Deng’s fiery courage vanished when he saw the snake rear up taller than the trees in the forest. The spirit beast’s fangs were longer than he was tall! How was he supposed to fight something like that!

  It sprayed venom like a waterfall of death, and his body — his powerful, qi-charged body — locked up completely.

  If the mysterious cultivator hadn’t shoved him out of the way, then Deng would have died in a geyser of venom. Once more, that man placed himself between Deng and certain death.

  The shove sent Deng rolling into the bushes, where he now lay, staring up as the snake crushed the mysterious cultivator’s bones with hideous cracks. Venom stripped the man’s flesh, but still he clung to life.

  Such manly tenacity!

  Tears filled Deng’s eyes. If only he could be half as brave as that cultivator!

  The newly formed qi in Deng’s dantian fluctuated. More powerful than what his body was used to cultivating, it hadn’t yet balanced itself after his recent breakthrough. He could feel the gaze of the heavens as they judged him — was he deserving of such power? Was he worthy of being a cultivator?

  If he failed this test, the backlash would rupture his cultivation and make him weaker than ever. He would end up as frail as a mortal.

  But would he rather live as a weakling or die fighting a monstrosity?

  The serpent lowered a fang toward the mysterious cultivator’s eye, but the stranger didn’t look away!

  Deng coudln’t watch, and he looked away, gritting his teeth as he waited for the screams that were sure to come.

  Except…

  When he looked away…

  He saw the cabbage sitting amongst the roots of a tree.

  The damned cabbage.

  He clenched his fists.

  No!

  “I won’t just cower like a rat,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll fight!”

  He leaped to his feet.

  Liquid qi burned in his dantian as it raced through his meridians, empowering his body with the speed of a horse, the strength of an ox, and the gaze of a falcon! He was an imperial cultivator, and he would not cower!

  He charged out of the bush, a wordless scream on his throat. The snake only had one eye, and he charged into her blind spot with a fist raised. The spirit beast twitched at his approach, but with her coils wrapped around the stranger, she couldn’t uncurl in time.

  Deng’s fist collided with the shadowy, emerald scales.

  His wrist snapped under the force of the blow.

  Blood spattered the scales, but he couldn’t be sure whose. He staggered back, eyes wide as he stared at his broken hand.

  His heart thudded in his chest, and pain flooded his body.

  “Aaargh!”

  That wasn’t how things were supposed to happen!

  Burning pain sent him to his knees as the snake unwound and reared up so high her yellow eye blocked the moon.

  His heart hammered in his chest as he cradled his broken wrist. There was too much pain — he’d never felt so much! — but still he pushed himself to his feet. His mind might be half mad with rushing qi and adrenaline, but he wouldn’t cave.

  The heavens were watching.

  The damned cabbage was watching.

  And Deng still had one more fist!

  The snake lunged toward him —

  So fast!

  Deng threw a punch he knew would never land —

  Someone vaulted off his shoulder. The mysterious cultivator leaped through the air, his fist outstretched.

  “Time for me to bite you!” he shouted as he struck the spirit beast’s face.

  She flinched back.

  “What?” she shouted.

  The snake hissed so loud that Deng felt it in his ribs as the stranger rammed his hand into her one good eye. Blood spurted up to block out the stars.

  “You insignificant rats!” the thrashing snake shrieked. “I’ll…”

  Her voice trailed off into a gurgle as the cultivator pulled his hand free of her eye socket. The snake shivered once before all fifty scaled feet went limp and sagged onto the ground like so much rope.

  Deng fell onto his ass and tried to remember to breathe.

  ###

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I flicked eyeball goop off my hand and flexed my fingers. Defeating the snake had been easier than I expected. Once I got my fleshy hand into her eye, I could reach the optic nerve canal in her eye socket. Even if her bone was too tough for me to punch, that small gap allowed me to send a whip of blood into her brain. It only took a frenzied second for me to turn her brain into mush.

  A good thing snakes don’t have hands.

  Blood poured from her gouged sockets, and where the flow touched my bones, it washed away the venom. I let out a sigh of relief as my flesh bubbled back into place. I clicked my skeletal hand back onto my wrist and washed it in the blood.

  Walking around as a skeleton in front of Deng was very low on my list of priorities.

  The Special Inspector sat on the ground, hunched over his broken wrist.

  I felt a pang of sympathy for the man. His injury wouldn’t heal as quickly as mine, and, worse of all, he felt the pain I was blessed to ignore.

  The fight had only been difficult because I had to protect him, but at the same time, the punch he threw was what allowed me to escape the snake’s clutches.

  Maybe my life would have been easier if I had let him die from that venom attack, but I didn’t regret my actions.

  With the snake dead, I was able to grab hold of the socket and tear it open. More blood splashed over my body, washing venom away from my ribs and legs. I quickly wiped some of the gore over my face, and with a twist of my regeneration, I regrew my flesh.

  Even if I looked horrific, I at least looked human as I walked over to Deng. He remained on the ground, cradling his wrist, but he watched me with wide eyes.

  There were questions in those eyes, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about what questions a Special Inspector would be asking.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but he beat me to it.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I blinked. That wasn’t what I was expecting.

  “I don’t see what I did that deserves any thanks.”

  “You don’t? No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

  I helped him to his feet.

  “Care to explain?”

  “You killed the snake. Thanks to you, I can make a report to my superiors without any shame."

  “You helped,” I pointed out. “I wouldn’t have been able to get that last strike in if you hadn’t punched the snake.”

  “I’m sure you would have figured something out,” he said, but a smile tugged at his lips.

  I shrugged, not wanting to take away from his sense of achievement.

  “I didn’t have to, thanks to you. Congratulations, again, on your breakthrough.”

  This time, his smile bloomed, and it stripped decades from his face.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Again, I don’t think I could have done it without you.”

  “Well, I don’t see how I helped with that.”

  “It was your cabbage.”

  I blinked.

  “What?”

  “I get it, you know?”

  My heart hammered in my chest.

  “What?”

  “Carrying that cabbage around as you fight… It’s a test, right? A way to handicap yourself?”

  “Yeah… yeah!” I said as I jumped on his explanation. “That’s exactly right.”

  There was no way I was going to admit I let that lecherous vegetable trick me into calling him my master.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?” Deng said with a laugh. “But I must say I’m glad that there are crazy people like you running around. You’ve saved a lot of lives by killing that snake.”

  “We’ve saved a lot of lives,” I said with a smile.

  We both walked over to the gigantic serpent in question. Deng cradled his broken wrist, and though he was white faced, he was doing better with the pain than I expected. The snake lay like a fallen log, her green scales like moss in the moonlight.

  Deng walked closer, his nostrils twitching.

  “There are people still inside,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t feel their qi signatures while the snake was alive, but now they’re bright and clear. Three people… and they’re alive! We have to help them!”

  I looked around.

  “Don’t suppose you have a sword or a knife that can cut through those scales?”

  Deng shook his head.

  “It was too much to hope,” I said. “Looks like I’ll have to do this the hard way.”

  “Hard way?”

  With a sigh, I stretched the snake’s mouth open — it actually opened quite wide — and climbed inside her throat. Deng held her mouth open with his good hand as I wriggled — like a snake, ironically — deep into her tubular body.

  It was for a good reason, but I hated every single second of being inside that snake. I thought the facility was bad, with the cold, dry, grey stone walls constantly lit, silent, and cramped in on me.

  That was paradise compared to the insides of the snake.

  Warm drool washed over me as I slid past the snake's tongue. Enough to scrub any lingering venom from my bones and wounds. I felt myself regrowing as I wriggled deeper into the hot dark throat. Dying flesh draped around me like wet blankets stinking of rotten kisses.

  Nothing hurt, but I wanted to scream.

  I was afraid of trying to tear through the walls. My attacks hadn’t pierced the scales from the outside, and trying from the inside would be just as difficult. Right now, I thought I could do it, but I didn’t want to know what would happen if I found out I couldn’t.

  It was better to live in delusion than face the truth and go nuts.

  Crawling through a fifty-foot snake takes a lot longer than you’d think. My hand found a foot in the dark, and when I wriggled it, there was a weak answering kick. I grasped the leg by the ankle and started to slide back out of the throat, dragging the still living person with me.

  As I retreated, I sent my other hand deeper into the snake’s belly. I probably should have just done that in the first place, but I was still experimenting with touch feedback, and it was hard to think straight when I had to go inside a damned snake.

  Everything was horrible as I crawled backward, slowly, the wet walls hugging me with humid fetid air slathering my skin. My hand crawled like a spider, feeling the strange pockets of heat and finding three more still struggling bodies.

  I finally emerged from inside the snake and felt the cold mountain air prickling my body. I quickly dragged the body out and checked their breathing. She was almost indistinguishable thanks to the thick layer of saliva, stomach juices, and gore caking her body.

  “She’s alive, right?” Deng asked.

  She sputtered up some liquids I didn’t want to inspect and blinked warily at us.

  “She’s alive,” I said. “I’m going back in for the others.”

  I dove back into the snake’s throat. If I didn’t do this as fast as possible, I would start to think about what I was doing and how I didn’t need to do it. If that happened, I would never climb back inside.

  Even that thought was dangerously close to actually considering the situation. I focused on moving as fast as possible to the other twitching bodies my hand had already found.

  It took far too long, but I managed to pull out another woman.

  She lay there beside the first one, as Deng wiped away at their mouths and noses with a spare robe.

  “There’s one more person inside,” he said to me with an apologetic look. “Alive, that is, I think there are plenty of corpses. I’m really sorry.”

  I grimaced.

  I really didn’t want to go back into the snake, no matter how much the forked tongue was extended like a welcoming carpet. But if I didn’t do it now, I’d never build up the nerve.

  Just pretend it’s not a tight, confined space designed to crush and digest creatures like me. Easy, right? I forced myself back toward my personal hell, but before I could enter the mouth, the snake bucked and squirmed. Deng gasped and scrambled to stand between the semi-conscious women and the spirit beast.

  He got points for bravery, but they weren’t needed.

  With a clap of thunder and a burst of blinding lightning, the snake split in half. Gore exploded out in a spray of scales and blood and shards of bone.

  The two halves of the snake flopped to the ground, and a woman stood where they’d split. No, she didn’t stand… she floated a foot off the ground without any effort at all.

  That could only mean one thing — she was a Core Formation cultivator… at least.

  She was almost seven feet tall, and bald, with steam rising from her pale yellow robes. Despite the situation, she was completely spotless — not a trace of venom, slime, or stomach acid. Her blue eyes crackled with barely contained lightning as she took in the clearing with a glance.

  “Finally,” she said. “I thought I’d have to wait for the snake to rot before I could escape.”

  Deng and I didn’t know what to say.

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