Black Snake's nearly thirty-foot body glided over the damp soil, swaying smoothly from side to side, his scales making faint rustling sounds against the gravel.
To stay alive, he fled through the awakening spring mountains.
He had no idea where to go. He simply kept moving, crossing ridges and wading through streams.
When he reached a town crowded with people and tangled sources of heat, he chose to skirt around it along the hillside.
There was no chance to hunt, so he could only drink water to fill his belly. In the past, he would have gone to the riverbank to wait for fish.
Apart from occasional pauses to rest and hunt, he spent all his time traveling, even at night. Day followed night, and he lost count of how many ridges he had crossed and how many streams he had forded.
The path he had come by, and the valley, gradually grew hazy and distant through day after day of trekking.
One day, he passed a broad stretch of farmland between two mountains.
Black Snake suddenly stopped, his slit pupils fixed on a squat little shrine beside a field ridge. It was crudely assembled from just a few stone slabs, wound with faded red thread, with an old bowl placed in front. Beside it stood an old woman in coarse cloth, bending over to tend the tender seedlings in the field.
She was a phantom, but why could she appear in sunlight?
Wonderful. One more thing to puzzle over.
He continued fleeing for his life, traveling day after day.
He had set out in early spring and traveled until the tender buds unfurled. Reckoning the time carefully, it had really been no longer than the span of a spring rain.
Fine rain drifted down without a sound, more like