Chapter 55: The Bone Demon Serpent
The pillar of light rose up from the horizon on the other side of the dead city.
It didn’t resemble the light of any transfer gate Ethan had ever seen. Not the familiar blue, nor the cold white of the emergency device Damien had given him. This light was a pale yellow, murky, and it didn’t flare up then go out like an ordinary gate. It simply stood there, towering, stabbing straight up into the sky, slowly rotating like a colossal column of smoke frozen in midair.
And on the hilltop, Laira was frowning hard.
Ethan noticed at once. She wasn’t looking at the pillar of light the way one looks at something dangerous. She was looking at it the way a person looks at something that had called their name.
"What is it?" he asked, his voice just barely audible.
Laira didn’t take her eyes off the pillar. Her hand unconsciously came to rest on her chest, right where her heart was.
"The Solar Flame Seal," she said quietly. "It’s resonating."
Ethan started.
"Resonating? With what?"
"With something inside that pillar of light." Her red-orange eyes narrowed slightly. "I don’t know what it is. But it’s making the seal inside me tremble. Very faintly. Like... two strings tuned to the same frequency. Pluck one, and the other rings on its own."
Ethan was silent.
And in that silence, he suddenly realized something that made him feel ashamed.
The Solar Flame Seal. The thing Laira had received in the Abyss Tower. The thing that had saved his life who knew how many times, that had pressed the Void Flame down through all those days he lay dying in the cave, that had burned away an entire sea of monsters. And yet from that day until now, he had never once asked about it.
He had only fixated on leveling up. Fixated on absorbing crystals. Fixated on thinking about his own power.
And the thing inside Laira, he had treated as a matter of course.
"That seal," he asked, his voice dropping low. "How is it doing?"
Laira turned to look at him, a little surprised by the question. Then she smiled, a very small smile.
"It’s nearing its limit," she answered. "Its current power is almost fully unlocked. I think..." She paused, weighing it. "I think when we reach Silver rank, it’ll open its first layer of sealing."
"The first layer of sealing." Ethan repeated it.
If the Solar Flame Seal, a thing that came from the Abyss difficulty of the Abyss Tower, a thing he still didn’t fully understand, was resonating with something in that pillar of light...
Then the thing inside it was definitely no ordinary article.
...
"Don’t even dream about it."
Lěng Ruò Yān’s icy voice cut across his train of thought.
She stood a few paces away, arms crossed, looking at the two of them with the eyes of someone who had just read the entire intent off their faces. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the way both of them looked toward the pillar of light said it all.
"I don’t know what you two were just whispering about," she said, her voice full of contempt. "But I take one look at those faces and I know. You’re plotting to go there, aren’t you?"
Ethan didn’t deny it.
Lěng Ruò Yān pointed toward the dead city, where the colossal body of the monster was coiling through the crumbling buildings.
"Then take a good look. That thing," she said, "eats Diamond-tier Awakened like candy."
Ethan turned back to look at the monster, and the chill crawled down his spine again.
"Diamond-tier?" he asked.
"We call it the Bone Demon Serpent." Ruò Yān’s voice dropped, and for the first time that day, her prickliness gave way to something else. Awe. "No one knows its true rank. No one has been able to measure it. It doesn’t fall into any of your classifications."
She looked toward the monster, and her black eyes darkened.
"Four years ago, an expedition from some safe zone came here. Forty Gold-tier Awakened. And two Diamond-tier Awakened leading them."
Ethan held his breath.
Forty Gold-tiers. Two Diamonds. That was a force enough to flatten a mid-grade Anomalous Coordinate. Enough to make a small safe zone tremble.
"What happened?"
"They fought it for three days straight." Ruò Yān said, her voice level. "We stood on this hill and watched. Three days, and the sky never went dark, because the light of every kind of ability just kept exploding down there."
She turned to look at Ethan.
"By the fourth day, the ones still alive fled. Not more than half. And one of the two Diamond-tier Awakened never walked out of that city again."
Ethan shuddered.
He looked down at the monster, that colossal body winding through the concrete skeletons, the pitch-black hollows blanketing its body like tens of thousands of eye sockets looking in every direction at once, and he understood that the thing he was looking at wasn’t a monster.
It was a disaster with a shape.
"As for that pillar of light," Lěng Ruò Yān continued, jerking her chin toward the horizon. "I won’t deny there might be a Blind Box there. There might even be treasure. There might be every good thing you’re imagining."
She looked straight into his eyes.
"But nothing is worth trading your life for. Not one thing."
Ethan was silent for a long while.
Then he let out a breath.
"I understand," he said.
And he truly did. He needed power, yes. He craved power so badly that last night he had considered stepping through a gate of unknown difficulty. But dying here, beneath the body of a monster that forty Gold-tiers couldn’t bring down, and he would have no chance left to do anything at all.
Laira, Mira, the debt owed by Nolan and Victor and Ryan, the sanctuary gate waiting for him to return. All of it needed him alive.
"One more thing." Lěng Ruò Yān turned and started walking back the way they’d come. "Today we have to go back."
Ethan frowned. "I thought you were leading us to the ruin?"
"That place with the pillar of light," she answered, without turning her head, "is the ruin."
Ethan stopped short.
"The spatial gates Vesna told you about," Ruò Yān continued, "are right inside that area. Normally, I’d lead you around by the southern route, far away from the Bone Demon Serpent, then go in from the outer edge. But not now. Something has activated the whole area. You see which direction that snake is looking? It’s looking at the pillar of light. And if it’s interested in something, then that something is definitely not a matter we should be shoving our way into."
She glanced back over her shoulder.
"Wanting to reach a different ruin means going very far. Many days’ travel. Today there’s no time for it. So go back. Stay alive and you still have chances."
Ethan stood on the hilltop, looking at the murky yellow pillar of light on the horizon, and a feeling of deflation rose up in his chest.
He had walked all morning to get here. He had placed his hopes on that gate. And now, he had to turn his back and walk away, only because a monster happened to be looking in that direction.
But he also knew Ruò Yān was right.
Life was the most important thing. Everything else could wait.
"All right," he said, turning around. "Let’s go."
But they had only taken three steps.
When the ground began to shake.
Not shaking because the Bone Demon Serpent had moved. This was something else. A low, muffled rumble, rising up from every direction at once, and in the air, a dense pressure began to bear down.
Ethan whipped around.
And he saw them.
From every corner of the wildland, from within the mountain crevices, from underground, from behind the ruins, creatures began to surface. Dozens. Hundreds. Every kind of bizarre shape Ethan had never seen in any book at Aurora Academy. Some slithered. Some ran on six legs. Some were nothing but a lump of flesh rolling along. Some looked like a tree that had learned to walk.
And all of them, without a single exception, were charging in the same direction.
Toward the pillar of light.
"What is happening?" Ethan blurted out.
Lěng Ruò Yān stood rooted in place, her face drained white. It was the first time that day Ethan had seen her truly lose her composure.
"I don’t know," she whispered. "I’ve never seen this before. Never."
Then the sky went dark.
Ethan looked up, and his whole body froze.
A shadow was falling over the entire hill. No, not just the hill. Over the whole valley. Over the whole dead city below.
It was a bird.
Its wingspan stretched more than a thousand meters, each beat of its wings creating a gale that knocked down the trees below. It flew past above them, slowly, majestically, and in the moment it swept overhead, the entire sky vanished, leaving only its colossal underbelly filling the whole of their vision.
Ethan couldn’t breathe. Laira stood rigid. Even Lěng Ruò Yān could only gaze up, her three puppets dropping to the ground because she had forgotten to hold them.
The colossal bird tilted its head.
An eye as large as an entire building rolled downward, and for a fraction of a second, it looked straight at the three of them.
Ethan felt that gaze. It carried no killing intent. It carried nothing at all. It simply swept over them, registered their existence, evaluated, and...
Passed them by.
The colossal eye turned away. The bird flew on, not slowing by even half a beat, heading straight for the murky yellow pillar of light on the horizon.
It didn’t consider them a threat. It didn’t consider them prey either.
It simply found them not worth the bother.
Ethan stood there, beneath the shadow slowly withdrawing, and the cold feeling inside him was worse than fear.
Because he understood something.
In this world outside the safe walls, he, a Bronze Tier 4 with a Mythical rank Partner, the thing that had shaken all of Safe Zone Number Seven, the thing they had formed an entire task force to hunt down...
Was nothing but a speck of dust a bird couldn’t be bothered to open its mouth for.
And all these creatures, the Bone Demon Serpent, the colossal bird, the hundreds of bizarre things racing off, all of them were pouring toward the same place.
There was something in that pillar of light.
Something terrifying enough to make an entire wild world take notice.
"We have to go. Right now." Lěng Ruò Yān snapped out of it first, hurriedly gathering her three puppets back. "If that mob floods through here then—"
She cut off abruptly.
Because it was already too late.
From the boulders around them, from the high outcrops, shadows began to appear. They weren’t charging toward the pillar of light like the other creatures. They stopped.
They stopped because they had found something more interesting.
Ethan slowly turned in a full circle, and he counted at least twenty figures.
They had bodies like humans, but gaunt and gangly tall, with legs ending in claws curved like a hawk’s talons. Behind their backs were wings covered in dull gray feathers, ragged and torn. Their faces were a warped blend of human and bird, with beaks jutting out and round, unblinking eyes.
Harpies.
The whole flock had the hill surrounded.
They began calling to one another in a shrill language, full of piercing tones and the clicking of beaks, a language Ethan couldn’t understand a single word of.
But he didn’t need to understand the language to know what they were saying.
Because all twenty pairs of those round eyes, without a single exception, were fixed on Laira.
And in those gazes there was only one thing.
Greed.
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