"You can't honestly believe this will work, what if it's too strong?"
"Stop worrying, the soul is powerful but it's shell is just a tiny snake body."
"Rou, snake ayakashi don't last long once they have been manifested".
"So it's a perfect fit!"
"I mean, It might be, but then again if you don't do this right it could get out of hand."
"Listen, the soul is said to be ravenous but kind of unstable, so placing it in this snake is the best chance we've got to get rid of the infestation. It should immediately devour all those stupid things and become too large to leave the cave. It won't stay sealed for longer than a few more years and if the spell breaks any sooner we'll be covered in hundreds of those mana creatures until they drive us insane, and then we'll both get in trouble for not killing them ourselves. Let's give this a shot, okay, what choice do we have?"
"Alright fine, I hate tedious hunting chores, just get it over with so we can go. I don't like this place ever since that creature was put in the cave."
"Well that thing can't get out either, so stop acting like a coward."
Rou set the ball python and the jar on the ground and stepped back after he loosened the lid and pushed it close to the corpse. As a precaution he put his own seal like a dome around the two so the soul had no choice but to go inside the snake. When it drifted inside he released the spell. Almost immediately it started moving and the boy grabbed it behind the head and, after a quick opening of the cave seal, chucked it inside before stitching it back up with his magic energy.
A short while later, once the snake moved beyond their field of vision, they left. As she shifted along on the cold wet surface of the rocky cave floor a few things occured to her: this was not the body she was supposed to have, and that boy seemed familiar, and she didn't like the cold.
The swinging motion that was propelling her forward felt both natural and completely wrong. Ah, that's right, she used to have legs. Two legs. Human. So what was she doing as a snake?
Her tongue flicked out instinctively and a wave of information hit her. She was definitely not alone in this place. She could actually taste the heat further up the cave, the smell of rodent, the sweet water of a natural spring, and then as if she were magnetized to it she moved faster in that direction. She was ravenous, and something told her she was able to hunt. She was starting to wonder why this place was so dark when she heard movement and stopped short.
It started to dawn on her that since she couldn't see her target she would have to pay attention with her other senses, so she moved her head to try and listen more carefully. With her intense concentration the alarming squeal that shot through the air scared her into jolting back to where she started and the critters shot away at top speed. Had she really gotten so close to it? Had one of them spotted her even though not a bit of light was shining anywhere down here?
After a good time passed she started to move again, trying not to over think this time. It took a minute but she'd traversed enough to smell them again. Suddenly her full body was picking up the vibrations of scampering and scratching. She decided to let instinct take over this time, just slightly sifting to move through the weeds and moss and get closer to the source.
Carefully. Agonizingly slowly with the pain of hunger driving her, she approached the smell and scratching. She coiled her body up tight like a spring and, just when the rodent was about to move, threw her head forward, maw wide, reflexes sharp, and effectively caught the creature. Her bite wasn't enough and she brought her body's strength in for the task, wrapping it around the creature tightly until it stopped moving. Any time it shifted she tightened her grip more. Eventually it was still and she had a meal.
Oddly enough she wasn't grossed out to the thought of feeding on it, though she was sure her human self would have probably hated the idea. To her current body it was just food.
When she was done she sat for a moment, thinking deeply to try and remember why she somehow knew that about her old self. Her memories, she realized, were nothing more than whispers of emotion. Everything was gone.
She dozed for a while and once she had digested the creature she decided to move on, after all she smelled water. She came upon a pool of it, no telling how large or how deep without light, but she drank her fill and enjoyed the sensation of it on her new scales. She got an idea.
Taking a deep breath and closing her nose, she took the dive and prepared herself for the fight to get back out, but to her delightful surprise she floated as long as she kept moving. She managed to swim the full length of the pool in just a few minutes and banked with ease. This body wasn't so bad, except for that painful hunger. Maybe this snake died of starvation, or it could be that the meer surmountable number of critters she sensed earlier were making her this hungry. Available resources led to desire, she supposed.
With nothing else to do and an insatiable hunger gnawing at her belly, she hunted for several days. Well, maybe, it was hard to tell how much time was passing without light. Nevertheless she had developed a very good distraction over the course of the time. With every rodent she digested, which was far too quick for a snake to do since she had eaten close to a dozen already when a normal snake would only need one or two, she started to feel a strange surge of energy building throughout her rope like body.
The flow of extra energy was foreign, jittery, almost the opposite of what she felt her own to be. She didn't particularly like it. Her intrigue was answered after she had caught six more. She realized, not just through practice, she had become much faster, much more agile. She could whip her entire body around and strike from behind. She could outpace every creature she came across. The rush of flickering energy seeped into her body and it gave her strength for faster kills. Now that this question had been answered, another sprung from the back of her mind: why did it do this to her? Was it normal for snakes?
If it wasn't pitch black her eyes would be gleaming. Though it wasn't the best feeling, feeling like squirming under her scales, maybe if she absorbed more of it she could navigate better and get out of the cave, that way she could find the answer.
A month crawled by and her luck had left her. She hadn't been able to catch anything else since the smaller or stupider rodents. At first she thought it was because they had figured her hunting strategy out and avoided even the slightest smell of her presence in the cave, but after a while she noticed the more daring ones would run close by, once even skittering right over her coils in an aggressive defense of its offspring until she snapped at it and the little ones had hid in a crawl space.
She shifted herself around, tasted the air, and sat stock-still. They were anxious, careful now that they'd lost so many from their numbers, and until they believed she was no longer around they would hide in far better places than she had found so far. She would have to wait them out.
This inconvenience didn't bother her much. She wasn't in stabbing pain from starvation anymore, or maybe the weird energy had stopped this body from failing by what had caused it's death in the first place. What did bother her was the distant memory of human eating habits, usually at least two meals daily, and the disturbing feeling of the extra energy steadily leaving through the gaps between her scales.
In a matter of hours her body went from feeling springy and cozy to sluggish and cold, her thoughts were far less crisp, and the instincts to hunt tried to kick in almost like she hadn't caught two dozen rodents. Her own energy was sapped away alongside the jittery energy and she was in fact incredibly hungry again. This wasn't normal.
She set off along the cave floor, unnerved and anxious, weaving around the stalagmites and bolders in a steady search. Most snakes are opportunists, they catch prey by waiting until something wanders a little too close and then BAM, easy lunch. This that she was doing wasn't exactly normal.
Well, neither was the fact that she remembered being human at all and that this wasn't a rebirth but a possession of a corpse. And nether still was the burst of energy almost like static from turning on a tube television or rubbing a balloon on hair or a coat. Unnecessary semantics in her opinion when she tried to get deep thoughts to process. She was destracting herself and she needed to focus on the hunt.
In fact she almost didn't notice the danger until it was right on top of her. A bird, a very large pissed off bird by the sound of it, started shreaking and pecking at her, scratching her with its tallons. From the few sources of heat and the sound of its wings she could almost discern its size, but it moved away from her after each strike so she couldn't get a lock.
She was aggravated that she couldn't understand why it could see her but she couldn't see it until it dawned on her. It wasn't pitch black in here, she was just blind. This had been a corpse after all and sight is the first thing to go.
She slithered to the nearest pool of water and dove in, thankfully ending the assult, but the scratches hurt and she was rather annoyed with herself for not realizing her state sooner. In fact she sort of wanted to cry in frustration.
Yawning to compensate for the lack of tear ducts, the only thing she could think of to ease her mind, she figuratively licked her wounds and exited the water on the opposite bank, ducking into a gap between a few rocks. The angry fowl, the frightened rodents, and from what she could tell based on the buzzing by her head and the light splashing sounds every once in a while, small fish emerging to catch surface skimming bugs before diving back to the bottom of the water were also in this part of the cave. She could comprehend much more of her surroundings now that her mind was calm, even without sight, but the fact that she had missed this detail really bothered her.
Moving on, there was no luck catching anything here with those birds keeping an eye on her, so she kept going. It was getting much harder to travel now, even her scales seemed to be complaining about the lack of energy.
Every so often something churned in her flesh, hurt her skin, and made her find heat. Being a reptile was kind of a hassle. Curling in a ring on the warmest surface she could find, she basked in the sun that split the ceiling in ribbons, making it more of a cavern than a cave. That might have been the only reason why plants and animals survived down here, but only around the pools of water it seemed. At the entrance of the caverns, which is what she'd think of it from now on, it was barren beyond scavenging rats. Typical.
"Hey, what do we have here?"
Struck stupid by the sound of a man's words after so long of listening to wildlife, she kept still as he scooped her up in his arms.