Chapter 52: Baked Rice with Cheese and Bacon

Being treated as an experimental subject made the black snake quite unhappy.

It cast a faint glance at the human, coiled her up and placed her back onto its own spine, then continued slithering forward.

No more strange occurrences took place in the subsequent burial chambers. Only some old backpacks were piled up in the corners, and occasionally, skeletal remains clad in orange exploration suits could be seen.

Finally, the black snake came to a halt in front of a stone wall.

The exact center of the wall had been blown open by an explosion and was now completely blocked by soil. It was not hard to imagine that someone had once blown up this place, crawled in through a grave-robbing hole, and taken the items inside the tomb.

Those remains... perhaps later explorers who had become trapped within the tomb chamber. As for how one of them had turned into a zombie, there was no way to know.

Su Su stared at the theft tunnel. "Little Black, can you crawl out from here?"

"Hiss!"

The black snake gave an affirmative response. First, it set the human down, then used its hard head to ram against the surrounding bricks and stones.

The already damaged stone wall was easily smashed open.

"Hiss."

Stay here and don't run around.

The black snake instructed Su Su with its eyes. Making sure she understood its meaning, it crawled all the way up along the tunnel.

More and more soil poured in, piling up into a small dirt mound inside the tomb chamber, but an even greater amount was pushed upward by the black snake.

Su Su retreated a dozen steps, tilting her head back to watch Little Black's serpentine body gradually disappear into the opening.

The soil continued to subside.

I know not how much time passed, but the tomb chamber finally welcomed light once more!

Yet soon enough, it was blocked up again as Little Black burrowed back in.

"Hiss!"

A section of the snake's tail dangled down from the cave opening, shaking slightly to urge her along.

The tacit understanding cultivated over a long period allowed Su Su to grasp Little Black's intention immediately.

She stepped onto the small dirt mound and tightly hugged that section of the snake's tail. Feeling that she had clasped on, the slenderest tip of the tail automatically coiled around her waist.

Whoosh!

Su Su was hoisted out of the grave-robbing hole!

Fresh air surged into her lungs, and the light stung eyes that had not seen brightness for so long. Su Su hurriedly closed her eyes, the tears stimulated by the glare dampening the corners of her eyes and her eyelashes.

A cold snake fork flicked and licked at her skin the very next second.

After a long while of adjustment, Su Su finally grew accustomed to the external light once more.

The sky remained hazy and gray, and the surrounding mountain ranges were blanketed in snow, making the "sunlight" that had appeared in the illusion seem exceptionally fake.

"Little Black! We're finally out!"

Su Su happily hugged the thick snake body, rejoicing for quite a while before realizing that the surrounding environment was utterly unfamiliar.

"But where is this?"

She looked around blankly in a circle. Wherever her gaze reached, there was nothing but snow and mountain tree trunks, resembling a small depression nestled within the mountain range.

Recalling their blind, directionless tunneling over the past seven days, Su Su seriously suspected that they had deviated from City G and were now located in some completely unknown region.

Once the excitement of leaving the underground subsided, she began to worry anew about how to find Pang Cancan and the others.

"Hiss~"

Perhaps dissatisfied with her prolonged absent-mindedness, the black snake hoisted her onto its back once more, set its sights toward the southern direction, and forged ahead.

"Forget it, never mind all that for now!"

Su Su crawled up to the top of Little Black's head, originally intending to view the scenery ahead, but the python's traveling speed was so fast that the biting cold wind scraped her cheeks painfully.

She quietly slithered back down to the snake's spine, hauling up Little Black's tail to use as a windbreak for herself.

After slithering along for a few kilometers, Su Su suddenly called for a halt: "Little Black, wait!"

She had spotted a fresh hot spring!

"I want to take a bath."

The environment of the underground cavern had been far too rudimentary; even with her serpent-shaped electric blanket, she had not dared to remove her clothes and take a proper bath.

Coupled with the corrosive dirty water splashed all over her by that fourth-tier zombie before it died, the lingering stench alone made her want to retch.

The black snake silently turned around, delivering the human to the edge of the hot spring.

The pools here were few in number, but the water temperature was very high, and the surroundings were wreathed in mist.

Su Su tested the water temperature and decided she could boil eggs in this particular pool.

The pools a little further away had lower temperatures, making them suitable for humans to soak in. As for Little Black... it was caked in mud from head to tail, and its belly was mixed with quite a bit of accumulated snow.

There was no way to let a giant python soak in a hot spring, right?

Su Su fell silent for a moment. "Little Black, why don't you go find a lake to soak in?"

The black snake let out an unhappy "hiss."

Its ink-green vertical pupils stared intently at the human before it. Seeing that she failed to understand, it took the initiative to place a section of its tail into the hot spring pool, signaling that it was not afraid of the water temperature here.

True enough, since Little Black could breathe fire, the temperature of a hot spring must be child's play to it.

The snake's tail had already been soaking in the hot spring for a good while, yet the human before it still didn't understand.

"Hiss!!"

The black snake grew so angry that it bared its teeth and hissed at Su Su.

Su Su: "...You surely don't want me to wash you, do you?"

The black snake finally nodded with magnanimous pity.

Every previous time it took a bath, she had been the one to wash it; there was no reason it should wash itself this time around.

Su Su took a deep breath, forming a large circle with her hands in front of her chest.

"Little Black, you've grown this big now. If you still make me wash you, it won't be finished even by dark."

Logic was logic, but the black snake refused to accept it.

It chased after the human, hissing several times, and rested its large head on the edge of the hot spring pool, its vertical pupils fixed unblinkingly upon her.

Su Su almost softened her heart.

However, looking at Little Black's current size, her reason instantly returned, and she rejected it with zero room for negotiation.

"No way. Go soak in the water by yourself; you'll get clean that way too."

Seeing that Su Su's mind was made up, the black snake reluctantly crawled into the largest hot spring pool. Its hundred-meter-long body thrust a section in first, only to discover—even the largest pool could only accommodate a tenth of it.

After a deadlock for quite a while, it ultimately chose to compromise, finding the nearest lake, breaking through the ice crust, and plunging to the bottom to churn the water wildly.

The surface of the lake was turned upside down, rippling with countless layers of waves.

By the hot spring.

Seeing that Little Black had obediently gone off to wash, Su Su let out a genuine sigh of relief.

Figuring that Little Black wouldn't be back for a moment, she selected a hot spring pool, scooped up the spring water to rinse away the grime on her body first, and then slid in for a comfortable soak.

The slightly scalding spring water enveloped her entire body, causing every pore to open up in sheer bliss.

Su Su let down her medium-short dark hair, tilted her head slightly, and carefully massaged and rinsed it by the edge of the pool.

The black snake, having churned the entire lake into muddy water, slipped back silently under the cover of the splashing noise, hiding its head amidst the water vapor.

A pair of cold vertical pupils locked precisely onto the human in the pool.

That was a bodily structure completely different from its own.

The slender physique loomed indistinctly in the pool, dark hair contrasting against fair skin. Logically speaking, a cold-blooded animal should not pay this much attention to a human.

But the black snake was different.

It had developed sentience, grown human-like traits, and received the human's confession of love.

The memories and inheritance left behind by the deceased giant python had not been few; it rarely ever thought of the word "servant" anymore, and its gaze toward Su Su was undergoing a slow transformation.

That perhaps... was the way one looked at one's female mate.

The massive python lay in silence at the edge of the pool not far away, and a place that had never known fluctuation vaguely stirred with a trace of heat.

A thought moved within its mind.

Its hundred-meter-long serpentine body instantly shrank down to a length of a dozen meters, and the familiar little Black form reappeared. Ever since it completely absorbed the giant python's crystal core and flesh, it had been able to control its body size at will. The reason it hadn't displayed this earlier was simply because staying in the underground cavern made a massive size more suitable for bringing the human along to survive.

"Hiss..."

The snake's hiss dissipated into the air.

Su Su turned her head back with a vague sense of intuition: "Little Black?"

There was no snake responding; perhaps it was auditory fatigue.

However, from an angle invisible to the human, a small python was quietly slithering into the hot spring pool where she resided.

Su Su sped up to rinse the foam from her hair, when suddenly, a faint, teasing touch brushed against her ankle.

Puzzled, she lowered her head and, through the clear pool water, spotted a large mass of swimming soft-bodied creature!

"Ah!"

Su Su let out a terrified scream, turning to climb out of the hot spring pool, but the speed of that soft-bodied creature was faster than hers. In the blink of an eye, it broke the surface of the water, revealing a familiar yet ferocious head.

And those familiar ink-green vertical pupils.

"Little Black!!!!!!"

Su Su was first furious, then snapped to realization: "You can shrink?!"

"Hiss~"

No, that wasn't the main point. The main point was that the awkward situation at hand was hardly a good opportunity to interrogate Little Black.

Consumed by anger and embarrassment, she kicked out at it: "Go to another pool!"

"Hiss!"

A pitch-black snake tail traced a ripple through the bottom of the water, fast, accurate, and fierce as it looped around the human's ankles.

Su Su was thus "bound" within the water.

Before losing her balance, she panicked and grabbed onto the rock at the side: "Little Black! What are you doing?!"

As soon as that roar left her lips, her back pressed against a cold, slippery snake body.

"Little Black!!!!!!"

The angry, panicked, and shocked voice failed to halt the black snake's malicious behavior.

Its head plunged back beneath the surface of the pool.

Seconds later, Su Su was trembling all over from shock.

With one hand braced against the rock and the other flailing wildly to grab that slippery snake body: "Stop messing around, come out right now!"

A dozen meters of snake body was easily grabbed into the human's grip.

Yet that head refused to emerge at all, slipping away cunningly whenever she tried to catch it.

Su Su scooped at it several times, only for it to dodge craftily every time.

Then, it hid at the bottom of the pool and churned violently, sending wave after wave of water crashing toward Su Su, while its tail precisely bound her in place.

Su Su's fingernails dug fiercely into the snake scales in her grasp; had her legs not been tied, she would have loved to kick it with all her might.

"Little Black!!!!!!"

She slapped that section of the snake tail away viciously and, before it could mount a comeback, broke free from the tail to scramble ashore in a disheveled state.

Warm water droplets rolled down her fair, delicate calves, and a wide towel wrapped around her body finally restored her freedom.

The shame and annoyance receded, leaving behind pure anger.

Splash!

The black python burst out of the water, its head sliding ashore just as its vertical pupils stared at her relentlessly, as though it hadn't finished toying with her yet... Noticing its gaze, Su Su could bear it no longer, and delivered a fierce kick right at it.