For safety's sake, the first thing Du Yi did was inspect that mammoth meat.
The facts proved Du Yi's caution warranted: there was indeed poison in the mammoth meat—though to him that trace of toxicity was nothing much, it was probably enough to kill a mammoth.
"So that means—poison was used to kill the mammoth, then the poisoned meat got eaten...... and on top of that, the meat had gone bad."
Du Yi more or less pieced the sequence together.
Things had gotten troublesome.
Killing a mammoth with poison, that much Du Yi could do—he need only sink his snake fangs in, or spit at it from a good distance. Of course, most of the time he wouldn't hunt by such laborious means; he leaned toward the simple and direct method of throwing rocks.
But as for curing poison......
That, Du Yi had no idea how to do.
So all he could do for the moment was treat it the way he'd treat ordinary food poisoning. First, naturally, was to use the tip of his tail to gently beat the man's belly—enough to make him throw up, but not so hard with his overwhelming force that he'd hammer the man into the ground.
After that, he went and fetched some black-nightshade berries.
These black berries he'd come by earlier, while gathering seasonings. At the time Du Yi had thought they might serve as a cheap substitute for crowberries, but once he'd prepared them the taste turned out all wrong, and eating them had left him retching for the better part of a day.
But just now, these black-nightshade berries were exactly the thing to bring on vomiting.
"First, I've got to clear all the spoiled meat out of his stomach......"
Once he'd gently beaten the man on the ground into slack-jawed, eyes-shut limpness with his tail, Du Yi precisely dripped the berry juice clinging to his tail-tip into the man's mouth.
After that, he fetched a great deal of honey.
Du Yi had once heard a theory: that much of the time, whether curing poison or treating illness, medicine offers only a supporting effect, and more often than not it's the body's own power of recovery doing the healing. Which meant that, going by this line of thinking, even if he didn't know how to cure poison, he could at least strengthen the man's powers of recovery by pumping a great deal of energy into his body.
To put it in vivid terms: he didn't know how to fight the battle at the front, but he could at least keep the supply lines well stocked at the rear.
Honey, rich in sugar, was without question the finest material for fast energy. That said, Du Yi was really just taking a shot in the dark here—if it were merely ordinary food poisoning, he could indeed have handled it, but the mammoth meat had poison in it to begin with, and that he truly hadn't reckoned on.
Yet to Du Yi's surprise—perhaps because the man's luck was good enough, or perhaps because a savage's body ran a far hardier metabolism than he'd understood—the savage actually came around, and even began to retch in great heaving mouthfuls.
***
Lightbringer had been on the very edge of death just then.
In his dying moments, Lightbringer had drifted in a daze. To be poisoned to death by the very poison he'd put in the meat himself—he would surely go down as the most idiotically dead chieftain in all the history of the Ignivas family.
But just as fragments of past happiness began to surface in his mind, a strange juice dripped into his mouth.
And then he began to vomit in great mouthfuls, his stomach churning and roiling, the nausea so violent he nearly heaved up his own innards along with everything else.
It was just then that a vast force lifted his body from the side and rolled him over.
This was precisely what spared the just-revived man the wretched fate of choking to death on his own vomit.
But the Lightbringer of this moment had no mind to spare for where that force had come from. The violent retching had thrown even his breathing into disorder; his head swam, and he couldn't so much as open his eyes.
Heaven only knew how long the vomiting lasted; at one point he truly thought he was going to retch himself to death.
Luckily, his stomach was soon emptied clean, leaving only the body's instinctive dry heaving.
And it was then that Lightbringer's sight gradually returned.
He saw the snake.
Just as his father's last words had described, there truly was a giant snake vast as a small mountain—though in some ways it differed from his father's dying account. At the very least, the snake before him bore no steaming flesh and blood draped over it, nor any sign of stark white bones.
All that met the eye were tough, jet-black scales, and at the edges of those scales there even ran a faint, golden rim.
That awe-inspiring bearing was, in truth, like a god come down into the world.
"This...... ugh!"
Lightbringer wanted to say something more, but no sooner had he opened his mouth than another violent dry heave seized him.
And it was just then that Lightbringer noticed the great patches of berries crushed all around him. From the smell alone, he already knew them for the emetic herbs the village's witch doctors so often used.
"A dose this size would lay even a mammoth flat—no wonder I threw up so hard...... but who did all this?"
At the thought, Lightbringer instinctively raised his head.
There wasn't much to ponder, really.
After all, the tip of the giant snake's tail was still smeared with black berry jam, not yet dried.
"I......"
Lightbringer felt a wave of dizziness.
He, who had set out to poison, had instead eaten his own poison—while the giant snake he'd meant to poison to death had been the one to reach out and save his life.
"What on earth have I been doing?"
In that instant, Lightbringer felt it might have been cleaner, after all, just to have died.
But faced with the sweet fragrance right beneath his nose, the weakened man still, by instinct, reached out his hand.
He had never tasted such sweetness in his life.
As the Nineteenth chieftain of the Ignivas family, Lightbringer had eaten honey before, but honey of this quality was something he tasted now for the very first time—no processing of any kind was needed; the honey alone, just as it was, was already a delicacy beyond the rarest in the world.
"Only in the deep, dangerous mountains, in places even the mages dare not lightly set foot, could you ever find honey of this grade......"
At the thought, Lightbringer—a little strength returned to him—lifted his head once more.
That pair of enormous snake eyes was looking back at him.
Their four eyes met.
And Lightbringer felt, somehow......
A trace of goodwill?
"He...... never meant to kill me."
In that moment, Lightbringer had unconsciously slipped into using the reverent form of address.
Which only made him more ashamed than ever.
It was only then that Lightbringer realized he had very likely wronged this Snake God before him. The Snake God was no terrible evil, still less some bloodthirsty monster.
And just as Lightbringer was deep in guilt and self-reproach, that enormous snake-tail had already coiled him up and set him down, gently.
This shamed Lightbringer all the more.
Because at this moment, he was riding upon the back of a god.
What manner of honor was this.