Chapter Ninety-Five: The Serpent Slaying Experiment

The lightning had been effective, but not fatal.

Watching the giant serpent slither toward him, Liu Zhi spoke without a trace of panic. At the same time, he removed the Thunder Coral and replaced it with the Sun Crystal.

“Flare Burst.” Liu Zhi raised the Staff of Death once more.

By then, the giant serpent had already closed to within less than a hundred meters of the pyramid. At its speed, that distance could be covered in only five to ten seconds.

A blinding white flash burst from the Staff of Death. Liu Zhi, standing behind it, felt nothing at all, but the giant serpent about to charge in was struck in the eyes.

Its sight was nothing like a human’s. It did not see the world with eyes in the same way people did, but through heat. Liu Zhi had forced the full, wide-area burst of light straight toward it, and all the serpent could perceive was a sheet of pure white.

Then a searing pain rushed from its eyes into its small brain, and in that instant, its vision was ruined outright.

The giant serpent had never imagined it could meet with such a fate, and for a moment it froze in place.

Only after three seconds did it regain its senses and begin thrashing wildly, no longer carrying the murderous momentum it had shown on its charge toward the pyramid.

“Is that it?” Liu Zhi murmured in mild doubt. Yet he did not relax. The serpent might be blind, but it had not lost the ability to move, and creatures of that scale possessed a terrifying vitality. At the last possible moment, they often erupted with impossible feats. Liu Zhi could not allow them to turn the tables now.

“Skeleton archers, fire.”

Liu Zhi lifted the Staff of Death and pointed it toward the serpent. The skeleton archers all raised their bows and loosed their arrows.

But their bows were all crude wooden ones made by Liu Zhi’s skeleton craftsmen, and the strings were woven from vines and bark. Managing to fire them at all was already no small accomplishment.

The skeleton archers did have skill, but the arrows they sent flying lacked force. They might be enough to pierce and kill a man, but to kill a snake this enormous was another matter entirely.

Watching arrow after arrow strike the giant serpent and bounce back off, Liu Zhi sighed.

“Forget shooting for now. Pay attention next time we fight. The skeleton archers still need another upgrade.”

As he spoke, Liu Zhi took out several vials of liquid.

Of course, these were not products of his alchemy. In his alchemy hut at the moment, aside from six different kinds of spider silk, he possessed only the four most basic alchemical substances: Aquatic Neutralizer, Earth Stabilizer, Wind Binder, and Fire Fusion Agent.

These four were reagents alchemy would inevitably require later on, but before learning other formulas, they had no practical use at all.

Naturally, Liu Zhi would not waste his alchemical supplies by using them here.

So the vials he had taken out were all poisons he had developed during this period.

Ever since the last time he had fought that Cutter and used poison, Liu Zhi had understood that his use of poison could never be like other people’s, smeared on a weapon or forced into someone’s mouth.

Enemies worthy of poison were generally formidable ones.

Thus, over this period, Liu Zhi’s entire approach to poison research had been aimed at one direction: something that would poison by inhalation.

The vials in front of him were exactly that. Once opened, wisps of white vapor rose from within.

Liu Zhi immediately used his hand to blend the several strands of white mist together on the spot. As the vapor slowly thickened, he pushed his hand forward, summoning a fierce gust of wind to drive the white cloud toward the giant serpent still rolling on the ground.

To keep the mist from scattering, Liu Zhi controlled the wind’s speed. As a result, the white cloud moved much more slowly. It took seven or eight seconds before it was finally forced onto the serpent’s face.

The instant the white mist enveloped the giant serpent’s head, it seemed to sense something. It opened its huge mouth, trying to roar, but the moment its jaws parted, the soft flesh inside had already begun turning a strange purple.

Then its throat began to ooze thick pus, and blood slowly started dripping from within.

But the serpent’s own vitality was tremendous, and such poison could not inflict any further serious harm.

Seeing this, Liu Zhi sighed.

“The poison works, but it’s too weak. I’ll have to change the formula.”

Just as he was preparing to switch to another mixture, the giant serpent finally remembered who had brought it such agony. It lunged forward, throwing itself toward the place where the pyramid had stood.

The serpent was quite formidable; instinctively, it knew the location where Liu Zhi was standing.

But at that very moment, Liu Zhi’s next experiment had already begun. This time, he produced another kind of poison. It could not be vaporized, so the previous method would not work.

Yet the serpent’s leap forward gave Liu Zhi an opening. He hurled the poison out with the bottle still intact, then drew his longsword with his right hand and released a wind blade.

Just as the serpent opened its mouth to bite toward Liu Zhi’s position, the bottle and the wind blade exploded together inside its maw.

The poison was inhaled into its body. The giant serpent felt as though its mouth had been set alight, its flesh and muscle turning a deep red.

Its charging body suddenly lurched and then plunged downward, crashing straight into the spiderwebs outside the pyramid.

“No, this one isn’t right either. The effect against the giant serpent isn’t strong enough. Switch again.”

Liu Zhi glanced at the serpent rolling about in the webbing and spoke in an even, calm tone.

“Still, it’s a good thing I had nothing better to do lately and prepared plenty of different poisons. Otherwise, I really wouldn’t know how to deal with a giant serpent like this.”

Just as Liu Zhi took out yet another poison, he suddenly froze, because he saw that the giant serpent below had been tightly wrapped by the spiderwebs and could not move at all.

Seeing this, Liu Zhi looked a little awkwardly toward the Web-Weaving Spider Lady. He could not bring himself to ask her to remove the webbing, and in the end could only say, “Add a few more layers of webbing. I’ll have the skeleton archers lure in another giant serpent.”

The words had barely left his mouth when the serpent spat out some substance, forcibly dissolving part of the webbing and bracing itself as it tore free.

Liu Zhi noticed that the liquid it had spat out had also damaged its own scales to a certain degree. The serpent flesh beneath was already exposed.

At this point, the giant serpent still did not know where Liu Zhi was. Opening its mouth wide, it spat out another stream of liquid, sweeping it across the area around the pyramid, trying to envelop all of them.