21 - Realization

Xu Xin sat on the floor of the carriage as pain covered his face. His hands were covered in purple lines that seemed to be eating away at him, and his entire arms were shaking violently and incessantly.

On top of the purple lines, his hands were covered in frost as they couldn't move at all. His hands had been completely frozen, but the poison still circulated through them.

Inside his body, his watery inner energy and the two drops of aquamarine blood were both fighting against the poison with all their might, with the aquamarine blood even consuming his normal blood in order to have the energy to do so.

Xia Yue looked at him with concern before turning to all the others and saying, "Check to make sure you haven't been bit."

Her voice was filled with urgency. It was obvious that this was a matter of life and death even to those at the spirit realm, and she quickly checked herself as well.

The reason that they had to check for any bites were because that type of snake had a bit that instantly numbed the area it bit, and there were no signs of being poisoned until you died.

If one of them got bitten without knowing, then they would simply get tired and fall asleep, and they would die as soon as they fell asleep.

The only possible way to stay alive would be to stay awake, but it was incredibly difficult.

It was a terrifying poison, and Xu Xin had gotten the painful but weaker poison that was on the scales of the snake.

There was a reason that she was so afraid of this snake and she had reacted the way she had when she saw it.

This type of snake was called the sapphire scaled viper, and it was known as the most terrifying animal to live in these woods, possibly in the entire continent, and it deserved its reputation.

Even spirit realm cultivators were terrified by these snakes, and even though they were only average in strength, the poison was horrifying. But the poison wasn't the only thing dangerous about them. In fact, it was far from the thing that made them so terrifying.

Although they were extremely rare and most people would never see one, they lived in groups of about fifty snakes, and if even one of them found potential prey, it would go back to the rest and bring them there.

After all, most of the animals in the woods were too big for a single snake to eat, and they all worked together to kill the prey before devouring them.

But aside from that, even if you killed the one that found you, if you didn't clean up the body, the rest of them would find it and lock onto your scent, and they would follow you almost forever until they caught up and killed you.

Even if you left, they would lock onto your scent and follow you based on where you were before.

On top of that, they were extremely fast and were one of the few animals in the forest that didn't sleep.

It could be said that they were the result of almost perfect evolution, and aside from humans, who killed them using things made to counter the snakes, almost everything in nature would be killed by them.

This was why Xia Yue had panicked so much upon seeing it. She had gone back to clean up the body and they were currently looking to escape the range of the nest of snakes.

As Xu Xin sat on the floor, his hands only got more purple as time continued, but the range that the purple covered gradually reduced as the poison was forced back down his arms and into his hands.

Then, he managed to speak quietly through gritted teeth, "Cut my palms," he said this to Xia Yue, but she was preoccupied with checking to see if she had been bitten, which forced him to yell out, "CUT MY PALMS!!!"

Hearing his pained yelling, Xia Yue finally realized what he wanted her to do and she instantly took her knife and sliced the inside of Xu Xin's hands, allowing blood to flow out.

By now, the majority of Xu Xin's hands had unfrozen, and though there was extreme frostbite left behind, only his fingers were still frozen, meaning that it was possible to cut his palms and drain the blood from them.

She knew that the only way he could get rid of the poison was to drain the poison out, because someone only at the second stage of the martial arts path surviving this poison for this long was already a miracle.

If he could keep the poison in his hands, then all he needed to do was drain the blood from his hands to get rid of the poison.

However, this was easier said than done, and as Xu Xin's palms were cut, purple poison flowed out, mixed with dying blood. Instantly, Xu Xin was able to push out some of the poison, but the fight wasn't over yet.

By now, he realized that the poison was beating his inner energy, and that he was slowly losing inner energy despite constantly absorbing qi to replace it.

If he lost the support of his watery inner energy, no matter how good the aquamarine blood was at purging poison, it would be useless.

After all, the reason it was able to get rid of the core crippling poison was because that poison wasn't meant to kill you, and it didn't fight back against the blood and spread like this poison did.

If gone untreated for several hours, this poison could even kill someone of the spirit realm, meaning that it was almost on the same level as the core crippling poison.

Though it was focused entirely on killing whatever it touched, not crippling them, making it more dangerous. And this wasn't even the main poison either; it was just the poison on the scales.

Using inner energy or inner breath to suppress the poison, you would be able to survive for much longer, with a spirit realm being able to prolong death for a couple weeks until they could get treatment if they couldn't just outright wipe out the poison.

As for someone at Xu Xin's level of strength, they would normally only be able to suppress it for a couple minutes at most before dying, but Xu Xin cultivated the element of water, which was good at purifying poison and flushing it out of your body, giving him an advantage.

But this advantage that he had was nullified by the fact that he had already used all his inner energy just to catch the snake in the first place, and he was basically running on fumes per se.

As he struggled, he felt his hands start to go completely numb as he lost control over them, signaling that his hands were in extremely terrible condition, and if this lasted much longer, he might lose them.

Luckily, at this moment, he suddenly felt a large portion of the poison flow out of the cuts on his palms, and he felt some feeling return to his hands as his inner energy furiously circulated through his arms, pushing past its limits and getting even stronger.

As his inner energy started to 'burn', he felt that it got stronger, but he felt pain when he did this. However, he didn't care about pain, because if he failed to get rid of this poison, he would die.

Suddenly, under the looming feeling of death, his body suddenly seemed to evolve as the amount of qi he was absorbing suddenly increased, allowing him to stop himself from running out of inner energy and even gain a little bit.

Instantly, he used this extra inner energy in the fight against the poison, and with the help of the aquamarine blood, a large portion of the poison was suddenly squeezed out of his palm, and it smelled disgusting.

He finally regained some feeling in his hands as he felt that they were not lost yet.

Finally, a minute later, most of the poison was pushed out of his body, but he couldn't stop yet, because he needed to get every last drop of poison out of his body.

This was because the poison actually got stronger as time went on, further increasing its danger, hence why his condition almost got worse as time went on, and it was why a mere contact poison had caused so much harm to his body.

Five minutes later, the last drop of poison was finally pushed out of his palms, and he used his watery inner energy to get the poison off of the surface of his hands before falling back, unconscious.

...

Thirty minutes again, Xu Xin woke up, and as soon as he did, he felt immense pain coming from his hands.

As he looked at them, he realized that they were still bleeding from the cuts on his palms, though not nearly as bad as before, though some patches of skin had completely died from either the frostbite or the poison, and sometimes even both.

His hands were in horrible condition right now, but he felt that the aquamarine blood was slowly circulating through them and starting to heal them, and now that he was awake, he could also use his watery inner energy to help heal them as well.

Instantly, his hands started to feel better as he focused on healing them.

If it was just the frostbite or the poison alone, it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the combination of the two made it extremely hard to recover from, and he felt that, without his aquamarine blood, the damage might have been permanent.

As he looked around, he realized that one of the royal guards was asleep while the rest of them were sitting there, doing nothing. It was clear to Xu Xin that the royal guard who was asleep had been bitten, and that he was likely dying, if he wasn't already dead.

With these snakes, the moment you fell asleep, it was the moment you died with no hope of return.

Only those with an immensely strong will could stay awake long enough to receive treatment, and even then, sometimes the poison would just outright kill you.

He felt that the carriage was currently moving as fast as the horses outside could pull it, and they had likely been going at this speed for quite a while. He knew this because the carriage was quite bumpy right now.

As he looked at Xia Yue, he realized that she was watching everybody right now, and she had a silver glow around her fists as she seemed to be thinking about something.

Suddenly, as she realized that he was awake, she looked at him sympathetically as she spoke, "Thank you for spotting it. We might have all died without your help. Are your hands okay?"

After looking at his hands and thinking for a few seconds, he responded with, "My hands should be okay in a couple days to weeks. As for spotting it, let's just say that I was lucky."

Looking at Xiao Wei, he had a hint of anger in his eyes, because it was precisely because they left at the time that Xiao Wei decided that they met this situation. Adding on his previous hate to this new anger, some of it started to show.

However, he quickly calmed down and simply closed his eyes, focusing on trying to heal his hands.

Now that he didn't have to fight off the poison, he was able to recover his inner energy faster than he was using it, meaning that he could use as much as he wanted to heal his hands.

As he thought about what had happened, it started to remind him of the last time he had seen these snakes.

The last time he had encountered the sapphire scaled vipers was shortly before he was accused of betraying the kingdom, and at that time, he had avoided being killed by the sneak attack of one of them, but he didn't clean up the body and leave, and he was soon surrounded by the other snakes.

At that time, he was only barely capable of killing all of them without being injured, and that was because he cultivated the elements of fire and metal, which could both be used in multi-target attacks with the fire being wide range attacks and the metal being multiple individual attacks.

At that time, he was closer to dying than he ever had been before, and it was at that time that he learned not to underestimate nature.

At the time, the only way he could deal with the wave of snakes was to have his entire body emit a massive amount of pseudo inner breath in the form of the fire element in every direction around him, making him like a fireball, while he used the metal element to condense spikes of pseudo inner breath in the air that went and stabbed into the snakes that got too close to him.

Now, facing the same type of snake, he realized just how weak he was currently, because at his peak, he could handle an entire nest of them at once, but now, he could barely manage to escape death facing only a single snake, and only one of the weakest in the nest, at that.

He was truly too weak right now.