What was the greatest feeling after recovering from a serious illness?
It was neither some wonderful sensation nor a profound enlightenment about life and death. Only one thing was pressing: hunger. A gnawing, gut-wrenching hunger that nearly drove her to eat whatever she could get her hands on filled her entire mind.
It was not merely the hunger after recovery, but the bewildering emptiness in her belly after waking from a long sleep.
She remembered how, back when she had been a young snake, every day had been fraught with fear and she had often gone hungry. The taste of grasshoppers had become her sweetest memory from those days. Unfortunately, she had grown far too large now; grasshoppers were no longer enough to fill her stomach, unless there was a locust plague.
She flew all the way down to the mountain village, dropped off the young woman, devoured the somewhat dried offerings that had sat on the altar for days, and still remained too hungry. She flew straight toward the distant great river.
In the village, the young woman's hair was a mess, and her face had turned blue from the freezing wind during that excessively fast flight.
"So fast..."
She had no choice but to fly fast. Her stomach felt as though it were on fire; she wanted nothing more than to chew bark and gnaw moss. Scrambling on all four claws, she raced across terraced fields and forests toward the water. There was more food in the river, and it was nutritious too—most importantly, easy to digest.
By the river, a white crane stood motionless in the shallows, waiting for prey to come to it.
This bird's hunting method was rather peculiar. Its two slender legs could stand in the water without wetting its feathers. It remained perfectly