Volume 4: The Sea and the Ship Heading North Chapter 291: Secret Corridor in the Snow
Fine pieces of ice floated up from the ground, moving irregularly in the air, just as the basilisk locked its body and then suddenly rushed out.
Jon suddenly rolled to the left!
Immediately afterwards, a loud noise of heavy objects colliding with each other was heard in the narrow passage. Jon leaned against the cold ice wall, and after steadying his body, he chanted a spell towards the place where the ice chips were emptied!
"God's sword has no shadow!"
The invisible blade appeared in the air almost the next second after he cast the spell, and the cold air flow seemed to be cut by a huge blade!
Soon, there was a sound of a sharp weapon piercing the flesh and a roar was heard!
The smelly blood splashed out like mud trampled out of a mud pit, and a lot of the sticky liquid even splashed on Jon's face. However, the unbearable stench did not stop him from dodging the next moment.
The basilisk, with a large cut on its soft belly, twisted its body madly, and its tail, which seemed to be made of steel, left clear marks on the surrounding ice.
The floating ice chips gave Jon a more direct sense of the surrounding objects than seeing with his eyes.
So at the moment when the basilisk went crazy, Jon's body was as light as a monkey and he dodged back to its original place with a few jumps.
Then he pointed it in the direction where he had just been and raised the wand again without hesitation!
"Avada Kedavra!"
The deadly green color instantly illuminated the entire dark space, and the beam of light representing death shot out !
The basilisk clearly felt the breath of death coming, and it roared even more frantically, trying to twist its body and attach its entire body to the ice surface on the far right to avoid the killing curse.
However, the severe pain caused by the wound in the abdomen seriously slowed down its reaction nerves!
When the command to dodge was issued from its mind and the back half of its body had successfully deflected to the right, the Killing Curse crossed the short distance of less than ten meters in an instant and hit the huge snake head of the basilisk!
The deadly earth-brown snake eyes lost all signs and emotions of life after being hit by the killing curse. Then, a "boom" sounded, and the huge body fell powerlessly on the ice, leaving only a mess on the ground.
Jon was breathing heavily, but he did not act rashly. Instead, he continued to use the levitation spell, controlling more ice chips to float around, to help himself clearly perceive the situation in front of him that he could not see.
After not getting any feedback from any angle, even letting some ice chips fall on the basilisk's heart, Jon heaved a sigh of relief and removed the black cloth covering his eyes.
Now he could finally see the true appearance of the basilisk.
Its body was just as huge as the one at Hogwarts, at least thirty or forty feet long, with scales on its body also a bright emerald green. Its abdomen was half the length of an adult, and the wound was still oozing smelly blood.
This snake did not seem to be malnourished at all, or to have undergone some strange mutation that allowed it to become able to withstand the cold.
This discovery made Jon's doubts even more difficult to explain. Why is there a basilisk in this maze in the Arctic? Was it Voldemort or someone else who put the snake in?
But he certainly didn't have the extra energy to ponder this problem at this moment. After calling out Gabrielle who was hiding in the ice above, they began to look for Nick on the ground covered with broken ice and blood.
Soon Gabrielle made a discovery in a corner.
Nick seemed to be frozen, with the horrified expression after seeing the basilisk still on his face. His originally illusory body was as stiff as a sculpture. No matter how Gabrielle called out to him, he couldn't make any response.
The little girl cried out in sadness.
"Jon! Nick is dead!"
Jon followed her voice and came over and patted her head.
"He was already dead, he can't die again. Don't worry, his current condition is only temporary. It won't be long before we get out and ask the professors to prepare an antidote with mandrake, and he will be back to normal."
John did not lie to Gabriel. It was indeed impossible for the Ghost to be killed by anything again. Even something as powerful as the instant death effect of the Basilisk's eyes would only petrify him. As for how long it would take for them to leave and for Nick to get rid of this situation, that was not something John could predict in advance.
Of course, they wouldn't just leave Nick here.
Even in the entire wizarding world, no one would be able to tell what the petrified ghost was, but the levitation spell John used on Nick was effective.
His originally stiff body was lightened a lot, and then with the help of Gabrielle, Jon tied Nick to his back.
This did not cause him much pressure, but it made him less flexible in his movements.
After that, John did not leave immediately. Even though the battle just now caused a lot of noise and no one knew whether it attracted the Death Eaters in the maze, he still began to collect his spoils from the basilisk.
How can you kill a monster and not pick up its equipment?
He couldn't take away anything that was too big, so he took everything he could.
He found two snake fangs that looked pretty good. Following the hole that Shen Feng Wuying had made, Jon took out a fist-sized object that looked like snake gallbladder from the snake's belly. Then he dug out the two eyes of the basilisk, but its eyes were too big. He tried all the pockets on his body, but there was no suitable entrance to stuff the two football-like eyeballs in.
Since he couldn't take it away, John didn't want to leave it to the Death Eaters, so he simply used the Shattering Curse to blow up the eyeballs and everything else he couldn't take away, and directly chopped the snake corpse, which was originally relatively intact, into meat paste.
Naturally, he did not let Gabrielle watch such a bloody process. After all the trouble was settled, John carried the petrified Nick on his back and continued forward with Gabrielle.
Without Nick's prior exploration, Jon moved forward more cautiously.
After passing an intersection, they came to a new fork in the road. Gabrielle was still the one to make the choice, while Jon left a shallow mark on the ice on one side before leaving.
After walking along the path chosen by Gabrielle for about ten minutes, they came across another intersection that was exactly the same as the previous one, and next to this intersection was obviously the mark that Jon had just left.
This discovery made Jon frown slightly.
But he didn't say much. He just took Gabrielle to change the road and continued to move forward towards the road in the middle of the three-way fork. However, after walking for more than ten minutes, they returned to the intersection again.
Gabrielle's face was full of surprise.
"Have we reached a dead end?"
Jon frowned even more tightly. He did not answer Gabrielle's words, but took her towards the last path that had not been walked yet.
But the result remained the same. It was still a journey of more than ten minutes, and they finally returned to the fork in the road.
There was no way left for them to try.
Gabrielle's face was full of surprise. She floated along the branch road and circled around the ice, but found nothing.
Jon thought about it and walked back a few steps. He turned a corner and saw the pool of minced meat scattered on the ground.
The road where he had just killed the basilisk was connected to the fork in the road where they were now, which meant that if they wanted to reach this fork in the road, they would have to pass by the corpse of the basilisk.
But just now they walked back along three different roads, but did not see the basilisk's body. But they saw it when they returned from here.
This made Jon suspicious.
He grabbed Gabrielle's hand, stopping her from trying to go into the fork in the road and cross the ice, then he used his wand to knock around the fork in the road.
Finally, Jon found some clues on the two ice walls separating the three forks in the road.
When his wand struck the ice, some inconspicuous bright golden spots burst out at the moment when the tip of his wand touched the ice.
These spots of light were so tiny that if Jon hadn't observed them carefully enough, he might have overlooked them.
After seeing the problem, he asked Gabriel to try to pass through the two ice walls, but nothing unusual happened. After Gabriel floated past one side, she floated out from the other side.
However, Jon did not give up trying. Instead of using the wand, he put on the ring and cast a universal spell to break the curse on himself.
Then he stretched out his left hand and carefully touched the ice wall.
As imagined, the cold and hard touch did not come. John's hand actually went directly through the wall, but did not come out from the other side of the wall like Gabrielle did.
Instead, it seemed to have disappeared and was gone straight away.
This made Gabrielle's eyes widen and Jon showed a surprised expression on his face.
He originally just wanted to give it a try, but he didn't expect it to actually succeed!
Jon didn't feel the disappearing hand at all, but instead felt warm.
He took a deep breath, grabbed Gabrielle's arm with his right hand, held her in his arms, enveloped her in the spell, and then passed through the ice wall.
It felt like he was walking forward normally without encountering any obstacles. The next moment, Jon disappeared in the ice and appeared in a narrow and warm corridor.
There is no ice on all sides here. On the left is a wall that is obviously made of bricks. On the right is a corridor consisting of four or five rooms. Above is a sealed ceiling with several kerosene lamps hanging from it. The blue flames in the lamps illuminate the space.
Gabrielle looked around curiously, and Jon was also attracted by the marks on the ground that were obviously left by some reptile.
He finally understood why creatures like basilisks could live in this area of the Arctic.
It didn't stay in the maze carved out of ice all the time. It should have lived on this corridor most of the time!
Jon finally got the answer at this time, but he did not stop. Instead, he walked towards the room closest to him whose door was always open.
There were a lot of things inside, but they were all destroyed. There were torn papers, tables, chairs and benches crushed by heavy objects, and things like the wreckage of a teapot and rotten clothes scattered everywhere.
Jon walked into the room and tried to pick up a few muddy papers from the ground, trying to find some valuable information from them.
But not only were the words on the parchments blurred, they were not written in English. Jon had no way of deciphering those words that looked a bit like Russian to him.
After walking around the small room and making sure that he hadn't found anything valuable, he continued walking towards the next room.
This is also an open door. It is a bit far-fetched to say that it is open, because through the broken wood, it can be clearly seen that this door was originally locked, but it was forcibly destroyed in half, and only the upper part still has rusty hinges connected to the door frame.
Jon hunched over and went inside, a fishy smell hit him in the face. The room was very large, and there was a pile of things that looked like clothes collected together in a mess.
There are many huge emerald green snake skins scattered around!
After seeing these snake skins, John concluded in his heart that the basilisk he killed could not have been brought by Voldemort.
It would take hundreds of years to shed such a large amount of skin. This snake monster must have lived here for a long time, and it has regarded this room as its own nest.
Enduring the stench, Jon searched here but still found nothing of value.
Without stopping, he continued to the next room.
The situation in the third room was even simpler and clearer. It was a dilapidated house, and the wall facing the door had collapsed in half, revealing a large layer of ice. In the ice there were many animals frozen in it.
Many of them are bears and wolves, and there are also some strange-looking creatures, which are obviously animals that have become extinct in the current world.
Most of the ice layer had been violently chiseled open. These were of course the work of the basilisk. The room was filled with various bones. It was obvious that it had survived by eating the animal carcasses in the ice. This room was its canteen.
After getting this information, Jon went to the last room on the corridor.
The door of this room was not damaged and was locked, but before he entered, Jon saw the nameplate hanging on the door and was stunned.
Adrian Fox's Laboratory
