novelraw Chapter 334: Survival in the Serpent's Belly
Chapter 334: Survival in the Serpent's Belly
This time, there was no distortion from a gravitational field.
Nor was there that kind of light-devouring gravitational black hole.
There was only the most primitive, most savage, and most unavoidable instinct to consume.
Lin Jie's reaction was not slow by any means.
The moment that head lunged upward, he had already activated the trench coat property of the [Black Mercury], attempting to slip sideways. But that giant serpent's body was simply too massive. The overwhelming darkness that blotted out the sky descended like a collapsing mountain peak, instantly sealing off all his avenues of evasion.
He only had time to cross his arms in front of his chest.
"Thud!"
A muffled impact.
Lin Jie felt like a bird caught in a tornado, completely swallowed by that abyssal maw reeking of intense, fishy decay.
His vision was plunged into absolute darkness.Followed immediately by a dizzying sense of weightlessness and a violent crashing sensation.
He felt his body plummeting rapidly down a slippery, sticky, and highly elastic fleshy pipe. The powerful esophageal muscles around him convulsed wildly, trying to squeeze this stubborn foreign object deeper into the digestive hell below.
"Lin Jie—!!!"
In the final second before his consciousness was utterly devoured by the dark, he faintly heard Evelyn and Julian's desperate, horrified cries.
But that sound was quickly muffled by the thick meat walls, turning into a dull, distant hum.
...
This was a veritable biochemical hell.
When that nauseating sensation of falling finally stopped with a soft impact, Lin Jie found himself in a sealed space filled with high temperature, high pressure, and suffocatingly toxic gas.
This was the stomach sac of the Giant Nabau Serpent.
A furnace of strong acid capable of digesting steel, stone, and even spiritual substances.
All around was an impenetrable, pitch-black darkness. Only the deep-sea demon monk's hearing bone embedded in the grip of the [Serene Heart] emitted an extremely faint, ghostly blue fluorescence upon sensing the extreme malevolence of the surroundings. But this weak light could only illuminate a distance of less than half a meter in front of Lin Jie.
By this hazy light, Lin Jie saw a scene that made his hair stand on end.
The "ground" here was not flat, but a constantly churning, bubbling lake of yellowish-green acid.
Countless remains not yet fully digested floated and sank in the viscous liquid. There were beasts corroded down to white bones, twisted firearm fragments likely left behind by Black Lotus cultists, and even some bodies that still retained human shape but whose skin had been dissolved beyond recognition.
The air was thick with an incredibly pungent smell of sulfur mixed with the sickly-sweet stench of rotting protein. This mixed gas itself carried potent neurotoxins; just one breath made Lin Jie's lungs feel as if they were on fire.
"Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle..."
A dense sound, like raindrops hitting a tin roof, came from all directions.
That was the sound of strong acid corroding objects.
Lin Jie looked down to see the soles of his tactical boots smoking in that yellowish-green acid. The specially treated rubber soles seemed fragile and pathetic against this high-intensity digestive fluid.
Even more terrifying, the undulating stomach wall overhead continuously secreted a highly adhesive digestive mucus, falling on him like an unending acid rain.
"Damn it."
Lin Jie cursed under his breath.
He could feel his [Black Mercury] trench coat enduring unprecedented pressure.
The shimmering black leather was now trembling violently. Its unique phase deflection force field, while capable of sliding off physical attacks, was consuming energy at an alarming rate when faced with this all-encompassing, dead-angle chemical corrosion.
The runic arrays on the trench coat's surface were growing hot, a sign of spiritual circuit overload.
If he didn't get out soon, even if he wasn't melted by the acid, he'd be steamed alive by the heat here due to lack of oxygen or the trench coat's failure.
"Must get out... must get out immediately..."
Lin Jie forced himself to calm down, steadying his footing on the small "island" formed by a pile of debris where he could barely stand.
The Zen force field of the [Serene Heart] played a crucial role at this moment. That cool, spiritual power washed over his mind like a clear spring, allowing him to maintain absolute rationality even in this hopeless darkness.
He didn't blindly fire his gun or swing his knife at the surroundings.
Although this giant serpent was a living creature, its body structure had mutated over the long ages. Its subcutaneous fat layer and muscle density were even thicker than tank armor. Ordinary attacks simply couldn't penetrate that several-meter-thick meat wall.
To get out, he had to find a weak point.
Or create one.
Lin Jie activated the sonar detection module on his [Cursebreaker Vambrace].
In this liquid-filled, enclosed space, sound waves conducted with extreme efficiency.
As waves of invisible sonic pulses spread out, the massive structure of the stomach sac gradually formed in his mind.
It was an enormous, irregularly oval cavity, roughly twenty meters long and five to six meters high, its inner surface covered in wrinkled glandular tissue.
According to the sonar feedback, the stomach wall thickness in most areas exceeded two meters—a despair-inducing thickness nearly impossible to breach in a short time.
But under Lin Jie's careful scanning, he detected an anomalous signal return point.
That point was located deep within a stomach wall fold about five meters to his left.
The sound wave feedback there wasn't the soft muscle tissue of other places, but instead showed an extremely hard, metallic reflection.
There was a hard object there.
And not just any object—it was a foreign body that not only hadn't been digested by the stomach acid but had even become embedded in the stomach wall, causing necrosis and thinning of the surrounding tissue.
"That's the chance."
A glint flashed in Lin Jie's eyes.
At the location of that foreign object, the stomach wall thickness, due to long-term ulceration and necrosis, was only half that of the surrounding area.
He took a deep breath, held it, and then jumped down from the pile of debris.
He trudged with difficulty through the glue-like, viscous acid. The [Black Mercury] trench coat operated at full capacity, trying to slide off as much of the corrosive liquid attempting to cling to him as possible.
Five meters was just a few steps under normal circumstances, but here it felt like a long march.
By the time he finally reached that stomach wall, his gloves were already softening from corrosion.
He raised the [Serene Heart] in his hand and, by the weak fluorescent light, finally saw the object lodged in the meat wall.
It wasn't a stone, nor ordinary metal.
It was a metallic fragment, only palm-sized, with jagged edges, looking like a piece broken off from some large artifact.
It was deeply embedded in the pink stomach flesh. Though its surface was covered with the scratches of time and acid corrosion marks, it still emitted a faint silvery sheen.
This sheen was familiar to Lin Jie.
It was high-purity mithril treated through alchemy, or perhaps some sacred alloy even more advanced than mithril.
Such materials were typically only used to forge the most top-tier Grotesque Armaments, or certain religious holy relics of special significance.
Why would this native Borneo monster have something like this in its belly?
Lin Jie had no time to ponder this archaeological question.
He extended his gloved left hand, grabbed the edge of the metal fragment, and tried to pull it out.
But it was stuck fast. Fleshy growths had invaded the metal's crevices, fusing it tightly with the stomach wall.
Lin Jie flipped his wrist, and [Silencer] appeared in his right hand.
The gray-white blade, carrying the withering law, sliced fiercely into the meat wall surrounding the metal fragment.
"Shh—"
The tough, old-leather-like stomach wall finally split open under [Silencer]'s edge.
As a gush of dark red pus and blood spurted out, Lin Jie exerted force and finally pried the metal fragment loose with a sickening crunch.
He shoved the thing into a waterproof pouch inside his coat without examining it closely.
This wasn't the time for treasure appraisal.
With the metal fragment removed, a half-meter-deep bloody hole appeared at that spot—the weakest point in this giant serpent's gastric defenses.
Lin Jie could feel that beyond this injured meat wall lay free air, or perhaps the cold river water.
"This is it."
Lin Jie retrieved all his remaining stock from the tactical pouch at his waist.
Three high-explosive alchemical grenades seized from that cowboy back in New Orleans, and two tubes of high-concentration Nitroglycerin Explosives Evelyn had stuffed into his pack before departure.
This was already enough firepower to collapse a small bunker.
He crammed all the explosives deep into the still-bleeding meat hole, then used a few bone fragments picked up nearby to wedge tightly into the opening, creating a simple directional demolition structure.
This structure would channel the vast majority of the explosion's energy outward through the stomach wall, rather than letting it ricochet around this enclosed space and blow him to bits.
But even so, detonating this much explosive in such a confined space would still produce a shockwave lethal to anyone inside.
Lin Jie retreated to the far end of the stomach sac, the point farthest from the blast site.
He curled his body into a ball, hiding behind the relatively intact skeleton of a swamp buffalo carcass, using the massive bones as cover.
He pulled the collar of the [Black Mercury] trench coat high, tightly protecting his head and neck.
"Three."
He counted silently in his mind.
His finger hooked around the thin wire connected to the detonator.
"Two."
The surrounding stomach walls seemed to sense the danger, beginning to contract and convulse even more violently, trying to squeeze this dangerous foreign object out.
Torrents of acid surged over.
"One."
"Fire!"
Lin Jie yanked the wire.
"BOOM——!!!!!"
An incredibly muffled roar instantly erupted within the enclosed fleshy cavity.
Lin Jie felt as if a giant hand had slapped his eardrums at that moment, followed by the entire world turning into a blinding white light.
A massive shockwave, carrying high-temperature flames, shattered flesh and blood, and highly corrosive acid, rampaged wildly through the cramped space.
Even hiding behind cover, Lin Jie still felt like a leaf caught in a hurricane, slammed hard against the opposite stomach wall.
The [Black Mercury] trench coat emitted a tearing sound of overstress. At least two ribs in his back snapped.
But he didn't feel the pain.
Because the very next second after the explosion, an even more violent, yet exhilarating, rush of air surged in violently from the blast point.
That was... outside air.
The impregnable great stomach sac had finally been blown open with a hole nearly two meters in diameter!
But it wasn't over.
Due to the massive pressure difference between inside and out, and the expansion of high-temperature gases from the explosion, a terrifying thrust of air pressure instantly formed.
This thrust caught Lin Jie's body, blasting him out through the blasted hole along with the disgusting debris and acid!
"Whoosh——!!!"
The feeling was like being shot into the air by a whale's blowhole.
Lin Jie only saw a flash of light as the endless darkness enveloping him vanished.
It was replaced by somewhat glaring sunlight and a rush of moist air against his face.
His body traced a long parabolic arc through the air before crashing into the river water.
The cool river water washed away the residual high-temperature acid on him. The long-missed sensation of coolness made him groan involuntarily.
He struggled to lift his head from the water, gasping in great lungfuls of fresh air.
Only then did the intense pain begin to set in.
He wiped the water from his face, opened his eyes—red and irritated from the acid fumes—and looked toward the distance.
There, that black mountain range had transformed into a floating island of corpses on the water's surface.
The Giant Nabau Serpent's colossal body lay quietly floating on the river. A horrifying, charred-edged wound gaped on its abdomen. Countless organ fragments and filthy bodily fluids continuously flowed from the wound, staining a large swath of the surrounding water a shocking dark red.
Its once-proudly raised head now drooped limply on the water's surface. Those yellow vertical pupils, once filled with tyranny and majesty, had completely lost their luster, turning into a dead, ashen gray.
It was dead.
Completely dead.
This gravity-wielding ruler that had dominated these waters for countless ages, revered as a deity by the local natives, had ultimately died inside the belly of a tiny human, killed by that internal, undefendable blast.
"Lin!"
The sound of frantic splashing approached.
Nadia and Julian were swimming toward him desperately, their faces etched with disbelief, joy, and the relief of surviving a catastrophe.
Evelyn was draped over a piece of floating wood, still clutching her now-empty backpack, crying and laughing at the same time.
Lin Jie looked at them, forcing a rather ugly smile at the corner of his mouth.
He raised a hand, wanting to wave to signal he was okay.
But he found his hand still tightly clutching something.
It was the metal fragment he had instinctively protected against his chest in the final moment.
Under the sunlight, this object freshly retrieved from the monster's belly finally revealed its true appearance.
It was a fragment of a shield.
To be precise, a fragment of an insignia made from an unknown alloy.
Though corroded and mottled by stomach acid, on the still-clear emblem relief, Lin Jie saw a pattern.
It was a round table.
And surrounding that round table were twelve swords.
On the back of the insignia was a line of ancient Latin inscription, worn but still legible.
Lin Jie's fingers lightly traced over the words.
Though not a linguist, under Julian's previous influence, he could barely recognize a few of the words.
"Tradidimus..." (We betrayed...)
"Infernum..." (Hell...)