Du Yi ought to have slept a good while longer.
Perhaps because he'd eaten so much before going under, this molt's sleep ran surprisingly long — though to Du Yi that was no great matter, since he'd never actually timed how long a single molt took him.
Nor was there any need to time it. He had only to sleep well and wait, at ease, for the new skin to form.
Only this once, his sleep was interrupted.
Something seemed to have wormed its way into his nostrils, and a gust of hot wind had blown in along with it. He'd meant to ignore it and sleep on — there'd been times like this before — but this once, the hot wind kept coming, kept on, even turned scalding.
So, under the ceaseless itch of it, Du Yi tipped back his head and loosed a sneeze.
Sneeze done, Du Yi found he couldn't get back to sleep. Still half-groggy, his fogged brain didn't stop him from taking a look at his surroundings first — and with that one turn of his head, a few stones came tumbling down off his skull.
"Seems I slept a bit long this time...... I'm fairly sure all I covered myself with was earth."
Du Yi's gaze followed the falling stones down.
And then he saw the several figures sprawled on the ground.
The figures were all clad in neatly stitched robes, every robe made from the hide of a sabertooth or a cave bear; the clothes were rough in style yet by no means crude, their cut and tailoring worthy of note even in Du Yi's eyes.
But now those clothes were soaked in vomited blood, and the men wearing them had long since rolled their eyes white and stopped breathing for good.
"Ah, this."
A glance at the wounds on the corpses, and Du Yi more or less knew the cause of death.
The force behind that sneeze of his had been, it seemed, a touch too much.
That one sneeze had, as it turned out, blown all these men to death.
Luckily one of them seemed not to have been blown apart — though this one's dress was rather different from the others. Next to those finely robed corpses, this fellow, with nothing but a hide thrown over him, could truly be called a savage.
And this set of hides looked to have been licked by fire, smoked black as charcoal.
Yet it was this savage who had the most stubborn life-force of them all — not only alive, but even lifting his head to look at him.
From the way he trembled, though, he'd plainly been scared witless.
"Hah. I'm sure I told Lightbringer ages ago — don't let the faint-hearted ones in, it's for their own good...... did he never pass that on to his son?"
Du Yi shook his head and gave the matter no further thought. He was in no state for serious thinking just now — freshly woken and still hungry, anything he came up with in this condition was bound to be no good.
Following his long-held habit, Du Yi resolved to fill his belly first, stretch his body, and only then get to things like thinking.
So he pulled his whole body up out of the earth — which was, of course, another bout of heaving ground and shaking mountain. Still, the toppled trees did at least spare Du Yi a bit of the work of finding fuel.
"Next, go round up a few mammoths...... how many mammoths can I put away in one sitting these days?"
Thinking this, Du Yi set off into the deep mountains and began his hunt.
And behind him, that young savage with the hides thrown over him forced himself upright, somehow, and trailed along after.
***
The young Ignis man gripped the bone knife in his hand; for a moment he'd thought himself already dead.
Sealed in the cave by raging fire, his body roasted by the wave of heat — at that moment he'd felt his life had likely reached its end. But with an inexplicable gust of wind, and the world-spinning upheaval that came on its heels, he had actually, amid all that heaving earth and shaking mountain, survived.
Yes — survived. And not only survived the fire's roasting: even the men who'd come to kill him, the royal mages, had fallen to the ground too, turned into a litter of corpses.
"This is...... what just happened?"
Disbelief filled the young Ignis man's face; it was all like a dream to him.
A killing-snare he was meant to die in — and in the space of one dazed instant, it had all been settled?
"Could it be I'm actually dead already? Is this all just some vision I saw on the brink of death?"
For a while the young Ignis man believed exactly that.
But then he knew the cause of it all.
Because he saw it — the vast snake's head, looking down upon the whole of heaven and earth.
"This......"
Under the gaze of that pair of vertical pupils, the young Ignis man felt himself small as an ant, small as a flea!
"After all — this is the great Snake God."
The young Ignis man drew a deep breath.
The great Snake God — how could he fail to remember Him? Every year, through the coldest stretch of winter, the royal house sent out mages to levy from every household the offerings owed to the Snake God. In name they were offerings to the Snake God, true — but the young Ignis man had once, on the northern battlefield, heard a bit of gossip from a comrade: that those offerings were never sacrificed to the Snake God at all, but hauled into the royal storehouses.
Did the Snake God truly exist? No one knew. All anyone had to go on were legends handed down from ancient times; no one had ever met the Snake God in person, nor even glimpsed Him from afar.
But now......
"The Snake God...... He's actually real!"
His eyes lit up.
So, after snatching a blood-stained robe off one of the corpses, the young Ignis man followed the path the giant snake had traveled, trailing after it.
He meant to ask this Snake God for help. If it was this Snake God, surely it could be done — as long as the Snake God was willing to pardon him, not even the royal house could go on calling him a deserter and a poacher. He could even tell the Snake God of the mages' wickedness at the front, and have the Snake God punish those traitors harshly, so that his fallen comrades would not have died for nothing.
"But to get the Snake God's help...... mere words probably won't do it."
Perhaps because he felt a little safer now, the young Ignis man recovered a measure of clear thought.
"Best to find some prey first to offer up...... just like the Harvest Festival every year."
Thinking this, the young Ignis man found a stout branch, then bound his bone knife to it, making a crude spear.
And after that, following the footprints on the ground, he set off in pursuit of a sabertooth tiger in the distance.