The clothes formed from the fur on her body did not cover her legs, and Song Xu could clearly feel the snake tail pressed tightly against the skin of her legs, twisting and moving.

When the snake swam, every inch of muscle would tense slightly, the faintly cool and silky distinct sensation special and making one shiver.

Green algae similar to hornwort grew thick along the water’s edge. When swimming through the water, she could see large patches of green algae shadows at the bottom, as well as small schools of fish weaving among them.

The shimmering ripples on the river surface shone upon Wumu’s body as it surfaced from time to time, and the dark-colored snake scales also refracted hazy light.

Song Xu held onto his shoulders, and gradually became less afraid in the water. The legs that had been tightly wrapped around him relaxed, and also began to sway along with the current. When swaying, they would occasionally brush against his snake tail, touching and then separating.

As for swimming, Song Xu only knew how, but was not good at it. In the past, she swam in indoor swimming pools, clear and transparent. Now she was in a wild river, and it felt completely different.

Leaving the water’s edge, unable to see the dark riverbed clearly, would make one suspect that beneath the water lurked enormous black monsters.

In the center of the river grew a large tree. When the water was shallow, this place was a small islet. When the water became deep, the islet was submerged, leaving only this single tree with half its body submerged in the water.

The big snake stopped beside the tree, coiling his tail around the branches. His upper body lay prone on a branch, long hair dripping wetly with water, fine strands messily sticking to his back like threads.

Moonlight passed through the sparse branches and lightly draped over him—it was truly quiet and beautiful. Song Xu watched, unable to resist raising her hand to give his waist a touch.

Wumu blandly flicked the tip of his tail, with no particular reaction, only to hear Song Xu sigh again, “Baby, you’re so pretty.”

A beautiful appearance and powerful abilities were both advantages when seeking a partner in the beastman world. However, as a half-beastman, Wumu had never heard anyone praise him like this.

Yet his… partner, from the moment she first saw him, had been praising him almost every day. Before this, Wumu had not known that there were so many phrases that could be used to praise someone.

Sometimes he did nothing at all and would suddenly be praised. Even after doing the most ordinary things, she would excitedly express her fondness. Even when he spoke, if he said two more words than usual, she would reveal an expression of gratified joy.

She gave him countless positive emotional feedback. This intense feeling of being loved and needed was something Wumu had never experienced before, and he was without a doubt drawn to it.

He could not speak sweet words like Song Xu, and even with actions, he often did not know how to express himself properly. Nothing showed on his face, but the tip of his tail had already quietly coiled around Song Xu’s ankle.

Song Xu noticed that she had been “tied up” by a “rope” again, lifted her foot and laughed. “Look, an anti-drowning rope!”

The river water splashed, nightingales sang on both banks, and a gentle breeze brushed across the water surface. Before long, Song Xu grew sleepy, turned into her squirrel form, and got stuck among the branches and fell asleep. Wumu did not call her, and remained coiled on the branches as well, resting like that for the night.

The next day, when the two returned, Song Xu rubbed her waist, sore from being stuck on the branches, and went to tidy up the wild yams she had dug up yesterday. Suddenly she shouted, “There’s a thief!”

The number of her wild yams did not match—several small ones were missing, and two of the big wild yams had large chunks bitten off.

Judging from the bite marks left on the wild yams, the criminal suspect should be a rat. There were many forest rats in the woods, all skilled at digging holes. Song Xu had encountered quite a few; when walking, the rustling crawling sounds she heard were mostly from forest rats.

The only big snake living here did not eat small things like forest rats. With no natural predators to hunt them, the nearby forest rats were numerous and active. When Song Xu had just arrived, she had tried eating one once. Later, she also kept her distance from forest rats and no longer attempted to eat them.

It was really because, without various seasonings, the meat of these undomesticated wild animals was basically fishy and gamey—some even pungent and bitter—making it impossible to swallow.

Previously, Song Xu’s stored food had been little, and also foods that forest rats did not like, so things had been peaceful. But this time, the wild yams that forest rats also liked had only been brought back for one night before those forest rats tunneled in and stole them.

“Would I allow petty thieves to run rampant!” Song Xu carried her beast-tooth knife and set out to capture the culprit and bring them to justice.

Beastmen had keen senses of smell. Song Xu could track the forest rats by the scent left on the wild yams, and in the end she uncovered a forest rat nest inside a tree hollow a few hundred meters away from the stone cave.

This kind of forest rat was also accustomed to storing food in burrows. Song Xu dug open the dirt tunnel, and not only found the few stolen wild yams inside, but also discovered the forest rats’ stored provisions, which looked like last year’s nuts. There was quite a stockpile—enough to be called a full granary.

“Stored food? Hand it over!” Song Xu shook the tail of the plump forest rat in her hand. “Your family assets have been confiscated by me.”

She returned to the stone cave with a bag of spoils and one forest rat, and tied that forest rat with thin grass rope to a Y-shaped tree branch.

Wumu still had wild yams coiled in his tail that Song Xu had placed there before going out, saying it was to prevent another theft. Seeing her now tie a forest rat to a tree branch, he thought she was going to roast and eat it.

No one expected that she did not light a fire. Instead, she sat in front of that forest rat holding a tree branch, and said to it with a serious face, “Do you know what your behavior is? It’s breaking and entering, it’s theft, and it deserves a sentence! You little Zhang San¹ Zhang San: A placeholder name in Chinese, similar to “John Doe.” Rat!”

The forest rat, poked in the belly by the small branch, squeaked in panic.

Song Xu rummaged through the forest rat’s stored provisions and picked out a nut, cracked it with a crunch, and ate it face to face in front of the rat. “See that? When you steal other people’s food, your home gets stolen!”

Wumu confirmed that the forest rat was just an ordinary forest rat, not a beastman. Then why was Song Xu talking to it like this?

“It…”

Song Xu was drawn by the suddenly speaking snake. Seeing that he looked a little confused, she slowly said, “It can’t… understand.”

“I know, but it not understanding doesn’t affect me talking to it.” Song Xu thought to herself—she was just bored, wasn’t she.

“All right, after you go out, you need to turn over a new leaf and be a proper rat, understand?”

The forest rat, which had been lectured, was released. For a moment it seemed overly frightened, crouching on the ground and not daring to move. Song Xu poked its belly with the branch, and only then did it dart away in a flash.

Song Xu threw away the small branch and came back to announce, “I’m going to make a storage cabinet, to store food, so that next time the house won’t get robbed again!”

But before her storage cabinet was finished, where to put the food became a problem.

Song Xu leaned close to Wumu, smiling especially sweetly, her small voice soft and sugary. “Wumu, that little shelter cave you have up there is pretty good—cool and dry. Can I borrow it temporarily to put some food, okay?”

And just like that, the snake’s shelter cave became the temporary food storage area.

Looking around, his stone cave was almost filled with Song Xu’s odds and ends.

The forest was full of big trees that had grown for many years, and between them there was also a notion of territory. The battlefield was divided into roots and canopy.

The roots in the soil struggled to grow, absorbing water and nutrients from the earth. Up above, the struggle for territory in the canopy was also extremely fierce. Every tree hoped to obtain more sunlight and rain. They were like solar receivers—only by receiving more sunlight could they produce more energy.

Some trees would fail in the struggle, and their only ending was death.

There were many ways for a big tree to die: it might be blown down by the wind and struck by lightning; it might be entangled and parasitized by vines; gnawed by insects and hollowed out by ants; or it might simply be that it was old, and so died of old age.

When a big tree fell in the forest, it would open up a patch of space in the dense woods. Song Xu liked this kind of small clearing. Clearings where sunlight could shine had more vitality than other places. At the base of the fallen trunk, countless new saplings would begin competing. They had enough sunlight and could grow an inch every day.

Moreover, a fallen big tree would become her playground, or dry firewood.

Song Xu searched all over the forest for something that could serve as a storage cabinet. When she encountered a tree that had fallen not long ago and whose trunk had been hollowed out, she laboriously dragged it back. After removing the extra branches, she only kept the bottom section.

Looking left and right at her achievement, Song Xu felt that this was more suitable as a place for a squirrel to sleep, rather than a storage cabinet.

That night, she did not sleep in her grass nest. She climbed into the hollow trunk and lay down—it was quite novel. It just so happened that there was a burl in the middle of the trunk, and a hole in the burl. She stuffed her fluffy tail into the hole.

From the outside, Wumu saw what looked like a squirrel tail growing out of a section of tree trunk. The scene was a little funny.

The snake did not know what was funny or not. He only knew that seeing his partner’s fluffy tail swaying, and hearing her make giggling sounds inside the trunk, she seemed very happy—and he wanted to be happy together with her.

Feeling lonely when not being paid attention to—this was also a first-time experience.

He coiled that section of tree trunk up and slept with it. In the morning, when Song Xu crawled out of the trunk, she realized that she had been a squirrel filling all night.

She thought to herself: So snake-snake actually wanted a pillow?

The blazing summer was long. Excessively high temperatures made people unwilling to work, only wanting to hang under the shade of trees and sleep. The sound of the river by her ears was just like her teachers’ lectures in the past—hypnotic.

The days of dozing off in classrooms while memorizing texts and writing exam papers seemed already very far away. Song Xu would occasionally feel a bit nostalgic about the past, but every time, the nostalgia never lasted long.

Her classmates liked to call her a freak. Perhaps she really was a freak—she adapted so quickly to life as a beastman.

“Wumu, I want to swim again.” Song Xu made her request.

After experiencing swimming in the river at night, Song Xu would from time to time feel like diving into the water. As for why she had to bring snake-snake along, wasn’t it because she was afraid there might be crocodiles by the water?

Snake-snake was a very easily domesticated snake. He dropped from the tree branch into the water, and Song Xu happily grabbed his arm and dove in with him.

The river during the day was an entirely different scene from the night. Lush green aquatic plants and small fish, river mussels and snails in the sandy mud at the bottom extending their soft flesh, large patches of aquatic plant roots on the surface trailing in the water—everything looked as if it were in 4K ultra-high definition.

The lone tree in the middle of the river where they had slept at night was bustling with visitors during the day, a flock of egrets filling the branches as they waited to catch fish.

Halfway through, Song Xu flipped over and climbed onto the big snake’s back. Watching the relaxed way this group of elegant fishermen caught fish, she made an envious sound, wanting to join in. “I also want to eat fish.”

“First, I’ll go ashore to weave a fishing net. Do you think using grass to weave a net would work…”

Wumu’s snake tail slapped the water with a pa. A large fish passing by was unfortunately stunned, rolling its eyes and belly-up as it was pushed to the surface by the snake tail.

Pressing down on the several-jin heavy big fish, the squirrel let out a shocked sound: “Sss!”

Wumu: “Sss.”

Footnotes

• 1
  Zhang San: A placeholder name in Chinese, similar to “John Doe.”