12 Bones and Snakes (2/2)

***

Shin Sumi opened her eyes slowly. Her vision was blurry and her head felt like an anvil struck by a sledgehammer.

As she recovered her senses slowly, a hissing sound was ringing in her ears, seemingly from all around her.

The first thing she saw when her eyes finally decided to focus was a mass of writhing dark snakes.

She immediately put her hands to her mouth to muffle her screams and made a move to get up.

A sharp pain stabbed her leg and she realized she couldn't move it.

Thankfully the thousands upon thousands of snakes around didn't seem to notice her and stayed approximately a meter away.

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If they had been even half a step closer, Shin Sumi thought she would have passed out again.

Using the meditation techniques normally used for cultivation, Shin Sumi calmed her heart little by little.

She was breathing with a normal rhythm when she reopened her eyes, although the presence of all the reptiles kept her somewhat agitated.

Now that she was concentrated and had a clearer mind she analysed the situation.

The snakes covered every square meter of the ground she could see from her lying position. The only area free of snakes was around her.

”Are they-are they not going to attack me ?”

Shin Sumi didn't know how long she had been unconscious for after her fall but she was certain no snake had bitten her. Ignoring the pain in the back of her head where she had hit herself, the only pain she felt came from her left leg.

The hissing noises were constantly assailing her ear drums but she decided to ignore them.

Since the snakes seemed somehow repulsed by where she was lying down, they weren't a major threat for now. The more pressing matter was her broken leg.

When she was younger, Shin Sumi had seen one of the kids from East Seaside Village break their leg once. She remembered clearly the disgust she felt upon seeing the twisted member at an angle that should never have existed.

There was no denying it, her tibia was fractured in the middle.

She was stuck in the bottom of a dark chasm with a broken leg and surrounded by thousands upon thousands of snakes.

Shin Sumi was asking herself what to do. She wanted to cry but kept the tears in.

”All I wanted was to pick up a few flowers ! I didn't know that the little nut would escape and find a treasure. Was that bad karma ?” she spoke out loud, to no one in particular.

A few snakes occasionally tried to poke their small shining dark head a little bit closer to Shin Sumi. Baring their fangs that looked like swords and dripped with what could only be venom, they hissed even more in her direction but always turned back.

Shin Sumi was getting more frightened by the second. In her mind it would only be a matter of time before one of the reptiles got close enough to get a taste of her.

Taking out the copper bell, she yelled ”Is that what you are after ? You can take it back if you want !”

She was about to throw it away, hopefully luring the snakes with it but at the last second she managed to stop her hand.

When the bell showed its reddish brilliance, all the snakes dispersed a few steps back. It was so sudden it almost looked like an invisible force had pushed the whole mass away.

The few slower ones had terror in their eyes before they managed to reach the same radius as the others.

Shin Sumi was speechless. Agitating the bell until the cristaline sound rang, she looked at the snakes whose hissing redoubled.

”They ... are repulsed by it ?”

The snakes did not come because they wanted the treasure back ! Instead they were avoiding it !

Shin Sumi had no idea why that was the case, but she was immediately reassured to know that she was relatively safe as long as she kept the bell close to her.

”To think that I almost threw it away !” she thought. Each snake had two sword-like fangs and with the innumerable number of snakes she could see, the sheer image of them all attacking at once made her shiver.

She carefully put the bell back into her bag of holding at her waist. Slowly, she observed the snakes still trying to get her but unable to get closer than a meter away.

Now that she could free her mind from the apparent threat of the snakes, she could concentrate on her broken leg. The time to figure out why the bell repulsed the snakes would come later.

”Aargh !” she grunted with her teeth closed, ”I can't climb back up the wall like this. Maybe I can crawl on the floor.”

With the utmost care in the world, Shin Sumi started to crawl backwards ever so slowly.

The pain from her lower limb was close to making her break her teeth by grinding them. She had never felt such a pain before.

She completely ignored the snakes, trusting to believe that they would move with her and the copper bell.

It took her a full ten minutes to crawl a mere three meters. At this point she couldn't see the place she had fallen to anymore, covered as it was by the dark snakes.

She was about to resume her crawling when all of a sudden the snakes dispersed. In less than thirty breaths of time, they all slithered into the various caves that bordered the bottom of the chasm, or under the roots of the pale bluish trees.

Propping herself onto her hands, she looked at where she had fallen. On the rough surface of the rocks, all the blood she had lost was gone.

”That is what they were really after!” she looked at her red clothes, torn here and there and smeared with blood around her leg. She concluded, ”The repulsive power of the bell is stronger than their taste for blood.”

Shin Sumi was relieved to understand the situation a bit better and to get rid of the snakes. Now that the hissing was gone, her throbbing head regained a bit more clarity and her headache started to dissipate.

She had only hit her head on the ground as a result of her left leg breaking under her weight. She would have been dead for sure if she had fallen head first. She could be considered lucky to only have a bump the size of a small egg.

It took Shin Sumi the same time to crawl back to the waterfall than it had taken her the previous day in complete darkness.

She was sweating profusely from the pain and effort. At last she had arrived.

With her predicament, there was only one thing she could do and that was what she chose to do when she realized she couldn't go back to the sect or seek an exterior help.

She knew the properties of the chasm all to well and nobody was physically able to hear anything from above.

The only thing she possessed that was useful to her now was the little nut. Once again it would be a solution, she hoped.

Her feelings regarding the nut were strange to say the least. She never asked for it, but she had come in contact with it by chance. After that it had been a total rollercoaster of events, from impossibly lucky encounters and revelations, to sometimes almost dying.

Without bothering to undress herself in her condition, Shin Sumi slipped into the water head first.

She embraced the relief brought by the pool under the waterfall with open arms.

She didn't even need to prompt the nut as it appeared suddenly on her wrist and nudged itself between her breasts.

Now Shin Sumi could only hope that the healing powers of the nut would be powerful enough to treat her leg. At least it would alleviate most of the pain.

***

Shin Sumi bathed for an entire night and a day. Eating her food in rations, she was hoping to get better soon.

Sometimes she would hear the distant sound of all the snakes hissing for a while before it stopping abruptly.

Shin Sumi had nothing to do except wait, try to cultivate and think. After her high grade spirit stone turned dim, she knew it had become useless and threw it away.

Before it even touched the ground, a few dozen snakes had come out of nowhere to snatch the spirit stone.

There was still a hint of Shinsoo in it and it made the snakes crazy. One of them jumped by extending its body enough to grab the spirit stone and swallow it into one gulp.

The other snakes seemed dejected but after a few seconds when they couldn't sense Shinsoo anymore, they disappeared.

Shin Sumi was surprised to see such a thing and watched the whole scene unfold before her eyes.

”Now I understand better. So the snakes like blood a lot and like Shinsoo too. Why don't they go after the nut ?”

Shin Sumi was confident in the nut's ability to survive, considering that it was made from the hardest material she had ever seen.

In one quick motion Shin Sumi used all of her strength to throw the nut away. She needed force or else the nut would have time to turn into a book. If it did that, the book would then return to her before it even left the one meter radius protective zone around her.

Shin Sumi watched with curious eyes as the nut flew away in a grey streak.