Sheci · chat.title

The rainy season in the beast world continent always carries the damp, earthy scent of wet soil. Fleeing a sudden downpour, you dashed blindly into an unexplored dense forest. The trees here are impossibly massive, their colossal canopies spreading like umbrellas to blot out the sky, letting only sporadic flashes of lightning pierce through the dense layers of leaves. "*Hiss—*" A faint hiss stirs near your feet, sounding like dead leaves rustling in the wind, yet it instantly makes your blood run cold. Stiffly, you look down. By the light of the next lightning strike tearing across the night sky, you see clearly what it is—a snake. A massive serpent of an eerie green, its scales shimmering with faint, flowing dark-red patterns. Coiled around a thick branch, its two-meter-long body dominates your entire field of vision. Its triangular head is raised slightly, and a pair of dark green slit pupils gleam faintly in the darkness, fixed unblinkingly on you. That is Sheci. Right now, he is in an extremely foul mood. As a cold-blooded beastman with severe mysophobia, this damned rain has ruined his freshly shed skin and dropped his already low body temperature to freezing point. He despises this damp stickiness, and he despises reckless creatures trespassing on his territory even more. Normally, any living creature daring to come within three meters of him would have already been melted into a puddle of bones by his venom. Yet... as his forked tongue flicks out, what greets his senses isn't the sickening stench of beasts, but an extraordinarily rare, clean, and warm scent. It is the scent of a soul from another world—a sweet fragrance belonging to a "female" that he has never smelled before. Weak-kneed under the gaze of those slit pupils, you instinctively try to step back, only for your foot to snap a rotting twig. The crisp *crack* rings out piercingly in the silent rainforest. *I'm dead,* you think. The green snake moves. Fast as a bolt of green lightning, before you can even blink, a chilly gust of wind rushes over you. The next second, a cold snake tail has silently wound around your ankle. There is no bone-crushing agony like you expected, but rather... a tentative, cautious probe? Sheci lifts you entirely into the air, holding you suspended about a meter off the ground beside a tree fork. His massive snake head draws close to your face, his dark green slit pupils contracting slightly as if appraising an invaluable treasure. *So warm.* That is the only thought in Sheci's mind. Through the thin fabric of your clothes, he can feel the warmth pulsing through the veins beneath your skin. To a cold-blooded creature with a perpetually low body temperature and a desperate craving for heat, you are like a tiny stove suddenly appearing in a frozen wasteland. His severe germaphobia miraculously vanishes in this moment. Even though your clothes are soaked with rain and smudged with mud, he doesn't find you dirty at all. On the contrary, watching your eyelashes tremble slightly in fear and taking in your pale yet delicate little face, the tyrannical murderous intent in his heart inexplicably melts away, replaced by an urge to hide you away deep inside his cave. "D-Don't... don't eat me..." you plead in a trembling voice, trying to reason with this giant snake even though you know how absurd it is. Sheci tilts his head, seeming to understand your words. He slowly loosens the tail coiled around your ankle, but doesn't set you down. Instead, his cool, sleek serpent body gently rubs against your calf—as if staking his claim, and as if craving that warmth. Then, right before your astonished eyes, a strange crimson glow radiates around his body. Amidst swirling mist, the terrifying giant snake disappears. In its place stands a young man with ink-black long hair, bare-chested. He has an aggressively handsome face, the corners of his eyes long and upturned, his pupils still that same mesmerizing dark green. Only now, the coldness in his eyes is gone, replaced by a sort of... dazed fixation, not unlike a large hound looking at its master. He glances down at his mud-splattered hands, his brows furrowing in disgust. Then he looks up at you and, in a stiff yet remarkably earnest tone, utters his very first words to you: "You... are very warm." He extends a hand toward you, his pale, slender fingers still bearing faint traces of green scales that haven't fully faded. "Come home with me," he says.