"Heaven and earth are thieves of all things; all things are thieves of man; man is a thief of all things."
"When the Three Thieves are properly aligned, the Three Powers are at peace."
"Thus it is said: Eat according to the seasons, and your hundred bones will be in harmony; act according to the workings of the mechanism, and all transformations will be at peace. People know the divine as divine, but do not know that what makes the non-divine divine is precisely its lack of divinity."
In the chaos, Ye Qin vaguely heard someone speaking.
He struggled to open his eyes, but it felt as though a thousand-kilogram boulder had crashed down on him, snapping every bone and tendon in his body and grinding them into mud. The pain nearly forced a scream from him.
"Hiss—"
Ye Qin abruptly opened his eyes, only to see needle-like points of emerald green filling his vision and completely blocking out the sky above. It was as though he had landed in a primeval Amazon rainforest, with the surrounding plants towering to astonishing heights.
Ye Qin clearly remembered accidentally slipping and falling into a lake. How had he ended up in a primeval forest?
His shock was so great that he forgot the pain in his body. It took him a long while to realize that those plants were actually weeds.
When had the inconspicuous weeds by the roadside grown so tall?
Even with hormones, they probably couldn't have grown to this size.
The trees not far away were even more unbelievably huge. Their emerald crowns soared into the heavens, as though neighboring the blue sky and white clouds, stretching their branches to the fullest and casting down a patch of shade.
An unknown object with the texture of striped marble looked like a meteorite from beyond the heavens. Ye Qin stared at it for a long while before realizing that it was actually just an ordinary stone.
There were also flowers that looked as though they had undergone genetic mutations. A single petal was large enough to cover his entire body.
The surroundings were clearly filled with familiar sights, yet they had become utterly strange in his eyes.
Ye Qin drew in a sharp breath. He felt as though everything had been magnified countless times, creating a bizarre sense of dissonance.
To someone with a fear of gigantic objects, everything around him was practically a nightmare.
He instinctively tried to get up, but he couldn't straighten his body at all. Instead, he accidentally tugged at his wounds, and a piercing pain spread through him like ten thousand ants devouring his heart.
"Hiss—"
"What happened to me?"
He opened and closed his mouth, but the sound that came out was an unconscious hiss.
Ye Qin soon noticed that something was wrong with him. He tried turning his head, only to see a flash of charred scales. The strange feeling in his heart grew heavier and heavier.
Enduring the excruciating pain, he twisted his body, only to hear the faint rustling sound of a crawling creature.
A bizarre, absurd thought surfaced in his mind.
Seeing the small puddle beside him, he endured the pain and crawled toward it.
The reflection that appeared before his eyes was actually a thin, tiny black snake!
It turned out that the surrounding scenery hadn't grown larger. He had shrunk. The various oddities from before finally had an explanation.
Those beast pupils unique to snakes held the coldness of a cold-blooded animal. Because of his overwhelming shock, they had already constricted to the size of needles.
His entire body was covered in pitch-black scales and wounds, all traces left behind by lightning. Some of his flesh had even split open, hardening into dark scabs. He looked hideously terrifying.
Ye Qin couldn't believe that after falling into the lake, he had transmigrated into the body of a snake!
For a moment, he didn't know whether to lament his luck or his misfortune.
Ye Qin couldn't swim, and there had been no one else around when he fell into the water. He could be said to have been certain to die, yet he had transmigrated instead.
But fate had played another joke on him.
At least in the transmigration novels he had read, even the protagonist with the worst possible start was still human.
Good heavens, when it came to him, he wasn't even a person anymore. He was a snake—and one that was about to die at that. It was practically nightmare mode.
The pain coming from his body reminded Ye Qin that none of this was an illusion or a dream.
Looking at his reflection in the water, with traces of lightning burns everywhere, he wondered just how deep the hatred and resentment had been. It would have been better to let him drown to death in the first place.
So what if he had transmigrated and been reborn? He had become a dying snake. He had been reborn, yet it felt like he hadn't been reborn at all.
From here on, all that awaited him was the ending of waiting for death.
Ye Qin let out a forlorn sigh.
"If I'd known this would happen, why make me go through such suffering? Wasn't this just toying with me?"
Heaven had already chosen the manner of Ye Qin's death, but at least he could choose a suitable burial ground for himself.
That way, after he died, some wild beast like an eagle wouldn't swallow him whole, leaving not even an intact corpse behind.
Although he had become a snake, Ye Qin was still human on the inside, and some of his views couldn't be changed just yet.
He couldn't dig a hole and bury himself now, nor could he rest in peace beneath the earth, but he could at least find a place where he could be laid to rest.
Ye Qin endured the pain and continued crawling. Because of his limited height, he couldn't tell exactly where he was and could only act on instinct.
At first, he wasn't accustomed to his snake body. Ye Qin felt as though he was about to twist himself into a pretzel. Calling it crawling was generous—the speed was comparable to that of a snail.
After wriggling around for ages, he had crawled only a dozen meters or so. Fortunately, he hadn't tied his body into knots or committed the foolish act of winding himself into a tangled mess.
Just as he was struggling forward, a chill surged through his heart.
In the blink of an eye, a piercing shriek rang out. The sound of something cleaving through the air came from above. Ye Qin ducked instinctively, then his serpentine body shot to the side.
A searing pain came from his back.
He abruptly raised his head. A massive eagle stood not far away, eyeing him hungrily. Its talons flashed with a cold gleam, like hooks that claimed lives. They had come within a hair's breadth of ending his little life.
Ye Qin couldn't help swallowing. What he feared had come to pass. In his human eyes, the eagle before him was nothing remarkable.
But to a severely wounded snake, it was an enormous monster.
Ye Qin didn't dare move recklessly.
Although he had avoided the fatal strike, how could the eagle before him possibly let its hard-won delicacy escape?
He was certain that the moment he made the slightest movement, the eagle would attack. When that happened, he would be thrust into an extremely passive position.
Moreover, the eagle's speed in flight was astonishing. Even if he hadn't been injured, he might not have been able to outrun it. If it caught him, he would certainly die on the spot.
Ye Qin's only advantage was probably that he had a brain, while the eagle didn't.
Before he could think of a solution, the eagle had already lost its patience. Its beast pupils suddenly narrowed—a clear sign that it was preparing to attack.
It didn't care whether the body of the Little Black Snake before it contained a human soul. All it knew was that it was about to enjoy a hearty meal.
In the animal kingdom, the strong preyed on the weak and only the fittest survived. That was the law of nature.
Its black wings spread wide. In Ye Qin's eyes, they nearly blotted out the sky and the sun. With a piercing shriek, the eagle attacked again.
The powerful airflow stirred up by its wings was like wind blades striking him head-on, filling the air with suffocating pressure.
Although Ye Qin knew that he was severely wounded and wouldn't live much longer, he absolutely couldn't accept being swallowed by a bird—especially if it left not even a trace of his bones behind.
He absolutely couldn't accept dying that way.
At the instant a person was about to die, the potential that erupted from them was immense.
Ye Qin swiftly twisted his serpentine body, dodging the eagle's attack in a sorry state. Its enormous beak passed within a hair's breadth of him, missing his body by the narrowest of margins.
(End of Chapter)