Ronan closed his eyes, making a conscious effort to ignore everything around him. He had to appear weak and wait patiently for an opportunity.
Since he couldn't distinguish between day and night in the underground, he lost track of the time passing, feeling as though each second stretched into an eternity.
By the time the old man reappeared, Ronan was in a daze from hunger.
After the old man came down, he first checked on the children's conditions. As he passed by Ronan's cage, he noticed that the "food" inside hadn't moved at all. Frowning, he said, "This little demon snake is quite stubborn!" It was actually refusing to eat.
Ronan lay limp inside the cage, not lifting his head.
The old man leaned in for a closer look, and just before turning away, Ronan heard him grumble, "Useless."
The old man returned to the experimental table, and Ronan secretly observed him as he skinned and dissected the earlier red demon snake, soaking it in a potion. He then pulled out a barely conscious boy from another cage and placed him on the table before walking over to Ronan.
Ronan immediately closed his eyes, letting the old man grab his body and hang him limply.
"Dead?" The old man wasn't sure and shook Ronan roughly.
Ronan remained still, and the old man cursed, tossing Ronan into a bottle filled with potion.
As soon as he touched the potion, Ronan's scales began to corrode painfully, and he almost jumped up in agony. Enduring it, he sank to the bottom of the potion like he was dead.
The old man turned away to busy himself, and Ronan seized the opportunity to swim up from the bottom of the bottle. He poked his head out of the opening, waiting for the old man to turn around before lunging out and biting down on the unprotected wrist under the golden silk gloves.
The old man immediately let out a pained grunt and instinctively grabbed Ronan, trying to fling him away.
Ronan held on tightly, and it was only after the old man pulled twice that he finally separated Ronan from his wrist.
Ronan was slammed onto the table like a rag doll, feeling dizzy and as if his bones were shattered. He couldn't even muster a response to run away.
The old man hadn't expected him to still be alive. Earlier, when Ronan was soaked in the potion, the serpent had shown no reaction. He stumbled to the front of the cabinet and found a bottle of potion, taking a few swigs.
Ronan's head swayed, but his vision gradually became clearer.
Even after drinking the potion, the old man had black blood seeping from the corners of his mouth as he glared at Ronan with venomous eyes.
Ronan wanted to run, but the old man charged at him, wielding a dagger and swinging it down.
Only after biting into the man did Ronan remember an important question: did he actually have poison... and was it strong enough to kill the old man right then and there?
Before he could think it through, the old man had pinned him down on the table. Ronan's thoughts froze for two seconds, and then his vision suddenly went into a parabolic arc. He first saw the dark green demon snake being cut in half and then watched as the old man collapsed to the ground.
Ronan's fragmented awareness registered two points.
One, he definitely had poison—very potent poison—enough that the alchemist had still died from it even after drinking the potion.
Two, he was dead again.
Black mist billowed out from the demon snake's body. This time, Ronan adapted quickly; perhaps because the process of dying was short, he surprisingly felt no pain.
In the familiar foggy vision, upon seeing his own corpse on the table, he silently averted his gaze.
The children in the cage were breathing heavily; most of them were only five or six years old and still unclear about what had happened.
After the old man fell, bleeding from all seven orifices and dying, Ronan didn't want to be seen by any humans in his true form. He floated to the corner of the long table and spotted the boy the old man had earlier carried, now placed in a bucket beneath the table.
In the bucket...
A pale yellow liquid submerged the boy's head, and the child had long since stopped breathing.
Ronan felt a pang of guilt in his heart. He thought that if he had calmed down a bit sooner, or if he had been stronger, perhaps he could have saved him in time.
The boy was entirely soaked in the potion, his skin turned a ghostly white. His eyes were tightly shut, and his long, curled eyelashes framed a small mouth that hung slightly open. Perhaps due to the pain of dying, his tiny hands were clenched into fists, his knees bent, pressing against his chin. His lips were blackened, and the earlobe on his right side had been cut off.
"That d*mned beast!"
The black mist surged violently, and Ronan suddenly felt that the old man had died too easily. He should have been dismembered him.
After returning to his "true form," Ronan's senses had improved significantly. His rage boiled over, but he quickly heard the faint groaning of the children in the cage, forcing him to calm down.
He had to save the other children... If he left them here, they would starve to death.
However, to move around in the human world again using his "true form" would be very dangerous. He had experimented several times in the Black Forest, where his mist-like body could sometimes touch objects and sometimes not. If it failed him at a critical moment, he would be in big trouble... To be safe, he needed a new body.
But where could he find one?
Ronan didn't need to think for long. He sighed softly as he looked at the child submerged in the potion.