Cultivation Nerd-Chapter 313 - A Talking Snake

After the letter and the lunch, which was delicious as always, I headed to another appointment I had planned.

This one took place at a small building on the outer sect. It looked like a stone bunker, with a thick wooden door at the front engraved in dark writings. Simple alarm and notification arrays and nothing too complex.

I flew down and knocked softly on the door. A part of me wanted to disable the alarm arrays with a thought and show up with blatant disrespect… but there was no need to make a new enemy. Or, in this case, rekindle an old one.

The door creaked open, revealing a scarred, burnt-looking face straight out of a nightmare.

It was like a damn jumpscare.

This was Song San without his porcelain mask.

He seriously needed to find a way to fix his appearance. He was ugly as sin, and couldn’t hide his face forever. With the mask on, he already looked sketchy… and for once, judging a book by its cover wasn’t wrong. Song San was a sketchy guy.

“Never thought you were going to come,” he said. “Also, why make an appointment for today and come during midday? I thought you were going to come around in the morning or something.”

I shrugged. “My schedule is chaotic.”

Song San narrowed his scarred eyes, flexing what was left of his eyelids. If he didn’t look like a ghoul, I might’ve taken that as blatant suspicion and a total lack of trust.

“Your letter barely mentioned something about some special poisons and how much someone like me could tell from observing the glands of poisonous creatures,” he said.

“Yes,” I nodded. “Also, I did some light reading on the subject over the last couple of weeks to get a basic understanding of poisons at the level we’re working at, so I wouldn’t be completely clueless.”

It wasn’t like I was blind when it came to poisons. One of my key moves during the previous beast wars was setting up arrays and releasing poison inside them.

But those were relatively common, easy-to-mass-produce poisons.

It was the equivalent of a McDonald's burger flipper trying to talk gourmet cuisine with a professional chef.

“Really?” Song San asked. “What poison did you find most interesting?”

I rubbed my chin, thinking. While I didn’t plan to rely on poisons in the future, some of the obscure ones were genuinely fascinating.

“Tragic Lover’s Kiss,” I said. “That’s the one I found most interesting, because of its nature and how it comes to be.”

“Good choice,” Song San smiled. “Tragic Lover’s Kiss is a poison that can only be made using the heart of a woman who loves you, and can only be made by the lover.”

Even without the final, tragic step, just the herbal combination created a lethal poison. But when blood from the heart of a lover was used, the full potency of Tragic Lover’s Kiss emerged.

I’d often wondered how something like that could even work. But testing and studying it involved cruelty I couldn’t stomach.

Song San rummaged through his clothing and pulled out a vial filled with dark green liquid, smiling.

“Another interesting fact about Tragic Lover’s Kiss is that it’s technically a different poison every time it’s made, so it doesn’t have an official antidote,” he said, waving the vial a little. “My mother made this poison using her childhood sweetheart, the lover she had back when they were both in the Sect Leader’s secret force. That was before she met my father.”

Oh? He actually had a vial of such a rare poison? That was surprising.

“The poison is quite potent,” he continued. “Though it was never officially reported, my mother managed to assassinate a Core Formation Cultivator back then when she was just a Foundation Establishment Cultivator herself,” he said, grinning grotesquely, sounding oddly proud of his mother’s accomplishments. “Of course, all her foundational techniques were centered around the act of administering poison, so she never really had a chance of breaking through to Core Formation herself. Her techniques were useless for advancement.”

Then Song San handed me the vial.

I stared at it, mesmerized.

“This is my gift to you,” he said. “Also, next time you have access to my storage ring, you should take out the monstrous beast corpses and look inside them.”

I was confused for a moment, until the realization hit me and my eyes widened.

When I had scanned Song San’s storage tool and bypassed the poison traps he had set in case anyone accessed it, all I saw were spirit stones and beast corpses. That meant he had hidden things like this vial inside the corpses.

“Damn, you’re so slippery with everything you do,” I grumbled.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Song San smiled, clearly pleased with outsmarting me, but didn’t gloat. We both knew that if I’d been more interested in plundering his possessions, I’d have likely figured it out eventually.

“I’ve gone on a couple of expeditions and dissected some monsters, so I could see how you might hide things inside their bodies. That’s ingenious on your part,” I admitted. “Also, the ridiculous amount of spirit stones was used to mask the Qi signature of any artifact or similar item hidden within. Clever.”

“True,” Song San nodded, and we stepped inside his house.

The place was well-lit, but the interior was a chaotic mess. Dead snakes and other reptilian creatures floated in jars scattered across the floor, forcing us to watch where we stepped. Five blank porcelain masks rested on a shelf on the wall, and six different tables were cluttered with herbs and ingredients. One table featured an array setup, while another resembled a chemistry set.

There was no order to anything. It looked like only Song San could navigate the mess a web of experiments in progress, all of which were probably dangerous. I touched nothing and waited as he led me toward a corner of the room, where two chairs had been inexplicably placed.

“Sit down,” Song San offered as he plopped onto one of the chairs. “You mentioned dissecting beasts earlier. How many did you dissect, and what kind?”

“Most were the uninteresting kind. I learned little to nothing new,” I shrugged, settling onto the other chair. “But there were some… There was a species that looked like human-spider hybrids. Upper part human, lower part spider.”

“Oh? That sounds interesting,” Song San said, intrigued. “What did the human part look like?” 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

“Bald, nondescript, usually male,” I replied. “Might be an evolutionary trait, developing that appearance to trick humans.”

“Wow. Never seen a beast quite like that, though I’ve seen some with human faces,” he mused.

“Another weird thing, they had lungs and other human organs they didn’t actually need. But the human part of their brain was barely the size of a grape. It only supported basic human actions,” I explained.

“Were they alive when you dissected them?” he asked.

I shook my head, shifting in the chair to find a comfortable position. These things were awful. This guy really had nothing to improve his quality of life. His bed was probably that slab in the corner that looked like a door covered in blankets.

“I dissected them while they were dead,” I admitted.

“I thought so,” Song San said. “If they’d been alive, you could’ve tested the lungs. Tortured them to see if they could scream. Maybe even force out human speech.”

And there it was, the crazy I knew. A shame, since we were having such a productive conversation.

“I admit my research results weren’t as good as I’d hoped,” I said.

Song San nodded and, to his credit, didn’t press further. Just like I didn’t comment on his... unconventional ideas.

I took out a purple sack of flesh, pulsing with black veins. It hovered above my palm, held aloft by a layer of Qi, and I handed it to Song San. He accepted it without hesitation, unfazed by its poisonous nature.

“A poison sac?” he murmured, running his fingers over it. “Though I’m not sure what creature this came from.”

“This is my gift to you,” I said, smiling.

Not exactly a gift. More of an incentive to get him to do some research and see if he reached the same conclusions.

“It came from one of those half-human monstrous beasts. On the spider part of their bodies. They had poison sacs even though they never used poison, and based on my dissection, had no way to deploy it.”

Song San’s eyes lit up. He stood up and crossed the room, grabbing a large syringe from one of the cluttered tables. He drew a small sample from the sac and transferred it into a glass vial.

Then he dropped the syringe and placed the sac in a jar filled with thick, sticky preservative fluid. The jar went on another random table. Finally, he brought the vial to a different table, the one marked with a drawn inscription.

He placed the vial in the center of the inscription and began muttering a chant, like a verbal passcode to activate the array.

The array wasn’t complicated, but its effect was fascinating. It worked like a microscope for Qi, allowing him to detect every minuscule change in energy within the sample.

I stood up from my chair and approached him to get a better look at the whole process.

“If you were to consider only the lower part of the monstrous beast you took this from, what kind of beast would it be?” he asked.

“None that I know of, and there are no extinct spider-type monstrous beasts that match either,” I said. “Of course, too many monsters have gone extinct. So who can say for sure?”

I knew about eight hundred species of extinct spider-type monstrous beasts, and none of them matched well.

After that, we spent the rest of the day researching whether the poison from human-beast hybrids was stronger compared to pure beasts.

The conclusion we reached was inconclusive. It really depended on the creature. The poison didn’t seem consistently weaker or stronger regardless of what kind of beast a human had mated with. I checked every record the Blazing Sun Sect had on the subject.

However, there was one inconsistency we both noticed.

“It doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary standpoint,” I said, frowning. “That would mean a stronger creature would rely less on poison, and over time, that poison should grow weaker.”

“Unless we caught them at the cusp of their evolution,” Song San rebutted.

“No,” I shook my head. “They didn’t look mid-evolution. There were no closed-off glands or unused appendages, just a single poison sac, alone in their bodies.”

Song San nodded, and a smirk crept across his scarred face, twisting into something eerie.

“Someone’s clearly making these things artificially,” he concluded.

“Likely true,” I agreed. “But they’re probably dead by now. The experiments were too weak. Otherwise…”

I looked him in the eyes, and it was strange how easily I could read his thoughts from the glint in his green irises. We shared the same realization and smiled at each other.

Years ago, I had encountered hybrid monsters alongside Song Song when we first met around that same area. That could only mean one thing.

“There might be an inheritance around there,” I said aloud.

“We need to prepare for an expedition,” Song San voiced the same idea.

I nodded. “It’s going to take a while to prepare everything.”

“Then we’ll take our time,” I said.

An unknown expedition into what was likely the lab or experimental zone of some long-dead cultivator. One with a scholarly pursuit. Their strength was unknown, but even if they had been weak, we were bound to find something interesting there.