Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Early the next morning, I woke up to find a snake coiled on my chest-and nearly jumped out of my skin.

How on earth had it gotten out?

The black snake was still asleep. It was a little heavy, and looked bigger than the black kingsnakes I remembered.

I sat up, and the snake woke too, flicking its tongue.

“How did you get here?” I rubbed my eyes.

A beautiful snake that crawled out in the middle of the night to sleep with you?

Cute.

I glanced at the air conditioner, which had shut off, then opened my phone and finally saw the landlord’s message from yesterday about a power outage.

The electricity was back now.

The black kingsnake stayed curled up on my bed, barely moving.

Before leaving for work after washing up, I thought about feeding it something, but it still refused to eat.

I stuffed the snake back into the reptile enclosure and went to work.

The strange thing was, my workaholic boss at the company still hadn’t replied to the document I’d sent him last night.

Normally, if he’d been working overtime at the office last night too, he would’ve replied to my email that very evening-and probably picked out a few more problems while he was at it.

But now, he hadn’t even assigned a single task all morning.

This wasn’t normal.

Just then, someone happened to pass by, so I called out, “Assistant Lin.”

“Manager Xu, do you need something?”

“Why haven’t I seen Mr. Qin today? I have a document waiting for his approval.”

“Mr. Qin took sick leave. He requested it last night.”

Sick leave?

Worthy of celebration. So workaholics could get sick too.

“Did he say how long he’d be out?”

“He’s taken the remaining two workdays off this week. I’ll be handling his work for the time being, and I’ll get that approval to you as soon as possible this afternoon.”

My expression eased, and Assistant Lin and I exchanged a look of mutual understanding between fellow beasts of burden just trying to survive.

As Qin Jingchong’s assistant, their workload was no lighter than ours.

As for the other colleagues, once they learned that the Big Devil would be out of the office for the rest of the week, they had already started celebrating in advance.

Qin Jingchong had been parachuted into our company two months ago. You could tell from his surname alone that he had some connection to Qin Group.

Our company was one of the brand companies under Qin Group.

Qin Jingchong’s arrival was basically the crown prince dropping in to gild his résumé.

At first, some of my colleagues had been fooled by that face of his and his obviously superior male-model physique.

Half a month after Qin Jingchong joined the company, even the most hopelessly lovestruck female and male colleagues had lost the ability to fantasize about him.

The day went fairly smoothly.

It was just that I kept thinking about the snake I’d picked up at home. During the day, I asked around, but I didn’t hear of anyone at the company keeping snakes.

Unexpectedly, the snake was behaving itself in the reptile enclosure.

It just didn’t look very energetic.

I stared at it for a while, then decided to message the reptile shop owner I’d added before, even sending him a video.

The owner replied quickly with a voice message. “Oh? Judging by the size, this one looks like a female. Nice quality. Where’d you buy it?”

A second voice message soon followed. “Keep an eye on it. With this kind of behavior, it’s either sick or in heat.”

The owner was probably quite interested, because he asked if a video call was convenient. After I agreed, he called the next second.

At that moment, I’d just put my hand inside the enclosure. The snake, which had still been clingy last night, stared straight at me for several seconds for some reason. When I was about to touch it, it dodged.

Of course, dodging was useless.

I reached in and grabbed it.

The first thing I did was check its sex.

Unexpectedly, it wasn’t female.

I raised an eyebrow, unable to resist poking it. “There really are two…”

The snake put up quite a fierce fight, though, and bit me.

“It’s male?” The owner’s tone grew visibly excited. “This is my first time seeing a male black kingsnake with such good quality. Bro, where exactly did you buy it?”

“Picked it up.”

“Picked it up? What kind of luck is that!” He froze for a moment, then his voice came through again the next second. “Bro, would you be willing to part with it and sell it to me? I want to use it for breeding. I’ll give you a price that definitely won’t leave you losing out. Or you can take a look at my snakes and see if there’s any you like, and I’ll throw in another one…”

While the owner chattered on and on, the furious black snake bit me a second time.

Hiss.