Ichikishimahime, Tagitsuhime

After Zi Xu pushed open the Stone Gate, he felt that familiar sensation of being transported again. Unlike the illusory transportation before, this time it was real. He even felt a little queasy.

Zi Xu had already guessed the truth behind the "reincarnation" in the previous space. There had never been any so-called "reincarnation" to begin with; everything had been the effect of Genjutsu. From start to finish, the scenes Zi Xu saw had never been real.

He had merely been repeating the cycle of Genjutsu over and over. As for whether the emotions shown by the residents in those illusions had been genuine, he couldn't say. After all, those people had nearly turned into stone statues, and he didn't know whether Tagorihime had a technique that could seal a person's consciousness inside Genjutsu.

"Hm? This place seems pretty normal. No strange buildings, no suspicious people... Speaking of which, where did Orochimaru go? I forgot to ask Tagorihime. It'd be best if he died here..."

Zi Xu raised an eyebrow. The space beyond the Stone Gate wasn't very wide, and thick fog obscured his view. The slick rock walls and the stalactites, which didn't look especially rough, at least showed that this place was still within Ryūchi Cave. He felt he probably hadn't fallen into Genjutsu.

"System, System. I never thought a guy with eyebrows as thick as yours would set me up, too. I'll have to be more careful about whether I accept quests in the future." Zi Xu sent out Shadow Clones to explore the way ahead as he jokingly complained to the system.

Of course, he knew it wasn't the system's fault. He just wanted to vent a little. He'd gotten into the habit of joking around with the system, at least to lighten his mood.

As Zi Xu sent out more and more Shadow Clones, he sensed something was wrong and dispelled them all in an instant.

When a Shadow Clone was dispelled normally, its Chakra and the memories it had formed would return to the original. But Zi Xu could clearly tell that the amount of Chakra returning to him was off. If his total Chakra was 100, then after splitting it among himself and several clones, each would have a share of that 100. Even accounting for the Chakra spent while the clones were active, he should have recovered 90.

But in reality, Zi Xu had only recovered 50. Not only had half of it vanished into thin air, but the memories sent back by the clones revealed nothing unusual. They had just kept walking.

After recalling his clones, Zi Xu narrowed his eyes and studied the surroundings for anything out of place. In the end, his gaze settled on the fog. It was the only unusual thing around.

"Such an obvious trap? But it doesn't seem like there's any good way to break it..." Though Zi Xu knew the fog before him was absorbing Chakra, he had no good solution. Was he supposed to use Silent Power to freeze the fog in place? He couldn't do that yet.

"There's no point just thinking. I should get moving. If there's no way back, then I can only charge ahead." Watching the fog slowly spread toward him, Zi Xu gritted his teeth and plunged into it, intending to run all the way through.

He hadn't known until he tried it, but now Zi Xu could feel the fog's power for himself. For an ordinary person, running usually felt like flying through the air, lightness filling the body. But once inside this fog, it felt like a bird falling into water with lead weights on its wings. Every movement took enormous effort.

But that wasn't a problem. An ordinary person could barely take a step here, but Zi Xu's physique could hardly be called "ordinary." His speed had barely decreased. It just felt as though the air around him had grown a little thicker; otherwise, nothing had changed.

"It's not draining much of my stamina. The main problem is how much Chakra it's absorbing..." Feeling the Chakra inside him being siphoned away bit by bit, he couldn't help growing anxious. But he forcibly used Silent Power to calm himself down.

A fork appeared ahead. It was the first branching point, and he guessed that only one of the two paths was safe. That made his next choice crucial.

His ragged breathing gradually steadied, and his awareness of his surroundings sharpened. As he ran, he noticed many strange symbols on the wall before the fork. He stopped and examined them.

He touched the pigment on the mural. Though he couldn't tell at first what it depicted, his hand brushed a small patch of black pigment loose as he tried to feel its surface, leaving his hand smeared with black. While marveling at the pigment's quality, he focused on the mural before him.

"Looks like a mural of snakes? There are snake-like pictures before the fork, too..." Zi Xu studied the mural. A purple snake and a black snake were painted on the left and right sides of the fork, respectively, with a large green snake in the middle. Each of the snakes was distinctive, and they had been painted with lifelike detail.

Every scale on the purple snake had been rendered in exquisite detail. Under the faint light, it even seemed to reflect the light realistically. The snake on the mural was curled up, showing only one open eye. Its tongue was caught mid-flick, and it looked rather curious.

The black snake looked miserable. Its eyes were half-open, as if it hadn't woken up yet. Its pitch-black scales reflected not a speck of light, and its tail drooped limply. It looked like a sickly thing.

The green snake looked lively. Its long body wasn't curled up in a dignified coil, but instead twisted about carelessly. Its head was raised high, unmistakable curiosity in its eyes, and its tail was slightly lifted, as if it were looking forward to something.

In front of each mural were some crookedly painted words:

Purple Snake: The Black Snake is lying. The path on the right is a dead end.

Black Snake: I never lie. The path on the right is safe.

Green Snake: Either the Purple Snake or the Black Snake is lying.

"If the Green Snake is completely impartial, then let's assume the Purple Snake is telling the truth and the Black Snake is lying. The Purple Snake says the left path is safe, and the Black Snake is lying. So the Black Snake should be saying, 'I always lie, and the path on the right is a dead end.' But if the Black Snake always lies, then could 'the path on the right is a dead end' be a lie, too?" Zi Xu's mind raced as he quickly analyzed the clues in the mural.

"Suppose the Black Snake is telling the truth. Then it doesn't lie, and the right path is safe while the left is a dead end. The Purple Snake is lying, so its words should mean, 'The Black Snake isn't lying, and the path on the right isn't safe.' In other words, the left path is safe..." Zi Xu's palms grew damp. The sudden drain on his Chakra made his heartbeat unsteady again, and beads of cold sweat appeared on his forehead.

"Either way, they're both dead ends... Wait, if the Green Snake is the one lying, then taking the words at face value means: the Black Snake is lying, and the right path is a dead end; or the Black Snake isn't lying, and the right path is safe. There's still no way through..."

Faced with this impossible riddle, he didn't choose a path at random. The more precarious the situation became, the wilder his ideas grew. In the end, he looked at the black pigment on his palm, thought for a moment, and made a bold decision.

He began rubbing both hands over the Black Snake mural, coating his palms completely in black. Then he reached his devilish hands toward the Purple Snake and the Green Snake, smearing all the black pigment onto their murals. In an instant, the once-pristine Purple Snake and mischievous Green Snake had been rubbed into two pitch-black, soot-covered iron rods.

The Green Snake and the Purple Snake had never been treated so unfairly. Zi Xu seemed to see a hint of humanlike grievance in their eyes on the mural. He shook his head, dismissed it as his imagination, and watched to see what would happen.

"Rumble, rumble—" A violent tremor shook the area. Loose stones crumbled from the surrounding cavern walls, and the rising dust mingled with the strange fog. Through the haze, Zi Xu thought he saw something fly out of the three murals, but even his sharp eyes couldn't catch its trajectory.

"It worked! Looks like I guessed right." Zi Xu was still rather excited. He didn't know if that was the intended answer, but at least the situation had changed, hadn't it? It was just that the area crumbling in front of him was getting bigger and bigger. Something seemed... a little off.

"Big Sis, don't stop me! This kid actually dared to smear grime on my beloved scales! Those were scales I'd cared for over hundreds of years! It took so long to make them so beautiful, and this brat actually sullied them with dirty soot! Aaaah!"

A sharp female voice came from the dust. From her tone, Zi Xu could tell she was furious. It was like a girl who'd just gotten her nails done having one of them scratched.

He had no idea which unlucky fool had angered the speaker so badly. Heh, how interesting. Wait, he was the only one in this space who could have offended her. Didn't that mean he was in serious danger?

As Zi Xu guiltily looked up at the sky, another voice confirmed his guess, making him even more nervous.

"Third Sister, don't rush. This is his trial. If he fails, he'll be yours to deal with. You can kill him or dismember him, however you like, but you can't break the rules during the trial. Understand?" A mature female voice, rational and composed, followed.

"But didn't that guy who looks just like us fail, too? Why didn't you let me eat him? I feel like eating him would make me a lot stronger..." The lively female voice spoke up again, no longer as furious as before.

"He's already half one of our kind. Bai Xian wouldn't allow us to eat him. More importantly, that guy's body is strange. Do you really want to eat him? If things go wrong, he might end up eating you instead..." As their conversation ended, the dust before Zi Xu had mostly cleared. Now he could see the woman speaking.

Both of them were dressed much like Tagorihime. One had blue-green hair and was a little girl with a pale golden crown on her head and blue-green, magatama-shaped earrings. She wore a pale green robe and a green ornament bearing a single magatama on her chest. She had sharp teeth and a pink tongue.

The other had similar accessories, but brown hair. She wore a white robe and had sharp teeth and a blue tongue. She was tall and slender, which, compared to the little girl beside her, was enough to make the girl feel self-conscious.

The brown-haired beauty gave Zi Xu a slight nod, then tugged at the sulking little girl beside her, who had turned her face away, and spoke:

"Greetings, trial-taker. We are Ichikishimahime and Tagitsuhime, the Goddesses responsible for testing trial-takers."