Chapter 92: Twenty-Four Poison Branches (7)
Translator: bjgoofy
Since the raid difficulty was so insane, what else could I do?
As the raid leader, I had to manage the aggro ping-pong of the raid members with precision.
However, since my martial arts were still unpolished, I couldn’t both deal damage and give commands. So I decided to step out from dealing and observe the situation, then give signals at the right timing.
One small mistake here could lead directly to death.
‘Damn. In my past life, I thought raid leaders just sat around, but it’s the hardest job of all.’
While I was fully alert, calling out aggro orders with focus to drain the monster's energy, it came time for Seol noona’s turn.
“Seol noona! Pull out!”
After Hwa-eun had gone in, it was Seol noona’s turn to retreat and be replaced by a warrior of Beast Palace of squad leader level.
At the moment I instructed Noona to retreat.
“Ugh!”
Seol noona staggered as she stepped on a strangely protruding rock due to the thrashing of the Flying Celestial Serpent.
As she leapt backward, her body tilted and her retreat was slightly delayed.
‘Damn it! Every raid requires watching the ground, always!’
Seol noona, forgetting the basic rule of watching the ground in a raid.
Since she was a skilled master, she quickly regained her balance, but even that brief mistake proved fatal.
-Shaaaa!
-Crunch.
The Flying Celestial Serpent twisted its body and immediately coiled around Noona’s staggering form. Her slender waist was gripped tightly by the creature’s body, like a cable tie being pulled taut.
As the creature swiftly started wrapping around Seol noona's entire body, a pained groan burst from her lips.
“Kyaaak!”
“Seol noona!”
“Elder!”
“Seol Unnie!”
The panicked cries of the people.
The creature raised its head above Seol noona’s, its jaw starting to open wide.
A situation where Seol noona could be seriously injured or even killed.
Saliva dripped from the gaping jaws of the creature, falling onto Nunim’s head.
-Thud. Thud thud.
“This won’t do! Stand back!”
-Kwaang!
Grandfather struck with a powerful twin palm strike, showing a face that accepted the Flying Celestial Serpent might die. However, when the dust cleared, what was revealed was the still-intact creature, still opening its jaws toward Seol noona.
Its scales seemed tougher than expected, and it looked like halting its motion briefly was the best he could do.
-Shaaa!
The creature, having taken Grandfather’s twin palms, glared at him once, then slowly began moving its mouth toward Seol noona’s head to swallow her.
“Seol noona!”
I immediately pulled out the pouch Yohwa had made from inside my robes and leapt toward the creature’s head from atop the rock.
Since it was a pouch that couldn’t be torn, I thought maybe if I covered its head with it, I could stop it from biting Nunim.
-Flap.
Leaping down with Yohwa’s pouch spreading like a parachute.
As I fell from the rock, the creature’s open jaws flashed before my eyes, and just before it bit into Seol noona, I managed to cover its head with the pouch at the very last second.
“Got it!”
-Kyaaah!
The creature thrashed wildly as soon as the pouch went over its head.
Clinging to the pouch as it writhed, I couldn’t hold on for long and was eventually slammed into the ground.
“Ugh!”
-Shaaaa!
-Shaaaa!
Then, something strange happened the moment the pouch was placed over the creature’s head.
Yohwa’s pouch was thin enough to be semi-transparent, visible from the other side, but the creature began flailing its head violently in all directions, emitting warning cries.
Its actions were bizarre, as if it had lost all sense of direction.
Then, it suddenly threw Seol noona away and immediately rose into the air.
“Are you alright? Seol noona?”
“Unnie!”
As I checked on Seol noona, the creature shook its head in the air for a while to fling off the pouch, then quickly began retreating to the far side of the valley.
“I’m aching all over, but I’m fine. Ryong, how about you? You got slammed pretty hard.”
“Ugh. I’m alright too.”
Though my shoulder throbbed from the impact, I wasn’t seriously hurt.
The fluttering pouch fell from the sky and landed over my head.
Attempt number 21 had failed like this again.
***
“It was almost a disaster earlier. Are you alright, Elder Seol?”
“I’m fine, Elder. Ryong saved me. Thank you, Ryong.”
“No need to thank me. We’re family.”
“Oh my, our Ryong has moved this noona’s heart so many times today. You even saved my life.... Yes, we are family.”
“N-Noona, I appreciate it, but family members shouldn’t cling to each other like this.”
"But we are family, aren't we?"
Back at the campsite, I peeled off Noona, who was clinging to me with her arms hooked around mine in gratitude for saving her life.
The 21st raid had failed again, but the mood wasn’t bad.
Isn’t it true that through repeated failures, camaraderie grows among comrades?
“Soryong-nim saved the Elder from a serious injury today.”
“Soryong-nim?”
“He saved Elder who had slipped on a rock from the jaws of the Flying Celestial Serpent.”
“Oooh, as expected. It’s Soryong-nim.”
Moreover, since I had saved Noona, the warriors of Beast Palace were now showing me more favor than before.
Surrounding the campfire, while roasting the wild boar the warriors had caught, we continued the same practice as always, analyzing the cause of our 21st failure.
It’s a well-known rule that after a raid failure, you gather to find the cause and discuss what to do next.
“Today, redirecting its attention to another target quickly went smoothly.”
"By the way, we'll have to be careful of the floor now too."
“That’s right, Hwa-eun. The rocks that sprang up from the ground because of that creature really interfered with using our footwork techniques.”
But while people continued the conversation, I was lost in another thought.
In front of the campfire, I held in one hand a piece of wild boar meat, and in the other, the pouch Yohwa had made.
Because the way that creature panicked when its head was covered with this pouch remained a mystery in my mind, I kept thinking about it.
I placed the pork back on the heated stone and tried putting the pouch over my own head.
The view was slightly blurry, but still clear enough to see through.
‘What is this?’
It didn’t seem like something that would fluster a fierce creature just because it had a pouch like this over its head, so I decided to investigate the strange behavior it had shown.
‘It really did seem like it couldn’t see.’
Snakes have about three ways to perceive things.
First is sound.
Snakes are often said to be deaf due to degenerated hearing organs, but that’s only partially true.
More accurately, they can’t hear in the traditional sense, but they can feel sound and respond to it.
They can sense sound waves, vibrations in the air, through their whole body.
They use these sound waves as a supplementary method to detect living things.
Though with the exception of some large snakes, most snakes are timid and move away from the direction of sounds.
Next is smell.
Snakes can perceive things through smell. Their forked tongue and constant flicking are for that purpose.
Their split tongue catches scent particles in the air and sends them to the Jacobson’s organ, which detects the origin of the smell.
The forked tongue is the result of evolution to detect the direction from which the scent is coming.
And then, there’s vision.
Snakes don’t have very good eyesight.
They can barely distinguish nearby objects, so they have an additional special ability.
There are special cells called Golgi cells located in pits beneath their eyes that can detect infrared.
Just like in alien horror movies, they can sense and detect the infrared radiation emitted from living organisms.
‘Wait a minute? Don’t tell me this is it?’
Just as I finished thinking about snakes’ infrared vision, I recalled how the creature had panicked as if it couldn’t see when Yohwa’s pouch was placed over its head, and a scene from a movie I had seen in my past life came to mind.
“What do you think, Soryong? Soryong?”
“Ryong, what are you doing?”
Realizing I was lost in thought, Seol noona and Hwa-eun shook me from both sides, but I quickly ran over and shouted to Yohwa, who was perched up a tall tree nearby.
“Yohwa, come down here!”
Yohwa descended upside down along a spider thread from the tree.
Yohwa, hanging upside down in Hwa-eun’s form, tilted her head at me.
-Kissit?
A look asking why I had called her.
Grabbing Hwa-eun-shaped Yohwa, I asked her,
“Can you wrap me up tightly in spider silk?”
-Ki, Kishishi?
“Ryong, wrap you?”
“Soryong, you want to be wrapped up? What in the world for, all of a sudden?”
At my request, Yohwa, Seol noona, and Hwa-eun all gave me baffled, shocked looks.
***
“Do you really think this will work?”
“That’s why we’re going to check now, aren’t we?”
"In all my life as the Man of Ten Thousand Poisons, this is the first time I've looked like this."
In the middle of the night, the Man of Ten Thousand Poisons grandfather and I were using qinggong to ascend the valley in search of the Flying Celestial Serpent.
Looking down at himself, Grandfather shook his head in disbelief.
The reason he wore such an expression was because both he and I currently looked like life-size white mannequins.
That was because we were tightly coated head to toe in Yohwa’s spider silk.
I had asked Yohwa to wrap me in spider silk, and since I needed someone else to test it with, that someone had to be the strongest among us, Grandfather. So, he ended up in the same condition as me.
While accompanying the grumbling Grandfather, we were flying up the valley when we finally saw it.
There, atop a cliff that jutted out near the top of the valley, lay the Flying Celestial Serpent.
[There it is!]
[I see it too. Let’s go.]
We quickly flew toward the rock where the creature lay.
When we reached what we knew to be its maximum detection range, the creature lifted its head and looked in our direction.
[Did it spot us after all?]
From twenty-one raids, we had learned that the creature’s recognition distance was about thirty jang, roughly a hundred meters.
This was the critical range, and Grandfather whispered with tension in his voice. But the creature simply tilted its head, then buried it back inside its body.
As we cautiously crept closer, it would occasionally lift its head, but even when we got within ten meters, it couldn’t detect us.
Even when our eyes met several times.
[It’s real!]
Grandfather sent a voice transmission in astonishment.
After signaling Grandfather to step back a little, I picked up a stone from the ground and hurled it at the creature’s head.
I had mastered beginner-level hidden weapon techniques of the Tang Sect.
At this range, a target like that was guaranteed to hit.
-Thwack.
The stone struck the creature’s head directly, and it recoiled in surprise, whipping around wildly.
-Ssshh!
-Sssh!
But what did that matter?
The creature was a blind man with open eyes.
After scanning its surroundings for a while and failing to locate us, it tilted its head again and laid it down.
However, once the creature calmed down, Grandfather, perhaps feeling resentful for all the hardship it had caused, picked up another stone and flung it at its head again.
-Smack!
-Kyaaahhhh!
Late at night, the sound of stone hitting scales and the creature’s enraged screech echoed through the valley.
After being pelted with stones a couple more times, the creature finally had enough and flew off elsewhere.
Once it disappeared, I heard Grandfather’s long-restrained laughter.
“Kahahaha! How satisfying! Rotten bastard!”
It seemed he found it quite amusing to tease the Flying Celestial Serpent. After a hearty laugh, Grandfather turned to me and asked,
“So, how exactly does this work again?”
“Snakes like the Flying Celestial Serpent don’t have good eyesight. So they detect the warmth from the bodies of beasts or humans. It seems Yohwa’s spider silk blocks that ability.”
“And how did you figure that out?”
“When Seol noona was in danger, I threw the pouch over the creature’s head, and it fled in a panic. I recalled that moment.”
In a movie I saw in my past life, there was a scene where the protagonist covered himself in mud to avoid infrared detection by aliens. I thought maybe Yohwa’s silk had a similar effect, and it did.
They say asbestos can block infrared sensors, so it’s probably something like that.
“Then, how do we capture that thing?”
I smiled and replied to Grandfather’s question.
“Wrap all the warriors in spider silk, then tail the creature so it can’t eat or sleep. Let’s see how long it lasts.”
‘I’ll stalk you without sleeping until I catch you. This is the punishment for all the hell you’ve put us through.’
At my plan, Grandfather gave a dangerous grin and spoke.
“That’s...”
“That’s?”
“A truly excellent plan. Kahaha.”
***
-Thud!
The staggering creature finally collapsed beside the valley.
After covering every warrior in spider silk and tailing it for six days, what else could a mere beast do?
Whenever it tried to hunt a Fire Carp, we threw stones to drive the prey away. When it tried to drink water, we threw stones to stop it. When it tried to sleep, we threw stones to keep it awake. No matter how strong a creature may be, all living things must eat, drink, and sleep.
In the end, pummeled by stone after stone like a hailstorm, the creature pitifully drank a few mouthfuls of water, then lay down by the riverside.
It looked to be asleep, as if it had passed out.
Even as I approached and gently prodded it, there was no reaction whatsoever.
I walked up to it and tapped its head, laughing.
“Wahahahaha!”
The top of the Twenty-Four Poison Branches, the Flying Celestial Serpent, was now mine.
*****
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