The blazing sun scorched down, snakes writhed in tangles, and the carriages came to a halt.
The coachman jumped down and picked up a stone to wedge beneath the wheel. The convoy stopped in the mountain hollow.
"Spectacular!"
Golden wings fluttered as the Heaven Centipede, Liang Qu, landed atop Li Xianghan's head. Its hundred segmented legs clasped her hairpin as it watched the brilliantly colored mass of snakes twisting, hissing, and stretching across the road ahead.
There were at least tens of thousands of snakes.
Brightly colored, red and green, densely packed together—if one could see a tail, one could not find its head; if one could see a head, one could not find its tail. They were a hundred times more tangled and intricate than the most complicated knot of rope.
They mindlessly entwined their tails and mindlessly swallowed each other, rolling down the mountainside, smashing against rocks, pouring into the shrubs, exhausting every effort to breed offspring. A stray pair of snakes was flung from the greater mass and landed by people's feet, slithering away in panic.
The wild was full of disobedient wild snakes. The pet rats were so frightened that they ran everywhere, burrowing into their cages and locking the doors tight.
Liang Qu had seen a similar scene once in Animal World when he was little. Those things seemed to be called garter snakes. The moment they emerged from hibernation, they threw themselves into a passionate group pile. He had nightmares that night. It had been creepy enough through a screen; seeing it with his own eyes made his scalp crawl. The snakes before him were even more vividly colored, and there seemed to be several different species mixed together.
Did these snakes have no reproductive isolation?
"It's the Myriad Snake Gathering, the Myriad Snake