บท 4: IV
The canyon walls rose like ramparts of bone, their surfaces striated with mineral scars, witnesses to a thousand bygone ages. Each fissure exhaled a cold, almost palpable breath that snaked through the shadows like a wandering soul desperately seeking peace.
Above, a stifling canopy, dense as a starless night, stretched its gnarled, twisted fingers to claw at the sky. The branches, bristling with thorns and covered in grayish lichens, resembled the petrified veins of a gigantic creature. Here, day is an illusion: the light only dies slowly, suffocated by the voracity of the leaves.
The ground is a carpet of carrion and life, where shredded roots and luminescent mushrooms intertwine like worms in a corpse. Each step crushes a litter of dead leaves that crack like bones under an insensible weight. The air is heavy, laden with a fetid humidity, a dampness that seeps into the very soul.
Everywhere, sounds perish. The wind groans through the gorges like a chorus of specters, and indistinct whispers seem to be born in the shifting shadows. Sometimes, a bestial cry tore through the silence, a foreign lament that echoed between the walls, reminding me that I am not the only one prowling. Countless eyes observe me, forming a morbid and bloodthirsty constellation.
In this natural prison, everything seems to whisper a gloomy promise: everything that enters here eventually becomes a part of it. Bones, skins, memories… Everything decomposes, everything is recycled, to nourish this matrix of shadow and terror.
And yet, in the midst of this suffocating hostility, beauty persists. A scarlet flower sometimes springs from a crevice, bursting like a drop of fresh blood on a shroud. A flash of bioluminescence in the depths reveals underlying currents of black water, sparkling like tears of ink. But these bursts of life are not promises: they are lures.
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My pace of life had slowed somewhat in recent days, which was a boon for me. The canyon where I resided, as gloomy and dangerous as it was, had not yet tried to kill me; anyway, I was the embodiment of caution now. I was able to safely gobble down a good quantity of rather exotic small creatures. Unfortunately, it didn't give me any particular advantage, other than satisfying my primary hunger. The resulting gene fragments were frankly useless to me, and the biomass negligible at this stage.
Even the herbs I had ingested, while searching for compounds to collect, yielded nothing conclusive, or it was too sparse or simple to make any difference.
Faced with stagnation, I had to take it upon myself and start exploring. Thus, after what would amount to half a day of rampaging, I found myself at the edge of a dull, muddy-looking lake.
If I were a simple snake, I would certainly have complained, but what I had just discovered was a welcome salvation given the monotony of the last few days.
Although I am reincarnated, the second the odors emanating from the lake reached my Jacobson's organ, I both smelled and tasted heavy, suffocating odors, mixing whiffs of burnt garlic and rotten eggs. No wonder the area around the lake was completely empty. The sulfur was in quite a high concentration, and the smell of burnt garlic closely resembled arsenic.
To be sure, I would have to ingest some of it.
Even if it's risky, I doubt it will do me any harm. My minor regeneration should protect me from long-term exposure, if they are lethal. And on top of that, these are compounds that can be used either in poisons or in healing elixirs.
Putting my doubts aside, I plunge my gaping maw into the water and begin to suck it in. And my God! It's damn burning, but I disregard the pain and continue to suck.
My status screen flashes every second, showing the HP I am losing.
Not wanting to push my luck too far, I stop drinking and quickly move away from the lake, as my HP continued to drop. I was even starting to feel dizzy.
Prudence dictated that I did not immediately begin to analyze. I instead looked for a tree high enough to take refuge and watch all around me, while recovering my HP.
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Sulfur (more specifically hydrogen sulfide), arsenic, antimony, and mercury were the predominant compounds in the water I had drunk. There were other compounds and heavy metals in the water, but their quantity was so negligible that I would have to drink astronomical amounts to make anything viable out of them.
However, what I harvested was quite interesting, especially the sulfur; I can already see myself emitting a highly concentrated gaseous poison that could save me from annoying fights, but for that, I would first have to find an animal like a skunk, a bombardier beetle, or even a namesake of a species of arthropod that, if I remember correctly, could emit hydrogen cyanide.
As for arsenic and mercury, I could keep them as secondary poisons, after combining them with other elements.
And while I'm thinking about it, I should also collect genes to counter or mitigate the effects of toxic gases. Dying from poisoning by one's own poison would be really stupid. Unlike other genes, this shouldn't be difficult to find; the lake environment should be teeming with such organisms; if there aren't any, the organisms in decomposing corpses should do the trick.
At this last thought, I swallowed in disgust; becoming a scavenger was very unappealing to me. But what wouldn't one do to survive.
Even if some things disgust me, I have to admit that being able to experiment like this would have been the dream of any science-loving nerd. I whistled appreciatively.
Oh, I started mentally. As another idea just struck me, like a blow from a club.
Hydrogen sulfide is a highly flammable gas; it would be a highly effective weapon against opponents who are resistant to my gas, if I managed to ignite it. My mind raced as I thought about it: genes from electric eels, compounds reactive with H₂S, all of that would do perfectly.
"Give me a few years, and you won't know what hit you." You bastards! I roared, both excited and resentful (especially thinking about the Dark Harfang).
I had barely finished recovering from my laughter when suddenly, I felt something sharp and massive strike me from atop my perch. I bounced off the branches of the tree before falling violently to the ground.
I was stunned! It was more from being surprised than from the pain, even though I was a little banged up.
"How could this have happened?" I asked myself, frustrated and angry.
Admittedly, I was lost in thought, but I was attentive to my surroundings.
In less than a second, I have my answer; as the latter, I felt a dangerous vibration near my head that I managed to dodge just in time, while retaliating with a quick lash of my tail that hit the mark, although it was of no real danger to my attacker.
"No shit!" I swore, when I caught the lapse of time that its camouflage faltered, that it was a fucking Komodo dragon on steroids, bristling like a porcupine.
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