Chapter 2: Tiger Girl Designs a Little Game

Below, the eyelashes of the "female corpse" suddenly fluttered.
It seemed to have been startled.
That slight quiver swept up a mighty storm across the galaxy in this realm, and Lin Xiaosu's consciousness was instantly expelled. Before him, there was no longer a skylight—only the quiet view of the Willow Grove Temple.
Huya sprang up with a start, landing squarely on her rear: "What was that noise?"
She dashed out of the cave.
Lin Xiaosu, still shaken, had no idea how to respond...
At this moment, he sat in a dark corner of the temple, staring blankly at the depths of its dim inner chamber.
The solar-powered lamp failed to reach the inner sanctum, yet in that darkness, he could see everything with absolute clarity—what he saw was utterly bizarre...
On the cavern wall hung a garment, its erratic stitching clearly the handiwork of his second uncle. On it were three strands of hair, long and fine, unmistakably a woman's. A mosquito, beginning its journey from one of those hairs, took flight; Lin Xiaosu could see each tremor of its wings in minute detail...
He possessed the Insightful Eye of Heaven, able to discern even the most infinitesimal things...
Wait... there was another power—the ability to reverse time!
How could he use it?
Lin Xiaosu glanced around, and everything before him seemed to flow backward in time. He saw Huya just as she had leapt up, her ample chest bouncing as she vaulted outside.
His eyes, it seemed, not only had the power of a microscope but also that of replay.
This—this was the Insightful Eye of Heaven!
How had such extraordinary eyes come to be?
All because a skylight had opened in the stone, and he had looked through it at the female corpse lying in repose. When a dewdrop was about to fall onto her eyelid, fearing it might disturb her thousand-year slumber, he instinctively reached out to stop it. In doing so, he had gained the Insightful Eye of Heaven.
Had his good intentions inadvertently done her harm?
Was this fortune originally meant for her? Had he stolen it midway, crossing from one world into another and claiming another's destiny? What had he done?
That fairy's lashes had truly moved—she was angry...
Outside, Huya suddenly let out an excited shout...
Lin Xiaosu rushed out of the temple as well, and beneath the dreamy starlight, he witnessed a scene he would never forget.
Huya braced her feet against the cliff face, pulling on a flowering vine—yet, this was no ordinary vine, for it bore scales.

"So it was you, little thing, disturbing my sweet dreams. Into my pot you go!"
Lin Xiaosu felt his teeth ache with apprehension...
"Quite defiant, aren't you!"
With a powerful yank, rocks flew as she dragged out a massive, seven- or eight-foot-long banded snake. The serpent, wild and fierce, arched in the air and lunged at Huya.
But who was Huya?
This was her specialty!
With a swing of her arm, she whipped the serpent like a limp rope—crack!
It struck the stone.
Crack! Crack! Crack...
A flurry of blows like a thunderstorm, until finally, the snake's head was smashed to a pulp. With the great serpent in hand, Huya was all smiles, brimming with satisfaction...
Lin Xiaosu, meanwhile, stared at the boulder, his face awash with disbelief...
"Stunned speechless?" Huya teased him with the snake's tail.
Lin Xiaosu seemed slow to react. Normally, in such situations, he would have turned and bolted at once, but today, he seemed dazed.
"Really scared? Don’t worry, I’ll protect you!"
"It’s not that..." Lin Xiaosu exhaled softly. "Something’s odd."
"What?"
"Take a good look—what kind of snake is this?"
Huya stretched out her arm, lifting the great banded snake, her eyes widening in shock: "Heavens! How is it so huge?"
The "Land Lady"—a venomous local snake, ordinarily never more than two feet long.
Yet the one she held now was at least two meters, and even for someone as famed for snake handling as Huya, she had never seen such an extraordinary Land Lady.
"And another strange thing—you just whipped this snake against the rocks over ten times, smashing the stone to bits, but there’s not a drop of blood on its body."
Huya glanced at the stone, then at the snake in her hand. "You’re right. What’s going on? Is it... haunted?"
A chill ran down Lin Xiaosu’s spine.

"Ah, I’m afraid of ghosts!" Huya shrieked, flinging the banded snake off the cliff before leaping straight at Lin Xiaosu.
Afraid that her tank-like charge would send him plummeting off the cliff, Lin Xiaosu quickly turned and darted back into the temple.
The latter part of the night passed quietly.
Huya climbed into bed, patting the mattress to invite Lin Xiaosu over.
She slept on the inside, Lin Xiaosu on the outside, sharing his second uncle’s thin blanket.
For childhood friends who’d played naked together, such a situation should have been nothing—but tonight something felt different. At the very least, Huya sensed a fluttering, unprecedented nervousness.
She wondered, just for a moment...
Suppose, just suppose...
Suppose a pair of hands reached out from behind—should she kick him off the bed?
But the imagined scene never came to pass.
The girl relaxed a little, yet felt a faint twinge of disappointment.
Had it been the Lin Xiaosu of half an hour before, he might have played along with her “little game”—but now, his thoughts were elsewhere, and he barely noticed.
Before midnight, he would never have believed his second uncle.
But now, he did.
For he had witnessed an anomaly on the day of the Yellow Path’s transformation with his own eyes.
His vision had completely changed.
He had just used the “reverse time” ability to trace the origins of that extraordinary Land Lady snake in Huya’s hand.
Before midnight, the snake was of normal size, barely over a foot long, but at the stroke of midnight, a faint ray of light brushed over it, and right before his eyes the snake grew out of thin air, becoming a massive seven- or eight-foot serpent...
But the real strangeness lay in that ray of light at midnight.