"Parseltongue" and the Basilisk (6)

The tunnel entrance was like a gaping mouth, swallowing every last ray of light from outside without leaving a trace. Darkness had piled up there, solidified, as though it had gained weight.

The ground was covered in a layer of slick moss and slime formed by stagnant water that had pooled there for years. Madara's boots made soft, sticky sounds with every step, like glue being slowly peeled apart. It was not the sound of the boots themselves, but the faint pop of air being squeezed from the wet deposits beneath their soles and bursting through cracks in the stone.

Madara lowered his gaze to the ground. In the darkness, his Sharingan saw the composition of that secretion—not slime, not bodily fluid, but something more complex: a tar-like substance formed from layers of keratin and bodily fluids shed during the Basilisk's growth, accumulated and compressed over a thousand years.

Its surface bore countless tiny, winding marks, like trails left by crawling earthworms. They were the imprints left by the Basilisk's belly scales dragging across the ground. The marks were not straight; a Basilisk did not travel in straight lines. Its body was too long. In the narrow tunnel, it could only slither forward in curves, its body bent into an S-shape as its belly scales scraped over the floor, leaving wave-like tracks of varying depth.

Madara walked deeper into the tunnel. His pace was neither fast nor slow, and every step was spaced evenly, as if measured with a ruler. The sticky sounds of his boots pressing into the secretion echoed through the tunnel in a steady rhythm—once, once, and once again—like an ancient drumbeat forgotten by time, one only the dead could hear.

His Sharingan swept through every corner of the tunnel—the torches in the recesses, the black tar