IWOL Chapter 96: Humbaba

Cui Zuojing’s pupils dilated.

The white cat’s whole body was strangled, and blood leaked out from his mouth as he convulsed. Meanwhile, Dong Zheng remained motionless and was completely silent.

The red-ringed snake also hissed at Cui Zuojing. It provocatively spit out a forked tongue at the youth, opened its mouth wide, and pierced Victor’s neck with its long, slightly curved fangs!

Cui Zuojing’s hand tightened on his sword, but he didn’t move forward. In fact, he even took a slight step back.

They were bound by a blood contract. If Dong Zheng was really bitten, how could he have continued to stand here and just watch everything in front of him?

This was an illusion.

At first glance, Cui Zuojing already concluded that it was all an illusion, but he didn’t know how he fell into it and what kind of medium was used.

He took one last glance at Dong Zheng and Victor, then he turned around and ran back to the same spot where he had first discovered that something was wrong. Without hesitation, he slashed into the thick cedar trunk!

“Hisssss–!”

A scream came from inside the cedar trunk. Cui Zuojing used the power of slayer to cut into the trunk, and where the sword’s edge was embedded into the bark, bright red blood gushed out.

A sense of disorientation appeared, followed by a sharp pain across his face.

Cui Zuojing sighed in relief. In a backhand grip, he pulled out the Tang Sword, strode forward, and slashed at the beast that was about to flee.

The sword slashed into the beast’s tail. Half of the snake-headed tail was cut off and fell to the ground, bloodied. The beast turned its head in pain and gave Cui Zuojing a hateful look. But, it knew that it was no match and so it hurriedly ran away.

It had the face of a lion with tight squiggly lines on its forehead.

Cui Zuojing didn’t give chase. The prisoner link between Dong Zheng and himself finally reappeared. Dong Zheng was holding Allen back, refusing to allow him to hit Lin Hangzhi, who was standing under a tree with a blank face.

Allen struggled and smashed his elbow into Dong Zheng’s face, causing his handsome face to immediately turn green, and the pain was faithfully reported back to Cui Zuojing.

Since Cui Zuojing drove away the beast, everyone awakened from the illusion it had created. When the monster in front of him turned into a dumbfounded Lin Hangzhi, Allen was stunned and looked down at his hands. There was no blood on them.

He suddenly realized what was going on.

He turned his head and saw Dong Zheng, who was accidentally injured by himself.

Allen: “…..”

Dong Zheng rubbed his face and waved his hand to indicate that it was okay. When he was about ten meters away from the cedar tree, he felt a vague data fluctuation attacking his kernel’s firewall. He’d stopped and called out to Cui Zuojing, but the youth continued to walk forward and didn’t respond.

By that point, he knew that everyone except for himself had been caught.

Every day, before going to sleep, Dong Zheng would lie in bed and meditate, trying to find ways to exercise his core. At the very least, he must ensure the strength of his firewall.

With continuous, intensive training day after day, coupled with fighting against Fu Zhe’s powerful brain ability, he made progress far faster than he thought possible.

Meanwhile, Lin Hangzhi had returned to the afternoon when everyone was accusing him of leaving the gauze in the patient’s stomach. Standing before the grave-faced Dean, who was indifferent. And, staring at the uncaring eyes of his colleague, he wanted to cry.

“It really wasn’t me.” He turned his head and muttered, not knowing who he was explaining to.

Dong Linhai was the one with the least mood swings among all of them. After he got rid of his illusion, he looked around and saw that Wang Que seemed close to collapse. He hurried over and pulled her up.

“What was that?” Dong Zheng asked.

The snake head at the end of the tail was hissing with its forked tongue out and was engrossed in its own final death struggle. Cui Zuojing picked the tail up and looked at it. He said, “It should be Humbaba, a giant monster that existed long ago in Sumerian legends. It was raised by the sun god Utu and became the guardian of the cedar forest where the gods lived. It had the ability to plunge people into fear.”

Afterward, he walked to the cedar tree to inspect that cut that was no longer bleeding. He stretched out his hand, wondering what kind of hard thing had blocked the rest of his blow.

He retched part of his hand into the gap but came across something very soft.

“Huh?” Cui Zuojing looked up at Dong Zheng and said, “There seems to be something in it.”

Allen and the others also came over. Cui Zuojing squatted down and looked in. He discovered that this cedar trunk seems hollow.

He immediately swung his sword at the gap, cutting the hole bigger until he could fit his whole hand inside.

Cui Zuojing took out what was hidden in the trunk. It was a thin, parchment book.

On the cover of the book was an eagle with its head pointed up and it’s wings fluttering wide. He opened the first page and immediately saw some words written in English.

[The person who rashly opens the bottle will eventually support his desires with his soul.]

There were many medieval English terms in the book. As the only native English speaker in the group, Allen was responsible for explaining the contents.

“Roughly speaking, King Solomon, the third king of the jewish kingdom had a ring engraved with the contract of 72 demon jinns. Before his death, in order to prevent the ring from being obtained by people with wrong intentions, he summoned a fiend to destroy the kingdom for the special purpose of hiding the ring.”

“But as thousands of years passed, the seal on the ring gradually deteriorated, and these demons may break out from the seal and come back into the world at any time.”

“For many years, the evil power that leaked out of the seal had condensed into a demon seed, which was bred on this island. When the demon seed hatches, a new demon god would be born. Once it is able to completely break the seal, the entire land will blacken.”

“And the pilgrims’ task is to find the demon seed before it hatches, destroy it, and postpone the day the demon can come back into the world.”

Unlike Chinese characters, which remained mostly consistent despite the passage of time, medieval English was a bit different from the present. There were a lot of words that Allen couldn’t recognize so he could only guess.

“Wait, there’s a page at the back.”

“…About four hundred years ago, a British fleet came here. At that time, a demon seed was gestating. They discovered the secret of the island, destroyed the demon seed, and left a message with the specific method on how to destroy it. They hoped that when another demon seed emerges, the younger generations would also destroy it.”

“What is the specific method?” Dong Linhai asked.

Allen said, “They left four books scattered on the island, corresponding to the four directions of east, west, south, and north. We need to collect the things in the books and go to the temple on the most central mountain of the island to summon King Solomon. This will give us a treasure that would allow us to destroy the demon seed.”

“The creatures on this island are all spawned by demon energy and will be extremely dangerous to us. On the last page, he told us to pay attention to safety.”

The last portion after the texts were illustrations of all kinds of strange creatures beyond imagination.

Dong turned a few pages and finally understood. “He wanted us to collect a part of the bodies of these creatures on the island?”

“Look, there’s Humbaba’s tail right here.” Cui Zuojing pointed to a page with an illustration of a huge monster. It’s serpentine tail was circled.

Dong Linhai became a little excited. “So we have already completed a task.”

Dong Zheng said, “We’ll still need to reunite with other people. If there’s no surprise, the remaining three books should be in their hands. Maybe they might even have information we don’t know about.”

Allen nodded and handed the book back to Dong Zheng for safekeeping.

At this moment, the sound of lush branches and leaves rustling came from above their heads, as if something was falling straight down.

Everyone raised their heads.

But, before they could clearly make out what it was, a gust of wind came at them, causing them to reflexively close their eyes!

Dong Zheng held his arm horizontally in front of himself, slightly blocking the wind. He barely opened his eyes when he saw a massive white bird with a wingspan of more than three meters long swooping down. Two tawny claws stretched out from it’s abdomen, sharp talons open and ready to grab Cui Zuojing.

At the moment when he noticed the crisis, the youth instantly rolled, trying to avoid it. But the giant bird turned slightly on one side of his body, angling his body size to fit and suddenly turning. He still managed to grab the youth’s shoulders anyway,

The sharp, hook-like talons immediately punctured into Cui Zuojing’s shoulders, creating several bloody holes.

Its wings fluttered fiercely. The whole bird drew a smooth arch against the ground and then suddenly ascended. It passed through the top of the forest and carried Cui Zuojing to the sky!

It happened so quickly that no one had time to react. Dong Zheng jumped up and stretched out his hand desperately, but his fingers only brushed against Cui Zuojing’s pant legs.

In the blink of an eye, the youth’s figure was taken away.

“Cui’er!”

“Brother Cui!”

The teammates panicked shouts came from below. The sharp claws gripped his shoulders, and it was so painful that Cui Zuojing’s vision turned black for a moment. They were flying at high speed, and the violent wind blew at his face, making his eyes teary.

Unintentionally or intentionally, the place where the large bird was holding onto was exactly his joints, which made Cui Zuojing unable to lift his arms. Even if he was still holding a sword in his hand, he couldn’t resist at all!

Soon, he discovered a more difficult thing,

This bird was like a fighter plane performing stunts, constantly moving up and down, left and right!

Like it was trying to shake something out.

It flew too fast, and Cui Zuojing was thrown wildly about in the air. The wounds on his shoulders tore wider, and blood flew out drop by drop and fell into the trees below.

Cui Zuojing felt as if he was dying of pain. He suddenly turned his his head to bite the bird’s leg with the strength of eating and squeezed out a hoarse cry from between clenched teeth:

“Dong Zheng!”

The prisoner link allowed Dong Zheng to hear the youth’s call. Without hesitation, he immediately drew a symbol and the grass symbol on the back of his hand flashed, directly summoning Cui Zuojing back into the prisoner’s space.

Except for the youth and his clothes, nothing from the outside world could be brought into the prisoner’s space. The large white bird’s claws became empty. The Tang Sword and the wooden box that was originally in Cui Zuojing’s pocket fell through the air.

“Cawww!”

The large bird issued a long howl. It dived reflectively with a flick of its wings, directly grabbed the palm-sized wooden box, and flew away with its trophy.

The Tang Sword fell into the forest, breaking many branches and leaves along the way.

Cui Zuojing was in so much pain that he was rolling around on the ground in the prisoner’s space. Dong Zheng immediately summoned him out, put the heart-stitched bear next to him, and tore off his shirt.

Blood poured along his fairer than average skin, and the wounds looked particularly shocking.

The little bear immediately spit out cloth and needle from its mouth and began to treat Cui Zuojing wounds.

The youth was leaning into Dong Zheng’s arms, grunting in pain and staring up at that sky with a quiet hatred. He wanted to catch the bird alive and eat it.

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