Chapter 1326: The Irritable Giant Python and the Captured Cubs

When the dozen-or-so-centimetre-long Yi snakes gathered around her, Xia Qing gripped the iron pole and quickly scooped and snapped shut the two snake-catching nets she had placed in the water beforehand. Once she confirmed the snakes were trapped inside the cage formed by the two net pouches, she lifted them up, and the nets broke the surface.

This way she could catch the most snakes with the least disturbance, so as not to startle the giant pythons hiding somewhere unknown in the depths of the hot spring lake.

Glancing down, she realised she had caught sixteen Yi snakes in one go!

Xia Qing happily held the net in one hand, first feeding six half-grown wolves and the blind tiger, then tossing some to the two half-grown leopards in the distance and the little tiger hiding behind the blind tiger.

These three little ones weren't familiar with Xia Qing and didn't dare approach, but when she tossed the little snakes over, they all opened their mouths to catch the prey. The little tiger missed its bite and let the Yi snake escape, anxiously swaying left and right as it searched.

The blind tiger swept its big tail over the little tiger, seemingly to comfort it. Xia Qing tossed another little snake over, accurately delivering it into the little tiger's mouth.

After feeding those in the net, Xia Qing continued scooping without even raising her head.

The baboons on the right soon discovered that the tools they had found couldn't catch snakes at all, and one after another threw the tools away, using their claws to grab like the macaques did, feeding the baby baboons they had brought along.

When the baboons' tools drifted along the water to Xia Qing, she discovered that they were actually... the insect-trapping pitchers of giant pitcher plants.

Although called "pitchers," these things were just watertight jars, so of course their snake-catching efficiency wasn't high.

However, the level of brain evolution and mimicry ability of this group of baboons still refreshed Xia Qing's understanding.

After Xia Qing had fed all the "little ones," including the blind tiger, the main force of the Tiger-Wolf Alliance began to hunt.

Although there were fewer snakes by now, Xia Qing, armed with her tools, still scooped up over thirty and placed them into the higher-grade aquatic specimen collection box her idol had prepared for her, then began feeding the adult wolves and adult tigers.

Before she had finished one round of feeding, the baboon troop let out "Kra! Kra! Kra!" alarm calls—the giant pythons were coming!

The smallest tiger in the western tiger group was carried in the mouth of an adult tiger, and Xia Qing climbed onto the back of the largest one closest to her, retreating quickly.

Because their territories lay in different directions, the Tiger-Wolf Alliance immediately disbanded—the western tigers and southern wolf pack ran westward, while the northern wolf pack ran toward Xiang Xinanfang.

Spreading out while running could also scatter the pursuing python group, easing the pressure on each other.

Worse than yesterday, this time the giant pythons and raptors were acting together!

The wolf pack had to evade the twenty-plus raptors circling at low altitude, and could only run through the slippery, dense, vine-choked rainforest, unable to pick up speed.

Judging by sound, Xia Qing confirmed that today's giant pythons seemed more irritable than yesterday, and faster too.

Xia Qing looked back at the several giant pythons flickering in and out of the water mist, unable to see how long or thick they truly were, and immediately made a decision.

She quickly turned around on the big one's back, hooked her feet into the foot buckles on either side of the protective suit's belly, lay face-down on its back facing rearward, shook off the moisture-proof bag covering the sniper rifle, and aimed the muzzle behind them.

This was Evolution Forest, and this struggle was for hunting—Xia Qing hadn't wanted to use firearms, but when her life was at stake she had to.

Then, an incredible thing happened. After Xia Qing raised the sniper rifle, the black giant python that had been closely pursuing the northern wolf pack actually... retreated.

Among the giant pythons Xia Qing knew, the only one with this kind of awareness was the brain-evolved giant python Black Loach, which had originally lived in the python pool on Mountain 55 and later moved back to the python lake in the north of Mountain 60. Could that fellow have travelled over ten kilometres to get here?

"Squeak squeak————!!!"

Just then, from another direction came the macaques' cries of extreme terror. Xia Qing looked up and, through the thin water mist, saw a giant eagle clutching a baby macaque, spreading its wings and flying high.

Unlike wolves, which run across the ground, macaques and baboons rely more on leaping between branches to change position and speed up their movement. To evade the furious giant pythons, they had climbed into the trees and were leaping, but this exposed them to the raptors' field of vision.

This was Evolution Forest, where survival competition was fierce—the fierce beasts that preyed on the little Yi snakes were themselves prey for other fierce beasts. The losers died, the victors got food, and life went on.

Xia Qing only glanced once at the giant eagle flying off with its prey before looking away, continuing to aim the sniper rifle at the giant pythons and raptors pursuing the northern wolf pack.

When the northern wolf pack entered the Dead Leaf Flower Sea, Xia Qing still held her gun and dared not relax, until the big one carried her out of the basin and stopped in the dense forest above. Only then did Xia Qing lower the gun, jump to the ground, and stare down at the basin below.

The sun cast the shadows of dozens of large and giant raptors onto the water mist, shrouding this stretch of dense forest like the shadow of death. The enraged giant pythons occasionally revealed a section of their thick bodies in the mist, while animals large and small in the rainforest shrieked and fled. The raptors circling in the sky occasionally swooped down to hunt, then rose and flew back to raptor territory.

This scene was even more breathtaking than when Xia Qing had first witnessed the wolf-versus-bear roaring contest.

A black giant python coiled around a huge banyan tree and climbed upward, reaching above the water mist. Its head, as big as a large round table, looked precisely toward the direction where the northern wolf pack was hiding.

This python was jet-black all over, including its eyes, forked tongue, and scales, gleaming with a cold light in the sun. Although Xia Qing knew it was a brain-evolved individual, as a Level 9.5 vision-evolver she could see no emotional change in its pitch-black eyes that a brain-evolved being should have.

This was the horror of a cold-blooded, scale-covered creature with no fur—the more you looked, the more it seeped into your bones.

Xia Qing lowered her voice and asked, "my lord, is that black python up in the tree the one from the water pool on Mountain 55?"

The alpha wolf lying beside Xia Qing, its rich golden eyes locked on the giant python's head, slowly nodded once.

It really was Black Loach. After Xia Qing had blocked the underground river channel of the python pool on Mountain 55 with stones, it had returned to the python lake in the north of Mountain 60. When the weather turned cold and pythons needed to hibernate, confirming it couldn't invade Mountain 60 from the south, it had gone to the raptor territory west of the python lake.

Xia Qing had assumed it was hibernating in raptor territory, but she hadn't expected it to actually cross the Mountain 62 region and enter the hot spring lake in the Mountain 67 basin.

This python's range of activity was far too large; its level of brain evolution might even be higher than that of the gold-eyed green python in the python lake, which had an even bigger body.

This raised a strong sense of crisis in Xia Qing. She looked at the alpha wolf, which had already bared its fangs and was bristling with killing intent, and said, "my lord, do you need me to use the sniper rifle to kill that python? It has very likely already recognised us."

Although both Xia Qing and the northern wolf pack were now dead-leaf coloured, pythons identified prey mainly not by sight but by their forked, pitch-black tongues.