Upon chilling the surroundings the snake became slower, when it realized it's poison, which was it's best weapon, wasn't effective it began rampaging and destroying the surroundings with it's tail
The snake beast was as tall a house and easily crushed stone walls as I dodged and rolled away from it's attacks looking for an opening
Finally I found a weakness in the snakes attacks and lunged forward with my sword imbued with Li I struck in it's chest as it turned to face me
Sparks flew as the Li imbued sword cut through it's scales that were as hard as iron and stabbed into it's heart, as I stabbed it I released frost energy inside it's body killing it
"haah, haah, strong slithering trash"
I said while panting and shaking off the icky hairs from my arms, as if normal snakes weren't disgusting enough this creature had thick hair growing on it's back
I pried a scale from it's body and cleaned the hairs off it, the scale was extremely sturdy but had a crack in it from the fight earlier, to test it's strength I took out some of my carving tools and carved my signature symbol on it which was a perfect circle made out of two braided lines
The reason I chose this symbol as my signature for all the items I made was because it had an interesting tendency to have Li flow constantly without stopping around this circle
It worked like two opposing magnets, the Li which flowed like a liquid inside each channel would push off each other and flow in opposite directions
Tossing aside the useless scale I carved out a few scales that were still intact and put them in my storage ring along with the horns that I dug out of it's head
Once I was done I took a look at my new talents which were Venomous lvl 7, Hair manipulation lvl 5, and fog breather lvl 5
The venomous talent allowed me to excrete poison from my skin or mouth and had toxins strong enough to kill even an Adept Jin Rank within a few hours if not treated, luckily I had the healing talent and could treat it without a problem
The fog breather talent allow me to breathe out fog like a smoke bomb and also I no longer needed to breathe as often as it enhanced my lungs and allowed me to hold my breath for longer
And the Hair manipulation talent allowed me to scratch my face even when my hands are busy, it felt really creepy controlling my hair which I had grown out to be touching my waist, I usually kept it in a ponytail but for the sake of the experiment I let my hair down and controlled it
...
"boss, we have been running nonstop to catch up to that guy and still can't catch up"
A boy dressed in black said as he panted
"don't worry, he'll most likely stop in Marsh Watch, we'll attack him there"
The leader said as he saw a small city in the distance surrounded by fog, together they quietly rushed in and saw their target walking into a bar
They quietly watched as a giant hairy, horned snake slowly creeped up to the door and then slowly left, the sight of the creature sent shivers down everyone's spine
Soon after our target dashed out of the bar and attracted the snake to himself, at first we were overjoyed by this but later on we saw him fighting one on one with the snake and he was actually winning
Gloom settled in our hearts when we saw him defeat the snake, as a final shot we decided to do a sneak attack on him
When we found where he was we saw him standing on the corpse of the snake, when we approached what we saw would haunt us in our nightmares forever
Long black hair covered his face, the hair itself moved around as if it was alive and upon closer look of his face all we saw was a mask of fog
"ahhhh! Ghost!"
One of our team members shouted as we ran for our lives, I was so terrified that it could have been me that shouted but I'm not sure
Only after a few hours when we returned did we realize he had tricked us again with his schemes and escaped towards Black Marsh leaving behind only a symbol engraved on a scale
Upon studying the symbol we realized what it meant, the two carved channels filled with Li flowing in opposite directions symbolized our incompatibility and mockingly meant we would never catch him
In anger I threw the scale on the ground and crushed it with my foot and found a scale on the corpse of the snake and carved our double 'S' symbol instead and poured in my own Li which I had been training using an ingenious technique that our group had made
"we failed again! Chase after him! We must kill him at costs! For the Listeners!"