Chapter 382: The Black Dog Outside the Cave

Of the Seven Gates, six were open.

The upside-down city had largely collapsed, leaving only a small stretch of street in the very center suspended from the dome.

The eleven-year-old boy stood in the middle of that small stretch of street.

He had no path forward. The houses on all sides had crumbled, scattering into mist.

"Mom?" he called out, standing there. His voice trembled. "Mom, why aren't you answering me..."

He had only been dead for twelve days—an apprentice from the modern era who had fallen alive into the sea.

Ancient decrees, sacred languages, encrypted inscriptions... none of them worked on him.

"Stop looking," Richard said, mimicking Hathaway's accent.

"Your mother can't find you because you walked through the wrong door."

The boy looked up at him.

His eyes still looked like the eyes of the living, only glazed with a layer of moisture.

"Your mother is waiting for you on the shore."

"She isn't in these empty houses. Count to ten. When you finish, follow the light and you'll be home."

"Count to ten?" the boy asked, his voice very small.

"Count to ten," Richard nodded. "Count slowly."

The boy tilted his head, weighing if those words were true.

Then, he started to count.

"One... two..."

With every number he counted, the tiny stretch of inverted street beneath his feet gave way, little by little.

"...nine... ten."

Having finished counting, the boy looked at Richard one last time.

"I'm going home."

That cluster of spirit coalesced into an incredibly faint light. Following the scent of the living drifting in through the fissure, it floated upward... no, it went home.

The upside-down city dissipated entirely, and the veil flipped back.

On the stone pedestal, the Serpent Mother's body—now just a layer of skin—limply dropped its head.

The one thousand two hundred years inside her stomach were gone.

Corbin wove Old Norse, Latin, and Albion together, letting no single language overpower the others:

"Sofid nú. Sleep now."

"Requiescant. May they rest."

"Everyone has gone home."

The cave suddenly fell dead silent.

That silence was even more unsettling than the cacophony that had filled the cave moments ago.

Richard took quite a while to fully retract his Mirror method's Still Water from the residual aura lingering around the fissure at the cave entrance.

None of the three Hunters were faring any better.

Colonel Javier sat on the ground, his face pale and ashen.

Gerard sheathed his blade. Richard could tell he was struggling to stay standing; his ether field was much more sluggish than when they had first entered the cave.

Old Phillips finally stilled his Bell and wiped his mouth.

"It's over," he said, his voice terribly hoarse.

Only then did the group dare to breathe a sigh of relief.

Phillips was the first to collapse, slumping heavily onto a rock.

He fished a tin of tea leaves from his coat, dumped the last few flakes into his hand, and shoved them all into his mouth.

"It's good to be alive," he mumbled, his cheeks bulging as he chewed.

"First thing I'm doing when I get back is brewing a pot. Nobody's allowed to fight me for it."

Corbin, organizing his rubbings nearby, didn't even look up.

"You're chewing dry leaves. It's only tea once it's brewed. What you're doing right now is eating grass."

"Let me have my moment of joy, Associate Professor. I was scared to death just now," Phillips said, rolling his eyes.

"Your father was the only one in danger," Corbin said, rolling up the rubbings.

"You were standing far away from the Serpent Mother. With the Chief Inspector's speed, he would have had plenty of time to react if any of her heads had lunged at you."

Phillips opened his mouth, found he had no retort, and simply lowered his head to continue chewing his grass.

Montagu went over to support his uncle.

Javier waved him off and pushed himself up.

"I don't need your help," the colonel grimaced. "I'm only forty-eight. I haven't reached the age where I need to be propped up yet."

Hathaway crouched before the stone pedestal, staring at the puddle of remains.

"The corpse of a High-Tier Evil Entity. The people at the Branch Office would kill for this."

She reached out and inspected it. "There's Ether Condensate here too, and its purity is terrifyingly high."

The Serpent Mother's corpse couldn't be left to sit. Corbin urged them to hurry.

"Extract the spine first, then get the condensate out of the skulls."

As he spoke, he wiped his small knife clean on his sleeve.

"Once these colors fade to the hue of dead matter, their hardness will multiply several times over. You wouldn't even be able to crack them with a power drill."

Hathaway didn't reply, but her hands moved faster.

They were essentially racing against the clock.

The Serpent Mother's flesh was undergoing a slow transformation—a kind of death that only alchemists could truly comprehend.

Right after its final breath, that body was still suspended between two worlds.

Half of it was flesh and blood that this world could contain, and the other half was something only the era of St. Hilda and the Viking longships would recognize.

Richard swept his Still Water over it. That mottled layer of light still flickered on the mirror's surface, twinkling like a candle flame on the verge of burning out.

Crouching nearby to help, Phillips suddenly spoke up. "Look at this..."

He pointed to the tail section of the Serpent Mother's spine.

The scales, which had been radiating a faint, eerie glow, were slowly losing their color, starting from the edges.

The fading began at the section closest to the fissure by the cave entrance, steadily creeping deeper toward the stone pedestal.

"Move faster."

No one said another word; they all sped up their work.

Cradling the final skull, Corbin stared at the fading light in the cave for a long time.

"A pity. If we had an alchemist here, we could have preserved it much better."

Only when the Serpent Mother's remains had completely faded into a dull, gray skeleton did that otherworldly aura truly dissipate from the limestone cave.

The corpse was hastily divided.

Seven skeletal heads were detached. The Ether Condensate settled inside each skull was exceptionally pure.

Shattered scales littered the ground, most having already lost their ether activity. Only the few scales closest to the spine still emitted a faint glimmer.

The spine was pulled out entirely. Lodged between the vertebrae were black beads the size of ammonites.

Those black beads were cores condensed from whatever she had digested, and every single one was a premium alchemical material.

Hathaway gathered the few lengths of old suturing thread from the Serpent Mother's teeth; strands of a nun's hair were still tangled in them.

"I'm taking these back," she said, winding the old thread up and placing it into an oil-paper packet.

"They need to be kept by the diocese. Things cut from a nun should be returned to the Church."

Corbin also found some odds and ends deeper in the cave:

A few iron-alloy nails thoroughly soaked in ether, and half a set of Rune Glyph stones;

along with several iron fragments embedded in the Serpent Mother's stomach lining—likely pieces of the sealing bindings originally brought by the Vikings.

All of these were valuable items. Once they got back, they would be divided according to everyone's contribution.

Richard helped Gerard walk out.

His grandfather didn't refuse this time, merely resting a hand on his grandson's shoulder.

"Grandfather," Richard said softly.

"Mm."

"In the future, are you..."

"Let's head back first," Gerard interrupted. "We'll talk once we're out of the cave."

The stone steps spiraled upward. As they neared the entrance, the chill of the early morning poured down through the fissure, carrying the familiar salty tang of the Whitby Sea Cliffs.

It had been a close call, but they had survived. After all, they had deployed two Major Adept Hunters at once.

A war was still raging across the sea, but this stretch of the sea cliffs was clean tonight.

The ammonites scattered along those fourteen miles of coastline would no longer need to be managed.

Hathaway led the way, carrying the lantern.

The lamplight illuminated the cave entrance. Outside, the sky was not yet bright.

The crooked tombstones of the Whitby cemetery stood upon the cliff top, having weathered the sea winds for centuries.

Something was sitting at the mouth of the cave.

It was entirely black—so black that even the sliver of gray light just breaking over the eastern sea refused to cling to it.

It sat squarely in the center of the entrance, its tail flat against the frozen earth. It didn't bark. It didn't move.

Richard's Still Water reached the black dog, but there was nothing on the water's surface.

A mirror could reflect darkness, but it could not reflect that crouching shape.

It was clearly a solid, physical form, yet in the mirror, there was only an empty void devoid of substance.

The black dog wasn't truly an evil creature; it was more akin to a storm about to break.

A mirror could not reflect a passing rainstorm, nor could it reflect a patch of fog.

Old Phillips's voice rang out, far graver than it had been when facing the Serpent Mother.

"Don't... move..."

He bit off each word, splitting them into isolated syllables.

"Don't look it in the eyes."

"Don't talk to it."

"Do... not... walk... toward... it!"

The black dog lifted its head.

Its gaze slowly swept over the group standing at the cave entrance.

It swept past Phillips, and Phillips stopped chewing the leaves in his mouth.

It swept past Corbin. The associate professor, who had spent his entire life nitpicking texts, opened his mouth but corrected nothing.

It swept past Hathaway, and her lips twitched.

The local fishermen never spoke that word at night, and in the end, she didn't utter it either.

It swept past the colonel, and then past Montagu beside him.

Then, it fixed its eyes on Gerard and Old Phillips.

The black dog stared at them for a long time—so long that the sliver of gray above the sea widened a fraction, and still, it kept looking.

Richard, holding his grandfather's arm, suddenly felt the urge to pull the old man behind him.

He knew it was useless.

The black dog did not bite, did not bark, and did not block the way.

It only appeared and followed, silently vanishing after its final walk on some unknown night.

The black dog was something that could not be stopped. Yet, he still wanted to pull him back.

The hand Gerard had resting on his shoulder gave it a gentle pat.

That brief moment of post-battle relief they had just felt in the cave was completely gone.

No one spoke. The black dog didn't stand up, nor did it approach.

It just sat there on the boundary between light and darkness, utterly motionless.