Song Xu felt that as soon as he spoke, he looked a bit dazed, not very smart.
But seeing his eyes up close, the slit-like vertical pupils under the light added a dangerous air to him, highlighting a cold sense of distance that made people not dare to joke with him lightly.
“My beast form is very small, not even enough to be a little snack for you, and squirrels don’t taste good either.” Song Xu cautiously steered this dangerous topic away from herself. “You probably usually eat animals with larger bodies, like deer and wild boar, right?”
Wumu didn’t make a sound again. He just rested his head on his arm, lazily looking at her from above, occasionally flicking his snake tongue out to test the air.
Snakes usually use their tongues to gather information from the surroundings. If he didn’t speak, then sticking out his tongue was probably his signature response.
Song Xu noticed something very cute: this snake-type demi-beastman’s upper lip was M-shaped, the cupid’s bow slightly raised. His upper and lower lips did not fully close, leaving a tiny gap, and the tongue would slip out from that gap… just like how, in snake form, the mouth would also have a small opening to make it easier for the tongue to flick out.
Song Xu: Wuwu, such a cute little gap!
Wumu seemed to have little interest in communication. Very quickly, he stopped paying attention to Song Xu and turned over, presenting his back to her.
Song Xu felt regretful. She hadn’t talked enough yet. In such a huge place, it was not easy to finally have someone she could talk to.
But since Wumu clearly had no intention of engaging with her anymore, Song Xu quietly moved closer to his tail and carefully reached out to pinch it.
This tail was really outrageously thick, and also very intimidating. Coiled into continuous S-shapes like this, she roughly estimated its length to be at least over ten meters. The thicker snake-tail section below the waist felt very different from the tail tip.
She had only touched it twice when the snake tail under her hand began to roll. Muscles rippled beneath the layer of skin covered with soft scales, and her palm pressed against it could clearly feel the movement’s trajectory.
His long snake tail was like a huge bundle of ropes, rolling and rubbing against the stone. The speed wasn’t fast, but with the constant twisting, it almost occupied this entire large rock. Song Xu had nowhere to place her feet and was nearly pressed by the wildly swinging tail, so she could only jump down from the rock to give him space.
Snakes also need sunlight. Song Xu could tell that he was probably enjoying a morning sunbath right now. She thought, you can run from a big snake but you can’t run from its den—she should go get breakfast first.
What she ate was a mishmash of various plant fruits. She had to eat at least two meals a day, otherwise she would get unbearably hungry. Compared to that, she really envied snakes.
Snakes could eat one meal and digest it for many days. Some snakes could go ten days, half a month, or even longer between meals. How convenient.
Finding food here was nowhere near as easy as strolling through a supermarket in her own world. To find something that even tasted slightly decent took a lot of effort.
Back in the small tribe where “Song” used to live, dozens of members were busy every day collecting food. Truly from morning to night, everything revolved around food.
Now, Song Xu was no longer so hungry that she would eat anything as long as it was edible, and she had become picky about food.
This season seemed to be between spring and summer, and ripe fruits were relatively scarce. Climbing up tree trunks, what she could find were mostly flowers and just-budding, unripe green fruits.
Eating like this for one or two meals was still fine, but by the third meal she felt she couldn’t take it anymore. For someone from a country of fine cuisine, eating these things every day was simply inhumane.
When tender shoots were bitten into, they had a raw, grassy taste, some even with bitterness.
The variety of food in the tree canopy was limited, and under the trees she could occasionally find mushrooms. They grew at the bases of damp tree roots that emitted a decaying smell, and their colors didn’t look very safe.
Even with the original body’s memories, in an environment the original body had never encountered, Song Xu could only fumble her way through survival.
On the ground, aside from some more commonly known mushrooms, there were even more mosses.
The kind that felt slippery when pinched and grew in large patches had a somewhat disgusting, slimy texture when chewed, and basically no taste.
The kind that looked greener, with small leaves but each leaf thick and plump, had a crisp texture, but the juice was very bitter, and after tasting it her tongue even felt a little numb.
Song Xu pfft pfft pfft spat out the saliva in her mouth, suspecting that it was poisonous.
Growing on the tree trunk, there was a kind of moss shaped like coral branches, purple-brown in color, and it tasted a little bit spicy. After Song Xu ate one piece, she discovered that beneath this moss there were more than a dozen ants running around chaotically. Looking closely, this moss seemed to be the doorway of an ant nest inside the tree trunk—now the entrance had lost one layer of cover.
Song Xu: “Sorry, I ate your front door.”
Aside from these mosses, there were even more bryophytes. They were widely distributed wherever they could grow; the carpet-like layer under her feet was exactly that.
Although they grew in abundance, they were basically inedible. In the relatively dark forest, mosses and bryophytes almost dominated the landscape.
Besides these two, there were also ferns on the ground. This type was much friendlier to her, because many tender stems and young leaves of ferns were edible!
Their leaves usually grew symmetrically, spreading out gracefully. The newly sprouted buds were curled up, and the edible part was only this small portion.
Song Xu slowly chewed the fern shoots with a faint sweetness, screaming in her heart about how badly she wanted to eat hot pot… at this moment, even cafeteria food, when she thought about it, seemed to carry an alluring filter.
After finally finishing breakfast, Song Xu decided to make herself a tree hollow.
The snake cave was big, but now that she had seen what that snake-type demi-beastman looked like and confirmed that he was male, she couldn’t keep shamelessly occupying his home.
Unable to find a ready-made tree hollow, Song Xu chose a large tree fairly close to the giant rock and planned to dig one herself. She had tried this type of tree yesterday—its bark was quite tough, and claws couldn’t dig through it. But the great thing about humans was knowing how to use tools.
A sharp stone struck the tree trunk again and again. The duk duk sounds attracted the attention of the big snake sunbathing nearby.
Wumu saw a squirrel hanging on the tree trunk, using a stone to knock at the bark—one fluffy little ball, its tail fur puffed up and sticking out, trembling along with her movements.
With a harmless demi-beast of the same kind nearby, Wumu inevitably felt a bit curious. But he didn’t have much curiosity. After glancing twice and feeling that he had gotten enough sun for today, he slid back along the giant rock into the cave.
At first, Song Xu planned to dig a big tree hollow, preferably with one bedroom and one living room. After all, the tree was very large. But as she kept digging, her standards naturally dropped.
So tired that she was about to stick out her tongue, Song Xu thought, what’s the point of digging something so big? One room is enough.
Then, looking at the several stones she had smashed and her own scraped claws, she resolutely decided that digging a tree hollow that her beast form could squeeze into would be enough.
Even with her requirements lowered again and again, she still spent several days before finishing this tree hollow. That very night, she couldn’t wait to move from the corner of the stone cave into her new home.
She gathered thick moss from the ground and put it inside the tree hollow, then spread a layer of leaves. After night fell, she lay in the high tree hollow, watching distant colorful clouds change and get chased down and swallowed by the night.
The wood shavings inside the tree hollow gave off a fresh woody fragrance, without the faint fishy smell of the stone cave. Moreover, the tree hollow was small—after she squeezed inside, it was basically filled. Then she blocked the entrance with moss, branches, and leaves. It was very warm, not as drafty as the stone cave.
Song Xu rolled around inside the narrow tree hollow, sleeping sprawled out, twisting and spiraling. The claws she accidentally stretched out scraped down quite a bit of wood shavings.
At least she was a demi-beast. Compared to ordinary squirrels, her claws were sharper, and they had played a considerable role when digging the tree hollow.
Young people sleep a lot. Song Xu was the type who slept quite deeply, but no matter how deeply she slept, if something knocked duk duk duk outside in the middle of the night, she would still be woken up.
Groggily poking out a squirrel head to look outside the tree hollow, Song Xu was startled by a pair of bright big eyes at the entrance. The one knocking on the tree trunk in the middle of the night was a woodpecker… probably. It was too dark for Song Xu to see clearly—she only saw the eyes.
The bird pecking the tree at night was also startled by her and flapped its wings as it quickly flew away. Song Xu scolded at its retreating figure, “Do you have any sense of morality? Knocking on doors in the middle of the night!”
A few goo goo goo bird calls came from the forest. Tonight there wasn’t even a moon. Outside, the shapes of the trees were eerie, and mist hung over the forest. Song Xu resentfully pulled her head back in and continued sleeping.
Aside from the unexpected visitor at night, Song Xu was quite satisfied with her new housing. To make herself live more comfortably, she decided to improve upon what she already had.
If she dried the damp, soft moss before laying it down, it would definitely be fluffier. And also—make a door.
Looking at the pink morning glow, Song Xu was full of enthusiasm for building her home!
Then, in the middle of the night, a torrential rain poured in through the entrance of her tree hollow, forming a shallow pool of water inside and soaking her freshly dried moss bed.
Cracks of lightning that could light up the firmament streaked across the gloomy sky outside from time to time. Thunder that seemed capable of shattering the earth made the tall trees in the forest tremble along with it.
Curled into a tight ball inside the tree hollow, Song Xu covered her ears tightly. From childhood to adulthood, Song Xu had rarely been afraid of anything, but she was very afraid of thunder.
The sound of trees breaking rang out nearby—branches were being snapped under the ravaging assault of torrential rain and violent wind. Listening to the sounds outside, the entire little squirrel trembled nonstop, like it had been fitted with a motor.
She realized that on a thunderstorm day, staying in such a high tree hollow was not safe. After another round of thunder ended, she shakily crawled out of the tree hollow against the pouring rain and fled toward that stone mountain that stood steady and stable amid the lightning and thunder.
By the time she rushed into the dry cave, all the fur on Song Xu’s body had already become soaking wet. She didn’t care about how bedraggled she looked and went straight to the deepest corner of the cave, jumped into the middle of that mass of snake tail, and covered herself with the snake’s tail.
She was terrified, caring about nothing else, only wanting to find a safe place to hide.
Wumu was woken by the slight movement. His pupils dilated in the darkness, allowing him to clearly see everything in the dark. He saw a wet squirrel tail draped over his own tail.
The long, patterned tail spread apart, revealing the squirrel underneath, covering her ears and trembling. Noticing that her cover had disappeared, the squirrel didn’t even lift her head. She wriggled farther under the snake tail that he had not moved, hiding herself again.
