Time slipped by; the seasons wheeled on.
Du Yi had rather lost track of how long he had lived in these mountains. He had no calendar on hand to keep the count, after all. He had once tried marking the turn of day and night with little tally strokes, but a few moltings in the middle of it had broken his check-in streak more than once, and in the end that humble little record-keeping failed for good.
Every time he shed his skin, Du Yi had to sleep for a very long while, and whenever he woke again, everything around him had changed its look—he could only judge from the growth rings on the surrounding trees, and from the soil that had buried him over, that a fair stretch of time must have passed.
But as for exactly how long, Du Yi couldn't begin to reckon.
Not that it made any difference to him. He had always been the sort to take things as they came: now that he'd slept and woken, the order of business—besides grinding off his old skin—was to fill his belly first.
Luckily, this stretch of hills was surprisingly rich in game. Even at Du Yi's appetite, eating for as long as he had, he still hadn't picked the place clean—which left him rather puzzled, since he'd already braced himself to eat the area bare and then range farther afield to forage. Yet who could have guessed that this patch of mountains would keep coughing up fresh prey, on and on without end.
"Almost like it respawns on its own?"
That game came knocking of its own accord was, on the whole, a good thing; but the strangeness of it genuinely baffled Du Yi.
These animals weren't fools, after all. At the very least they had the basic instinct to survive—just one whiff of his scent or one sound from him and they'd scatter to the four winds. How could they possibly come delivering themselves to his door?
Luckily, before long, he discovered the answer.
It happened during one of his sleeps. He had woken, but was still a touch groggy, so he hadn't shaken off the earth that buried him as promptly as he usually did—and it was just then that he saw several savages come running from the distance.
The savages wore neatly stitched animal hides and carried a faint air of ferocity, and ahead of them, no fewer than three full-grown mammoths were being driven in headlong panic, charging straight into this stretch of the mountains.
"How are they pulling that off?"
Du Yi was dumbfounded. By any reckoning the situation ought to have been the other way around: three mammoths were nothing much to him, but to a handful of savages they were colossal—three mammoths, and in fairly open ground at that. Forget a few savages; even a few dozen would likely have been trampled into scattered scraps.
Yet here it was the three mammoths being run ragged across the ground.
"To pull off something like this...... looks like they've already got a touch of civilization."
Du Yi couldn't help nodding to himself.
It was just then that the three terrified mammoths braced for a desperate, do-or-die stand. They wrenched their heads around, their huge skulls lowering, their sharp tusks leveled like keen spears straight at the savages giving chase.
At a mammoth's tonnage, a full charge would crush those few savages into pulp on the spot.
But at that very moment, the savage in the lead suddenly threw up both palms and slammed them together with a crack!
"BOOM—"
With the clap of his palms, a great sheet of flame burst out of thin air, the searing fire gathering into a fireball that crashed full onto the head of the lead mammoth!
"RRROOO—"
The charging mammoth threw back its head and bellowed at the sky, its great skull blasted black and scorched across a wide patch, the momentum of its charge stopping dead as it fell back, once more, into a desperate, undignified scramble of flight.
The other two mammoths were no different. Faced with the fireballs the savages hurled out, those enormous beasts had not the slightest power to resist.
But the savages didn't press the chase any further. They only herded the mammoths into a thicket of berries, then bounded off in great leaps and scattered in all directions.
Those berries, Du Yi recognized. They were crowberries, plump with juice—even Du Yi found them rather cloyingly sweet. Food so rich in sugar was naturally a fine meal for the three mammoths.
And so, lured by the food, the three mammoths gradually settled and bent, single-minded, to gnawing at the berries.
Watching it all from his hiding place, Du Yi more or less grasped what the savages were up to.
"Looks like they mean to keep these mammoths as livestock...... but is it really proper to raise your elephants right where I sleep?"
Faced with three mammoths delivered to his very face, the famished Du Yi naturally wasn't about to refuse. In any case, the moment he rose, those three mammoths were certain to bolt.
Come all this way—no need to run now.
So after a brief pursuit, the three mammoths were all swept off their feet by a sweep of his snake's tail, then gutted one by one and roasted in the fire.
Du Yi did not forget the spices, of course; he had always held real standards for the quality of his food.
Three mammoths down his gullet, full and content, Du Yi gazed up at a sky brimming with stars. True, at his present size three mammoths' worth of meat could only fill him halfway, but the great rush of nourishment still drew him out of the muddle-headed daze of having just woken.
"Should've stopped those savages while I had the chance—at least to ask them where this place is, and what day it is."
So Du Yi thought.
And then there was that knack of theirs, slapping their palms together to conjure a fireball. That, Du Yi found very interesting indeed.
Luckily, it wasn't too late to think of it now. Those savages had made no effort at all to hide their trail; he could simply follow the tracks they'd left and trace them all the way back to their settlement.
"Hope I won't scare them to death the instant I show my face."
Du Yi had a clear sense of his current size, and he knew very well what a terrifying thing it would be for his vast bulk to appear around the savages' settlement.
After all, he too had once been human.
"What approach should I take...... maybe treat them to a meal first?"
As the old saying goes, you don't strike a smiling face. If he came bearing food, the savages, seeing that he had food of his own, ought to conclude that he had no intention of eating them.
"At least they won't be scared to death...... after all, you can't very well question a corpse."
And so Du Yi set about his preparations.
After a brief spell of hunting, a column of fire once again roared up to the sky, and Du Yi set to his roasting work anew—to rouse the savages' appetites first, rather than their terror, he poured his full tenfold skill into this cooking.
Burning in the fire was the fruitwood-smoking recipe he had prepared with such care; and to make the meat taste sweeter still, Du Yi had gone out of his way to gather crowberries for seasoning. Mammoth roasted this way, Du Yi could eat eight at a single sitting.
"As long as the roast meat grabs them first, the rest of the talking will be easy."
Perhaps because snakes are cold-blooded creatures, Du Yi always felt that his way of thinking was growing ever cooler and clearer too.