Xuan Chi · Chat

【The Intruder】 The feeling of the miasma clinging to your wound is harder to bear than the pain. It crawls into the torn flesh like a living thing, seeping in from the edges, making your entire leg from the knee down go numb and heavy, as if filled with lead. You can't remember how you stumbled into this forest. A pack of wolves from the foot of the mountain chased you for half a day, and in your desperation, you dove into a patch of gray fog, thinking it would help hide your scent—but the fog only grew thicker, and the trees grew denser. By the time you noticed the soil beneath your feet had turned deep black and the tree bark was covered in long, deep gouges, it was too late to retreat. You know what place this is; no beastman in the Southern Border doesn't. But you can't leave. The gash on your calf torn by a wolf's fang is still seeping blood, leaving deep red footprints in the mud with every step, as if you were personally writing an invitation to this mountain. You sit down against a tree trunk to catch your breath. The surroundings are eerily silent—no birdsong, no insect chirps, no rustle of wind through the leaves. There is only your own heartbeat and the sound of blood dripping onto the fallen leaves, one by one, clear as a death knell. The gray fog flows slowly around you, and you constantly feel as if something in the fog is watching you. But when you look up, there is only the mist, like a giant eye half-closed, too lazy to fully open. Then you hear a sound. Not a footstep, but something heavier—a muffled sound like an entire rock face being slowly dragged, crushing through the depths of the forest, the sound of leaves being pulverized drawing closer in circles. You tighten your grip on the broken branch in your hand. The fog parts in front of you, forming a slit. He is there, leaning against a twisted black tree trunk about ten zhang away, looking as if he grew out of the fog. Dark, ink-black curly hair falls from his shoulders, and the bone-gold snake crown entwined in his hair glimmers faintly in the gray light. His upper body is bare, his cold white skin covered in spreading dark patterns that run from his collarbone down to his waist, like a static map of snake scales. A thick section of a snake tail is coiled over his shoulder, the tip hanging lazily, its barbs scratching a shallow white mark on the bark. You didn't see him walk over, and he stands there, the distance unchanged from before, but you feel he is much closer—close enough for you to see the fine gold on his earring swaying slightly. He is looking at you. Those eyes are cold, a color that doesn't seem to belong to a living creature—translucent white, vertical, the pupils shrunk into extremely thin lines like needles poking through ice. He slowly tilts his head, hair sliding from his shoulder, revealing the dark patterns on the side of his neck that glow briefly and then dim. His gaze moves from your face to your leg, following the trail of bloody footprints all the way back—looking at the tree you leaned against, the mud you stepped on, the leaves you stained red—then returns to your face, expressionless, like he’s checking if the base of his wall has been gnawed by mice. Silence lasts a long time, long enough for you to hear a few more drops of your blood hit the soil. He finally moves, not by walking closer, but by straightening up—his back leaves the tree trunk, and the snake tail on his shoulder slowly rises. The tip stretches toward you, like a snake's tongue testing the air from a distance, then retracts. He speaks, his voice low, like snake scales grinding over coarse sand, the end of his words dragging slightly with a lazy lack of effort: "You stepped onto the scree belt." After a pause, he glances down at the wound on your leg; the blood has already soaked through your trouser leg. "Blood is dripping on my mountain, all the way from the foot, like scattering grain to lure birds—who do you think will get here first?" He doesn't walk over, he doesn't even stand fully straight, remaining in a loose, casual posture. But those cold white vertical pupils remain locked on you, moving from your eyes to your Adam's apple, from your Adam's apple to your hand clutching the branch—as if appraising whether a prey delivered to his mouth is worth opening his jaws for. He tilts his head slightly, the tip of his tail lightly tapping the tree trunk. "I will give you three breaths." "Stand up by yourself, walk back, and get out of my mountain boundaries." "If you can't stand up—" He stops, the tail tip tapping the trunk again, harder this time, leaving a thin scratch on the bark. His gaze slowly rises from the wound on your leg to meet your eyes, his pupils narrowing even further in the gray fog. "I don't scavenge meat bitten by others." Having said that, he stands there motionlessly, like a wall, or like a snake coiled in the shadows, leaving you a narrow path to retreat down the mountain, but his gaze presses down on the end of that path. You smell the scent of the gray fog surrounding him—cool and fishy, carrying an indescribable numbing sensation. As the fog brushes against the edges of your wound, the numbness spreads even faster. He is waiting for you to choose. Stand up and walk back, get out of his mountain within three breaths, and he won't bother to kill you. Or— You can't stand up.