Chapter 10 : The Serpent Demon Reappears

“Lin Xiao Xia!”

At the moment of the sudden change, Bai Ling didn’t know where she got the ferocity.
Her canvas shoe crushed a pebble.
She charged towards Lin Xiao Xia, who was still standing by the monstrous senior’s side.

The incandescent streetlight illuminated the monster’s slowly dissolving skin in minute detail: it wasn’t a human face at all, but an openwork visage woven from countless black threads, each thread frantically rearranging itself.

‘She had experienced something similar before!’
‘Two days ago, in the bathroom at home, she had been attacked by something like a red-clothed female ghost!’

The jade pendant that had been hanging around her neck was now clutched in her palm.
‘It was this pendant that had emitted a white light and defeated that red-clothed female ghost! Xu Zhi was right! This pendant could indeed ward off disasters!’

She charged towards Lin Xiao Xia like a cheetah and pushed her behind her.

“Get out of the way!”

‘If only she could rely on the light from the jade pendant, just like that day…’

The end of Bai Ling’s roar was cut short by the sound of tentacles tearing through the air.

Three bowl-sized black tentacles burst out from the roots of the willow tree, their surfaces covered in caramelized, carbonized patterns.

“Crack!”

The three black tentacles viciously whipped Bai Ling’s side, sending her flying like a rag doll.

The crisp sound of her ribs breaking was mixed with the clinking sound of the jade pendant rolling into the grass.

Bai Ling curled up in the night-dew-covered wolf’s tail grass.
In her spinning vision, an asphalt-like liquid twisted into countless tentacles that filled the sky.

‘Damn it! Didn’t you say it could ward off disasters…’

The pain gradually became dull.

‘I could have just left them and run away…’

‘Why did I rush up so recklessly to try and save her…’

Bai Ling asked herself this before her consciousness faded.

Moonlight spilled down from the gap in the dark clouds, like a mother’s gentle hand caressing her skin…

The lake surface suddenly surged with a black tide.
Numerous blurry human faces, sketched with chaotic lines, rose and fell, each mouth mechanically opening and closing: “So beautiful…” “Lend me your skin…”

The voices were like a stuck old cassette tape.

“Buzz!”

The Miao silver bracelet on Chengzi’s wrist suddenly burst with a moonlight-like glow.
The engraved talisman patterns on the bracelet lit up one after another.

The tentacles that touched the light twisted and melted like wax statues in boiling water.
The dripping black liquid burned honeycomb-like holes in the wooden planks.

The sudden turn of events made the back of Chengzi’s neck instantly break out in a cold sweat.
The drunkenness was driven away without a trace, replaced by the explosion of adrenaline in her veins.

“Bai Ling!”

She wanted to rush to Bai Ling’s side.
The light from the streetlight shone on the wolf’s tail grass.
The toe of Bai Ling’s canvas shoe was visible outside the grass blades.
The night dew on her shoelaces was being eaten away by a black mucus, making a sizzling sound like corroding plastic.

“Come back!”

Su Jiu Li grabbed her wrist and forcefully pulled the impulsive, reckless girl back.

The light emanating from Chengzi’s silver bracelet wove into a curtain of light, enveloping the three of them.

But outside the light curtain, the entire lakeside path was already covered with the substance sketched from those black lines.
No one knew what would happen if they touched it.

A giant fist formed from the asphalt-like tentacles, wrapped in a foul, hot stench, bombarded the light curtain.
Each blow shook the paint off the wooden path’s railing.

Lin Xiao Xia’s shoe was stuck in a crack in the wooden planks.
The pink satin was being corroded into a scorched mark by the seeping black liquid.

“Crack!”

The light curtain above their heads cracked with spiderweb-like patterns.
An asphalt-like tentacle, with a tip like a baby’s arm, poked out from the crack.
The tip grew a shape sketched with the same chaotic lines as the monster.

“What are you spacing out for, you silly girl!”

Su Jiu Li grabbed Lin Xiao Xia’s arm and pulled her back.
The next second, the tip of the baby-arm-sized tentacle grazed past her hair.
The mimicked human face at its end split open a black hole of a mouth.
The teeth, woven from black threads, bit into the gap in the light curtain, shaking frantically like piranhas tearing at their prey.

If she hadn’t pulled Lin Xiao Xia away in time, she would probably have been torn to shreds by those piranha-like teeth.

The lake surface suddenly rolled with a tide of asphalt.
Countless half-finished faces churned at the crest of the wave.

One unfinished face was imitating Chengzi’s features, its broken eyelashes and crooked lips floating in the mucus.

The moonlight suddenly cut through the clouds.
At some point, a white figure stood in the wolf’s tail grass.

The night wind lifted the hem of her tattered clothes, revealing the spreading snake scales on her waist.
Those white scales were refracting the neon lights into a fluorescent glow, casting a light spot on the lake surface.

The evening wind messed up her black hair, revealing golden, vertical pupils.
A slender snake tail, extending from her tailbone, swayed left and right with the breeze.

Silver light flowed over her body.
She walked towards the monster on the moonlight, each step blooming with frost flowers in the late-August heat.

The wolf’s tail grass brushed against her, making a rustling sound.

The moment her toes stepped into the asphalt, the surface of the mucus showed patterns like cracked tiles.
The asphalt screamed and retreated, like darkness being driven away by sunlight.

The retreating black substance condensed into a spherical compound eye under the lakeside bench, its pupils reflecting the newborn scale crevices on the back of the white figure’s neck.

The amber-gold vertical pupils were silent.
Her cold eyes looked at the black shadow sketched with chaotic lines, as if looking at a corpse.

The black shadow roared and swung an asphalt-like giant fist.
The surface of the fist protruded with blurry lips sketched with chaotic lines.

The white figure tilted her body slightly.
Her hair brushed past the opening and closing mouths, hearing the rising and falling whispers.

In the rising dust, she crushed the frost flowers.
Each ice crystal was attached with a tiny snake scale, forming a constellation-like navigation trajectory under the moonlight.

The black shadow sketched with chaotic lines let out a screech like a stuck cassette tape.
The lines drew a long saber in its hand.
It held the long saber and struck a decent-looking stance.

With a single thrust, the white figure lightly reached out and grabbed the blade.
A silver light burst from her fingertips like an electric current, coiling around the asphalt-like black saber.
The silver light traveled along the inscription-like black blood vessels on the blade.

“Rip!”

The sound, like a clumsy sound engineer imitating the sound of shattering metal, pierced Chengzi’s eardrums.
The black long saber was instantly disintegrated, and the fragments condensed into ice crystal prisms in the air.

After disintegrating the long saber, the silver light didn’t stop.
Instead, it coiled around the black shadow’s arm like a venomous snake.
The chaotic lines were cut to pieces by the silver light.
The black shadow let out a piercing sound like a disk being formatted and cut off its own right hand.
If it hadn’t, it would have been dismembered by the silver light in a few seconds!

The black shadow shrieked and immediately turned to jump into the black tide.
It wanted to escape!
But the monster that leaped into the black tide suddenly froze.
The silver light wove into a spiderweb-like network of nerves at the crest of the wave.
A powerful, cold aura exploded in the low air.
In the late-summer heat, the black giant wave was instantly frozen.

On the surface of the frozen wave, the frozen black shadow maintained a posture as if reaching out for help.

The white reflection was distorted and elongated on the ice surface.
The snake tail swept past, shattering the line-like tentacles struggling to break the ice.

The black shadow shrieked, trying to break the ice.
The ice crystals that exploded in the center of the lake created a string of bubbles.

The white figure suddenly froze.
The bubbles reflected her current appearance—black hair falling over her shoulders, her cheeks covered in scales, and only a cold aura in her amber-gold vertical pupils.

She seemed to see her appearance from that day sealed in one of the bubbles—a girl in oversized pajamas, facing the bathroom mirror, trying to trim her long black hair with scissors.

On the moonlit lake surface, she saw her own face, covered in snake scales, her amber-gold vertical pupils seeming to mock her.

‘Am I still Bai Ling?’

She suddenly wanted to run away.