The Phantom Knight's projection manifested as a physical entity more than 300 meters long, entirely a deep, ghostly blue. It flew through the sky with nine snake heads baring their fangs and brandishing their claws, swallowing clouds and spitting mist. A pair of fleshy wings sprouted from its serpentine body. If not for the peculiar radiance displayed by a knight's projection after it condensed into physical form, anyone who saw such a terrifying nine-headed serpent would have thought an ancient beast had reappeared in the world.
Legends of the nine-headed serpent existed in both the West and the East. The nine-headed serpent in the myths Zhang Tie had heard on the Weiyi Subcontinent was called Hydra, while in Great Xia, it had another name—Xiangliu!
After pondering those two names carefully, Zhang Tie suddenly came to a realization.
Hydra and Xiangliu—one was the name of the nine-headed serpent in Western myth, the other its name in Eastern myth. They were the memories of two different human civilizations concerning this monster. If one carefully compared the pronunciations of Hydra and Xiangliu, taking into account the phonetic deviations caused by history and geography, anyone would make a startling discovery: the names of the nine-headed serpents in Western and Eastern myths sounded remarkably alike. "Xu" and "Xiang," "La" and "Liu"—they were extremely similar.
The same nine-headed serpent monster appeared in legends from different cultural backgrounds under nearly identical names. What did that mean?
This was no mere coincidence.
Before the Great Cataclysm, humans had regarded all myths and legends as fabricated tales. But after the Great Cataclysm, everyone knew that both Eastern and Western myths concealed great secrets of human history. Many myths were far more than mere myths.
The nine-headed serpent flew through the skies of the middle layer at over 1,400