Chapter 131: The Flood Dragon's Severed Horn

It seems Chen Jin has encountered a misanthrope; his luck is indeed quite good.

"Evil deeds will eventually lead to one's own destruction. You deserve this," Chen Jin retorted unsparingly.

"..."

There was silence amidst the mist, followed finally by a harsh, grating roar: "Die! I want you to die! You wretched worm!"

Chen Jin pushed his hand back, and a stream of light shot out. It flew rapidly, piercing directly toward a certain direction in the mist.

"Argh!"

A scream resonated through the mist, stirring and visceral. Then, the mist slowly began to contract, transforming into a cloud-serpent ten zhang long. This serpent had a single horn on its forehead, nearly becoming a venomous dragon, though a large portion of that horn had been sheared off.

"Hiss! Bah!" The serpent roared, spitting out a stream of light—it was Chen Jin’s Tiger-Tooth flying sword.

The light flew back to Chen Jin, who caught it by exhaling and wrapping it in his Hunyuan Qi. Looking at the sword, he saw it had returned to its original form—a hiltless flying sword—but its blade was stained with viscous, oily black filth that made one want to retch at the mere scent. Chen Jin immediately coated it with his most refined Hunyuan Qi to purge the stains from the blade.

However, the serpent would not grant him any time. It lunged at Chen Jin with a roar. Its ferocity flattened a large section of the embankment, and it opened its blood-stained maw, wide enough to swallow a man, biting down fiercely at him.

Chen Jin retracted his sword. It was not out of carelessness or lack of respect for the serpent’s power; he merely wanted to incite the serpent’s rage. People are at their most foolish when blinded by anger, and he figured that wily, ambitious demons were much the same.

Just as Chen Jin expected, the serpent lunged forward in a fit of pique, desperate to swallow him whole.

*Crackle...*

A bolt of cyan-purple lightning surged from the ground, striking straight into the serpent’s gaping maw.

*Poof!*

A sound erupted from within the serpent, like a hen on a bicycle colliding with a pile of cotton—muffled and soft. Finally, the serpent itself dissipated like cotton in the wind, scattering into nothingness.

As the mist vanished, Chen Jin saw its true form: a broken horn! It was this fragment that had gained sentience.

Chen Jin scanned his surroundings. With the mist gone, the rice paddies no longer appeared lush and moist; instead, the earth was cracked, the stalks were withered and yellow, and the weeds had died away. The embankment beneath his feet had lost all traces of the spring and summer vibrancy it once held; there was not a hint of green left.

*Rumble...*

Suddenly, clouds gathered in the sky above this land. Dark clouds grew dense and heavy; rain was coming. This was likely triggered by the defeat of the horn.

Chen Jin paid little attention to the changes in the sky. He first used his Hunyuan Qi to wash the filth from his Tiger-Tooth sword, and as the rain began to fall, he picked up the broken horn from the ground. Then, he walked with long strides toward the dilapidated mountain village not far away. Before, due to the influence and environmental distortion caused by the horn, Chen Jin had been unable to see the village that lay right before his eyes.

After traveling a mile, he reached the village and found a house that was still relatively intact to stay in for the time being. Once settled, he began to study the broken horn in his hand.

This horn was clearly the severed part of the serpent’s original appendage. As the saying goes, the less one has, the more one craves it—a common flaw among sentient beings. The horn had longed for a body, so it gathered the mist to manifest one and satisfy its own desire.

There remained a sliver of consciousness within the horn. Chen Jin used the fragment of the Divine Edict he had recently acquired to contain the remnant spirit. After the fragment purified it, Chen Jin extracted the information. Because of the unique nature of the Divine Edict fragment, Chen Jin could not absorb the contents directly into his own memory; he had to read it like an e-book. However, his mind was operating at high speed, and he could process data with his eyes quite quickly. It took him about a minute to finish reading everything.

Chen Jin now knew who the original owner of the horn had been. It had belonged to a dragon-serpent that once stirred up trouble in the Ying River, frequently capsizing boats. During one of its escapades, it was slain by a passing cultivator of great power. However, as a creature of the demonic variety, the dragon-serpent possessed immense vitality. While it had not yet reached the stage of regenerating from a drop of blood, these creatures possessed a method of shedding their skin to escape. This dragon-serpent had condensed the essence of its remaining body into its horn and cast it away, hoping to one day be reborn through it.

Clearly, its hopes were dashed; it had been wiped out by Chen Jin’s lightning. From this moment on, that dragon-serpent ceased to exist in this world.

In the remaining memories of the horn, Chen Jin also found a cultivation technique for dragon-kin. It was simple and crude, merely describing the frequency of breathing and meditation, lacking any foundational scriptures. Still, Chen Jin recorded it. One never knew if a future transmigration might land him in the body of a snake or a fish; accumulating knowledge was never a mistake—it was all wealth.

Furthermore, Chen Jin realized that this village had not been reduced to its current state by the horn alone, but by another group of demons: a pack of foxes. The horn had merely been a squatter. The foxes had feared the residual dragon aura of the horn and had voluntarily withdrawn from the village. However, this withdrawal was not absolute; the walking corpse Chen Jin had encountered earlier had been sent by the foxes to test the horn. Unfortunately for them, it had crossed paths with Chen Jin and been reduced to ash.

Chen Jin pondered for a moment in the room, considering whether to do another good deed and wipe out that nest of foxes. In any case, his black book showed no new tasks, so he was free to continue wandering this era, observing the customs and releasing the frustrations he couldn't express in reality. Besides, slaying demons and eliminating evil was a natural reaction for any human who saw their own kind slaughtered by monsters—an indignation that spurred one to take action and seek vengeance.

Thus, Chen Jin settled into the village. It was small, occupying an irregular circle with a radius of about a mile. There was not a single person left, nor even a human corpse; he assumed they had all been devoured by the foxes. Because of the presence of the horn, the entire village, like the surrounding fields, had been devoid of any moisture.

*Pitter-patter...*

Fortunately, the rain had finally begun to fall.