I woke up next to my egg, more refreshed than I was in a long time. A ray of hope in my heart, that maybe it will help me once again! Defend me from mental intrusions! My mind might be no fortress, but what about the egg?

Alas, its walls are crumbling, it is a safe harbor no more. Still, even a breakwater is better than nothing for a broken ship (or snake). I went in, and tried to think calmly about last nights events.

***

She was tired. She slept better than expected, whatever her child did calmed her but her body hurt. Wounds closed up, thanks to being a strong old snake, but it still felt painful. some kind of toxin still wrecking havoc. 

Time to see if children are fine. Three sons left. Daughters leave earlier. The older two, good healthy snakes. One, will shed in 2-3 days. The other, still a week away. She patted their tails, and went with them to the sunbathing spot. After checking (more carefully than usual) if there was nothing in the lake, she came to see the youngest one.

He was a good snake. Didn’t fight with siblings. Mostly healthy, though smaller. But strange. I mean why still hide head in shell? How did he defeat the gecko? What about the weird dances? And… While she was thinking about all the… unique behaviors of her son, without realising it, she just walked into another bizarre event connected to him.

Due to her many years of experience, she could recognise mental-related attacks. They were rare in most parts of the jungle, especially the complex ones, as they required high intelligence, something uncommon among most beasts. As such, they usually consisted of simple emotions like “pain” or “fear” (a favorite of a small bird, using it as a way of scaring away predators), sometimes they might even inhibit senses (a type of flying cave rodent would make everyone around it unable to see, itself using hearing as its main sense) - but this type of complex illusion made the elder snake aghast. 

She thought she was slithering in her nest, towards her child, head still hidden in an egg, but as she was getting closer and closer, the shell pieces started getting bigger and bigger. Eventually she had to start climbing them, among a loud crunching sound. Pieces of the shell started falling from the sky! Everything was cracking, from the now mountain sized egg, through the sky to the earth.

“So is it “I” or are we “We” now?” 

“I” “I” “We” “Neither?”

“I mean I am a single mind, I just split for a moment sometimes?”

“But we talk to ourselves..”
“I talked to myself as a human, it doesn’t make me crazy! Contrary to what some old friends of ours would say…”

Multiple big snakes were talking to each other. They were huge, far bigger than her now. She couldn’t say how many exactly there were, as they seemed to appear and disappear at random, as if splitting from each other. Sometimes one would disappear, sometimes another… and sometimes it wouldn’t be Arak Snake at all! Instead, some kind of snake-ape hybrid! 

Suddenly, they saw her. She could feel their surprise, and an echo of her own bewilderment, all of that quickly amplifying, making everyone panic.

She used one of her skills, “Sharp-scaled mind”, an ability causing pain to mental attacker in retaliation, (a result of hurting oneself to wake oneself up in fights, no longer requiring self mutilation)

Success! But why is it dark? She also feels weaker than usual… something is covering her head, she moved back.. Something ssstill feellsss wrong. Wait, she was in the egg? How did she fit in there? She turned around to look for her son and instead… saw herself?! What’s more it seems her body was writhing in pain! She jumped back in surprise and…

And suddenly she was back. Her son in front of her. She looked at him… and she ran away. Distracted, she didn’t notice notifications:

Reisinling

Recommend me some super stereotypical Chinese webnovels, preferably with chapters containing your favorite clichés, to upgrade our sect-head persona!
More coming in a few hours.