At night, a torrential rain poured down, smashing onto the vast grasslands of Tanzania, and the entire world seemed shrouded in a roaring curtain of water.
On the single bed of the tent hotel, Gao Yue hugged her pink suitcase, dialing the rescue hotline over and over again, but it was still busy.
The murky water had already submerged the tent and was about to reach the bed.
She had called every kind of rescue hotline, and they all just told her to wait for rescue; calling again only got a busy signal.
"It's over..."
She murmured blankly to herself.
Perhaps something was about to happen to her.
Who could she leave a message for? Her parents had passed away long ago, and she wasn't close to any of her relatives. Because of running a beauty self-media account, she'd spent all her time cooped up at home, and her contact list was full of work-related people. For a moment, she had no idea who to reach out to.
The murky water inside the tent kept rising, and in the blink of an eye it submerged the bed, turning the white bedding into a complete mess.
The price for one night at this tent hotel was very high; she'd gritted her teeth to book it, wanting to give her 23rd birthday a perfect ending. Who would have known they couldn't even handle flood prevention during the rainy season—what a scam.
The power supply had long since been cut off, and the only light around came from her phone's flashlight. Soon, something even worse happened.
The poles supporting the tent groaned under the strain, and the entire tent collapsed in an instant.
"Ah!!"
Gao Yue screamed, and along with her suitcase, she was swept into the rapids by the surging floodwater. The torrential rain pounded against her glasses, blurring her vision completely.
"Help!" she shouted until her voice grew hoarse, but it was swallowed by the even louder sound of the rain.
The instinct to survive made her clutch the suitcase with all her strength.
Fortunately, the suitcase had been expensive, with excellent waterproofing, and it had buoyancy—it became her only lifeline at that moment.
The rushing current swept her forward at a terrifying speed. Gao Yue clung to the suitcase, barely managing to keep a small part of her body above the surface.
The night was pitch black, the floodwater murky.
She saw a zebra struggling in the floodwater, its eyes flickering with the same terror as her own.
At that moment, a human from Huaguo and a zebra from Tanzania became companions in misfortune within the surging floodwaters, pushed together by the merciless current toward an unknown direction.
As time passed, Gao Yue felt her body heat draining away rapidly. Just as she was becoming unable to bear the cold, a massive whirlpool suddenly appeared ahead, pitch-black like the gaping maw of an abyss.
Gao Yue was scared out of her wits and paddled desperately, trying to escape.
Once pulled in, there would be no surviving it. In the chaos, the panicking zebra kicked her several times to gain leverage.
Gao Yue, furious, tried to grab its leg in retaliation.
But no matter how hard the woman and the zebra struggled, neither could resist being pulled into the massive whirlpool.
A terrifying sense of suffocation washed over her.
Gao Yue thought she was surely going to die this time.
But when she opened her eyes, she found that although she was still in the water, the water around her was a deep, clear blue, calm and tranquil, with shimmering light rippling across the surface.
Through her glasses, she saw within the clear blue water the hazy shapes of many giant pythons swimming slowly, their bodies so massive it made her heart stop—even from more than ten meters away, she could clearly make out the patterns on their scales.
Countless giant pythons were slowly circling around her and the zebra.
It was as if some kind of anaconda apocalypse was unfolding.
..She couldn't tell if this was a hallucination brought on by oxygen deprivation.
Could there really be pythons this enormous in reality? This wasn't Tanzania—it had to be the Amazon rainforest. But even the giant pythons of the Amazon rainforest would look like earthworms next to these.
It had to be a hallucination.
The agony of suffocation returned, and Gao Yue, clutching her suitcase, used both hands and feet, paddling upward with all her survival instinct could muster.
The suitcase's buoyancy helped carry her successfully upward.
The zebra beside her was also paddling desperately, and as it surfaced, it stepped on her head again for leverage.
That step made Gao Yue's skull throb with pain, and she nearly choked on water.
After successfully breaking through the surface, she took two deep breaths to ease the discomfort in her lungs, then, unable to hold back her anger any longer, punched the damn zebra beside her twice and yelled at it:
"You bastard, how many times have you stepped on me? You think just because you're a protected animal I won't dare hit you?!"
The moment the words left her mouth, she suddenly froze.
She saw dozens of giant pythons emerging from the pitch-black lake water all around, encircling her and the zebra.
Their smooth, cold bodies brushed against her, the needle-sharp chill freezing her in place. Her pupils shrank to pinpricks in terror, and she felt her soul nearly leave her body—she almost wished she'd just drowned in the water earlier. So what she'd seen before hadn't been a hallucination after all.
What kind of horror movie scene was this...
Help. Someone, help.
In her extreme terror, she let go of the suitcase and, trembling like a leaf, threw her arms tightly around the zebra's neck instead.
The zebra, too, was frozen stiff with fear. Faced with an apex predator, it stood rigid as a log, letting Gao Yue cling to it tightly.
If one looked down from the sky.
They would see that Gao Yue, a chubby little thing weighing eighty kilograms, and a three-hundred-kilogram zebra, looked as insignificant as a leaf surrounded by Amazonian anacondas in the midst of these massive creatures—small enough to be swallowed whole in a single bite.
When the icy python body slid across the sole of her foot, Gao Yue finally couldn't hold back her terror and screamed.
"Ah——!"
Unexpectedly, she wasn't swallowed by any of the giant pythons. Instead, one with mottled patterns lifted her up onto its back and glided across the surface of the lake.
The thick python body was cool and slippery, and she couldn't keep her balance at all—she tumbled over and slid a long way backward.
From behind in the lake water, another python head emerged, coming up to nudge her back.
She now felt like a puffer fish being batted around like a ball by orcas, utterly at the mercy of this group of giant pythons with no chance to resist.
Amid her terror, adrenaline surged through her, but all it did was give her the miraculous strength to cling even harder to her fellow sufferer the zebra's neck, screaming nonstop the entire time.
"Ah!!!"
"Ah——!!!"
From the deep azure lake water, an emerald giant python emerged, playfully knocking her off the back of the mottled python.
Gao Yue fell into the water unprepared, only to be lifted back up out of the lake by the emerald giant python.
Resurfacing with her glasses askew, Gao Yue kept screaming, "Ah! Help me!"
Her screams seemed to act like some kind of stimulant—another python flung its head and knocked the emerald giant python flying, sending water splashing everywhere, and even more giant pythons rushed over to compete, all wanting to come frighten Gao Yue.
The lake water was churned into chaos by these terrifying, massive creatures.
In the confusion, Gao Yue accidentally fell into the lake water. This time she was completely unprepared, falling back-first, and in an instant all she could hear was the gurgling of water in her own ears, every other sound blurring away. Then water rushed into her nostrils, and she began to thrash in agony within the lake.
Through her blurred vision.
She saw, within the clear, deep lake water, an enormous and terrifying pitch-black giant python swimming toward her, dark as the shadow of death itself.
Then a white light rose up from the python's body, and within that soft white glow, as if by some miracle, the pitch-black giant python transformed into a tall, towering man.
✦✦✦