Had My Hibernation Ability Disappeared?

"So I slept for a month? Winter's here. Why don't I need to hibernate?"

Bai Chuan had just woken from his evolutionary slumber, and he was a little confused. He clearly remembered that it had only been autumn before he evolved.

Yet after his evolution was complete, he had woken to find that it was already winter.

And a skinny old wolf and a rabbit had actually appeared right in front of him.

Hadn't Bai Chuan been staying in a cave before he evolved? Where had the wolf and rabbit come from?

Though Bai Chuan still had no idea what was going on, he'd just woken up ravenous, so having food come to him was undoubtedly a good thing.

He didn't bother being polite. He also took the chance to test out his newly evolved ability to generate electricity.

As expected, his electrical ability was a double-edged sword.

He looked at his claws, which were now a little red and numb, and sighed.

After all, his claws were covered in a thick layer of highly insulating keratin and dense, hard scales.

Even so, after he'd unleashed ten consecutive slashes charged with Electric Current, they had started to redden and sting a little.

It seemed he couldn't use this ability as a regular attack unless he found a better way to protect himself from the Electric Current.

But this was only the second time since arriving in this world that he'd had cooked food, wasn't it?

Bai Chuan glanced at the meat on the ground, some of it half-cooked and some only charred in patches, and wondered.

After a while.

By now, he'd eaten his fill and finally figured out how the wolf and rabbit had ended up in his cave.

It turned out that the snow had piled up too thick over the winter, and his luxurious cave hadn't been dug very deep.

With the weight of the snow pressing down, and the wolf and rabbit arriving on top of it, the section of the cave roof near the entrance had suddenly collapsed.

"Looks like I'll have to pay more attention to safety when digging caves from now on. If this cave hadn't been so spacious, I'd probably have been buried alive."

Bai Chuan looked at the hole in the cave ceiling and thought.

But he couldn't stay in this cave anymore. It was time to leave.

Even now, he still didn't understand why he didn't need to hibernate.

And though the wind outside was bitterly cold and he could feel the chill himself, his metabolism showed no signs of slowing down as he prepared to enter hibernation.

Snakes were cold-blooded animals, after all. Their body temperature changed with the temperature of their surroundings. The colder it got, the stiffer their bodies became.

Yet his body temperature was still normal. In fact, the cold was making his whole body stir into activity of its own accord to resist the chill.

His food began digesting faster, breaking down into biological energy that his body could quickly absorb.

Did this mean he'd lost his ability to hibernate?

Or was he no longer a cold-blooded animal?

He had no idea whether this was a good thing or a bad one.

After leaving the cave, Bai Chuan's head was full of questions. He had no idea that the scales on his body were slowly changing color with the environment.

His scales were no longer black and golden-yellow. Instead, they began turning the same colors as their surroundings: white, yellow, and green...

The white was the snow, the yellow the withered trees nearby, and the green the cold-resistant trees in the Snow Forest...

Before long, there was no sign that a great serpent had ever been in the Snow Forest. Only a deep depression in the ground showed that he had been there.

He hadn't crawled far before Bai Chuan sensed something was wrong. "What's going on?"

He lowered his head to look at himself, but all he could see was the color of the snow.

"Am I... invisible?"

Suddenly, he realized that besides his electrical ability, he also had Environmental Mimicry.

But was this ability passive?

Bai Chuan knew for certain that he hadn't actively used Invisibility, yet he was invisible now. Did that mean the ability was passive?

He closed his eyes and carefully felt the strange sensation his body brought him.

The next moment, his body slowly returned to its original black. Then, before long, all his scales turned gold, white, and blue...

For a while, he had so much fun playing around with it. The sensation was quite extraordinary.

It turned out that he could leave the ability entirely to instinct. That was what caused the passive changes he'd experienced as the environment changed.

At the same time, he could also control it himself and change to whatever color he wanted.

That made sense. If the changes weren't passive and he could only change colors actively, then whenever he wanted to use the ability, he'd have to keep his full attention on the environment and constantly adjust his colors to match.

Wouldn't that wear him out? And he wouldn't be able to do anything else, either.

After all, if he focused all his attention on this during a fight, would he have any energy left to keep track of his opponent?

Now that he understood, Bai Chuan realized that this creature's instincts were both remarkable and powerful.

If one day he could unlock them, just how powerful would he become?

An hour later.

Bai Chuan stopped crawling and gazed solemnly at the desolate Snow Forest. It was even more barren now than in the other seasons.

As far as the eye could see, there was hardly any sign of life.

"I can't go on like this. It's getting colder and colder, and I can't stay exposed to this biting wind. I need to find somewhere comfortable and sheltered from the wind."

Bai Chuan watched the howling gale and thought.

But where could he find a place like that?

Bai Chuan had no experience with this, and for a moment he felt lost. In the past, whenever he ran into a problem, his body's instincts would usually point him in the right direction.

But now those instincts were gone. Snakes didn't normally come out in winter, after all. They usually began hibernating back in autumn.

But because he'd kept evolving, he had now lost the ability to hibernate—and on top of that, his cave had collapsed.

As a result, he couldn't adapt to the situation.

Ultimately, there was too little food in the Snow Forest during winter.

Under normal circumstances, he would have found food and started eating within the hour he'd spent out earlier.

But now he couldn't find even the slightest trace of life.

If he hadn't run into two meals that had practically delivered themselves right after he woke up, he might have become a disgrace to all transmigrators—the first to starve to death.

Now that he had a clear goal, Bai Chuan soon set off again.

Along the way, he focused on places where caves might lie beneath the ground.

Sure enough, before long he found a narrow cave.

He didn't care what was inside and went straight in. If there were living creatures in there, so much the better—it would give him a chance to feast.

At the same time, he used his claws to widen the cave a little.

Before long, he felt the cold air outside slowly recede, and his body gradually warmed up.

For the first time, he realized how wonderful warmth could be.

Soon, he entered a cave that suddenly opened into a spacious chamber.

What met his eyes was a snake coiled up inside, hibernating.

Bai Chuan estimated that the snake was over two meters long. Its head was triangular, and its black markings faintly formed the character "king." Its scales were a mix of yellow, white, and black, like the vegetable patches full of flowering Chinese cabbage.