The Serpent's Bewitching Dance

The year I turned twenty-four, a group of snakes gave me a marriage contract. It was signed by someone from the Guangxu era, named Yin Jiuyuan. When we met again, he handed me an employment agreement. “Snakes are unusually attracted to you, which makes you valuable to my research. Your salary is twenty thousand a month, and double if one bites you.” I was broke, so I signed. Only later did I learn that he was a snake king who had lived for three hundred years, and I was the person he fell in love with in every lifetime. And the person who died in his arms every time. This time, he said he didn’t have to marry me, but I had to die. I laughed. “Then why should you get to live while I die?” He froze. I began playing along, pretending to be naive while secretly investigating. He realized I was looking into things, but said nothing. Until the day he was cornered, and I walked out through a sea of snakes, a red mark on my forehead glowing. He asked, “When did you learn to do that?” I blinked. “From the moment you said, ‘It wasn’t you.’ You lied to me, so I lied to you. Fair is fair.” He was silent for three seconds, then suddenly smiled. “In three hundred years, you’re the first person who’s dared to play chess with me.” Later, he asked if I had ever really meant it. I said, “What about you? You waited three hundred years, but were you waiting for me, or for her shadow?” He didn’t answer. But that night, beneath the moonlight, his shadow was not shaped like a human. It was a massive coiled snake, wrapping me completely in its embrace.