Chapter 3169: Extra Resurrection
The silvery-white Magic Moon hung beneath the Chamber of Secrets' vaulted ceiling.
It shrouded the basilisk's enormous body.
It lay coiled there, utterly motionless, as if dead. Only the shadows beneath it, twisting like aquatic grass, told the others what kind of frenzied transformation was taking place within that colossal body.
After a long while.
Or perhaps only a few short minutes.
Harry wasn't sure.
His sense of time had become blurred amid waves of pounding headaches. The only thing he could be certain of was that the basilisk's shadow on the floor was becoming clearer and clearer, increasingly matching its massive form.
Crack.
Crack, crack.
Fine cracking sounds echoed through the empty Chamber of Secrets, unusually loud. Though Harry had never heard such a sound before, he immediately realized that the basilisk was shedding its skin.
"—Want to see it more clearly?"
Zheng Qing seemed to have guessed what the young wizards were thinking—or perhaps he had simply thought of his former self, of how he had once been driven by youthful curiosity. If he had been Ron or Harry at that moment, he would certainly have been very curious about what was happening up there, yet too intimidated by the terrifying situation before him to ask. He drew The Wand and traced a circle before him. Amid a sizzling crackle, a slowly moving overhead view of the basilisk clearly appeared before them.
"Wow..."
Three simultaneous sighs rose from within the barrier, carrying both astonishment and awe.
They could clearly see that, starting from the basilisk's head, a fissure had split open in its dark-green scales, exposing a dark-red new "skin" beneath, covered in scales and resembling tender flesh injured raw. The fissure was very long, spreading down from its head and seeming to extend