A Serpent's Tale-Chapter 374: Heart of the Realm

The moment I passed through the doors of the building, I was greeted to the dim sight of a staircase.

’Yaaaaaaay...’ I thought to myself in a monotonous tone.

I hate stairs. They feel really weird and annoying on the scales of my tail.

Still, I started descending them regardless as I saw no other way of turning the barrier off, nor was there anything to nab along the way.

It felt so irritating going down the stairs. And they were so long as well. That’s another thing I hate about stairs. They just suck in general. I don’t understand why the other races don’t also use just a simple ramp or path to get down. Why do they all have to use stairs?

Eventually though, I reached the bottom, where I was greeted to the sight of a gloomily lit corridor. And I say it was gloomy because of the lights hung upon the wall.

They looked almost like [Astral Flames] with their sparkling blue hue, but there was just something off about them. They appeared sickly, almost dead looking.

Still, they lit the way to a simple wooden door. No lock, just a handle and some hinges.

I prepared myself for any ambushes as I grabbed a hold of the handle and opened the door, but nothing happened. The door just simply opened, revealing a room lit by regular candles that emitted an almost golden glow to the room inside.

The room itself was a large round chamber, with three doors that led to different unknown areas.

Cluttered all along the edge of the chamber were various desks and cupboards filled with nicknacks, potions and scrolls. None of which I really knew anything about, nor did I care.

Still, I looked through it all because I could. Who knows? I might actually find something worth taking.

I quickly got through most of it and found nothing worth taking except a couple of minor healing potions and some Mana potions that I chugged immediately to recover my missing Mana. Unfortunately, they only recovered another ten percent of my total Mana. Better than nothing I suppose.

The last thing I had yet to go through, was a closed cupboard. A little weird since all the others were closed, but I didn’t think anything of it.

That was until I opened the damn thing and saw a giant slab of living pink flesh inside. It pulsed for a second, the veins turning red as blood flowed.

Then, a prehensile tongue snatched out and tried to grab me. But I snatched back at it by stabbing into it with my claws, digging into its fleshy tendril and yanked it outwards, causing a screech to bellow out from within this thing.

*Crack* *Crack*

Out of nowhere, the sides of this thing cracked open and spindly arms reached out from the side of this ’cupboard’ as well as a similar looking pair of legs from beneath it.

The thing stumbled forwards due to my tugging but managed to stabilised itself. Then the supposed doors of this thing started to twist and turn unnaturally for a piece of wood.

I soon saw why this was the case as they slowly morphed into fleshy protrusions with teeth lining it.

Seeing all of this made me realise what I was dealing with right now. I hadn’t ever encountered one before as they were supposed to be quite rare and difficult to deal with.

Mimics.

They’re a rather odd piece of life, only being found in dungeons. But this place can’t be such a thing if it’s possible to call demons here. Especially after Lucifer made his move. This place cannot be a dungeon.

So then where did this guy get a mimic from? Did he make it himself or did he extract it from its original home?

As these thoughts ran through my head, I kept a hold of the Mimics tongue at it tried to attack me with its arms or ram into me with its whole body, basically trying to swallow me up into its mouth.

I was able to of course prevent it from harming me since I held it bleeding tongue with my claws, preventing it from taking any truly risk manoeuvres.

Within a minute, I had a general idea of what this thing could do. Which was not a lot frankly speaking.

The best it had was that initial surprise attack. After that it was just rushing me, trying to stuff me in its mouth, an I’m dure if its tongue was free, it would try and use that also.

As for its arms. Well, for one, they were too short, and even if they were able to reach my, I still had its tongue in my hands, or more accurately my hands stabbed through its tongue, which I could then use as a shield in the event that I needed to.

Needless to say, this was an easy fight, but I didn’t want to drag it out for too long, so I just decided to set it on fire and devour its soul. If it had one of course. Not every monster does.

That aside though, the monster quickly died but I didn’t get anything out of it. No Souls Scroll appearing in front of me to say I had killed the monster nor to say I had devoured its soul either.

That left me with a charred corpse and a middle of the room that I had yet to explore.

In the middle was some kind of ritual formation or something surrounded by three tables that were filled with more junk I couldn’t care less about. Not even a Mana potion or two.

Either way, I was mostly interested in this ritual formation that was embedded into the ground that glowed with Astral light, err... Lightly. It wasn’t all that bright to be honest and the other lights were far more powerful in that regard.

I crouched down and inspected the formation, trying to gleam from it what I could so that I could maybe use it to improve my knowledge for my [Enchanting] profession. Sadly though, it looked to be made up of entirely just lines ranging from almost as thick as my arm to as thin as a hair.

Getting up I was about to head to one of the other doors to see what was behind them when I suddenly had an idea.

What if I took control of whatever this thing is? Actually, that raises another question, what is this thing even for?

Crouching back down, I reached out with my left hand and suddenly winced. Something within had changed, or rather, flared up. I realised instantly that it was my broken arm bone.

’Great, now that’s going to be in my mind constantly and bringing me pain constantly now.’

With a heavy sigh, I slowly lowered my left arm and reached out with my right, feeling a little weird about using my right arm like this.

The moment I touched it however, it shocked me. "Ah!" I reactively whipped my hand away and shook it.

Frowning at the formation, I reached back out and it shocked me again, but I didn’t let it touch me as I had activated [Elemental Scales] with my [Space] affinity, which seemed to work well in warding off the sparking energy.

I was then finally able to touch the lines in the formation, and somehow, I was able to understand that this was the heart of the realm. Kind of.