Song Xu nearly scrubbed off a whole layer of her own skin before she finally managed to wash away all the remnants of spider webs on her body. When she looked at the surface of the water, besides some fur that had been carried away by the current, there was also a whole layer of floating fur drifting on top, making Song Xu feel heartbroken—just how much fur had she lost this time!
Wumu was soaking in the water. There were even more spider webs on his body, and he still hadn’t finished dealing with them.
He bent his snake tail, hugged it in front of himself, and wiped the spider webs off. Under the moonlight, the scales on his body looked hazy and radiant, and at a glance he looked a bit like a dreamy, beautiful mermaid.
Swimming over to his side, Song Xu also lifted a section of his tail and helped him wipe off the spider silk. His scales were smooth, so it was much easier to rub, but his body was too long, and the area with sticky webs was too large.
Wumu was too careless when wiping by himself—he would just remove the large patches of spider silk on the surface and more or less ignore the small ones. Song Xu had no choice but to take it over and do a second round of processing. Such a beautiful snake, how could he not be properly maintained!
As she wiped, she touched a certain spot slightly lower on the snake tail. The scales there were not very even. The tail in her hands suddenly twitched and moved away.
Song Xu realized where she had just been rubbing: “Sorry, I didn’t notice!” What a pity—she hadn’t looked carefully.
Seeing Wumu holding his own tail and dealing with that part himself, the squirrel muttered inwardly. A snake’s organ was usually wrapped inside the scales, unlike many animals where it was exposed outside—this was basically like being born wearing clothes. Everyone’s wearing clothes, so what’s there to be embarrassed about? Besides, she had touched it plenty of times already.
Since he wouldn’t let her help anymore, Song Xu sat to the side. Right now, many parts of her body were a little red and swollen, and her hands were too—just touching them made them burn.
At times like this, she actually wasn’t noisy anymore, quietly staying to the side and looking at Wumu. His body was now almost completely covered in scales. Those poisonous spider webs had been blocked by the scales and couldn’t cause him any harm, so after washing clean, he was still a smooth, slippery snake, with no sign of redness or swelling.
She hadn’t seen him like this in a long time. Even though her eyes were swollen, Song Xu still wanted to look a bit more. Propping up her now-chubby little face, she asked, “Are you easy to talk to in this form?”
The scales had already spread to his chin, and his mouth looked like it was about to be wrapped up too.
Wumu lifted his head to look at her: “Talking, okay.”
“Alright.” Song Xu chuckled softly, teasing, “Even the inverted sentence is still one.”
Finally, everything was completely dealt with. The snake tail was taken out of the water and sprawled all over the shore. The two of them didn’t plan to look for a nearby cave to stay in anymore—this open riverside was good enough.
They leaned against a rock together. Song Xu got up and sat on the soft snake body, probably around where Wumu’s chest would be. With an eager expression, she pressed on Wumu’s face and carefully observed his chin and mouth area, studying the junction between scales and skin.
Even with moonlight, it couldn’t compare to lamplight. If she didn’t lean close, she couldn’t see clearly.
Wumu uncooperatively moved his face away. Song Xu grabbed his ear and said, “Wumu, open your mouth.”
Wumu opened his mouth: “Sss!”
Song Xu: “Eh, that’s right! Let me take a look. Your mouth is still a human mouth, it hasn’t turned into a snake, it’s just that these few teeth are a bit sharp. Stick out the forked tongue and let me see.”
Wumu grabbed her hand down, his expression a bit fierce: “Not looking. Sleep!”
Song Xu pinched his eyebrow: “Don’t, don’t frown!”
Wumu hid in the shadow cast by the big rock. A shallow layer of gloom covered most of his still-intact face, while the scales below were like ever-expanding darkness, spreading upward. Song Xu felt along the scales at the junction on his neck, followed the thin scales to behind his ear, then slid both hands through his hair at the back of his head and crossed them, using this posture to suddenly hug—or rather, loop—Wumu’s neck.
“If you appear like this again next time, will the scales spread to your eyes? Then what will your mouth and nose turn into?”
“And will you still have hair at that time? I’ve been curious for a long time. Is your hair transformed from scales? Why do snakes have no fur, but when you turn into a human, you have such beautiful long hair instead of being bald?”
Wumu’s face was like it had been frozen over. Leaning on Song Xu’s shoulder, he let out a “gu” sound from his throat.
He could even make this kind of sound, what does that mean? Song Xu secretly laughed and asked, “Can you transform whenever you want, or only when you’re in a hurry?”
Wumu didn’t speak.
Song Xu: “I’m guessing you should be able to freely turn into a half-beastman form now, it’s just that you don’t want to transform, right?”
Wumu: “This is not, half-beastman, appearance.”
Song Xu understood: “You think this look doesn’t resemble a proper half-beastman, you don’t like it, so even if you can transform you don’t want to, and you’d rather maintain beast form?”
She had thought snake-snake didn’t understand these things, but she hadn’t expected him to care about whether he looked good or not. She hadn’t even noticed this kind of secretly fussy little mindset.
Snake-snake indeed hadn’t understood these things at first. That was thanks to a certain squirrel who liked saying sweet words—praising his beauty three times a day—making snake-snake start to care.
“Oh my god, wake up, you’re super cool like this, okay!” Song Xu vigorously shook Wumu’s neck.
“Never before, had this kind of, change.” Wumu’s language skills were just like his transformation skills—full of ups and downs. When calm, he spoke word by word, and paired with his appearance, it was even a bit intimidating. Once he got anxious, everything became jumbled, and that was it—only cuteness left.
“Not, not good, to maintain! Not…” When the third “not” came out of Wumu’s mouth, Song Xu suddenly smacked a kiss onto him, blocking the sentence he had finally smoothed out.
“Ahhhhh hahaha so cute!” Song Xu both shook him and crazily rubbed his cheeks, suddenly getting excited.
Wumu: ?
Why this reaction? Wumu didn’t understand.
After Song Xu finished getting excited: “What were you saying just now? Continue.”
Wumu forgot. His mind was now full of wondering whether his partner had been poisoned by spider venom and become a bit delirious. In the past, there had been people in the tribe who went mad after being bitten by poisonous insects.
Wumu instead pressed Song Xu’s swollen cheeks, inspected her, then pulled up her hands to look, and tugged up her feet as well. Song Xu was pulled so hard she stumbled and toppled to the side: “Oof!”
She hadn’t been bitten by spiders. After confirming, Wumu hugged her back, resting his head on her again. He recalled what he had wanted to say earlier and continued: “Not good, later will be even, uglier.”
Song Xu immediately forgot to question why he had just done all that, and frantically rubbed the back of his head, using sweet words to bewitch the snake heart: “Don’t be unhappy anymore, you’re really super handsome like this. Even if your eyes were gone later you’d definitely still be super handsome! You’re an unstoppable, fight-anyone, super brave, fierce big snake—get confident already! Have you heard the story of Nüwa creating humans? You haven’t? Okay, I’ll tell you right now. Nüwa was a snake with a human head and snake body. The clay figures she molded became humans. She molded them after herself, the prettiest. You were molded after that!”
Even though he didn’t really understand, Wumu could feel her emotions.
In this world, no one would fanatically love another person. Even when pursuing the opposite sex for reproduction, after the breeding season passed, the passion would fade. Once a season passed, many partners would part ways.
But the squirrel wasn’t like that. Even though he couldn’t reproduce with her, she was still willing to stay with him. One season after another passed, and she was always by his side. They left the settlement and went to distant places, doing many things that most beastmen would never do in their entire lives.
The squirrel was small, but she was very impressive, and very good.
Song Xu: “So, uh, I’m kind of about to suffocate. Wumu, could you loosen your tail a bit?”
Snake-snake didn’t know how to express things with words, so all his feelings went into actions. When he coiled someone up, it was really deadly.
After that night’s guidance, snake-snake no longer transformed back into beast form, and just used this strange half-beastman form to move around. In order to keep his confidence up, Song Xu would praise him from time to time. Luckily, she had read a lot of extracurricular books—she used every compliment she could think of, and with explanations she could also ramble on for a long time.
Song Xu also had a bit of worry. If she used up all the flattering words now, what would she do in the long future? But maybe not necessarily—maybe snake-snake wouldn’t understand human language later. Thinking about it that way, she should take advantage of now and praise him a few more times.
Song Xu held a long stick in her hand to probe the road. Day or night, whenever she felt like it, she would poke forward a few times. Especially when walking under trees or through narrow rock crevices, she always had to probe with the stick. This showed just how shaken she was by those spider webs.
As the saying goes, if a place has one spider beastman, it won’t have only one spider beastman. They aren’t social creatures, but they like living near each other—each in their own home, not really communicating, but living extremely close.
Song Xu and Wumu encountered several spider webs. In the daytime, they could see clearly. These webs, woven by spider beastmen, truly lived up to their reputation—appearing in all kinds of unexpected places, and in different shapes.
For example, the web in front of them right now was shaped like a bagua diagram. The most amazing part was that this bagua diagram had formed after the fact—each of the yin-yang dots had a bird stuck to it, and during their struggles, they had unintentionally arranged the complete web into this magical shape.
It made Song Xu repeatedly exclaim in amazement.
A male spider who had been woken up by the vibration of the web and came out to eat a small snack hadn’t expected that there would be two beastmen observing his web beside it. He was a lazy person, and the web he wove was also casual, with especially large gaps.
Tapping the web with his long legs, he hung above and asked, “Where did you come from, and what are you doing next to my web?”
The moment he spoke, Wumu swung his tail, and Song Xu raised her stick. Seeing that the situation was bad, the spider beastman climbed higher up again, his legs trembling weakly: “What are you doing? I’m telling you, I’m poisonous!”
The male spider was at the very bottom of the food chain in this area, facing danger to his life at any moment. Recently it was the breeding season, and he needed to find a partner, but among some races, female spiders would eat the male after mating. Unfortunately, all the female spiders he fancied were of this type, so throughout the entire breeding season, he had been busy breeding and escaping for his life. Now he was practically an expert at running away.
Song Xu and Wumu were still considering whether to go up and fight when the male spider, after finishing his tough talk, had already turned around and fled without a trace.
Judging from the environment, this place could be called a barren mountain of treacherous waters. Besides poisonous spiders, there were also poisonous scorpions.
Song Xu had forgotten how many times she had moved rocks or dug into soil to look for food and then discovered scorpions.
If it was an ordinary scorpion, it would swish and raise its barbed tail the moment it appeared. If it was a scorpion beastman, it would curse loudly while brandishing its weapon: “Which blind idiot dug into my home, looking to get stabbed, huh!”
It had to be said, without some lush mountains and clear waters to improve the environment, the beastmen living here all had somewhat irritable tempers.
Snake-snake adapted very well here—after all, he was also an irritable person. When a scorpion beastman waved its stinger and cursed angrily, Song Xu was still promising to bury the soil back for him, while snake-snake’s tail had already lashed out. The scorpion beastman who got flung to the ground realized he couldn’t defeat a likewise poisonous big snake, so he turned and left, not even wanting his house anymore.
Snake-snake’s attitude was: no one was allowed to show aggression in front of him. Otherwise, he would react reflexively.
Besides these, Song Xu had also encountered big lizards.
As a reptile enthusiast, Song Xu mainly liked snakes, but lizards were also popular pet reptiles.
Although the big lizard in front of her wasn’t as good-looking as geckos that were artificially domesticated and kept, its slow, leisurely way of walking also had a kind of cuteness.
The lizard-man finally couldn’t hold back and looked at the two beastmen beside him whom he had never seen before: “Why are you two following me all this time? If you want to fight, just say it!”
