Third Male Lead Syndrome

Chapter five: The food bandit

Who was this so-called food bandit that usurped and robbed Ru Yijing of his necessities? Good question!

The food bandit seemed to materialize out of nowhere. It was on the second day of that one junior brother.. whose name Ru Yijing had already forgotten by now; to put that one inconsistency aside, after the tantalizing dishes had been delivered straight to Ru Yijing on a silver platter, was when a seemingly innocent snake slithered out of the hedges of the eerie forest near the peak's vicinity.

It was a very attractive snake, with shimmery scales that absorbed the sun rays, acting as a kaleidoscope, bouncing off the reflected light rays as a multitude of colours on the spectrum. Its length was about a metre long, and as it crept across the ground, its lengthy body would coil in hypnotizing annular swirls. With a head as small as a python's, the dichotomy of the massive body and the minuscule head would come off as a comical sight, if Ru Yijing had not been terrified out of his wits.

He had always been a common coward of those that were grotesque to the human eyes; the inhuman scaly bodies of reptiles, their jagged, sharp canines, their silver thin pupils like rifts that tore a sky. Even towards the littlest reptilians lizard that harmlessly clung onto a ceiling, Ru Yijing would let out an earth-shattering, high-pitched scream that could contest famous female opera singers— in the face of this huge, inhumane snake, he was scared into silence. The plate of curry that he had been previously holding slipped from his wobbly fingers, becoming strewn all over the ground. A piece of fatty chicken landed in front of the scaled creature, which in response, lowered its head and gobbled up the boneless meat.

Ru Yijing watched it swallow the lump of meat effortlessly, and imagined it were to be his leg instead that was being efficiently devoured at the speed of light, and he was even more terrified, which inevitably led him to be riveted to the spot.

There were moments in one's life where they would see something so horrifying, so spectral, so beyond their judgement, that they could only adopt the same mannerism of staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed, chained down to one's spot, unable to tear their eyes away from the fear-striking sight, and whilst this action of being simultaneously motionless and speechless betrayed the accordance of human behaviour to activate their fight or flight instinct, Ru Yijing could not perform the usual tasks that the special homeostasis system innate in humans should trigger.

In the blink of an eye, the creature had assimilated the meat into its digestive system. It perked its head up, knife-slit eyes pinning Ru Yijing down.

Ru Yijing did not say anything. It was better when he was unexpressive, for the original body had facial features that might seem akin to water, with agreeable eyes and kind lips, but there evoked a sense of oxymoron; where one would appear perfectly normal and ordinary on the outside, but the more presumably generic it was, the larger the feeling of incongruity would engender. When not donning an expression that would shatter this sense of discordance, the body resembled that of an unmoving statue. If the inner person was shaking, the body on the outside was as cool as an Okinawa cucumber, leaving an impression in someone that this person was definitely not an average cultivator.

Finally, the beast pried its mouth open, causing a thread-like, two-parted tongue to flicker out. The snake rattled its tail in satisfaction. "That was a good piece of meat, young cultivator. Would you share more of what you have on you?"

[ !!! .. This is not an ordinary snake! ]

Generally speaking, a talking snake was a concept so facetious that it should belong to a comic, or a fantasy story in which all animals could engage in conversations with fellow humans as if nothing was out of the blue. But, remembering that the setting of the story was supposed to take place in the cultivation world, where the impossible was as possible as finding pebbles at beach bays, it came as no surprise. However, seeing an occurrence that was deemed fictitious now in full-blown action before him, Ru Yijing could not help but be overtaken by surprise.