Because she had gone to sleep too early and woken up early, Song Xu urged Wumu to get up and hurry on their way while the sky was still dark.
“Walking through the forest before dawn is a rare experience, let’s try it! We can even watch the sunrise later!” Song Xu said.
In the forest, sunlight is the most precious thing. Everything here depends on sunlight to survive, and plants that receive more sunlight grow better.
They had already moved from dense forest into comparatively sparse woodland. Shrubs began to appear more frequently, and low-growing plants, receiving more sunlight, grew vigorously.
The change in environment created a certain amount of obstruction to their travel.
In Wumu’s forest, there are wide gaps between tall trees for people to walk through, but in areas overgrown with shrubs, the bushes do not leave a single patch of empty ground. This place is rarely traversed, and even more rarely has paths cut through it, so it is often a situation where the road ahead is blocked, and all four directions are blocked.
What is especially hateful is that most of the chaotically growing shrubbery has thorny vines, and the result of a furry squirrel delivering herself to them is imaginable.
By comparison, Wumu the big snake, covered all over in smooth scales that thorns cannot catch on at all, can directly press through any shrubbery no matter what he drills into.
Those resilient thorny bushes often spring back and close up quickly after the big snake slithers through, making it impossible for Song Xu to follow behind and take shortcuts.
So, along this stretch of road, it often becomes a scene where the big snake moves through the shrubs below, while the squirrel hangs from branches above, leaping, and continuously leaping.
The squirrel spreads her body and claws to grab a branch, using inertia and her body’s spring to fling herself out, flinging herself onto another branch, repeating this over and over. It looks dashing, but in reality it consumes a lot of stamina and, because of the complex terrain, it is easy to mess up.
There are always places without suitable branches—she has already flung herself out but cannot find a good landing point, or the branch is too thin and fails to bear her weight and breaks, and so she plunges headfirst into the shrubbery, coming back out with a whole body covered in thorny leaves.
The increased activity of an airborne squirrel causes her appetite to increase as well.
So while she is flying along up there, if she grabs a branch and sees some tender leaves on it that look quite tasty, she will stop and eat a couple of bites. Sometimes she eats with too much enthusiasm. Wumu slithers along below and notices that the person has not followed. A big snake head will then emerge from the bushes below, flicking its tongue as it searches for the scent of the missing squirrel.
Spotting a tree in bloom, with flowers giving off a sweet, fragrant scent, Song Xu felt that not eating a couple of bites would be a loss. She scampered up along small branches to the trunk, then slid all the way to the top of the tree.
The white flowers were trumpet-shaped, convenient for birds to sip nectar. Song Xu plucked a large dew-covered flower together with its stem, shook it twice, and all the dewdrops fell into the bottom of the trumpet. The liquid tinged with yellow pollen swayed inside the trumpet cup. Song Xu took a sip like tasting wine, and felt blissful.
As she was savoring the nectar, she saw on another branch tip a small, delicate figure also busy at work. The other looked a bit like a squirrel, but more like some kind of pet sugar glider Song Xu had seen before.
It was relatively small in size, with a gray-black back, a white belly and paws, a tail much longer than its body, and two round black eyes that happened to notice her and flickered with frightened light.
Song Xu paused in place and sensed the other’s faint aura—this was actually a beastman. The other quickly twitched its pink nose twice, clenched the flower in its hands, then turned and ran. The word “hi” was still stuck in Song Xu’s throat before she could call out, and the other had already disappeared.
Regarding Song Xu’s mid-journey disappearances, Wumu had long since grown accustomed to them. He was a mature snake; he would come back to find her himself. Song Xu stood on the branch tip and craned on tiptoe to look around, while Wumu silently began to coil up the trunk and climb.
Rarely encountering a beastman smaller than herself and failing to strike up a conversation, Song Xu regretfully monopolized the entire flowering tree. She climbed to the treetop to pick the flowers that were blooming the best.
The sunlight was very good. Sunlight at this temperature made people only want to fall into decadence.
How about eating a full meal here and then taking a short nap? Song Xu straddled the branch, her two hind legs dangling in midair, paws cupping a flower as she sucked the nectar.
All of a sudden, she caught a gust of wind coming from the sky. A patch of shadow, carrying the wind, dove down. Song Xu instantly pressed close to the trunk and hid beneath the canopy, sliding down several meters in one continuous motion.
After reaching a safe spot, she turned back to look at where she had just been sitting. A giant eagle with a wingspan of more than three meters had missed its grab and was flapping about on the treetop.
This was a large but ordinary eagle, not a beastman.
In this world, ordinary animals and beastmen also stand in a mutually predatory relationship. Beastmen with small beast forms like Song Xu are often treated as prey by those large ferocious beasts and raptors.
So Song Xu was able to develop such proficient evasion skills.
The big snake that was slowly coiling up the tree suddenly lunged upward. Almost at the same moment the squirrel sprinted downward, he had already rushed to the canopy in the blink of an eye. In the very next second after Song Xu saw clearly that it was an eagle, the big snake had already opened his huge mouth toward the wings.
Snakes and eagles are also in a predator–prey relationship in nature, but here, a big eagle cannot contend with a big snake and can only flee in haste.
The big snake succeeded because of his size, and also failed because of his size. His thick, long body frightened the big eagle into escaping, but at the same time made the treetop unable to bear his weight and snap. In that moment of flying and falling together, the two sides were pulled apart. The big eagle narrowly escaped with its life, not being bitten by this big venomous snake.
The eagle flew away. The big snake released the broken branch he had wrapped around, half of his body still leaning forward as he hissed toward the sky.
Song Xu, the person involved, took a sip of dew-and-nectar, jumped onto the branch beside Wumu, saw that he was still holding his mouth open, and casually tossed the flower in her hand into it.
“Don’t be angry. Anyway, neither side’s hunt succeeded.”
Sudden incidents like this had played out countless times. This world is full of crises. Even if the companion by her side is a top-tier predator like Wumu, danger will still arrive without warning. She needs keen perception and agile movement in order to avoid risks.
The big snake seemed a bit bothered by the matter. After a while, while coiled on the tree, he suddenly hissed at the air again.
After eating, Song Xu took a short nap in the tree. Beneath her was the soft snake body, beside her were swaying flowers. A lazy sleep after being well fed soothes the heart.
In the undulating terrain, shrubs and vines grow in continuous stretches. In this kind of dense forest, quite a few tall trees stand half a head taller than the ones around them, and each one looks weather-beaten. These trees become resting platforms for squirrels and snakes.
Song Xu gazed into the distance, then suddenly patted the snake beside her. “Wumu, look at that tree. It’s so strange. Did it grow a lot of lumps? It’s all branches and I don’t see a single leaf.”
“Let’s go take a look!” After saying that, she dove down the tree, running along the trunk as if on flat ground.
The tree that Song Xu called strange was very large, twice as big as the tree they were resting on. The closer they got, the clearer the shape of those “lumps” on the giant tree became.
Song Xu skidded to a stop and waved at the snake head poking up from below. “Hurry up and come take a look!”
“Are those bird nests? That whole tree is covered in bird nests. How many birds must live there!” She remembered that there was a kind of weaver bird that lived in groups, with a whole flock building nests on the same tree.
“Can we get a little closer to look?” When Song Xu asked this, it basically meant she wanted to go closer and look.
But after getting a little closer, she smelled the bird scent drifting over and realized that it was not ordinary group-living weaver birds over there, but bird-type beastmen living there.
“Bird beastmen… I’ve never seen any before.” Song Xu muttered, glancing at the big snake beside her.
If she brought the big snake over, no matter how you looked at it, it would seem like killing and stealing eggs. At that point, either those bird beastmen would be scared to death, or the two of them would be treated as invading outsiders.
Song Xu painfully decided to suppress her curiosity and resolved to just look from afar, to avoid triggering large-scale armed conflict.
She had just finished comforting herself, but the big snake did not play by common sense and took the lead in acting. He darted toward that direction. Song Xu stared in shock and stretched out her claws behind him. “Wumu…?!”
She failed to stop him and could only chase after him. Seeing the big snake’s aggressive momentum, could it be that he was hungry and wanted to eat birds? These birds are not something you can just eat, my friend!
The flock of birds became noisy. Those chorus-like cries spread very far. Even from a distance, Song Xu felt as if someone were holding a loudspeaker and blasting it beside her ear.
She thought that Wumu had not even arrived yet and they were already sounding the air-raid siren. They had been discovered a bit early.
In the gap between running strides, she lifted her head and took a look, and discovered that the air-raid siren was not aimed at the big snake creeping along the ground, but at an eagle in the sky.
A giant eagle was circling above the tree full of nests, occasionally trying to approach the nests below. But a group of much smaller birds surrounded it and were attacking it, making it impossible for it to get close. The two sides were locked in a stalemate, and the small bird group seemed to be faintly at a disadvantage.
That eagle looked a bit familiar. It seemed like the one that had tried to hunt her yesterday morning. This eagle was something else—just an ordinary eagle, yet in encountering it twice, both times it had been hunting beastmen. Very impressive.
The big snake approached the giant tree at this moment. The tree was so covered in bird nests that not a single patch of green could be seen, and for some reason the area around the base of the tree was also completely barren. A patch of land that looked very fertile was giving off a rather strong bird scent.
The little birds, who had just suffered an air attack that still hadn’t been resolved, finally noticed that an even more dangerous predator had arrived beneath the tree. The chirping instantly became even louder, practically about to pierce eardrums.
Is their method of attack ultrasonic waves?! Song Xu covered her ears and watched as Wumu cut through the branches laden with bird nests like a hot knife through butter, charging straight for the treetop. In the process, frightened little birds kept bursting out of their nests. They shot out of the nests one after another like little cannonballs.
Small birds with golden feathers on their backs filled the branches. Those that couldn’t find space flew chaotically around the tree. It was a scene of utter doomsday-like chaos.
And Wumu was simply too fast. When he rushed into the battle at the treetop, he bit down on the eagle that was entangled by the flock, then dragged it all the way down the tree and slammed it in front of Song Xu, while the bird flock was still in a state of panicked confusion, not yet understanding what had happened.
The giant eagle, as if mutated in size, twitched inside the snake’s mouth. Song Xu confirmed that this was the very same eagle that had tried to grab her yesterday.
Who would have thought that this forgetful snake was actually so vengeful.
