Fusheng Tales · Evening Sound

Prologue

Autumn had arrived — my favorite season.

The heat and restlessness had departed along with the silenced cicadas, and all living things showed their fullest, most spirited face beneath the warm winds and broad skies, in harmony with the defining quality of the season — harvest.

It had been quite a few days since I’d returned from Xi’an, and the nearby schools had been back in session for over a month. But I’d noticed that Bu Ting had developed a small problem — the sales figures, which should have been climbing sharply with the return of my little greedy-cats, had not only failed to rise, they had dropped considerably. The shop, always lively after school let out, had grown cold and quiet, a scene entirely unlike the one I was used to.

Though the highs and lows of Bu Ting’s sales held no practical significance for my own finances, I had been running it for nearly a year now. I had genuinely treated it as a proper undertaking. I had grown accustomed to the constant flow of people through the shop. The sudden quiet didn’t sit well with me.

I thought about it, then sent Fatty and Skinny out the door, telling them to walk around the neighborhood and take a look.

By evening, they came back. The news they brought confirmed exactly what I’d suspected.

Across the street from Bu Ting, a new shop had opened. Also selling sweets.

According to the testimony of Fatty and Skinny, this shop was not particularly equipped to compete with mine on the merits. Compared to Bu Ting’s dazzling array of sweets — beautiful to look at and delicious to taste — the products at this establishment were absurdly limited and unrefined: cotton candy. Only cotton candy, in various colors and flavors.

The cotton candy displayed in the glass case was like clouds that had briefly paused — different colors expressing different moods.

Those little greedy-cats who had once been regulars at Bu Ting seemed to have devoted their entire attention to these soft, quick-dissolving creations. Their pull on the children, in an astonishingly short time, had overtaken the children’s longtime fondness for everything Bu Ting had to offer.

My instincts told me this was abnormal.

Ever since accompanying Jiu Jue on that trip — to be precise, since that moment on the return flight when I had intercepted a gaze watching me, a gaze I could not locate when I turned to look — I had been carrying a faint sense of displeasure. Or unease, perhaps. Or some unknown thing lurking in the shadows, seeping quietly into my life with an unfriendly intent, something I hadn’t yet been able to catch.

They say a woman’s intuition is sharp and accurate. I was not only a woman — I was a female demon.

The shop’s name was as peculiar as my own Bu Ting.

It was called: Evening Sound.

The owner of Evening Sound, I heard, was also a woman.

I thought to myself that it was good practice to be neighborly, even toward so-called competitors. A polite visit was in order.

Evening Sound was not far from Bu Ting — only across one street. But I sensed that what I was about to cross was far more than the distance of one street.

Wind had come up outside. The sun had disappeared today, and the temperature had dropped sharply. Fatty and Skinny were rummaging through boxes and cabinets hunting for thicker clothes, making a complete mess of the room.

I had no patience today to scold those two disasters. I only stood at the window with my teacup, watching through the steam that slowly dissipated from the cup, as countless golden leaves drifted down to cover every inch of the courtyard.

The gaze that had been weighing on me — it seemed to refract from every falling leaf…

1.

I watched the police car pull away from the entrance of Evening Sound, and also watched a middle-aged couple, faces drawn with worry, help each other out through the shop door. The wife was clearly not ready to let something go — she attempted to turn back inside, but her husband pulled her along, and finally they got into a car, desolate, and drove away.

Mu was a clever woman. I knew this from the first moment I saw her — her eyes told me so.

No one’s irises had ever been as captivating in their jade-green color. In the flowing motion beneath those long, dense lashes, what moved was not merely the ordinary eye of a living person, but a living green — a green that only heaven and earth could have produced — and the longer you looked, the more it seemed capable of dissolving, without barrier, into your body and your consciousness.

Wisdom cannot be feigned. Mu’s eyes gave wisdom a physical form.

I hadn’t even opened my mouth to ask about the police car or the couple when she was already smiling as she poured me a glass of juice, and said with ease: “There have been several disappearances recently, apparently. The police have come by quite a few times now.”

She delivered this in such a natural tone, as if reporting a weather forecast.

I held the orange juice, swirling it gently like red wine, with no intention of drinking it — only appreciating the color. Much like the décor of this little shop, which was rich and even in tone, dominated by deep green, beautiful and dignified. Yet it all carried an underlying weight of stubborn solidity, and the furnishings — tables, chairs, cabinets, lamps — were all squarely round or squarely square, no unusual shapes, nothing mixed. Without the fringed tablecloths draped across the tables to add a touch of vitality, this shop couldn’t possibly hold any charm for children.

Most critically, the sweets cabinet that should have been the centrepiece occupied only an unremarkable corner of the room. A few red, yellow, blue, and green cotton candy sticks trembled a little in the occasional draft that slipped inside, looking rather lonely. Compared to my Bu Ting, this place was truly sparse.

That a competitor like this had stolen my business made no sense at all.

“Someone else might have panicked in the face of all those police visits.” I set down the orange juice and looked at her with approval. “You’re very composed.”

“Those missing children did indeed visit my shop before they disappeared. But they bought their things and left. No matter how many times the police come, my answer is the same.” Mu said, unhurried. Then she looked at my completely untouched juice. “Doesn’t the juice suit your taste, Miss Shaluo?”

“I prefer tea.” I smiled and set down the cup. “But your juice is a lovely color.”

Yes — the juice was a lovely color, but nothing here was as lovely to look at as Mu herself. I rarely found myself genuinely admiring another woman’s beauty from the heart. After the Robe-and-Snow Immortal of years past, Mu was only the second. I admired those women who, with the simplest ornaments and the most natural ease, produced the most captivating charm. Such women were far more clever than those who cultivate beauty through elaborate refinement, and they leave a deeper, more lasting impression.

Mu’s clothes were only a simple knitted light-green long dress, cinched with a thin belt. White flat shoes showed just a strip of snow-white ankle above, where a thin red cord was tied, a small, unassuming jade-green pendant at its end, making her flawless skin look exquisitely charming. Her long hair was loosely gathered at the back, without any particular shape — like a half-opened rose, pinned with a dried flower clip that carried its own quiet elegance. Her every movement carried the clear, free energy of mountain forest air.

A woman like this, sitting before you with a smile that held just a faint trace of detachment — it was hard not to be drawn to her.

If I were a man, I might have fallen in love with her at first glance.

I felt toward her an inexpressible familiarity, and a genuine inclination to be close to her. This was a strange change for me — I was habitually cool toward people I was meeting for the first time.

This woman was the competitor who had been stealing my business — yet I had no intention of confronting her head-on.

We continued to chat. She said she was new to the area, had passed by Bu Ting, had even gone in to buy sweets. She’d heard that Bu Ting had a beautiful proprietress — but pity, when she visited I was not there. Only a bamboo-pole-shaped Skinny and a rubber-ball-shaped Fatty were busy in the shop. The two of them had competed to pack her sweets, and Skinny had even had the nerve to ask for her phone number.

Did they behave any differently toward regular customers?

“Ah… my two helpers are always very enthusiastic toward customers,” I said, smiling, while silently calculating how to dock Fatty and Skinny’s wages on the grounds of damaging the shop’s reputation.

“Toward female customers, I’d say.” She covered her mouth and laughed, utterly charming. “But your sweets really are delicious. That’s what gave me the idea to open a sweet shop of my own. I still can’t make many kinds, but my cotton candy seems to be quite popular with the children.”

“Ha — it certainly is. All my customers have been pulled away by your cotton candy.” I said it as a deliberate joke, letting my gaze wander apparently idly around her shop.

I knew, of course, that this could not be an ordinary sweet shop, and I knew equally that the beautiful woman called Mu in front of me could not be an ordinary woman, however hard she tried to play the part.

I couldn’t see through Mu. She probably wasn’t a demon — no matter how ancient the demon, my cultivation was sufficient to detect the distinctive scent they all carried, the one that could never be fully shed in a lifetime. But I caught no such suspicious odor from Mu. And yet, by instinct, I found it equally unlikely that she was an ordinary human.

In the intervals of our conversation, I found nothing unusual in the shop — except for a copy of On the Harm of Regional Military Governors’ Separatism left on the neighboring table, which caught my interest.

“You like this sort of rather dry historical scholarship?” I pointed at the clearly well-thumbed paperback. “I would have thought you’d prefer something like Zhang Ailing or Zhang Xiaoxian.”

“So-called regional lords were nothing but treacherous ministers, and should have been eliminated to prevent future disaster. But do you really think that’s true?” she said.

She was asking me that.

Though I was a demon who had lived many, many years, the regional separatism that had emerged after the An-Shi Rebellion was something I had heard about firsthand. But in those days, I had no awareness of such matters of state, and Mu’s question was beyond me to answer.

“Why does no one say: the regional lords were clearly guarding the border and managing the land for the emperor, sharing his burdens — if a foolish ruler sat the throne, what wrong was there in a regional lord replacing him?” Mu’s tone had turned noticeably more urgent, as if arguing with someone.

Truly a strange woman — in a moment she had pulled our easy small talk down into the weight of historical debate.

Could this be another woman who had read too many books and thought herself right into a category beyond normal thinking — part intellectual, part creative, part indignant activist?

“Either way, none of it matters anymore — it all happened over a thousand years ago.” I had no intention of debating long-buried news with her.

She smiled, a smile of quite low temperature: “Not necessarily all past.”

I thought it was time I took my leave.

It was clear enough — on this first meeting, she was feeling me out. And I her.

Two armies face off; there would be ample time ahead.

“You’re very beautiful.” Just as I was about to stand and leave, Mu said this suddenly, her eyes looking at my face with genuine seriousness.

We held each other’s gaze. My eyes passed beyond her incomparably beautiful irises; hers dropped from my face to my wrist. After a long moment, she gave a cool, mild smile. “A red-gold dragon-patterned peace lock… they say the proprietress of Bu Ting is obsessed with gold. Clearly not an exaggeration.”

My gaze dropped to the small object on my wrist, fashioned from twenty-four-karat gold. I deliberately jingled it: “I like cash too.”

“Ha — well, do visit again.” Mu waved me off.

I was just about to leave when I suddenly turned back and gave her a particularly radiant smile. “By the way — your concluding statement, that Death card — you seem to have overlooked one detail.”

“What?” She raised an eyebrow.

“From your position, the Death card was upright — implying death and endings. But from my position, it was reversed.” I cleared my throat. “An upright Death card means death. But a reversed Death card means… rising from the ashes.”

I saw Mu’s smile freeze in an instant — from some form of malice, or unwillingness. An expression like that truly should not have appeared on someone as beautiful as she was.

“Speaking of Tarot…” I winked at her. “My skill with the cards is perhaps not below yours.”

I turned and left Evening Sound. The red-gold peace lock at my wrist swung with my hands, filling the quiet night with a clear, bright jingling…

2.

Fatty and Skinny were sleeping with the profound satisfaction of the truly untroubled. Their snoring was audible from any corner of Bu Ting.

I lit the lamp at the bedside, and from my sleeve shook out a Tarot card — one I had quietly taken from Mu when I bent to gather the fallen cards for her: The Tower.

The reason my heart had contracted for that one second then was that I had heard that card crying out: Help!

That was this card — The Tower.

A card cannot speak. And the voice I heard calling for help was distinctly a cluster of voices still youthfully immature, screaming together.

I held the card up beneath the lamplight, letting my fingers carefully sense every inch of it.

When my fingers moved to the center of the card, a chill shot from my fingertips straight to my heart — then immediately reversed into a burning heat, as though trying to reduce my blood to ash. This alternating force of ice and fire churned and tangled inside my body.

I pulled my fingers back.

The Ice-Fire Soul-Binding Curse.

I recognized this technique.

It was used by practitioners of no small ability to seal a spirit-form into an alternate medium-space. Normally employed against malevolent spirits that could not be allowed to remain in the world. Only those with corrupt intentions would use it to forcibly seal innocent living beings into another world from which there was no exit.

In truth, the Ice-Fire Soul-Binding Curse was a forbidden technique. Few could use it, and even fewer did — because its cruelest quality was precisely this: there was a way in, but no way out.

Who had used this card as their medium to cast this curse? And who had been sealed inside the card?

In my heart I already had an answer — yet I still clung to a sliver of wishful thinking. I so very much did not want the ones sealed in the card to be those four children.

I stared at the image painted on this card — a tall tower, tottering on the verge of collapse beneath heavenly fire and thunder, rendered in the center of the card. People screamed and fell from the tower. At its base, one side was a surging ocean; the other, a chaotic earth.

I needed to have a “deep conversation” with this card.

Closing my eyes, I placed The Tower in my palm and began to recite, in my mind, an incantation only I knew.

In the darkness, the faint sound of waves breaking against a shore; leaping firelight, chaotic and ferocious; countless massive stones crashing to the ground, a world-splitting, earth-shaking force. My consciousness worked to gather, to penetrate, to break through every barrier obstructing me.

All demons have an eye of spiritual perception — able to see through different mediums, seeing sights that ordinary eyes cannot. This invisible eye is buried within the demon’s spiritual power. The higher the cultivation, the more this eye can perceive. Some of the elder demons I knew who were more powerful than me could see three lifetimes before and after you. As for the lower-level minor demons, being able to perceive how many banknotes were in someone’s wallet was already an achievement.

But what is gained must be sacrificed in equal measure. The longer the eye of perception is used, the deeper the medium entered, the faster spiritual power is drained. When this power drops in that abnormal steep decline, the user’s primordial spirit is severely damaged — the consequences are difficult to calculate.

Today, however, I needed this eye — to see clearly what secret this card was “hiding.” Because it concerned four young lives.

The sound of waves grew increasingly clear in my ears. The dim vision gradually brightened. A towering stone tower, in a mysterious space swaying left and right, pressed toward me. Countless terrifying cracks spread across the grey-white outer walls. Fire and thick smoke poured from the tower’s shattered windows. In the pitch-dark sky, lightning and thunder rolled; every so often, a crack of thunder exploded at the tower’s top. Men and women in grey-white clothing — faces too blurred to make out — screamed and wept as they leaped from windows that hadn’t yet caught fire, fleeing for their lives.

Truly a scene of the end of days.

And yet — oddly familiar. Everything before me was clearly the image painted on The Tower card itself.

“Help! Is anyone there? Please help us!”

I heard that familiar cry for help again — Mandarin, articulate and clear.

Without hesitation, my “eye” moved toward the room at the top of the tower.

And there they were: four children huddled together in a corner of that battered, dilapidated room, trembling — three girls and one boy, all in identical high school uniforms.

“Ren Xiaochen?” I called the name of one of the girls. Fatty had once recited all the missing children’s names to me without missing a single one.

The short-haired girl jerked her head up, her eyes wide with panic, searching the air: “Who… who’s there?”

The other three children seemed to hear my voice too and began to shout incoherently: “Help us! Who are you? We’re almost going to die! Please, please save us!”

The powerful will to survive, and the unmistakably vivid human spirit — I knew I had found the right place and the right people. The missing children had indeed been imprisoned in another space — the eerie space belonging to the Tarot cards.

The scene was very much like an invisible deity calming a group of people awaiting rescue. I deliberately made every word I spoke sound sacred and weighty, with the force of a thousand tons behind it. I knew that only this way could I temporarily steady these directionless, panicking children — and make them hold onto this sudden hope, commit to memory every word I said, and believe it without question.

I told them I was the one who had come to bring them out of this wretched place — but they needed to wait just a little while longer.

“Don’t… don’t leave us!” The pale, pudgy boy — already fifteen or sixteen years old — was, at this moment, like a five-or-six-year-old child, wailing with tears and snot. “I don’t want to be an honor student anymore… I don’t want any fortune-telling… I don’t want supernatural help… I just want to go home… waaah…”

His outburst set off the other three, who added their own heartbroken cries.

“I’m never eating cotton candy again!”

“Me neither! And I’m never going back to that horrible Evening Sound again!”

“Mom… I promise I won’t talk back to you anymore! I’ll study hard!”

These little rascals — I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But from their logically scattered shouting, I picked out a few useful pieces of information.

“All of you, pull yourselves together! What kind of display is this! No one is dying — it’s not nearly that serious!” I scolded them sternly. “With me here, what are you afraid of?”

The four of them quieted down with sniffling sobs. Ren Xiaochen asked timidly: “Then… when can we leave?”

I didn’t know, in truth.

The fire was already spreading this direction, and the entire tower structure had begun to sway on the verge of collapse. I didn’t yet know whether this space’s medium would cause them actual physical harm.

After a brief consideration, I used my intent force to press into this room and drew a triangular ring of light at its center.

“All of you, step inside the ring of light. Until I come back, no matter what happens, do not step outside that ring even once!”

This was the only thing I could do for them now — use what remained of my spiritual power to construct a Three-Kings Imperial Seal, temporarily protecting their physical safety. As long as they stayed within the Three-Kings Imperial Seal, the fire could not burn them, falling stones could not crush them, and even if the tower collapsed and they fell, they would not die from the impact or drown.

I was deeply grateful I had not forgotten the incantation for this seal. I recalled it had been a monkey spirit who taught me this technique — I heard it had later become a monk and gone off to protect some Buddhist master on a journey to India. We never saw each other again. No matter — I was grateful to it.

The Three-Kings Imperial Seal’s potency, however, only lasted twelve hours.

If I still hadn’t found a way to bring them back within twelve hours… I didn’t dwell on the consequences. It served no purpose.

The children scrambled to jump inside that multicolored triangular seal and crouched down pitifully inside it.

“Remember — I’ll be back very soon. What you need to do is do your best to drive away your fear. Understood?” I had to leave. My spiritual power was being consumed too quickly.

The four of them nodded hesitantly, wiping their tears. “You have to… come back fast!”

“I will.”

The tower, the firelight, the waves — all growing further and further away, finally shrinking to a single black point.

I snapped my eyes open. Outside the window, the still moonlight fell softly across the dressing table.

This world was as peaceful as ever.

Fine cold sweat seeped from my neck and forehead. My complexion at this moment must have rivaled a corpse crawling out of a coffin.

Utterly exhausted — body and spirit both, a bone-deep sense of something about to fall apart.

To be honest, I had not drawn on my spiritual power to this extent in many years. I had long since grown accustomed to living as a true human being.

Yet a premonition in my heart was growing ever stronger — my peaceful life was about to be completely overturned by a single Tarot card.

And yet, this only made me more determined to understand what lay behind it. Mu. Her Evening Sound. The Tarot card with its hidden evil curse. The imprisoned children. Every element was pulling me insistently toward something deeper.

Perhaps this was the source of my unease.

The Tower card lay silent in my hand — seemingly lifeless cardboard. But who was to know that beneath it, a life-or-death storm was raging.

Twelve hours only.

5.

Before dawn, I went to Evening Sound for the third time.

Mu appeared to have been up all night as well, sitting in the shop playing with her cards. Her expression was serene, as if she had expected my unexpected arrival. On the table, a cup of orange juice had already been set out for me.

Whatever I didn’t like, that was what she offered — this was the fact illustrated by her orange juice theorem.

“You’ve come to return something you accidentally took, I suppose?” she asked with a smile, turning her cards one by one.

“The card is yours, but what’s inside the card isn’t yours. So I suggest you first return what doesn’t belong to you — then I’ll return what belongs to you.” I sat down across from her, openly produced The Tower, but had absolutely no intention of returning it to her.

For most curses in the world, the simplest and most effective method of breaking them is naturally for the one who cast the curse to withdraw the curse’s power. Even if there was only a one-in-a-thousand chance, I intended to try.

“I was only helping these children.” Mu, clearly aware of the true purpose of my visit, said with no particular concern. “They told me they weren’t happy with their current lives. They didn’t want to spend day and night doing homework, memorizing textbooks, taking exams, and then anxiously waiting for parent-teacher meetings. They envied the honor students — the ones teachers liked, the ones parents doted on. While they were always overlooked, always mediocre, always unable to see where their future path led.” She raised her head and smiled. “If life in this world is so joyless, why not go to another world — a place without exams, without academic rankings, without the strict gaze of parents and teachers. That place suits them far better. If in the future anyone else asks me for the same kind of help, I would be glad to continue helping them.”

Boom.

A tongue of flame materialized from nothing, shooting from my direction across the black table surface like an unsheathed blade, straight toward Mu on the other side.

She moved swiftly, sweeping the cards from the table and sliding back, chair and all, half a foot — the red-edged, blue-core flame grazed her forehead and singed the very tip of her fringe.

Clearly, she hadn’t expected this.

Courtesy before force is my principle. I have no fondness for resolving problems with violence — but that doesn’t mean I can’t. Special circumstances require special treatment.

To be frank, the breezy little speech she’d delivered a moment ago had displeased me. Very much so.

I have no admiration for any conduct that treats life as expendable.

“Did I make you angry?” Even as composed as she was, she must have been startled by the unexpected. At least I saw a flash of panic cross her face — however quickly it was covered over by a teasing smile. “Tree spirit Shaluo — you haven’t attacked anyone in quite a long time, have you?”

“Ha — indeed. A gentleman acts with words, not fists.” I smiled, and with a touch of my finger, the fire blazing across the table between us shrank instantly to a line as thin as a thread, obediently returning to my fingertip and vanishing. Not a single trace of burning was left on the table. “But, as you know, I’ve never considered myself a gentleman — especially when dealing with someone who refuses to see sense.”

She rose slowly. Her pale green long dress, soaking in the darkest light of pre-dawn, turned pale and ashen. Her originally slender, graceful figure looked, in that moment, like a strange crack split open in the darkness of night.

Mu flung her hand upward. The Tarot cards flew into the air, floating in a ring that surrounded her. Each card grew a pair of cold eyes — staring at the world with no emotion whatsoever.

“You have your Bu Ting, I have my Evening Sound. We stay out of each other’s way. Elder Sister Shaluo, why stick your nose into affairs that aren’t yours? That doesn’t seem like your style.” Her gaze was a hundred times sharper than those eyes grown on the cards.

I had no interest in probing her origins, and even less curiosity about how she knew my identity. I simply answered with calm: “Idle business I don’t like to involve myself in — but you stole my customers and hurt my revenue. That’s not idle business.”

“Ha. You like to collect gold; I like to collect lives. Each to their own. Why must you come at me, elder sister?” She lowered her eyes slightly. Her red lips were especially vivid against the surrounding pallor.

“Please — no elder sister and younger sister. I’m independent. No family ties.” I waved a hand at her. “But I’ll say this: even if you were my own blood sister, I would still do what I need to do.”

The second method of breaking a curse was to make the one who cast it simply cease to exist. Once they were gone, their curse power would simultaneously expire. I truly had no desire to use this blunt and crude approach.

Mu sighed long and slowly. Suddenly she raised her head. Her jade-green eyes were filled with a vicious, coiled-spring intensity. She pinched the Death card between her fingers. “Perhaps I am not your match — but you are not time’s match either. If you want to fight, I’ll oblige.”

I paused for just a moment.

A clever woman, as expected. She knew how to find her opponent’s weakness and remind them of it at the right moment. Yes — in a head-on confrontation, she might not be my match. But defeating her would have no meaning to me. Defeating time was my purpose.

I only had twelve hours. Those were her Tarot cards. She must know what I had done to one of them. I could, of course, gamble on it — bet that I could reduce this woman to nothing, body and spirit, within twelve hours. But when I thought of the ironclad promise I had made to those unfortunate children, I decided not to stake their lives as chips.

“I had thought that if you turned back from your wrong path, we might still find a way to coexist peacefully in the future,” I said with a slight smile. “But clearly, that’s not going to happen now.”

She watched my retreating figure.

The last thing I heard her say was: “You will lose everything.”

An interesting opponent. I left without looking back.

Leaving Evening Sound, I called Jiu Jue.

I gave that old fellow, who had seen far more of the world than I had, a brief account of the situation — but substituted in someone else as the person involved. I didn’t want Jiu Jue to know that the one going into the card to save people was me. My greatest reluctance was adding trouble to my friends’ lives — especially trouble that might be dangerous.

He told me: certain sorcerers and malevolent spirits would use the Ice-Fire Soul-Binding Curse to imprison the living in another space. That space’s form was variable. It might look exactly like our real world, or it might take the appearance of hell or heaven. In any case, the living people sealed inside would, after a period of time, ultimately be driven toward the underworld by the space’s power. Once they arrived there, the curse within their bodies would combine with the powerful negative energy inherent to the underworld, producing an enormous repulsive force that would in an instant cause the people’s bodies to vanish — compressing their souls into spirit balls the size of a thumb. These would then flow back upstream through the River of Forgetting to the one who had cast the curse, who would absorb these distilled soul balls into their own body. For rapid enhancement of spiritual power, it was remarkably effective. But it was, in the end, a crooked path.

Having heard his account, I now understood for the first time what I hadn’t known before — that I had only known half of this curse, and hadn’t known people would use this method to advance their cultivation. Mu, this woman…

But Jiu Jue also told me another solution. The Ice-Fire Soul-Binding Curse’s “no way out” referred, in truth, specifically to coming back alive — dead was another matter. It appeared that once people entered the first space — for instance, this Tarot card world — there was no way to send them back along the path they had come, and the underworld seemed like a way out, but only after they had been turned into soul balls — which was no different from death. The only option now was, before they were forcibly sent to the underworld, to “protect” them, and then actively find the passage leading to the underworld. Once through, they would see a field of crimson spider lily flowers blooming at the river’s edge. Following those flowers, traveling upriver — as long as the young people from the human world could be kept from being harmed by the underworld’s power before leaving it, they could escape safely. Only — something or someone capable of moving freely in the underworld without being affected by its forces was very hard to find.

I fell silent for a moment, then told Jiu Jue: next time you come to Bu Ting, all your drinks are half price.

He was quiet on the other end of the phone for quite a while, then asked: “Little tree spirit, are you all right? The ‘friend’ you said needs rescuing urgently — that’s not you yourself, is it?”

“Am I that noble?” I countered with a question. “All right, carry on enjoying Xi’an. I’m granting permission for you to bring those two friends of yours to Bu Ting next time.”

I hung up with a show of lightness, and told myself: nothing to worry about. A small matter like this — I could certainly handle it.

In truth, I already had eight parts of a plan. How to rescue them, how to pass through the underworld — I had it figured out.

I drew a deep breath of the fresh air buried in the first threads of morning light, summoned a cloud, and at the fastest speed of my entire life, flew toward a particular destination…

6.

Here I was again.

The place of my birth — the peak of Fulong Mountain.

The scenery here was as breathtaking as always. Whether you looked up or down, the sky was blue and the water clear. Every blade of grass, every tree, every bird and animal, always seemed possessed of a little more spirit than elsewhere.

This was my home. The first place in my life to be marked with my imprint.

Every inch of soil beneath my feet, every stone, radiated a warmth of blood and kinship.

The Colorless Flower still bloomed, opening once a year without exception. But I no longer needed its reminder.

Too many memories were here — the ones I never wanted to take away.

I would only come once a year. I should, perhaps, thank Mu for her “candor.” Had it not been for her, I would not have come a second time this year.

I was a tree spirit — a thousand years of cultivation. My true form, the divine tree of Fulong Mountain that countless people had once taken for a sacred being, stood there at the summit, before me.

Elegant and straight, branches full and lush, a clear, lucid green — every leaf flowing with a delicate five-colored radiance. This was what I truly looked like.

An ordinary person could not see it, for the man who had once helped me take human form had concealed its presence in the mortal world. He left only a five-colored flower, instructing that every year when the flower opened, I must return to my true form for twelve hours. Only in this way could my human form be maintained, and I could live my days in peace.

Two months ago I came back to fulfill this “routine.”

Today I returned to… take my true form with me.

I had not been driven to madness by Mu’s words. I understood, of course, the importance of a true form to a demon. I knew what I was doing.

There was not much time left.

I stood before the real “me,” formed a hand seal with one hand and placed the other against the trunk of my true form, and began to recite.

Faint smoke spiraled upward from the earth beneath the roots. Accompanied by green light shooting into the sky like threads of fine rain, a deep rumbling stirred underground, as though something down below was rolling and shifting. The entire peak of Fulong Mountain trembled faintly, as if under the force of something immense.

My lips moved faster and faster.

A brilliant pillar of light several meters in diameter shot from the earth straight to the sky, then transformed in mid-air into irregular light patterns like clouds, slowly drifting back down to wrap around my true form. I felt it spinning rapidly inside that indescribable luminous body — shrinking, changing.

My eyes were forced shut by the brightness before them. All the vital energy and spiritual power within me flowed outward from my palms, involuntarily.

I didn’t know how much time passed. When no more howling wind reached my ears, and my tightly closed eyes felt no more discomforting light, I opened them into a silence without parallel.

I looked at what had appeared before me, and let out a breath of relief.

A simple small wooden boat, resting quietly in a shaft of soft sunlight.

Yes — I had transformed my true form into a boat.

A thousand-year tree spirit’s true form was not merely a fixture for me to return to once a year for a brief stay.

A tree of a thousand years — wood becomes a vessel. Through heaven and earth, free to come and go. — These were the four lines written on a birthday card from a close friend, who on one of my birthdays had given me a gift and written: This gift may come in useful someday. You are the only demon who has something like this.

She was truly far-sighted.

Because of this gift, once I transformed my true form into a boat, there was nowhere in heaven or earth that I could not go. No adverse force could act upon me — as long as I was aboard my boat.

Whether immortal or demon, though one might fly through the sky and vanish into the earth, this did not mean one could move freely between any and all spaces. The universe was too vast, filled with countless spaces of different natures. An object belonging to one space, if it blundered without preparation into another space of completely different character, could very easily be harmed by forces entirely unlike its own. Like an ice cube placed in a freezer — it remained intact. But placed outside in full sunlight, it would quickly melt and evaporate. Such were the consequences of differences in spatial properties. A human being, that ice cube — alive, was only meant for the human world. Accidentally falling into the underworld, the body could not bear the completely opposite forces of that space. The consequences were imaginable.

I knew that for a demon who had already cultivated a human form, fully exposing one’s true form was an extraordinarily dangerous thing. If the true form suffered any damage, I might disappear entirely, with no remedy possible.

But this was the only way. And I believed I was a demon of great fortune — I still had to keep this life, to fulfill a wish I had not yet seen through.

I turned and looked one more time at this scenery I had seen countless times. The faces and voices of the past — those I wished to forget, those I could not forget — gradually took shape in my mind.

The bright sunlight cast my little boat in a lush, living green. I lowered myself gently into it — into my truest life.

I had made a promise. I would bring them back.

The Tower card was gripped tightly in my hand…

7.

Being a demon actually has its perks — my boat, it turned out, worked on land, water, and in the air.

Even in a crisis like this, I could still find it in me to poke fun at myself. I was clearly not afraid of death.

With my true form to assist, using the card as medium — entering this dream-like Tarot world required no effort whatsoever. My seemingly plain little boat cut swiftly through the surging, churning sea. But not a single drop of seawater touched it. Around the hull, a faint red light seemed to float at all times, like a buffer zone, keeping everything it judged unfavorable safely outside.

Fortunately, the tower had not yet collapsed — only now it was entirely surrounded by fire, from base to top.

My boat rose smoothly from the tower’s base to its very top, and only then did I see clearly: ferocious lightning, like a scalpel, had cut away the domed top of the tower, exposing a jagged, charred cross-section to the air. The fire blazed fiercely, completely encircling the topmost room. Dense smoke rolled upward, blocking my view. My boat floated just above this roofless room — but I couldn’t see inside.

“Hey! Little rascals! Are you still alive in there?” I called out loudly while forcing the boat to descend.

“Yes! We’re fine! You came back? Please get us out of here!”

Three faint lights arranged in a triangle gradually emerged through the thick smoke. The shouts that followed from the children let me ease my breath just slightly — I hadn’t come too late.

The fire that could have reduced them to charcoal had been peering resentfully from outside the Three-Kings Imperial Seal the whole time. Everything here had been swallowed by it — except for the people inside that triangular seal. I thanked the monkey spirit again.

I reached out and pulled these four unfortunate creatures up into the boat one by one, just as a tremendous crash sounded — this powerful, magnificent structure collapsed before our eyes, layer by layer, eventually becoming like a pile of mud: one half onto the fire-lit ground, the other half into the crashing, violent sea.

The children were too stunned by the scene to speak, both hands clamped white-knuckled onto the side of the boat, gripping as though to crush it.

“All right. Nothing to be afraid of now.” I sat at the prow, looking over these disheveled little rascals. “We can go home soon.”

The little pudgy boy pressed his lips together and nodded vigorously. Already a half-grown young man, he looked at that moment like a small girl — a puddle of aggrieved tears swimming in his eyes, threatening to fall, yet afraid of being laughed at.

The girl called Ren Xiaochen pressed her hand to her heart for a long moment, then appeared to settle slightly. She raised her head and looked at me with cautious, timid eyes. “You… are you the deity who came to save us? You… you’re not going to take us somewhere even more terrifying, are you?”

“One doesn’t have to be a deity to come and save you.” I poked this overthinking little girl on the forehead. “Do you think there could be anywhere more terrifying than that tower back there?”

All four of them shook their heads in unison.

“There you go. In any case, I will bring you out safely.”

I knew that my earnest manner of making promises tended to instill genuine confidence and peace of mind in others. The children gradually shed their deep terror and despair and began to anticipate the joy of surviving what might have ended them.

The boat had descended from the air and was making its way through a boundless open expanse. There was no moon in the sky — only two or three ragged stars. An eerie dark-blue light moved across the ground. The gift from my close friend gave my boat the ability to find the entrance to the underworld on its own. We only needed to follow where it led.

“All right — tell me how each of you ended up here. You all went to Evening Sound and spoke to that proprietress, didn’t you?” I found a topic. I was afraid too long a silence would trigger a new wave of psychological distress — especially in an environment like this.

The mere mention of “Evening Sound” made all the children flinch simultaneously, as if bitten by some creature.

“It’s all your fault. If you hadn’t insisted on dragging me there, I would never have ended up in this horrible place.” The pudgy boy shot a dissatisfied look at the three girls, grumbling.

“Fatty, you literally pestered us to take you! You said you desperately wanted to make the top three in class, desperately wanted to know what it felt like to be an honor student — so your mother would stop calling you useless. That’s why we took you!” The bespectacled girl beside him tapped him on the head.

“You’re no different! You were all obsessed with becoming honor students too!” Fatty rubbed his head with a grievance. “Anyway it’s your fault. If you didn’t keep going to that horrible place and making friends with that old witch, I’d never have let you drag me into this mess!”

I didn’t intervene in the argument. Listening to these little ones bicker was quite entertaining, and from their squabbling I pieced together the general picture of what had happened.

The three girls had initially gone to Evening Sound simply because the cotton candy there was exceptionally delicious — like many other children, they became regulars. Then one day, Evening Sound’s proprietress had suddenly told Ren Xiaochen that she could see something was troubling her, and asked if she’d like to talk about it. It turned out Ren Xiaochen’s father had accidentally lost an important contract — if it couldn’t be found, he faced the prospect of being sued by the other party. So Mu had used her Tarot cards to do a reading, and told her the contract was in the desk drawer of her father’s colleague. It was found there. From that point on, the “legend” of Evening Sound’s proprietress and her divination spread quietly. Many students came seeking her out, and Mu turned no one away. Only she gave Ren Xiaochen special treatment — every time she came, Mu would invite her first to try new cotton candy flavors, and wouldn’t take payment. For such a beautiful and kind-hearted proprietress, Ren Xiaochen naturally felt both fondness and trust. One day — Ren Xiaochen’s birthday — Mu said she wanted to give her a special gift: one wish. Any wish. She would help make it come true. Ren Xiaochen believed her, and told Mu that not just for herself, but for her and her two best friends, their greatest wish was to change their current situation and know what it felt like to be honor students. No more facing their parents’ disappointed gazes, their teachers’ helpless sighs. They wanted to become those people others envied — those who lived in praise and applause, the so-called honor students. Mu agreed, and even permitted her to bring the two friends along, on the condition that the matter must be kept secret. As for the pudgy boy — not in their class but at the same school — he had accidentally overheard their conversation and then badgered and pestered his way into coming along, threatening that if they didn’t let him participate, he’d make it known to the entire school.

And then — when, following Mu’s instructions, all of them simultaneously placed their fingers on The Tower card — the terrible event happened. They were “pulled” into another world, their calls to heaven and earth unanswered. They didn’t even know how much time had passed from when they entered that world to when I found them. There was no day or night there, they said. Time seemed frozen. They didn’t grow hungry. Only endless fear.

Poor foolish children.

“Remember this: a wish is something you keep in your heart and realize through genuine effort. The demons and crooked forces of this world are most skilled at exploiting the human desire for shortcuts — using your wishes against you, turning them into tools to harm you.” I said to Ren Xiaochen and the others with seriousness. “And — you are yourself, the only one of you in existence. Don’t let envy or any other emotion turn you into a copy of someone else. It has no meaning. The reason life is precious is precisely because it cannot be replicated.”

The children exchanged glances, said nothing, and silently lowered their heads.

The boat glided smoothly across the rough ground, making not a sound — as light as a feather drifting across the sky — carrying us toward a passage hidden somewhere in the darkness.

A moment later, the pudgy boy was staring at me with an uncomfortable, fidgety expression, clearly wanting to say something.

“What is it?” I noticed his unusual look.

“I… I need to go to the bathroom… I’ve been holding it for a long time…”

“Trust you to cause trouble!” his companions rolled their eyes.

“Nature calls, it calls three times!”

I had no choice but to stop the boat, let Fatty step down, and instructed him not to go more than one meter away from us. We female companions turned our backs.

Fatty nodded repeatedly, in urgent need, and hopped off the boat.

Though the sound of the ensuing business was distinctly inelegant, it would have been truly unkind not to let him relieve himself.

Soon enough, I heard Fatty let out a long sigh of relief, followed by the sound of a zip — and then a sharp, piercing yelp from the pudgy boy.

We spun around instantly.

Right where Fatty was standing, a massive hand — its knuckles covered in thick brown fur — burst through the earth and seized the pudgy boy’s right foot.

“Stay on the boat and don’t move!” I shouted to the three girls, launched myself off the boat, and at the same time drew from my waist a slender blade, snow-white throughout, about two fingers wide, and drove it with full force into that monstrous hand.

My sword had not left its sheath for many years — but it had in its time helped me slay no small number of evil things. This blow clearly hurt the hand, which released its grip at once. At the same time, a muffled roar sounded from beneath the earth.

The wildly struggling Fatty tumbled forward. I grabbed his arm and hauled him upright, then gave him a push on the back that sent him back onto the boat.

But before I could turn around, I felt the ground beneath my feet give way. My body began to fall involuntarily downward.

The place where I stood had become, in an instant, a vast sinkhole, earth and stone flowing inward on all sides like water. Worse still — I found I could no longer summon my cloud-riding ability. In other words, I could not fly. I understood: because I had left the protection of my true form, the forces of this world had conflicted with my own and suppressed my spiritual power.

In this sudden extremity, I acted swiftly — used every last bit of strength to drive my sword hard into the wall of earth, gripped the hilt, and hung there suspended over this black pit. Below was no escape, above was no way out. And the earth of the surrounding walls was constantly shifting and crumbling. My sword could not hold on much longer.

Thud. Thud.

I heard a strange, heavy footfall — like the sound of a Tyrannosaurus Rex walking in Jurassic Park.

Two green, glowing lights — like vehicle headlamps — dropped from above me.

I looked up, and found myself staring at a head larger than my dining room table — the head of an ox. Two curved cyan horns, like two curved blades against the light. And below the neck — a human body, complete with a textbook set of six-pack abdominal muscles.

An enormous ox-headed, human-bodied creature, leaning out halfway, peering down at me as I struggled on the edge of life and death. It gave several bizarre laughs, then withdrew and went thumping away.

This was not the legendary Ox-Head and Horse-Face from folklore — I was certain. Looking at this creature’s shape, I suddenly recalled: this was the Tarot world. The Tower was the sixteenth card, and the fifteenth was The Devil — an ox-headed, human-bodied creature. Each of these “cards” was an independent scene, yet each was connected to the others. We had lingered in The Tower too long, and The Tower’s neighbor — The Devil — had caught wind of the commotion and come to join in. Given this logic, the longer we stayed, the more “neighbors” would come.

At that moment, I heard the crash of violent impacts, and the screams of the children.

That Ox Demon King must be attacking my boat. But I was not too worried about that — the strength of my true form was such that even several days of battering wouldn’t produce a crack. As long as the children stayed inside the boat, they were safe. The problem now was how I was going to get out.

My strength was nearly gone. My sword was beginning to slide.

I thought of Mu’s Death card. Surely I wouldn’t actually fall to my death in this wretched, filthy dirt pit?

Would someone please come and give me a hand? Even a kick — as long as it got me back up to the top.

Sweat rolled from my forehead. Then — a crack — my sword finally slipped free from the loosening earth…

The feeling of being unable to fly was truly terrible.

My body plummeted toward the bottomless black pit.

At the last possible moment — a scorching heat suddenly swept across my left wrist. The red-gold dragon-patterned peace lock trembled violently, its clear jingling ringing out without pause. The dragon etched onto that small round ornament began to move — lifting its head, stretching its claws. In an instant, it burst from the peace lock and into the air, becoming a vast, agile golden dragon, its claws treading clouds.

Before I could react in any way, this dragon that had descended from the sky clamped its mouth around my arm, flung me backward, and deposited me squarely on its back. With a long, reverberating roar, it carried me rapidly upward.

Just as I had expected, the Ox Demon King was repeatedly slamming its horns against my boat. The children inside were white-faced with fright.

The dragon dove from above, dropped me into the boat, then swept its tail in a mighty arc that struck the Ox Demon King squarely on the head and sent the creature tumbling several yards away.

I had no intention of lingering in any further entanglement with the Ox Demon King. Taking advantage of this opening, I dove swiftly back into my peace lock.

The children stared, stammering as they pointed at me: “You… you must be a divine being! And that was a dragon… that was a dragon, wasn’t it?”

In truth, I was quite bewildered myself. This red-gold dragon-patterned peace lock had been a little gift from Ao Chi. Exactly when he had given it to me, I could no longer remember — only that I had mocked him at the time for being too stingy, that since he knew I liked gold, he could have given me something bigger. He’d been so furious he’d wanted to hit me, and kept saying I had no appreciation for anything.

Ao Chi, this fellow…

I gripped my left wrist. The peace lock still retained a familiar fiery warmth. My heart gave an inexplicable twinge of pain.

He had always, in every situation, been thinking of me ahead of time, hadn’t he?

But Ao Chi — where on earth have you disappeared to?

I shook my head hard, forcibly suppressed the brief confusion of thought, and focused on the matter most urgent: getting out of this wretched place with everyone intact.

Then, from somewhere ahead came the sound of a river — slow and vast, lapping at our ears.

My boat stopped before this quietly flowing river. The stars in the sky had multiplied, reflected in the river’s surface as it wound into the distance, like pairs of gentle eyes blinking.

The boat moved gradually forward, settling onto the water without stirring a single ripple.

But instead of following the current forward, it sank below the surface.

Could it be that beneath this star-reflected water lay the passage leading to the underworld?

The children, who thought the boat was sinking, let out another round of clamoring shouts.

Bubbles rose all around us in gurgles — but not a drop of water landed on us or on the boat.

The boat continued to sink, the bottom seemingly never arriving. At some point, radial light sources appeared from the depths, growing brighter and brighter, each shaft of light as if capable of piercing through every cell in our bodies.

I was suddenly overtaken by a drowsiness — like three days and nights without sleep, too exhausted to hold on any longer.

I glanced at the children. They had already tilted sideways and were sleeping collectively.

My will wanted to stay awake, but this time it lost to my body. Too tired, too desperate to sleep. My eyelids grew impossibly heavy and closed…

8.

A distinct, different sound of flowing water, and a strange, ethereal fragrance, pulled me from a dreamless sleep. Opening my eyes, our boat was moving on a broad expanse of river — traveling upstream. Along the banks, countless crimson flowers bloomed in a continuous stretch, forming a soft curved line against the night, without visible beginning or end — like blood, like fire.

This was the place. The underworld.

The river called the River of Forgetting. The flowers called Spider Lilies. And the air all around, which carried an energy opposite to the human world. Every sign confirmed: this was the place we had come to. Only one step away from the world we needed to return to.

The children woke one by one, looked around at the scenery and at the sky above — which looked like a sky but wasn’t — and asked me somewhat anxiously where this was.

I didn’t tell them this was the land of departed souls. I only told them it was the road they had to take to get home.

Their faces finally showed a glimmer of joy.

The water parted before our little boat. The Spider Lilies looked like rows of friendly hosts, watching our uninvited arrival.

We encountered nothing unusual along the way. In truth, the underworld was not what legend made it — a fearsome place concerned only with death. It was simply a space accommodating another form of existence. The universe was like this: everything had two sides. Black and white. Yin and yang. Life and death. This was true balance. At the very least, the underworld was a normal space — far more decent than the one before, filled with fire and Ox Demon Kings.

I began to contemplate whether, when I got back, I ought to seriously deal with Mu. That woman — truly a menace.

The sound of the water grew fainter. The river ahead flowed ever more slowly, its level ever lower. Where the water entirely vanished was a stretch of dry, smooth stone ground. Every pebble was as smooth as a mirror, and five-colored light played between them. Standing in the center was a rectangular, door-like black object, edged with flowing white light. Looking closely — that black rectangle was made of ceaselessly rotating black vortexes. Extraordinary, gorgeous light would sometimes shoot through the gaps between those vortexes.

That was… the light of the human world.

“All right. We’re almost home.” I smiled as I announced this to the children.

They seemed to still not quite dare believe it, asking again and again: Really? Really?

“Step through and you’ll know,” I said with a wink.

I drew a deep breath, patted my true form, and smiled: “You worked hard this time. When we’re back, I’ll definitely give you a good soak of spirit dew. Next year you’ll grow even greener and more lush.” Then I extended a hand to the pudgy boy. “Hand to me. Everyone else, chain yourselves — one by one. Don’t let go.”

Quickly, the prow slowly entered that “door.” The pudgy boy didn’t dare open his eyes, the hand gripping mine clammy with sweat. The three girls were in similar states, holding each other’s hands in a death grip, eyes squeezed shut.

My body was the first to pass through those vortexes — ice-cold, but not uncomfortable at all. Quite pleasant, actually. One second later, brightness flooded my eyes. My body was wrapped in a long-missed warmth. Sunlight — real, true human-world sunlight — poured down from a crisp autumn sky. In the distance, mountain peaks and a road at their base, cars passing by — solidly, visibly real.

Quack, quack, quack, quack.

I turned toward the sound. By the edge of a pond in an uninhabited area, a flock of ducks was taking a leisurely stroll. A few flapped their wings and looked curiously at the people materializing from nowhere.

The exit of the underworld was like this — not fixed. No one knew where they would emerge in the human world. Fortunately, it was a rural pond. Had we materialized in someone’s home, we would have given innocent people half a fright.

I smiled, knocked on the pudgy boy’s head, and said: “We’re here. Open your eyes.”

He opened one eye tentatively, then froze — then burst with excitement, shook off my hand, and shouted: “We’re back! We’re back! I’m back!”

The boat continued to emerge. The two bespectacled girls came out safely. Then, last — Ren Xiaochen.

My heart finally settled completely.

The pudgy boy and the two bespectacled girls were scrambling off the boat. Ren Xiaochen was about to follow — when her face changed, she let out a scream, and her body, already through the underworld’s door, was seized by some invisible force and dragged back inside.

A bad feeling struck me instantly. The boat had already come through. If Ren Xiaochen, as an ordinary human, was pulled back into the underworld at this moment, without the protection of my true form, her body and soul would be torn to pieces in an instant by the completely opposing forces of the underworld and the human world.

I threw myself forward and seized her hand. “Hold on!”

The other three children instinctively moved to help. I shouted them back. I couldn’t let them come anywhere near this suddenly convulsing exit. If another unlucky soul got pulled in, I wouldn’t be able to manage.

“Help me!” Ren Xiaochen cried out in distress.

I could clearly feel her body sinking little by little back toward the underworld. The unseen opponent behind the door seemed to have far more strength than I did.

“I don’t want to die… I don’t want to die!” Ren Xiaochen screamed and struggled desperately toward the outside, calling to me for help.

In truth, at this moment, both my vital energy and my spiritual power had been consumed to an extreme limit.

But how could I fail at this final moment!

I steeled my heart, transformed both hands into unyielding branches, and locked onto Ren Xiaochen’s arms and whatever of her body was still outside. I told myself: even if I spent every last drop of strength, even if I were to die in the next moment, I would pull this girl out.

I held my breath, gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, tilted backward, and shouted: “Come. Out!”

And for once I truly was a force unto myself.

With a whoosh, Ren Xiaochen’s entire body was dragged from the door. She crashed into me, and the enormous impact sent us both sliding backward a considerable distance, scattering the ducks in all directions.

Ren Xiaochen was likely scared out of her wits. She pressed her face into my arms and sobbed.

I patted her back: “All right, all right. It’s over. Please don’t wipe your nose on me. You—”

I hadn’t finished speaking when I noticed something was wrong. A faint sting, mixed with a spreading numbness, began to expand from my chest.

Ren Xiaochen climbed off me, removed her right hand from my chest, and stepped aside. On the corner of her young lips was a smile — dark and cunning, entirely out of keeping with her age. But her eyes held only a blank emptiness.

I tried to stand and found I could not. In my chest was an ice pick, no thicker than a little finger, razor-sharp, covered in various runes that swam across its surface like strange insects, moving rapidly toward my heart. I reached through the pain to grip the ice pick, intending to pull it out — but the moment my palm touched it, the thing dissolved into a pool of water that vanished into my palm.

Now it was no longer a stinging pain but an agonizing one. Every inch of my body, inside and out, was as though being torn by countless sharp teeth. My head hurt as though about to explode — as though a saw were grinding open the top of my skull, trying to take something from inside.

“Xiaochen… you…” Her companions were clearly frightened by her behavior, and backed away as if they’d seen a ghost. Ren Xiaochen stood motionless, as if nothing had happened.

My vision grew blurry — perhaps sweat falling like rain had blurred my eyes. Through the haze, I dimly saw a figure, willowy and graceful, walking toward me.

Now I could not even wipe my own face.

The figure drew closer and closer, and finally passed straight through my body.

I felt nothing particular — only the sense that some things originally belonging to me had left with the figure that had passed through me.

Gradually, the unbearable pain lessened. My body felt much lighter than before. My eyes could see clearly again. I could even push myself to a sitting position. I raised my head.

The person standing across from me — even just the silhouette was achingly familiar.

“I warned you. You will lose everything.”

That person turned slowly, and showed me the victor’s smile.

I froze.

That person — was me. Features, body, voice — even the color of eyes and hair, identical. No — that was my body. From that body radiated a scent uniquely and solely mine, inimitable.

I quickly turned my head to the side, leaned out over the edge of the pond, and looked at the face reflected in the water’s surface.

My breath stopped.

The reflection in the water was not me — it was Mu.

Our bodies had been exchanged.

“Those children were never my target. They were only bait.” The “me” across the way drew from its sleeve a rope as thin as fishing line, flung it forward — the rope coiled like a snake around my true form. She pinched the rope and tugged it back. My boat — originally my own true form — was wrapped and compressed into a ball of light the size of a fist, and she tucked it into a black pouch.

“The fish I was angling for, from the very beginning, was you.” She put away the pouch, walked toward me, and looked down at me with arrogance. “Aren’t they always praising the tree spirit Shaluo for her brilliant cleverness? I suppose rumor does differ from reality after all. If I were you, I would never have taken such a risk for a handful of strangers.”

I only smiled. I said nothing.

I knew she wanted to see me in a rage. I would not give her that.

“I genuinely don’t understand why everyone always praises you. What’s so good about you?” She leaned down, studying my face. “Even the incomparable King of the Underworld counts you as a close friend, willing to send you such a precious birthday gift. I truly find it baffling.”

“You understand perfectly well. You’re simply envious.” Though “I” was no longer “I,” the ability to see straight to the truth remained.

“Being too good to people may end up harming them. If it weren’t for that birthday gift, my master wouldn’t have sent me to find you.” She gave a cool, cold laugh and patted the pouch at her waist. “Your true form now belongs to my master.”

Yes — the close friend I referred to was the current King of the Underworld. On one of my birthdays, this friend had placed a drop of their fingertip blood on my true form. It was because of that drop of the Underworld King’s blood that my true form gained the ability to move freely through all of heaven and earth. I was likely the only demon who could enter and exit the underworld at will, whenever I pleased. The true nature of the gift was, in essence, trust. Though I had not anticipated that it would bring me this trouble.

“Open a shop called Evening Sound, steal my business, attract my attention. Then deliberately let me discover that the children had been trapped in an alternate space — knowing I wouldn’t stand by and watch. Exploit the opportunity when I was utterly exhausted, my spiritual power completely depleted, to ultimately steal my true form. You and your master, step by step, lured me unwittingly into your trap. Ren Xiaochen — you got to her early, didn’t you. You knew I would have no guard up against her.” I paused, then couldn’t help but clap my hands and smile. “Excellent. Opponents like you — devious enough, shameless enough. I like it.”

“Ha — still this hard-mouthed.” She pointed at me and laughed, then looked at Ren Xiaochen. “My master’s goal was only to obtain your true form. While I — I gave myself an additional task of my own…”

“To take my human form and replace me,” I said, easily taking the words before she could. “You like being me that much?”

She walked to Ren Xiaochen’s side, drew her finger lightly across the artery in her neck, and from it pulled a thin silver thread, winding it around her finger like wrapping cotton candy.

“I spent one month cultivating this soul-gnawing spike in this foolish girl’s body — specially prepared for you. Every piece of new cotton candy she ate was made with special ingredients — my finest effort. I knew you still had some ability, and taking your body would not be easy. And you know — the soul-gnawing spike only strikes to best effect when the target’s heart and mind are completely without defense. Fortunately, I managed it — very smoothly.” After pulling the thread entirely from Ren Xiaochen’s body, a tiny blood point appeared at the girl’s neck. “But don’t worry — I have no designs on these foolish children. They’ve helped me complete my task. I’ll erase their memories and send them safely home. Not to waste your great sacrifice rescuing them, noble Elder Sister Shaluo.”

I let out a breath. The pain in my body had nearly disappeared. I tried to stand, and waved a hand at her: “I said — no randomly claiming relatives. I have no fortune to deserve a sister like you.”

“But…” Her eyes suddenly took on a meaning all their own. “Many, many years ago — that was exactly what I called you.”

I paused slightly.

She reverted to her teasing demeanor and opened her eyes in a show of innocent wideness — those eyes that now belonged to me — and said sincerely: “Also, allow me to give you a kind reminder. The soul-gnawing spike is a particular kind of curse-poison. It can transform all that is yours into mine. But there is a way to break the curse. When someone recognizes that you are the true Shaluo, the curse is broken. Remember, however — you telling someone yourself or hinting at it doesn’t count. Someone else must actively come to believe it of their own accord. And also — a demon struck by this curse-poison loses all magical power. The body you now possess, which originally belonged to me, is no different from an ordinary human’s.”

I listened quietly, without question or comment.

Seeing me give no apparent reaction, she lost a little composure, and said with cold amusement: “Though my body would suit you perfectly well enough, there is one unfortunate point. When the Colorless Flower blooms next year, you will have no way to return to your true form — because within one day, you’ve lost your true form, and…” She ran a satisfied hand through “her own” hair. “And the human form you had cultivated. You know — if you can’t return to your true form and absorb vital energy, you will fade away.” She paused, counted on her fingers. “Roughly one year remains. Of course, if within that time someone recognizes you and helps retrieve your human form — then wrests your true form back from my master — if these two nearly impossible tasks could be accomplished, I would acknowledge that the tree spirit Shaluo’s abilities do surpass mine.”

“I have never needed acknowledgment from anyone.” I said lightly, yawned, and looked at the several innocent children she had knocked unconscious on the ground. “Only, I hope you keep your word and send these little rascals home in one piece.”

“Of course.” She raised an eyebrow. “I’m being rather generous to you, actually — leaving you your life, and handing you a perfectly decent little shop. You see, you can still be a proprietress — just in a different setting.”

“Mm. Thank you,” I said with a particularly bright smile. “And congratulations to you as well — from today, you turn over a new page in your life, and live on, interestingly, in this interesting world, in my name. Let me also remind you — watch out for those two disasters in my shop, one fat and one thin. They have tremendous potential for driving you half-mad.”

“Mutual congratulations, then — ‘new’ proprietress of Evening Sound. Welcome to your post.” She tilted her face up and threw me a coquettish look — then appeared to remember something and pulled out a few banknotes, tossing them to me. “Almost forgot — you have no powers now. This is the outskirts. To get back to Evening Sound, you’ll have to take a taxi. Ha ha ha.”

Trailing a string of mocking laughter, I watched the other “me” mount a cloud with practiced ease, take those four children — and everything taken from me — and fly into the heights of the clouds.

From the air, someone apparently felt they hadn’t delivered enough of a blow, and called out one more time: “Take this as a souvenir.”

A small object drifted down from mid-air and landed before me.

A Tarot card. The Death card.

I looked at the card’s orientation, tilted my head up, and said with an undiminished smile to that departing figure: “My dear — the Death card you’ve given me is still reversed.”

I picked up the card and tucked it away. A gift someone gives me — I will always keep it carefully.

9.

Life is truly this wonderful. I have always believed it.

You see — overnight, I had inexplicably gone from the proprietress of Bu Ting to the proprietress of Evening Sound.

To be honest, I was a little sad. All that gold I had saved was now someone else’s.

Even Fatty and Skinny, those two grubby men, had become someone else’s staff.

No wonder Mu had said I would lose everything.

It took three hours of taxi rides to get back to the city. Not being able to ride clouds was genuinely inconvenient.

Standing in Evening Sound’s shop, looking at the unsold cotton candy, I began to plan how to use this little shop to sustain myself. Dying because I couldn’t return to my true form to absorb vital energy would be a relatively normal death, I supposed — but dying of starvation because I couldn’t afford food would truly be pathetic.

I began to take stock of the shop’s fixed assets — which of the valuable items could be sold to generate capital for some small investment.

Of course, I also thought about asking Jiu Jue and others for help. Even if they couldn’t lift the poison curse, they’d be willing to keep me like a useless freeloader, at least. But I quickly dismissed the idea. For one thing, that scheming false tree spirit would certainly be monitoring me at all times — it wasn’t the right moment to involve my friends. For another, Jiu Jue might not believe me. Demons identify each other by “scent” — each demon’s scent was as unreplicable as DNA. How could I convince Jiu Jue that a body without Shaluo’s scent was the real me? Too much trouble.

Most of the time, I preferred to solve problems independently.

I hung a “Temporarily Closed” sign at Evening Sound’s entrance. I needed a little time in quiet to think about what to do next.

That evening, I found an instant noodle packet in the refrigerator, made it, and ate it with great satisfaction. I’d never considered this kind of junk food a delicacy before. It seemed living under a different identity was not necessarily a bad thing.

I was quite skilled at comforting myself.

During the day, a sentence Mu had said suddenly sprang into my mind: “Many, many years ago — that was exactly what I called you.” Her expression, as she said it, hadn’t looked like idle nonsense.

Did I know her? And from “many, many years ago”? Why did I have no memory of it whatsoever?

As I turned it over, a headache came on. I threw down my chopsticks, climbed into bed in the inner room.

Her bed, like my own, was clean, and faintly fragrant. The pillow was soft, and sleeping on it felt just like sleeping on my own pillow.

After so much upheaval, for the first time as an “ordinary human,” I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

“Elder Sister Shaluo, take me with you!”

“That’s not possible. You and I are different.”

“How are we different? Weren’t we born in the same place?”

“I’ve told you — we’re different.”

“Where? You can do it, and so can I! I want to live the way Elder Sister does — free and easy!”

“Staying here is better for you.”

“Liar! You’re lying! You’re lying! You can — so why can’t I!”

In the depths of the night, two arguing voices startled me awake. This fragment of dialogue, surfacing from nowhere, buried for who knows how many years, began to slowly, piece by piece, awaken a memory I had forgotten.

I got up and pushed open the window, letting the cool wind rush against my dulled head.

Mu… Mu…

Suddenly, in a flash, it came to me.

Why I couldn’t see through this woman. Why I couldn’t detect any demon-scent from her. Why I had felt drawn to her from the very beginning…

It was only now that I knew the answer.

In the world, tree spirits who had cultivated into human form were very few. Precisely because it was so difficult, tree spirits who had achieved human form were generally a little more capable than other kinds of demons, and their ability to identify the identity of others by scent was the sharpest of all. Yet tree spirits could not detect the scent of their own kind — especially those who had grown from the same ground. Their scents were often too similar.

Outside the window, the moon was hidden. In the sky, black clouds — layer upon layer, growing thicker, as though about to drop from the sky.

My heart, suddenly, was exactly like the sky I was looking at. Heavy, and about to fall.

Mu was my own kind. Always the same as me. A tree spirit.

10.

“Master, the thing you wanted — I have retrieved it successfully.”

She presented the black pouch with deference.

In the large, empty room, there was only one vast table, one chair, and books piled across the black floor.

The man sitting behind the table was drawing something on a sheet of paper. He glanced up briefly and nodded, gesturing for her to set it down.

The room had almost no light and almost no sound — only the soft scratch of the man’s pen nib moving across paper.

“Master, I…” She opened her mouth, then stopped.

“Anything else?” The man’s voice was low and resonant, with a tangible, solid weight to it. He raised his head slightly. A pair of eyes cold as a hawk’s flashed in the darkness — and then he lowered his head again. “If there’s nothing, go out. You’ve done well this time.”

“Yes!” She withdrew, delighted as a child who had received a reward.

The room reverted to a deathlike silence. The faint light slowly shifted onto the paper beneath the man’s hands. Dimly, one could see that what he was drawing on that paper was — a woman’s portrait.

Epilogue

Three days later, “my” Evening Sound reopened.

Still selling cotton candy — but I didn’t know how to make it. I went to the next street and found a cotton candy vendor who agreed to come and work part-time. The new helper’s asking price was reasonable, and the cotton candy turned out reasonably well. Though it lacked the creative touch Mu had achieved with her demon techniques, it still sold.

But the real income didn’t come from cotton candy alone. Don’t forget — I also knew Tarot. My fluency with these cards had long since reached a level that required no magic whatsoever. Using the cards in my hands to help the confused souls who came through the door — finding their missing cats and dogs, offering useful counsel to those with troubles in their hearts — then accepting the small red packets they offered in return. A life like this was not bad at all.

The Death card Mu had left me — I placed it in the bedroom, on the most prominent spot of the dressing table.

In reversed position, naturally — because it had always appeared in reversed position for me.

Reversed Death — rising from the ashes.

That was how I had always read this card for others.

I found I still had a talent for running a business. After one month, Evening Sound’s revenue was quite decent. Those who came seeking divination far outnumbered those who came for cotton candy.

Many of the customers who had been lured away from Bu Ting came back. They said Bu Ting’s sweets were better. Though Bu Ting and I had, for now, no particular connection, hearing this still gave me quiet satisfaction.

Ren Xiaochen and the pudgy boy still came by Evening Sound occasionally. And I believed Mu had indeed erased their memories.

Though they would never remember the harrowing events that had once unfolded in their young lives, and would never remember the demon who had fought with everything she had to rescue them — every time I saw their young, bright faces, saw that they were still living well in this world, I felt that, on balance, this wasn’t such a bad deal after all.

One day, Fatty and Skinny came in too. Those two creatures, unimproved as ever, used the pretext of buying cotton candy to ask for my phone number. They were, of course, chased out with a broom.

I clearly heard the fleeing Fatty say to Skinny: “How is this proprietress even fiercer than ours?”

I dusted my hands together with a private smile. How many in this world could be fiercer than your proprietress?

As for what came next — I didn’t know. Though I had Tarot cards, the thought of doing a reading for myself had never crossed my mind.

Was I afraid? Impossible. In the dictionary of a Sagittarius tree spirit, those two characters had never appeared.

I simply felt that precisely because the future was full of variables, life had meaning. As long as my sincere nature remained unchanged, my striving purpose remained unchanged, my hope-filled expectations remained unchanged.

In Evening Sound’s shop, I hung a pair of couplets I’d written myself. Well — let’s call them couplets.

The first line: Heaven made me and my talents shall be used.

The second line: Even scattered gold returns.

The horizontal scroll: At peace with whatever comes.

And at the end, a small smiling face I had drawn.

Whether I was Bu Ting’s proprietress or Evening Sound’s proprietress, whatever form I might take — I was still me. The tree spirit Shaluo, Sagittarius, born in a snowfall-filled December, at the peak of Fulong Mountain.

Of course — I also remained certain that the battle with a particular someone had only just begun.