At night, the fox caught a familiar scent in the air and bounded happily toward Giant Rock. It shook its head and called twice to the coiled Black Snake, as though inviting him out to play.
Black Snake lazily raised his head, glanced at it, then lay back down to stare into space. The fox did not pester him, simply turning cheerfully and disappearing into the night with light-footed steps.
It was as though it had come all that way just to say hello.
Black Snake did not want to move. The rainy season was approaching, and he was waiting to heal his hidden ailment with lightning that tore across the sky.
The moon was bright tonight, but his eyesight was poor. Distant scenery looked hazy as mist. Using thermal sensing, he noticed a few more heat sources in the Lone Crag Courtyard and wondered when he would have time to listen to "Snake Brother" calling again.
Suddenly, his thermal senses vaguely pieced together the outlines of something unusual.
What was that?
He swiftly switched modes.
In one part of the courtyard, a patch of color flickered repeatedly. Whenever it was about to emerge, something forcibly cut it short at the crucial moment.
Was that blurry apparition about to be drawn out again? I seemed to have seen it once before, but I've long since forgotten the details.
The anomaly flickered for a while, then fell silent.
An unknown amount of time passed before the same spot began flickering again. It was as though some indistinct thing was straining to emerge, only to fail in the end. After a moment, it stopped, waited a while, then began again, repeating the cycle...
The strange phenomenon stirred intermittently for a long time, making Black Snake marvel once again at how peculiar humans were.
After observing carefully, he realized this was very different from before.
Previously, that person had drawn out a blurry human silhouette. This time, however, it was strange, and the distance made it difficult to distinguish. After a little thought, Black Snake decided to go over and get a proper look.
He slid down Giant Rock and slithered straight toward the courtyard.
As usual, he climbed onto the rock. His gaze paused briefly on the shed snakeskin beside the wall; it looked rather like something he had discarded.
In its kennel, the yellow dog curled up, trembling, its teeth chattering.
He poked his head out from above, flicked his tongue, and aimed his head toward one of the rooms, patiently waiting for the anomaly to appear.
He did not wait long. Through his special sensory vision, Black Snake finally saw what was happening.
The little heat source's own spectral outline seemed to fit its body unsteadily. Whenever it loosened slightly, uncanny ripples spread through the surroundings. Some cold, deathly silent scene, overlapping reality yet utterly different from it, tried to seep through and make contact, but some restriction prevented it from emerging. When the soul's phantom outline settled firmly over the body again, all the flickering, eerie images vanished instantly.
Humans really were troublesome.
Black Snake instinctively felt that the cold scene was dangerous. It exuded the aura of death, and he ought to stay far away without touching any of it.
Just as he was about to leave, he suddenly fixed his attention on the hillside below.
At some point, a blurry, distorted human figure had appeared among the trees, wandering silently.
Black Snake considered whether to go over and swat it.
What followed grew eerie.
Whenever the little heat source's spectral soul wavered unsteadily inside the room, the cold, blurry figure on the hillside drifted silently toward the courtyard. When the child's soul and body stabilized for a while, that cold apparition circled in place. After some time, when the soul inside the room loosened again, it found its direction and drew closer, only to wander again once things stabilized.
Again and again, soundlessly, it ate away at the distance to the courtyard, inch by inch.
Black Snake paid no attention to how sinister the scene was. Instead, he was curious about its appearance and where it had come from.
As dawn hovered on the verge of breaking, the cold apparition stopped some distance from the courtyard.
Both the shed snakeskin hanging on the wall and Black Snake perched high on the rock radiated a vicious aura, a threat it could hardly endure.
Black Snake slid down and blocked the apparition's path with tremendous speed.
His slit pupils examined the distorted, icy energy before him, missing not a single detail.
He could no longer remember what the apparition he had encountered last time looked like.
He vaguely felt it had been different from this one. Their auras were utterly unlike, just as crows and sparrows differed despite both being birds.
While Black Snake strained to recall, the fox suddenly darted out from somewhere.
At the sight of the apparition, delight lit up its face. It leaped forward, raised a paw, and swatted.
Who would have thought that a single swipe would scatter the apparition like a wisp of smoke? It seemed beyond any hope of piecing itself back together.
"..."
The fox looked down at its paw, then searched for the vanished apparition. Its round eyes turned innocently toward Black Snake. It seemed to have just swatted his toy out of existence. By the rules of the wild, that counted as stealing food.
Black Snake fell into thought again. Looking at the increasingly dense, warm energy surrounding the fox, he roughly understood why the cold apparition could not withstand a swipe from its paw.
He flicked the tip of his tail, unconcerned about whether the apparition lived or died.
Dawn came early in summer.
As the human cub woke from sleep, the intermittent, icy phenomenon disappeared.
Through gaps in the branches and leaves, Black Snake saw the child take something. The signs of instability in the spectral outline diminished noticeably, occurring only once over a longer period.
The fox sat nearby, pawing at bugs for fun.
Black Snake dredged a nearly forgotten question from his memories: why had that apparition appeared in the valley? Could something capable of summoning it be hidden nearby?
It was quite vexing.
Before long, the scent of cooking drifted out of the Lone Crag Courtyard. Three adults set off on the journey home with the cub.
Black Snake put his thoughts aside for the moment. He glanced at the fox amusing itself, turned, and slithered toward Giant Rock.
Those tangled worries did not matter.
The urgent task was to remedy the mist leaking from his own body.
Coiled on the rock, he watched the four sources of living warmth recede farther and farther away, until they disappeared into the vast mountain landscape...
He was somewhat curious why no other birds or beasts attracted cold apparitions. Only these two-legged creatures had the most troubles, always producing things that could not be eaten. It was just as well that it had been swatted apart; that would spare him distractions while hunting at night.
Besides, the fox's energy was growing increasingly pure. Had it become stronger?
You'll never believe why I moved to... Kaohsiung
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How exactly did it do that?
A trace of envy rose in his heart. How wonderful it would be if he could learn to improve himself that way too.
He shifted a little farther into the shade and waited quietly...
After many days of bitter waiting at Giant Rock, the wind finally brought a long-absent coolness. Though the sky was clear for ten thousand miles without a cloud, Black Snake could already sense the rainy season quietly approaching.
Days without rain were truly torment. The damp air beside the river mingled with a fishy scent; in the end, it lacked something.
Only the rain in the mountains was cool and refreshing, the finest of all.
He recalled the dazzling lightning and heaven-shaking thunder. They could help stabilize the mist leaking from him, but there seemed to be none here at Giant Rock. In his memory, thunderbolts often struck the summits of tall mountains. Could it be that he needed to climb to the peak?
Yet he was very reluctant to leave the familiar Giant Rock.
After weighing it up, he decided that improving his condition and stopping the leakage mattered more.
He immediately set off toward the mountaintop.
Though the rugged peak was steep, it was not a sheer cliff. Various grasses and shrubs covered the slope, and the patches of exposed rock were thick with moss. Climbing was not too strenuous. Of course, the consequences of losing his footing and falling were unthinkable.
A few old pines stood on the summit, evergreen through all four seasons. Animal tracks were rare.
Black Snake wound this way and that, snaking upward. Once he had climbed high enough, he felt only the mountain wind howling, making the pine needles rustle.
After living in this valley for more than fifteen years, Black Snake was climbing a tall peak for the first time.
There was simply no prey up high. Places near water were better.
The higher he went, the fewer plants there were.
Only a few stubborn pines remained, along with patchy moss and a beehive as large as a coiled bundle.
The summit was smooth rock. Lowering his head, he could see several long, dark grooves in the rocky slope. His tongue caught scents carried by the wind from far away. There were not so many complicated smells here.
The pines on the summit grew crooked and twisted. A few dry yet hard, smooth stumps still stood, their surfaces retaining the charred blackness left by fire.
Those startling marks stirred certain painful memories in Black Snake.