章 12: Bones and Snakes
Apart from her own perception, nothing had really changed. The chasm was still plunged in its mysterious darkness.
It showed on the plants that no sunlight had ever come this far inside the ravine.
Shin Sumi somehow knew that but she had no way of testing it and so discarded the thought for the moment.
She quickly summoned the little nut using the seeds she had gathered before leaving the sect.
She didn't have a lot of time. When Shin Sumi had left the sect she had only brought enough food to sustain herself for a few days.
It was her first time outside the sect and she previously had no idea she would go this far.
While she was waiting for the nut to refine the seeds, she explored the area for a bit.
Now that she could see everything, the bottom of the chasm didn't seem so terrifying.
She picked up a few plants specimen she didn't know about and even found a few stalks of White Cloud Lotus!
"Great, a few more and my first quest will be completed!"
She was happy. She had thought the quests would be much harder. Maybe she was simply lucky. After all she had even found a treasure in the form of a copper bell.
She toyed with it for a short time but apart from a crystalline sound that was actually very pleasing to the ear, nothing seemed to happen.
Settling down at the entrance of the cave where she found the bell, behind the waterfall, she worked on her cultivation using one of her remaining high grade spirit stones.
The nut didn't go back inside her wrist but remained nested between her breasts. It wasn't bothering her that much after all.
She had completely forgotten how angry she had previously been, now that the nut had found her a treasure.
The clouds above the ravine were starting to darken when the nut started moving, disturbing Shin Sumi's cultivation.
Twelve hours had passed and the seeds had been refined.
Finding the perfect place next to the pool so that the plants would have enough water, she planted them. In total, she had almost a hundred seeds of Worm Roots Flowers.
Shin Sumi was about to resume her cultivation but decided otherwise.
Fumbling around in her bag of holding she pulled out a bamboo scroll. It was the massage technique she had obtained from Xiao Yue.
Shin Sumi looked at the scroll before unravelling it.
"It seems like a normal scroll, nothing magical or strange. But since it is about a massage related to cultivation, I wonder if the nut will upgrade it too."
The way the Shinsoo Gathering Manual had appeared on the book when the nut turned into the book had left a deep impression within her. She had wanted to test a few things for two weeks but she had literally nothing with her that resembled writings.
Now that she could finally read something, she was excited.
The whole reason she had accepted to get into the Dark Sky Starry Sect in the first place was to read Immortal books after all.
There were only a few dozen lines on the bamboo scroll. They had been handwritten a long time ago and the end part was almost impossible to read.
Shin Sumi's fingers traced the words as she quickly went over the whole text.
"Oh, that's it ? These are just Shinsoo passageways that should be rubbed in the correct order. Too bad you need to use Shinsoo to maximize its effects..."
Shin Sumi had committed the words to memory. She closed the scroll and put it to the side.
Fetching the nut from her clothes, she called out loud "Little nut, it's time to do your thing. Can you please turn into a book ? Or do I have to throw you ?"
The nut seemed to understand and immediately spun into a grey vortex. Less than a second later the ancient tree like book materialized in her hands.
A new page had been added right after the Shinsoo Gathering Manual.
"Yin Aperture Shinsoo Awakening !"
Immediately, Shin Sumi opened up the scroll again. All its content had been erased.
Shin Sumi's eyes ran along the leaf-like page as she discovered the real technique.
"Most of the good parts were not even in the scroll ! What Xiao Yue did to me was a simple 'Yin Massage Technique'. It was rumored to only work on women at night " she recalled the words that were on the old scroll. "The Yin Aperture Shinsoo Awakening works in any kind of Yin environment, not just at night."
She was intrigued to discover that the technique also worked on men, although not as much. For one part it only stimulated one half of the Shinsoo passageways, the ones attributed to Yin energy.
It was common knowledge that men had a dominant Yang. It was also the reason why disciples at the end of the Shinsoo Gathering stage only tended to open a few passageways corresponding to their energy affinity.
"If this technique is used in correlation with the Shinsoo Gathering Manual, I bet it can help me during the fourth step of Shinsoo Gathering ! Maybe I can even open up at least half of the sixty four passageways in one go !"
Shin Sumi was really excited. She would have tried the massage method on herself immediately if she could.
But something that hadn't changed with the upgrade of the information was the fact that one needed Shinsoo to use the technique.
Once Shin Sumi finally reached the stage of feeling the flow of Shinsoo around her, she could practice the technique on herself. She didn't even need Xiao Yue to do it for her.
Only the lesser version required a second person.
Shin Sumi thought about how she would also give back the favor to her sworn sister when she mastered the technique. Xiao Yue would be very pleased.
***
The sun had disappeared from behind the clouds and the ravine was plunged into darkness.
Only Shin Sumi could see perfectly well, although it was somewhat different from daytime.
At night the darkness was natural whereas during the day even without any Shinsoo affinity she could feel that something strange was going on.
Shin Sumi bathed in the waters that now felt warm on her skin before cultivating again.
Since her own blood had made a connection with the copper bell, she felt protected from the cold and was less tired.
"The bell seems to feed on the Yin energy from this place and convert it in Yang energy."
Her senses were working perfectly fine, unlike the previous day where she was cut off from everything.
At some point during the night, Shin Sumi opened her eyes with a frown. She had been thrown out of her peaceful meditation by a putrid smell.
It only lasted for a few minutes before a hissing sound rang into her ears and the smell disappeared soon after.
Curious, Shin Sumi stood up from her cross legged position. She put away the high grade spirit stone of which the power was already declining and went to explore the other side of the chasm.
She previously only adventured on one side because the pool made walking along the bottom of the ravine difficult.
By using the natural cave behind the waterfall she reached the other side while keeping her clothes dry this time.
She remembered smelling the same putrid odor of decomposition right when the bell had shone under her blood for the first time. At that moment she didn't pay it any attention, mesmerized as she was by the situation.
She didn't have to walk for long before finding the source of the stench.
Less than a hundred meters from the other side of the waterfall was a pile of bones.
Shin Sumi's eyes opened in an exaggerated manner as she froze on the spot.
"Bo-bones... BONES !"
Shin Sumi screamed as she realized that she had been peacefully practicing cultivation next to a pile of bones this whole time.
Without even thinking about it she started to run away. Forgetting all about her precious flowers planted earlier, even forgetting to pick up White Cloud Lotus Flowers when she ran past them, she made way to the exit of the chasm.
She had acted on instinct and her body moved on its own.
With reckless abandonment she started to climb the steep slope.
All of her resolutions to be brave had crumbled in an instant, mortified as she was at the sight of thousands of bones.
Her body was full of adrenalin and she didn't notice that the rock she gripped onto was loose.
***
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.
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.
週次パワーステータス
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