The Tagore Desert.
Beneath the scorching expanse of endless sand and bleached sky, deep within the Snake-People's Holy City, there existed a chamber that never saw daylight. It was vast and dark, its air thick with the mingled scent of ancient herbs and something older — something sacred.
In the center of the chamber sat an enormous medicinal pool, and around it, positioned at each of its four corners, four elder women of the Snake-People sat utterly motionless. Their lower halves were coiled tails of glistening scales, their eyes diamond-shaped and unblinking, the cold pupils of creatures who had lived long enough to shed sentiment like a skin.
At the heart of the pool rose a great serpent statue, carved from stone darkened by centuries of ritual smoke, a jewel of deep crimson embedded in its brow like a third eye.
Beside the statue, seated cross-legged in the steaming medicinal bath with the composure of someone entirely accustomed to ceremony, was a woman of extraordinary beauty. Her figure was flawless — slender and poised, with the kind of presence that made a room feel smaller simply by being in it.
This was Medusa. Queen of the Snake-People.
"Medusa." One of the four elders opened her eyes slowly. Those cold, diamond-shaped pupils settled on the queen with the same expression they might settle on a weather pattern — observing, calculating, devoid of warmth. "Are you ready?"
"I am ready at any time, Elder," Medusa replied, her voice even and grave.
The elder gave a fractional nod. Her gaze moved to each of the other three in turn — a silent conference that lasted no more than a breath — and then all four looked back toward the center.
"The baptism begins."
The words fell like a stone into still water.
Simultaneously, all four elders formed their hand seals, and four streams of battle qi surged upward — each a different color, each carrying a different weight — and converged on the jewel set in the statue's brow. The gem blazed to life. Brilliant crimson light erupted outward in a shockwave of radiance, spreading across the floor, climbing the walls, washing over the pool and over Medusa until the entire chamber was swallowed in a deep, pulsing red glow.
Three days passed.
When the light finally faded, Medusa remained in the pool, still and composed — but everything about her had changed. The aura that rolled off her in quiet waves was nothing like it had been before. Where she had entered the baptism as a two-star Dou Zong, she emerged as a five-star Dou Zong, the difference as stark and undeniable as the gap between a candle and a bonfire.
Three full stars. In three days.
Even Xiao Se might have felt a flicker of competitive embarrassment at that rate.
As the queen of the Snake-People, Medusa occupied the highest throne their civilization knew. By every measure, this should have been a moment of uncomplicated triumph — cause for celebration, for reverence, for the kind of quiet pride the four elders had spent decades cultivating.
Instead, they frowned.
The four of them exchanged glances, something unspoken moving between them like a current beneath still water. Their already-lined faces had gone rigid — not from displeasure, exactly, but from the particular grim cast of elders who have just discovered information they do not yet know what to do with.
Through the secret technique woven into the baptism ritual, they had sensed something unexpected.
Within Medusa — faint, new, unmistakable — a second life.
Medusa noticed the shift in their expressions immediately. She was not a woman who missed things. One delicate brow lifted almost imperceptibly, and something moved behind her eyes — a recognition, perhaps, of what was coming. Her voice, when she spoke, was carefully measured.
"Elders. Is there a problem?"
The elder who had spoken before drew a slow breath.
"Nothing catastrophic," she said, in a tone that suggested it was at least somewhat catastrophic. "The high-grade medicinal herbs you provided allowed the ritual to reach its fullest possible effect — that is cause for satisfaction." A pause. "However. There appears to be a new life growing within you. And through the same technique, we have also determined that you are… no longer as you were before."
She left the last part with the careful delicacy of someone who had been an elder long enough to know that some things were better implied than stated directly.
The other three said nothing. They did not need to. The weight of four sets of ancient, unblinking eyes conveyed the rest.
A complicated mingling of emotions moved across the elder's face — joy, because the next Queen was evidently already on her way into the world; worry, because the identity of the father remained entirely unknown; and the low, thrumming concern of someone responsible for an entire civilization's continuity discovering that its leader had made a significant unilateral decision without consulting anyone.
Queen Medusa was quiet for a moment.
Then she let out a long, soft sigh — not of distress, but of someone who had known this conversation was coming and had simply been waiting for it to arrive.
"So it's been found out after all." A faint curve touched the corner of her mouth, wry and almost fond. "Well. I suppose it was always going to be."
And then, with the same composure she brought to battle strategy and diplomatic audience alike, she told them about Xiao Se.
At that precise moment, the subject of the story was standing at the outer gates of the Snake-People's Holy City.
He had arrived without fanfare, descending from the sky and retracting his Evil God Wings before his feet touched the sand. He could have simply flown over the walls — his strength made such considerations largely academic — but that wasn't the point. He had married their queen. The least he could do was walk through the front door.
He had barely crossed the threshold when a sound split the air.
The arrow came fast — genuinely fast, the kind of speed that earned the word fast — thick as an infant's wrist, jet-black, trailing a wake of pressure that bent the air around it. It was aimed squarely at his face.
Xiao Se's expression shifted, just slightly. He raised his right hand and caught it.
The arrow shuddered in his grip, vibrating with enormous residual force, the gust of wind compressed behind it slamming into his protective battle aura and deflecting outward in all directions. Several ordinary Snake-People standing nearby were simply bowled off their feet.
Xiao Se looked down at the arrow. Then, with a small, unhurried application of pressure, he closed his fingers.
It turned to dust and scattered on the desert wind.
He raised his eyes.
The figure standing before him was large by any standard, and by the standards of the Snake-People — a race not lacking in physical impressiveness — he was remarkable. Broad horns curled from his head. His face carried the settled, deeply embedded ferocity of someone who had worn cruelty long enough that it had become a feature rather than an expression. His arms, crossed over his barrel chest, were roughly the width of Xiao Se's torso. Behind him, a massive gray snake tail swung in slow, irritated arcs, and where it struck the ground, the stone cracked.
He was staring at Xiao Se with the open, uncomplicated hatred of a man who had already decided how this was going to go.
"You are Mobas?" Xiao Se's voice was flat.
He already knew the answer. He remembered — the original timeline, the original Mobas, the one he had already dealt with. Clearly the position had been filled again.
"That's right." The snake-man's eyes didn't move from Xiao Se's face. The killing intent rolling off him was not subtle. "I am Mobas. Leader of the Snake-People's warriors. And you—" his voice dropped into something lower, more dangerous "—who are you, human? What gives you the right to walk into our holy city uninvited?"
Xiao Se stepped forward.
"Xiao Se."
Just the name. Nothing more.
Mobas blinked. The aggression in his posture didn't fade — but something flickered behind his eyes, a fractional hesitation, the involuntary pause of someone who has just heard a name they know and is rapidly recalibrating.
He knew that name. Every Snake-Person in the holy city knew that name. The human who had helped Queen Medusa complete her evolution. The one who had saved Lady Butterfly. The one who was, by all accounts, soon to stand at the queen's side as her husband.
"So it's you." The hesitation passed. The killing intent returned, hotter than before. "You saved that traitor of our people. And then you had the audacity to lay hands on our queen." His jaw tightened. "You should die for that."
Mobas was, in the way of true believers everywhere, genuinely committed to his position. As one of Medusa's most fervent admirers and among the most radical voices in the holy city, the idea of a human — a lowly, short-lived, non-scaled human — placing himself in the queen's orbit was not merely offensive. It was a violation of something fundamental. The Snake-People's Laws. The natural order. Everything that was right.
He clenched his right fist. The veins along his arm surfaced like cords of rope.
And then he swung.
"Mobas!" A woman's voice — clear, sharp, carrying the particular authority of someone accustomed to being obeyed — rang out from somewhere in the crowd behind him. "Stand down! Now!"
Mobas did not stand down. If anything, his fist accelerated.
Xiao Se's eyes went cold.
The gathered Snake-People barely had time to register what happened next. Xiao Se's fist came up — golden battle qi surging through it in a concentrated, blazing pulse — and met Mobas's strike head-on, the smaller man somehow moving first despite appearing to react second.
The collision produced a single, crisp crack.
And then Mobas was airborne.
He traveled several hundred meters in a long, graceless arc before meeting the stone wall at the far end of the courtyard. The impact carved a cross-shaped crater into the rock, the kind of damage that spoke less to Mobas's toughness and more to the sheer, unreasonable force that had sent him there. He slumped within it, the wall holding him upright in his own wreckage.
Silence dropped over the holy city like a curtain.
Then, all at once, the Snake-People began reacting — a ripple of stunned, half-voiced exclamations moving through the crowd in waves.
"He beat Mobas—"
"With one punch—"
"He looks sixteen, maybe seventeen at most—"
"Her Majesty the Queen's husband is a Dou Huang?!"
"I heard he's a powerful alchemist too — he's the one who refined Lady Butterfly's Transformation Pill—"
The crowd was still processing when the owner of the clear female voice who had called out to Mobas made her way forward, parting the gathered Snake-People with quiet purposefulness until she stood before Xiao Se. She pressed a hand to her chest and inclined her head in a formal gesture of respect.
"Greetings, Lord Xiao Se." Her voice was composed, her expression carrying the particular careful neutrality of someone who had just watched their commanding officer get sent through a wall and was choosing to treat this as a routine occurrence. "Commander Mobas was unforgivably discourteous just now. On behalf of the Snake-People, I offer our apologies."
(End of Chapter)
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