Chapter 274: Third Night: Host

I immediately flipped Fatty over, pressed my knee into his stomach, and ground it in hard. He began to vomit violently, spewing large amounts of green liquid mixed with something like white cotton wool, all over the branches and then dripping down. I pressed a few more times until he was done. His breathing eased a bit—it seemed the stuff in his stomach had also been compressing his airways severely.

The amount he threw up was enormous, as if it had been poured from a bucket. Luckily, Fatty had a big stomach; otherwise, an ordinary person's stomach would have burst from being so stuffed.

I laid him down, covered my mouth, and looked at his vomit. A sour, rotten smell hit my face. Among the green liquid were white gelatinous lumps like egg drop soup. I broke off a branch and poked at it, discovering that the gel was packed with something that looked like eggs.

A wave of extreme nausea surged into my chest, and I almost threw up myself. Seeing the scales mixed in, I thought to myself: Could these be snake eggs? Damn, that is just too disgusting. This kind of snake lays eggs inside a person's stomach—like a monster out of a Hollywood movie. I quickly brushed all the snake eggs off the branch.

That meant the corpses down below should also be stuffed full of snake eggs. Damn, I couldn't even imagine what it would be like when these eggs hatched.

Fighting back my nausea, I looked at the mud pit below, then at the snake eggs floating on the water and drifting downstream. I began to understand what was going on here.

Could this mud pit be an "incubation chamber"? These snakes use the heat from decomposing corpses to hatch their eggs. That's why they keep carrying bodies over and dumping them into the pit—to keep them rotting and mixing with the mud to generate heat.

I've heard that many ants can control the temperature inside their nests through fermentation and decay, but snakes obviously can't do that. Still, these snakes were already using the heat of decay to incubate their eggs.

But the ruins nearby got plenty of sunlight—why didn't they incubate their eggs in the sun like other snakes? Could it be that these snake eggs require a very precise temperature to hatch? That didn't seem right. Another possibility came to me: if it hadn't rained so hard, there wouldn't be water in this mud pit—just a pool of sludge. If Fatty had fallen in, he would have taken a long time to die. His body heat would last until he was completely dead, which might be why he was still alive now. Those snakes only wanted to paralyze us, not kill us—they used our body heat to incubate their eggs.

I knew that some highly evolved snakes already develop their eggs most of the way inside the body, and after laying them, they just need a stable temperature for a day or two to hatch. Could that be what these snakes were doing? Luckily it rained so hard, or I would have fallen right into a pile of baby snakes earlier.

The most hair-raising thing was: if there were snake eggs here, didn't that mean there was also a mother snake? Just thinking about that relief statue made my blood run cold, but then I realized it was impossible. Such a huge mother snake would completely violate the laws of biology. These eggs might be the offspring of that giant snake's descendants.

Fatty's belly was still a bit swollen. I wasn't sure if there was any more stuff inside. I thought it was safer to make him throw it all up. So I propped him up, stuck my finger down his throat, and made him vomit again. But what came out next was just green-tinted water, and finally only dry heaves.

I figured there was nothing left. If there was any more, it would have passed the stomach, and he would have to… pass it out.

The mist had mostly cleared, and visibility was gradually returning. I went back to work, tightening the vines around him and preparing to lower him down slowly. It was very difficult—if I lost my grip even a little, Fatty might fall straight out of the tree. He was unconscious now, unable to use his muscles or react to protect himself, so a fall like that could kill him. I had to control the length of the vines carefully.

I got everything ready and shone the mining lamp down from the tree. The big tree grew at the edge of the mud pit; if I wasn't careful, he might drop right back into the pit, ruining all my efforts. I had to choose a good spot.

As soon as the mining lamp lit the ground beneath the tree, I froze. Below, everything was hazy. I couldn't see the ground clearly—the light seemed to hit a murky chaos.

This was really weird. Earlier, without using the lamp, just the stray light from it had let me see vague shadows on the ground. Why couldn't I see anything now? Had the fog thickened again? But why was it only thick near the ground?

Looking more closely, I realized something had changed in the mud pit. A black vapor was rising from the water, already covering the entire surface. The corpses within it appeared and disappeared, and in the black mist, they almost seemed to be moving.