The Snake Was Never the Villain — Yorushika's "Hebi" and the Two Ancient Texts Behind It

The second ending theme for Chi. — About the Movement of the Earth is "Hebi" (Snake, へび) by Yorushika. Composer and lyricist n-buna had been writing a song about snakes after being struck by the beauty of a snake's scales one day. When he returned to it while working on the anime, the fit became obvious.

Read the lyrics:

• [Yorushika Official Site](https://yorushika.com/lyrics/detail/70/)
• [Uta-Net](https://www.uta-net.com/song/367021/)
• [UtaTen (with furigana)](https://utaten.com/lyric/mi25010607/)

The song draws on two ancient texts: one from the Bible, one from Tang dynasty China.

The First Reference: The Serpent in Genesis

The first thing "Hebi" calls to mind is the serpent in the Book of Genesis.

In the Garden of Eden, a serpent approaches Eve and suggests she eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. "God knows," the serpent says, "that when you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Eve eats. Adam eats. They are expelled from paradise.

In most Christian interpretation, the serpent is the villain — the tempter, the instrument of the fall. The snake brought sin into the world.

n-buna reads this story differently.

"The well-known image in the Bible of humans eating the fruit of knowledge and the serpent that tempted them — I interpret that as a simple metaphor for the desire to know. From there, I wrote a song about a snake waking from winter sleep and crawling out to discover the world."

Not the serpent as evil. The serpent as the embodiment of the desire to know.

The song opens from the serpent's perspective — or rather, from a narrator who has become the serpent:

*行方知らずのあの雲を見た*

*わたしの鱗はあなたに似ていた* "I saw those clouds without direction — my scales resembled you" (Lyrics: n-buna / Yorushika "Hebi")

"Clouds without direction" — moving with no fixed destination, pulled by something they can't name. The scales resembling someone else speaks to an identification, an intimacy, between the serpent and the human who also cannot stop looking upward.

This reframing maps exactly onto Chi. The characters pursue heliocentrism, which is forbidden knowledge — the equivalent of the fruit they're not supposed to eat. The Church says: you are not permitted to know this. The desire says: I need to know this. The serpent, in this reading, isn't the source of corruption. The serpent is the part of every person that cannot stop wanting to understand.

The problem isn't the desire for knowledge. The problem is any system that calls that desire a sin.

The Second Reference: Yuan Zhen's "Lísī"

The other text underlying "Hebi" is a poem by Yuan Zhen, a Tang dynasty poet who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries. The poem is called "Lísī" (離思, "Parting Thoughts"), written in grief for his deceased wife.

The key lines:

曾経滄海難為水　除却巫山不是雲

*Zēng jīng cānghǎi nán wéi shuǐ, chúquè Wūshān bù shì yún.*

In translation: "Having once known the great ocean, ordinary water no longer satisfies. Having once seen the clouds of Wushan, no other clouds count as clouds."

Yuan Zhen was saying: I have known you. Now I cannot unknow you. No one else will ever be what you were to me. The great ocean and the clouds of Wushan are metaphors for a love that made everything else small.

n-buna borrowed the *structure* of this feeling, not the romantic content. "Having once known the great ocean" becomes: having once touched genuine understanding of how the world works, ordinary ignorance is no longer bearable.

The lyric makes this direct:

*また巫山の雲を見たいだけ*

"I only want to see the clouds of Wushan again" (Lyrics: n-buna / Yorushika "Hebi")

*ただ海の深さを見たいだけ*

"I only want to see the depths of the ocean" (Lyrics: n-buna / Yorushika "Hebi")

"Only want to" — the word *dake* (だけ) in Japanese carries a kind of humble simplicity: *that's all I want, just that one thing.* But the thing being wanted is bottomless. The clouds of Wushan. The depths of the ocean. Things you can look at forever without exhausting.

Once you've seen what's true, you can't unsee it. Once the characters in Chi. have encountered the evidence for heliocentrism, the geocentric model doesn't feel like a belief they can hold anymore — just a story they're required to perform. They only want to see the truth again. That's all. That's everything.

Waking from Winter

The song's imagery of spring and serpent come together in one of its most direct lines:

*ブルーベルのベッドを滑った　春みたいだ*

"I slid along a bed of bluebells — it feels like spring" (Lyrics: n-buna / Yorushika "Hebi")

A snake emerging from winter. Flowers just blooming. The feeling of a world opening up after long cold.

Snakes are cold-blooded — their body temperature follows the environment. In winter, they go dormant. They cannot eat, cannot move, cannot hunt. When spring arrives, warmth returns, and the snake wakes, crawls out, begins discovering the world again.

The desire to know can be suppressed. It can be driven underground. It can be made to lie dormant under threat of death. But it cannot be killed.

And the song's final image carries this forward in the most vivid terms:

*舌は二つ、まぶたは眠らず*

*いつか見たへびに似る* "Two tongues, eyelids that never close — becoming the snake I once saw" (Lyrics: n-buna / Yorushika "Hebi")

A snake has a forked tongue and no eyelids. It cannot stop sensing the world. It cannot close its eyes. The narrator has become the snake — has become the thing that never stops looking, never stops tasting the air for what might be known.

This is the shape of Chi. The pursuit of heliocentrism is repeatedly suppressed. Scholars die. Notes are burned. The relay seems to end. But it never does. Somewhere, in some person, the impulse survives the winter. And then spring comes again.

How the Two References Fit Together

A Biblical serpent and a Tang dynasty love poem seem unrelated. But "Hebi" uses them to say the same thing from different angles.

• The serpent: *The desire to know cannot be forbidden out of existence. It is prior to authority.*
• Yuan Zhen: *Once you have truly known something, ordinary ignorance is no longer possible. You cannot go back.*
• Winter and spring: *The desire survives suppression. It outlasts even the people who carry it.*

A snake that will tempt. A person who cannot unknow what they've learned. A force that will wake up no matter how long the winter lasts.

That is what "Hebi" is about. And that is the shape of the story in Chi.

"Aporia" and "Hebi" as a Pair

"Aporia," the first ending theme, captured the state before knowing: the puzzlement, the desire to reach what cannot be reached, the feeling of searching without a guaranteed destination.

"Hebi" captures the state after: the irreversibility, the awakening that cannot be undone, the hunger that having satisfied only deepens.

The first song is about the journey toward knowledge. The second is about what knowledge does to you once it arrives.

Together, they trace the emotional arc of the whole anime — from "I want to know" to "now that I know, I cannot stop."

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Vocabulary:

• Yuan Zhen (元稹): Tang dynasty Chinese poet (779–831). A major figure in classical Chinese poetry, known for poems of grief and love
• Lísī (離思): "Parting Thoughts" — a set of five poems by Yuan Zhen mourning his deceased wife. The most famous contains the "great ocean / Wushan clouds" lines quoted here
• Wushan (巫山): A mountain range along the Yangtze River in China, associated in classical poetry with extraordinary beauty and myth
• Hibernation (冬眠): The winter dormancy of cold-blooded animals including snakes, during which metabolism drops and activity ceases until temperatures rise in spring