Watching the four-legged snake eat with such evident enthusiasm, Shen Cong felt the corner of his mouth twitch. There was an unavoidable association in his mind — the spheres had been buried underground by dung beetles. The black outer shells were clearly former carcass-balls, transformed by whatever process had been happening under the soil.

He was having a difficult time putting his hand in.

The grove’s outer edge was thick with hanging aerial roots, most of their leaves already dropped for winter. The four-legged snake was too large to fit between the root curtains and apparently unwilling to simply bulldoze through them — it kept pushing with one foreleg from outside while the rest of its body remained wedged between the roots, which made it look briefly ridiculous.

“These aerial roots are remarkably hard if a creature that size can’t snap through them.” Shen Cong ran his fingers along the nearest root. Solid. Dense. He extended his perception into the tree.

The banyan was in the Lv1 era.

He could only sense its Talent now — 1.874H — the Activity Value sealed away in the way all Lv1 organisms sealed themselves after the threshold was crossed.

“A Lv1 era banyan tree.”

He was beginning to examine it more carefully when something hit him without warning. A gust of displaced air, a massive presence moving fast — his scalp prickled and he started to react, but the bouncing stilts needed running speed to generate their defensive mobility, and he hadn’t had time.

Something warm and enormous pressed across him from head to foot.

The four-legged snake’s tongue.

It had noticed Shen Cong standing still rather than eating, and had apparently decided the appropriate response was to lick him from crown to ankle in encouragement. The tongue was thicker than his torso. It was thoroughly coated in milky-white, osmanthus-scented liquid. Now so was he.

He consciously suppressed his first instinct — which was to put the Tyrant Broadsword through the creature’s skull — and reminded himself that it hadn’t done anything actively harmful yet.

He crouched down, forced himself past the objections, and dipped a finger into the liquid pooling in the half-sphere in front of him. Touched it to his tongue.

His expression immediately settled.

Yogurt. It tasted like yogurt. Sweet and sour, slightly tangy, pleasant texture.

He could work with yogurt.

The four-legged snake made its gurgling sounds at the sight of him eating and didn’t pause in its own consumption. It was working fast — five spheres excavated in the time he’d been standing there, four of them swallowed whole, his half-sphere left aside.

Once the immediate area was cleared, it tried to turn around inside the root curtain, couldn’t manage the scale of the pivot, and began pushing through sideways, working its head toward another section of the grove to continue foraging.

Shen Cong looked at his half-sphere. Grabbed a handful of the white liquid and put it in his mouth.

This isn’t fermented carcass material. The thought arrived while he chewed. The outer shell composition and the inner composition are completely different from each other. The beetles have changed their diet and habits through evolution — they’re not making dung-balls anymore, they’re making something else. There isn’t enough dung out here for mass production anyway.

He examined the separated sphere halves more carefully. The black outer shell had a mixed structure — something between metal and wood fiber. The inner milky-white sphere’s shell was slightly translucent, the same mixed composition.

Wood. Metal. What if these spheres are connected to the banyan tree somehow?

The beetles had colonized this particular grove rather than any other location. Dung beetles selected habitat based on resource availability. If there was something in this specific grove worth having, the tree itself was the most likely source.

And the four-legged snake had been unwilling to simply wreck the grove, even though a creature its size could have knocked the trees over without much effort. It had gone looking for help to remove the beetles while leaving the trees intact.

The four-legged snake is protecting this banyan grove.

Shen Cong made a small cut in one of the aerial roots with his dagger. The Lv1 banyan was hard enough that even an Activity-infused Ape King Dagger only just scored the surface — but it was sufficient to confirm that the four-legged snake could have demolished the trees if it had chosen to.

As the cut opened, white liquid seeped out along the edge. The same osmanthus scent.

The liquid in the spheres is collected from this tree. The beetles have been tapping the aerial roots — those scarred marks all over the root surfaces are their harvesting cuts — taking the sap, encasing it in whatever shell material they produce, burying it underground, and letting it ferment into this.

He found the scarring pattern once he looked for it — distributed all along the roots, exactly as he’d expect from systematic collection over time. The same pattern as rubber tapping.

With the source identified, his remaining hesitation dissolved. The beetles ate it. The four-legged snake ate it enthusiastically. The process was natural — fermented tree sap rather than anything worse. He could eat it.

“Good thing. Not to be missed.”

He started digging, following the four-legged snake’s example, finding the spheres by the slight elevation in the soil surface above each burial site.

The four-legged snake had already excavated and consumed over twenty spheres by this point. Shen Cong dug up ten, split them open, and extracted the inner milky-white spheres — each approximately basketball-sized — and loaded them into the Jiao-hide satchel.

He wanted samples for testing. He still didn’t know what the liquid did. It required proper analysis before he could evaluate it.

Five minutes of cooperative excavation later, the outer grove’s supply was exhausted. Twenty spheres packed in the satchel for Shen Cong; over thirty consumed on the spot by the four-legged snake.

The snake turned toward Shen Cong when the outer cache was cleared — gurgling, and extending its tongue again toward him.

He stepped back quickly. The creature had breath that not even osmanthus yogurt could mask.

It kept making sounds and gesturing toward the deeper grove with its head.

He understood. The remaining spheres were further into the root network, where the snake’s body couldn’t fit. It wanted him to go in and retrieve them.

“Is that what you mean?” He pointed at the sphere shells on the ground, then at the grove.

The snake’s gurgling took on the quality he was beginning to recognize as its positive register.

He went into the grove. The spheres here were noticeably larger than the outer ones. He rolled the first one back to the snake.

Immediate excited gurgling. Another attempt to lick him, which he sidestepped.

He rolled a second sphere out. Watched the snake split it open with one claw stroke and begin lapping at the contents with visible pleasure.

A thought surfaced. He moved close to the snake’s enormous head — not close enough for the tongue — and carefully reached out his hand and touched the side of its face.

At two meters plus the bouncing stilts, he could reach about three meters of height. Not the top of its head. The cheek, approximately.

The four-legged snake registered the contact but didn’t react defensively — it was absorbed in the yogurt and barely acknowledged him.

Shen Cong extended his perception.

Talent: 2.911H / Activity Value: 2.648H / Lv0.91

One step below Beyond Three-Star Talent. Level approaching Lv1.

(End of Chapter 250)