the entire wall moved as if collapsing.
Dozens fell at once, and behind them, endless numbers poured down like a tempest. Scratching sounds from all directions tore at my eardrums, filling the space.
I tried to pull my body back, but a snake's legless flesh took a beat longer to turn direction. That brief delay was fatal.
Sharp claws grazed past my flank. A bizarre weight clung to and hung from my tail. When I crushed one, two immediately clung to that spot.
Tentacle-like leg ends burrowing between my scales found wounded spots with demonic precision. Cold, hard sensations drove deep into bare flesh.
I gritted my teeth.
I swung my tail wildly, striking the ground. Five or six were simultaneously crushed, spraying rotten bodily fluids, but the vibration sent even more swarms falling from the walls.
Break one and two climbed on; push away two and four covered that spot. No matter how much I tore and killed, the numbers didn't add up—a desperate war of attrition.
Breath rose to the tip of my jaw.
I raised spiritual power and Dao power simultaneously, but the loosened Ouroboros spun empty like a machine with stripped gears. The circulation wavered precariously, as if about to sever.
I couldn't die crushed under mass like this.
Inside my vertically slit pupils, I forcibly rotated the snake pattern that had barely been meshed together.
Dynamic Art.
Widening my vision, I ensnared the time and flow of the entire space captured in my eyes at once.
Including the creatures leaping from mid-air, the grotesque movements of dozens froze solid like stone in an instant. The sensation of burrowing legs stopped too.
It works.
Crack!
"Kuaaaack!"
My head burned white.
There were too many targets. The mass of dozens forcibly bound, and the blind survival instincts of things lower than insects, backflowed all at once, crushing my optic nerves head-on.
Overload.
The Dynamic Art shattered to pieces, and tears mixed with blood drops flowed down my scales. My vision dyed red and flickered.
The creatures frozen in mid-air poured down again.
Legs crawled madly over my scales. A horrific weight piled in layers crushed my thrashing body to the floor.
The muscles beneath my scales stiffened. One beat became two, then three. In the end, even the final resistance stopped.
I collapsed.
Is this the end.
The last moments of my previous life flashed by.
The weight of the distant heavens pressing down, that sensation of being crushed helplessly—this time it returned as the weight of eight legs.
"Keuk......!"
Something deep and heavy embedded itself in my flank.
A sharp tentacle broke through the gaps of weakened scales and burrowed ruthlessly deep into my entrails. The black liquid pooled in their stomachs poured into me.
An acrid, deadly venom spread through my severed meridians, surging terrifyingly throughout my entire body.
My vision died black. Above my head, beyond the broken shadow, the yellowish-gray fog was visible, very faintly.
As far away as something eternally out of reach.
Just as all senses were severed, and I was sinking into perfect darkness.
Thump.
A bizarre vibration echoed near my heart.
The black venom that had been burning through my blood vessels faltered for an instant.
The mass of power I had crammed inside while risking rampage, at the battlefield of the light zone. That rough, alien energy that had wandered directionless inside me convulsed as if seizing upon meeting the terrible toxicity.
Creak.
The snake pattern inside my pupils—the Ouroboros, stopped from overload—began to spin in reverse like mad.
My stilled heart gave one great, violent lurch.