Ye Qin did not feel smug after strangling a natural enemy several times his size. Instead, he replayed the scenes from the battle in his mind, constantly reviewing every detail.
To be honest, if not for cultivation, strangling prey like this would have been impossible in the wild.
He was not an ordinary snake, after all. His former human nature had given Ye Qin an advantage, and it was also the foundation on which he would establish himself in the future.
Otherwise, he would never have embarked on the path of cultivation.
Animals possessed instinct but lacked intelligence. Now that he possessed both, strange transformations could naturally occur.
After lying on the ground to rest for a while, Ye Qin finally recovered his strength.
Yet when he looked at the eagle's corpse, he found himself at a loss.
He was not hungry after eating the squirrel earlier. Besides, he could not finish such a large creature.
Moreover, the eagle was covered in too many feathers, which made its meat unpleasant to eat. It was like how some people disliked fish because of all the bones.
The same applied to the eagle before Ye Qin. Thus, he did not bother with it and simply waited for other carnivores to deal with the corpse.
Ye Qin did not know that not long after he left, no other predators came.
A tall figure approached from not far away. He slowly picked up a feather that had fallen to the ground, then spotted the eagle's corpse nearby.
"Huh? I clearly saw it flying this way earlier. How did it suddenly die?"
The man was utterly baffled. Carrying the eagle's corpse, he began examining it carefully and discovered that all the bones in its body were limp, as though they had been snapped by some tremendous force.
The grass around it was also somewhat disordered. Feathers lay scattered everywhere, along with several other traces.
Judging from the scene, the eagle had clearly engaged in a fierce battle with another creature not long ago.
Although eagles were not as large as lions or tigers, they were absolute rulers of the skies. On top of that, they could fly and possessed incredible speed and diving ability.
Apart from those enormous animals, most land creatures were no match for them.
The man's pupils suddenly contracted, as though he had seen something. Between the green blades of grass, several black scales glimmered brilliantly under the sunlight.
He picked them up and could not help exclaiming, "These are snake scales."
"Could the eagle have fought a snake just now?"
The man found it hard to believe. Eagles were snakes' natural enemies. Their sharp claws, fangs, and beaks were all devastating weapons against snakes.
Once caught by one of them, a snake had almost no chance of surviving.
When a snake saw an eagle, it could not even outrun it. How could it possibly take the initiative to fight?
And yet, in this battle, the snake had won.
It simply defied the laws of nature. Looking across the entire ecosystem, such a thing should have been impossible.
However, the scene before him was right there, leaving him no choice but to believe it.
Snakes strangled their prey, suffocating them and crushing their bones. The marks on the eagle's corpse matched this characteristic perfectly.
In addition, he had found snake scales, and there were no traces of any other animals.
Every sign pointed to the creature that had killed the eagle being a snake!
Eagles had always been the ones to prey on snakes, but now the tables had turned. Such incidents did occur, but they were not common.
There were cases of animals killing their predators, but there was always a prerequisite: the difference in their strength and size could not be too outrageous.
Looking at the snake scales in his hand, the man could not immediately tell what kind of snake they belonged to. However, the scales were relatively small, so he deduced that the snake itself should not be very large.
As everyone knew, a creature's strength was proportional to its size.
A five-meter-long python could exert up to one kilogram per square centimeter of pressure when constricting its prey.
By that calculation, a snake with scales like these could at most constrict two sparrows—or perhaps a large Field Mouse—to death. That was already the limit.
For it to have constricted this eagle to death was nothing short of a fantasy. It was impossible, because a small snake simply did not possess such strength.
Moreover, according to what he knew, this mountain range was home only to small and medium-sized snakes. Pythons could not possibly appear here.
If it had been a large snake or a venomous snake, killing the eagle in return might still have made sense. But a small, nonvenomous snake trying to kill an eagle?
It was simply inconceivable.
Even a biologist would have clicked their tongue in amazement.
Everything before him defied common sense and left him utterly baffled.
The man found it strange, but he did not dwell on it. "The world is truly vast. There really is no end to its wonders."
Meanwhile, Ye Qin had already returned to the cave. That filling meal would probably keep him from needing to hunt again for several days, allowing him to focus on cultivating inside the cave.
Not far from the bones was a pit several meters deep. From a human perspective, it was not particularly impressive.
But if the one who had dug it was a snake, that was another matter entirely.
As everyone knew, snakes did not dig burrows themselves. They had no such habit. Usually, they occupied the caves of other animals or found a hole in the wild to barely serve as their nest.
To say nothing of digging such a large pit—it practically violated biological common sense.
Ye Qin had cleared all the soil to the side. The newly dug pit was taking shape more and more, and it would probably be finished after a little more time.
After completing all this, Ye Qin resumed cultivating.
"Rumble—"
Dull thunder continued outside the mountain cave, drawing closer from the distance and heralding the arrival of another round of rain.
Outside the cave, the rain pattered like large and small pearls falling onto a Jade Plate. From time to time, a few clear frog calls rang out, as though performing a stirring symphony. Yet none of this could affect Ye Qin.
He could now enter a meditative visualization state very quickly, but there was one regrettable thing.
The state of "entering meditation" that he had reached the first time he cultivated had never appeared again.
After spending this period visualizing, he guessed that the earlier state was not something that occurred often. It could not appear every time, and represented a transcendent state of sudden enlightenment.
If he could enter that state, his body might undergo some inexplicable transformation, and even his cultivation would improve by leaps and bounds.
However, these were merely Ye Qin's guesses. After all, he had entered that state hazily the last time and had not had the chance to figure out what was happening.
When he later tried to enter it again, he could not find the way. He did not know whether the timing had been wrong or the method.
Perhaps only after entering that state of enlightenment for a second time would he understand its underlying principles.
When Ye Qin opened his eyes again, the rain outside had already stopped.
Without the irritating sound of rain, his thoughts instead grew restless, like a small stone tossed into a lake of the heart, sending out faint ripples.
"Ah, my cultivation these past few days has felt somewhat off."
Ye Qin could not explain it clearly. It was as though he had already touched the threshold, yet remained separated from it by the final layer of paper. No matter what he did, he could not pierce through.
He felt as if he were trying to view flowers through a fog. He was clearly only a tiny step away, but because he could not find the right method, he could only keep wandering in circles.
Ye Qin could not help muttering to himself, "This is probably what they call a bottleneck. And as for the path of cultivation ahead, I'm still completely lost. I have no plans at all and am simply taking things one step at a time."
(End of chapter)