A Snake That Truly Flies
Now that we had pinned down the location of the Flying Divine Snake—ranked first among the Twenty-Four Poison Branches—I had expected us to move straight into the capture. But we could not set out at once.
When you are dealing with what is supposedly the top of the upper-tier venomous beasts, there are a great many preparations that have to be made first.
So the first thing we prepared was realgar.
It had protected people even from the Poison Feather Bird’s catastrophic venom. That made it insurance we absolutely had to secure.
What we used was made by taking raw realgar, blending it with medicinal herbs and the Tang Clan’s secret formulae, and packing it into cakes. Grandfather declared he would have it finished before we left.
—Bubble, bubble.
Watching the herbs seethe in the decocting pot, Grandfather spoke.
“They say the only reason it failed to make the Ten Great Poisons is that its venom is weak—but we still cannot afford to let our guard down.”
“Of course not, Grandfather. You can never emphasize safety too much.”
I was itching to go catch the thing already, but Grandfather was not wrong.
Especially not for someone who, in a previous life, had died of a snakebite.
Granted, I had never imagined a snake would turn up in a hotel room in that life—but catching a venomous snake is dangerous no matter how carefully you take precautions.
Living animals all have their own temperaments. Even if you prepare for the average case, something unexpected can always happen.
So Grandfather prepared realgar cakes that each of us could keep on our person, and I was given a task of my own: the bag.
“Even if we catch the creature, the problem is where to keep it.”
“Snakes will escape through the tiniest gap if you give them half a chance, so people usually put them in a bag.”
“Our Tang Clan does the same.”
Realgar I could leave to Grandfather. The bag was the real problem.
Snakes can slip out of the narrowest opening, so when you catch one in the wild you bag it immediately—and only after that do you put the whole bag into a box or a cage.
Reptile specialists all use roughly the same method, and there is a reason for it.
If you put a snake straight into a box or cage without bagging it first, it will find the smallest gap and escape—or, when you open the lid, it will launch itself out and bite. Even experts with decades of experience regularly end up envenomed that way, which is exactly why the bag method exists.
So we needed a pouch for the snake. The trouble was the material. Given that the Flying Divine Snake was almost certainly a spirit beast, ordinary cloth would be shredded in an instant.
“Regular fabric won’t do, will it?”
“Probably not. Have you got a better idea?”
“M-me, Grandfather?”
“You’re the expert, aren’t you?”
“…”
I suggested going back to the Tang Clan to see if they had anything usable, but according to Grandfather there was nothing left that could hold a creature like this. There had been something once, he said, but it had grown too old and worn to use.
What we needed, then, was something hard and tough enough that even a spirit-beast venomous snake could not tear its way free. In my previous life there would have been carbon fiber and any number of other advanced textiles—but this was not my previous life. This was the Central Plains.
Something stronger than steel, with good elasticity and serious durability…
While Grandfather worked diligently at the realgar, I fretted over how to make a capture bag—until, by pure chance, the answer dropped into my lap.
A filament stronger than steel, more elastic, more durable, had been sitting right under my nose the whole time.
“Young Master So-ryong! The gold-coin trapdoor spider is gone!”
One of the warriors, checking the gold-coin trapdoor spider that morning and failing to notice it had burrowed into the soil, came running to report that the spider had vanished.
I hurried over and found the creature had already built itself a home inside a small jar.
We had put it in a jar filled with earth, and true to its nature it had dug in and set a trap. Trapdoor spiders of the gold-coin kind dig a vertical shaft into the ground and line it with silk in the shape of a sock, then live inside that silk sleeve.
Apparently the people who had caught it and the people managing it were not the same, and the mix-up had produced this little farce.
I dug into the center of the jar and lifted out the sock-like nest of white silk with the spider still inside. Then I tore it open and showed the warriors that the spider was right there.
“See? This gold-coin trapdoor spider digs a burrow and builds a silk house inside it. It was only hiding. Nothing to worry about.”
“I was completely fooled. It looked like it had really disappeared.”
The warrior from the Venomous Beasts Division pressed a hand to his startled chest. I made a mental note that I ought to hold a seminar on venomous creatures one of these days and give them proper training, then went on.
“It happens. They’re voracious eaters, so if you catch grasshoppers or crickets and drop them in every day, they’ll feed well. Clear out the refuse they throw out of the burrow as it piles up. And don’t forget to mist them lightly with water once every morning.”
“Understood, Young Master So-ryong!”
I passed along a few more care notes for the gold-coin trapdoor spider and was heading back to my quarters with the torn, rubber-balloon-like silk nest still in my hand when the thought hit me.
A bag shaped exactly like this would be perfect… Wait. Hold on. Why didn’t I think of that sooner?
Looking at the ripped silk house of the gold-coin trapdoor spider, the idea struck like lightning. I broke into a run toward Yo-hwa.
“Yo-hwa! Yo-hwa!”
—Kishit?
Yo-hwa had taken as her temporary den the rock in the middle of the first circular meadow—the one where the giant army ants had all died. I ran to the foot of it and called, and she came scuttling down the stone pillar at once.
I held up the torn silk of the gold-coin trapdoor spider’s nest and asked,
“Yo-hwa, can you make something like this?”
—Kishi?
The reason I was asking her for a bag was simple.
Spider silk—true spider silk—is roughly twenty times tougher than steel of the same weight, and about four times stronger than the specialized fibers used in body armor.
And that is not all. Unlike synthetic fibers, it provokes no rejection response from the human body, and its elasticity is so high it can stretch up to fifty percent of its length.
Now add the fact that Yo-hwa was a spirit beast and one of the Ten Great Poisons. Her silk’s strength needed no further introduction.
The thread she had tied around my waist in the middle of an army-ant swarm had never broken. That alone told me it was very nearly the finest fiber this era had to offer.
I could make body armor out of this!
Yo-hwa tilted her head at my question. I explained with gestures, then with footwork, and finally by drawing pictures in the dirt.
“I’d like you to make a big bag like this out of your silk.”
—Kishit!
“You can!? Yes!”
At my request Yo-hwa thrust her abdomen forward and began to spin thread with her pedipalps in a blur.
A spider’s leg tips end in hooks, all of them designed for climbing silk. Her legs moved, and the filament she spun began to take the shape I had asked for.
A short while later—
—Kishit?
She seemed to be asking whether this would do.
At the tip of her leg hung a large sack, roughly the shape I had requested. Being Yo-hwa’s work, the finishing was a little rough—but when I drew a throwing knife to trim the ragged edges, the blade would not even bite, and when I pulled, the silk stretched like spandex.
Just as I had expected: the elasticity and the toughness were absurd.
On top of that it was thin enough to be faintly translucent, so you could see what was inside.
“Amazing, Yo-hwa!”
At the praise she guided my hand up onto her head, which clearly meant she wanted a thorough petting, so I stroked her at once.
She had more than earned the compliment today.
She had made a perfect bag for the Flying Divine Snake.
“Good girl! Good girl!”
—Kishishi…
“Big brother can finally stop worrying thanks to you. I’ll show Grandfather the bag and tell him we’re leaving first thing tomorrow!”
Days of fretting had been solved in a single stroke thanks to Yo-hwa. I ran straight for the place where Grandfather was still making realgar.
The moment I arrived I shouted,
“Grandfather! I made it!”
“Hm? Made what, exactly?”
“The bag! I had Yo-hwa weave one from her silk—and it won’t even cut under a blade!”
“From Yo-hwa’s silk? Let me see…”
He turned the bag over in his hands for a long time, then spoke with a look of genuine astonishment.
“Well now! This is a rare treasure. In that case, we can leave tomorrow without delay!”
“Then I’ll have the warriors ready to depart in the morning!”
The biggest problem had been solved. It was time to move.
Not many people knew it, but flying snakes had existed in my previous life as well.
I had featured them once on my stream. Plenty of viewers had insisted there was no such thing, that I was lying, that it was impossible—but they were real.
Five species of them, no less.
They belonged to the genus Chrysopelea, five tropical jungle species that, strictly speaking, do not fly so much as glide. Even so, there is a reason they are called flying snakes.
The snakes of that genus prey on lizards, frogs, and small birds up in the trees. Their habitat is jungle made of very tall timber—so for fast travel they chose gliding.
Today’s stream: Introducing the flying snake.
“These guys glide, you know. Pretty incredible, right?”
That was what I got from the viewers who piled in after reading the title. But there was a reason I introduced them as flying snakes.
Calling what they do a mere glide felt too modest.
Why?
Because one of them—the paradise tree snake—can glide as far as two hundred and fifty meters.
Not two-point-five. Not twenty-five. Two hundred and fifty.
That is roughly the length of two soccer pitches laid end to end—and they cover that distance not in a few short hops, and not by plummeting two hundred and fifty meters straight down, but in something close to level flight.
That is why they are not called glide snakes, but flying snakes.
When a creature can hold a horizontal glide for two hundred and fifty meters, it is as good as flying.
Two hundred and fifty meters is flight, no question.
The reason Chrysopelea can manage that kind of level glide is physical. When they fly, they first climb to a treetop, drape their bodies into a J-shape, and reshape themselves.
They can spread their ribs like wings, turning a round snake’s body into something flat and concave—ribs as the frame, skin as the membrane—exactly like the wing of a glider, built to catch as much lift as possible.
Then they launch from the tree, swinging their heads from side to side as they sail toward their destination. That is their glide—and their flight.
So I had assumed this world’s flying snake would work on the same principle.
Nothing in the universe escapes the laws of physics, after all.
It might have the grand name Flying Divine Snake, but people in this far more primitive world would look at a gliding serpent and call it a sky-flying snake without a second thought.
The name was Flying Divine Snake, and its habitat was said to be Narrow Water Gorge—a deep-cut canyon. I figured it rode the winds between the cliffs for lift and moved from wall to wall that way.
And yet…
Two days of waiting in the narrow valley floor of Narrow Water Gorge, where the creature was said to appear from time to time—
Then why the hell is that thing actually flying?
There, between the canyon walls, the Flying Divine Snake drifted at its leisure, swimming through the air the way a sea snake swims the ocean, circling the gorge as if it owned the sky.
“Just as the records say. It truly does fly through the heavens.”
Grandfather—the Lord of Ten Thousand Poisons—nodded in open admiration as he watched it.
My brain felt like it had thrown an error. I asked again.
“D-doesn’t that seem a little strange, Grandfather?”
“What does?”
“I mean—a snake is flying.”
“That is why it is called the Flying Divine Snake.”
“Ah. Right. Flying Divine Snake. Of course…”
Lately nothing made sense.
Elder Sister looked up at the sky, stroking the little dragons, and said,
“You lot should hurry up and become proper dragons so you can soar like that too.”
—Tsurut!
Cho answered loudest of all, as if accepting the order on the spot.