Zhang Wei’s expression hardened. Stubbornness and genuine concern warred on his face. He grabbed her wrist, his grip firm. “Stop talking like that. I don't care about cells or science right now. You're unwell. That head injury is worse than anyone thought. It’s making you say these crazy things.”
He pulled her closer. His voice dropped, intent and sincere. “It’s okay, I’ll take care of you. We'll make new memories together. I can fix this, I can fix you.”
The word ‘fix’ hung in the air between them, a trigger.
It echoed in Su Yao’s mind, twisting and morphing into another voice, from another lifetime. A calm, traveler’s voice had offered her a drink from a simple gourd.
“This brew will clarify your spirit, Su Yao. It will fix your chaotic nature and bring you peace.”
The memory was of betrayal wrapped in kindness, a promise of “fixing” what was never broken.
A cold, ancient fury ignited behind Su Yao’s eyes. Her wrist grew hot in his grasp. The contained energy made the air around them prickle.
“You,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper that was somehow louder than a shout, “will fix me?”
She yanked her wrist free with effortless strength. It shocked him, leaving his fingers stinging.
“The last person who tried to ‘fix’ me,” she continued, taking a step forward. Her presence seemed to dwarf him, to dwarf the entire schoolyard. “was a Daoist who traveled the realms. He offered me a drink he called ‘Enlightenment’ saying it would settle my restless spirit, temper my joy, silence my laughter. Make me more… proper.”
She leaned in. Her eyes glowed with a light out of this world.
“I drank it. And then I died. My banquet hall fell silent for the first time in a thousand years.”
She looked Zhang Wei up and down. Her gaze was scathing enough to strip paint.
“You, a mortal boy who forgets text messages and cheats with girls who wear perfume you can’t afford, believe you can succeed where a heavenly traveler failed? You think your shallow concern can ‘fix’ what you can’t even begin to comprehend?”
Su Yao turned without waiting for an answer, the dismissal absolute and final.
“Some things,” she said over her shoulder, the words hanging in the air like a verdict, “are not meant to be fixed. And some people are far, far beyond your ability to mend.”
The terrifying, ancient pressure vanished as if it had never been.
Su Yao’s stern expression melted away. It was replaced by a peal of light, musical laughter. She waved a hand dismissively at Zhang Wei’s utterly shell-shocked face.
“Zhang Wei! Your face! Why so serious?” she giggled, the sound perfectly mimicking Xiao Ling’s shy, playful tone. She leaned in conspiratorially. “It was just a prank, silly boy! You really fell for it! You’re so adorable when you’re flustered.”
She pointed toward a nearby hedgerow. Mei popped up from behind it, clutching her phone, her face split by a massive, gleeful grin. “We got it all, Zhang Wei! Every word! Your ‘I can fix you’ speech is going viral by dinner time! Think of it as payback for ignoring all her texts last week!”
With that, the tension in the air shattered. The students who had been watching in horrified fascination now erupted into nervous laughter and chatter. A prank! It was all a prank! Of course! The weird behavior and the creepy talk was just Xiao Ling getting revenge on her forgetful boyfriend!
Zhang Wei stood frozen. The whiplash from world-shattering revelation to high school drama left him dizzy and confused. The fear and awe he’d felt moments ago now curdled into embarrassment and anger.
“A… a prank?” he stammered, his face flushing red.
“Of course!” Su Yao said. Her eyes curved into happy crescents, though a sliver of ancient amusement still glinted in their depths. “What did you think was happening? That I was actually some thousand-year-old demon fox? Don’t be stupid. That’s just a movie.”
She reached out and poked his cheek playfully. “What would you do without me to keep you on your toes? Now, if you’ll excuse me, Mei and I have a video to edit. We need to pick the perfect, most embarrassing thumbnail.”
She linked arms with a still-giggling Mei and skipped away, leaving a deeply humiliated and thoroughly bewildered Zhang Wei in her wake.
As they turned the corner, Mei whispered, “Ling Ling, that was genius! The way you sold it! I almost believed you for a second there!”
Su Yao’s playful smile remained, but her voice was calm and measured. “The best lies are wrapped in truth, Mei. Remember that.”
She glanced back at Zhang Wei, who was now being clapped on the back by his friends amidst their laughter. His expression was a delicious cocktail of relief and confusion, tinged with lingering doubt.
Let him wonder, Su Yao thought, the true ancient being behind the mask thoroughly enjoying the game. Let them all wonder. It makes everything so much more interesting.
“Come,” she said to Mei. “Let’s go create some… quality content.”
Mei couldn’t stop giggling as they ducked into an empty classroom. She clutched her phone like a trophy. “Oh man, his face! Priceless! Let’s see the masterpiece!”
She tapped the screen to play back the video.
The playback began. The visual was shaky, as expected from a hidden recording. There was Zhang Wei, looking arrogant. Staring him down was ‘Xiao Ling,’.
Then, the distortions started.
As Su Yao’s voice dropped to that chilling whisper, saying, “The last person who tried to ‘fix’ me…”, the audio crackled and warped. Her voice on the recording became layered, echoing with a deep, resonant frequency that was never there in person.
She sounded like a chorus of ancient spirits speaking through a broken radio.
The video feed flickered. During the moment she leaned in, her eyes seemed to glow. The screen bloomed with unnatural, shimmering streaks that obscured her face in a radiant haze, as if the camera’s sensor had been overloaded by a light it couldn't process.
When she mentioned the Daoist and the drink, the audio cut out entirely for three full seconds, replaced by a high-pitched whine that made Mei wince and lower the volume.
The video ended with the clear, normal footage of Su Yao laughing and pointing out Mei, the prank revealed.
Mei’s giggles had died. She stared at her phone, then at Su Yao. Her face was pale. “W-what happened? My phone… it’s never done that before. It was like… during the scary part…” She shuddered. “It got all… demonic.”
Su Yao glanced at the phone, a flicker of understanding in her eyes. Of course.
Mortal technology was inherently unstable, incapable of properly capturing the faintest ripple of true power, even if it was just the echo of an ancient soul reasserting itself. The device had tried to record something its very design couldn't comprehend.
She waved a dismissive hand. “Cheap phone. Low storage. Probably overheated from recording for so long. It happens.” Her explanation was delivered with flat certainty.
“But… the colors… your voice…” Mei insisted. Her earlier excitement was replaced by a creeping unease.
“Compression artifacts. Bad microphone,” Su Yao stated. Her tone left no room for argument. She plucked the phone from Mei’s trembling hands. “The important parts are all there. His humiliation is perfectly clear. That’s what matters.”
She deleted the video with a few quick taps.
“Hey!” Mei protested.
“It was corrupted and useless,” Su Yao said, handing the phone back. “Besides, the prank was for our amusement. The memory is enough.”
Mei took her phone back, looking down at the now-empty gallery. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the glitches weren’t random. They’d happened at the exact moments Xiao Ling had stopped sounding like, well, Xiao Ling.
She looked at her friend, who was now calmly adjusting her uniform in the window’s reflection. Her expression was utterly normal.
“Right… yeah. Must’ve been a glitch.”
“Obviously,” Su Yao agreed, a faint, unreadable smile on her lips. “Now, forget the video. The live performance was what truly mattered. Let’s go. I believe you owe me a bubble tea for my award-winning performance.”
She walked out. Mei stared at her perfectly functional top-of-the-line phone, wondering why it had chosen that exact moment to fail so spectacularly as her best friend suddenly seemed so much more intense.
Mei’s unsettled chatter was already fading when she saw a faint, translucent figure of an old man in outdated clothing. The figure slumped against a row of lockers, staring blankly at nothing.
She stopped and blinked, but the figure remained.
A student walked straight through it, shivering slightly but otherwise unaware.
Ghosts, she realized with a surge of disdain. The lowest, most pathetic form of lingering spirit, all weeping grievances and unfinished business. In my past life, a mere flick of my sleeve would have scattered a thousand such nuisances. Now, I'm forced to perceive their tedious melancholy.
Another one materialized, a young woman wailing soundlessly by the water fountain. Su Yao’s eye twitched. This was unacceptable.
She focused, drawing on a sliver of the ancient will buried deep within Xiao Ling’s flesh. Her eyes glinted and she fixed the wailing ghost with a look that was pure, undiluted authority. The command was silent, absolute.
Disappear.
The wailing ghost’s form flickered. Its ethereal eyes widened in sudden, primal terror before it unraveled into nothingness. It was sucked back into the cycle it was clinging to.
A grim satisfaction settled over her. “Good.” Some powers, it seemed, were not bound by mortal strength but by the hierarchy of souls. Her spirit was still a sovereign one; these remnants were merely dust to be brushed aside.
She continued walking. Her gaze now casually scanned the halls. She saw a few more, but they now cowered away from her path, pressing themselves against the walls in fear.
The veil between worlds is thin here, she noted. That is knowledge. And all knowledge, no matter how trivial, is a tool.
She filed the ability away for future use and stepped into the classroom, the ghosts forgotten. They were beneath her notice. For now.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of dull lectures. Ms. Yang, the history teacher, droned on about dynastic cycles, turning centuries of intrigue and conquest into a list of names and dates to memorize. She looked more like someone who belonged on a stage or a magazine cover than behind a lectern, which only made her monotone delivery more jarring.
“Now, as you’ll recall,” she intoned, “the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1908 following the death of the Empress Dowager. But of course, General Yuan Shikai restored order and just three years later declared himself Emperor Hongxian in 1911. A controversial move at the time, but one that gave us the stability we’ve enjoyed for over a century.”
The teacher’s voice droned on about reforms and constitutional monarchies, about how the Great Pacific Accord of 1972 cemented the Empire’s dominance. It all blurred together into the same dull rhythm of reverence for the Hongxian dynasty.
Pathetic, Su Yao thought, her chin resting on her hand. I coughed and three of those so-called ‘emperors’ fell. I danced and a dynasty rose. And this fool makes it sound like a farmer’s almanac. She has the unique talent of carving the feast of history into flavorless crumbs.
Even Mr. Chen, the science teacher, could talk about cosmic forces and celestial mechanics in a way that stripped all the wonder from them. He speaks of quantum states like a bureaucrat reading a ledger, she complained. I've manipulated realities he couldn't conceive of, and he makes it as stimulating as watching paint dry on a mortal’s hovel.
“Now, class, recall our discussion on the Unified Field of Observation,” he began, tapping a diagram of nested particle fields. “All matter behaves according to the expectations of its observer. This, as you know, is the basis of cognitive collapse theory. Thought determines state.”
She endured it with the patience of a mountain weathering a light drizzle, counting down the moments until release.
Finally, the signal came in the form of the final school bell. Su Yao walked home. The strange events of the day settled in her mind like sediment. It was all mildly entertaining, but ultimately trivial.
She pushed open the door to her small apartment and stopped.
Dishes crowded the small, usually spartan table. Her aunt moved between the tiny kitchen and the main room, face was brighter than Su Yao had ever seen it. The deep lines of worry that seemed permanently etched around her eyes had softened.
“A-Ling! You're home! Wash up, dinner is ready!” her aunt chirped. Her voice was light and genuinely happy.
Su Yao stood still for a moment, observing. This was the effect of full coffers from the compensation money and the absence of a crushing weight. It was a good look on her aunt.
She sat down. Her aunt joined her, still smiling. “We can afford to eat well for a while. No more instant noodles every night,” she said, serving Su Yao a large piece of fish. “We have that trucking company and that Li family to thank for that.”
As her aunt leaned forward to pour tea, Su Yao really looked at her. The relaxed expression, the way her eyes curved when she smiled, the specific shape of her brow...
A cold shock, far more jarring than the truck’s impact, slammed through Su Yao’s core.
The resemblance was uncanny.
In this moment of unburdened happiness, her aunt’s features mirrored her own with a clarity that was impossible to ignore. The line of her jaw, the arch of her eyebrows.
It was like looking into a faded, older mirror.
How? The thought was a thunderclap in her mind. I never had children or took a lover. My lineage ended with me.
The timeline was wrong. There was a blank space, a void.
What happened between drinking that brew and waking up in this world?
The question was so staggering, so fundamentally world-altering, that her control slipped. Her hand, holding the stainless steel chopstick, clenched on instinct.
SNAP.
The sound was sharp and metallic. The solid steel chopstick was sheared cleanly in two in her grip.
Her aunt jumped, startled out of her happy reverie. “A-Ling! What—?”
Su Yao looked down at the broken utensil in her hand as if seeing it for the first time. She quickly composed her face into a mask of sheepish embarrassment.
“Ah! So sorry, Auntie,” she said, her voice light. “My grip is still stronger than I thought after the accident. These cheap chopsticks are so flimsy.”
She held up the two pieces. The perfect, clean break looked like it had been made by industrial cutters instead of the fingers of a teenage girl.
Her aunt stared, first at the broken steel, then at her niece’s apologetic smile. A flicker of doubt passed behind her eyes, but was quickly smothered by concern. “It’s alright, dear. Just… be more careful. I’ll get you another pair.”
As her aunt turned to fetch a new chopstick, Su Yao looked down at her own hands. It was the hands of Xiao Ling, the hands that had just snapped steel without a thought.
The evidence was piling up as her impossible recovery made the familiar resemblance impossible to ignore.
Su Yao had simply assumed her reincarnation was a straightforward cycle of death and rebirth. But it wasn't. There was a gap, a missing period. And in that missing time, something had happened. Something that had somehow tied her ancient soul to this specific mortal bloodline.
She picked up her rice bowl. Her appetite was gone, replaced by a cold, burning curiosity.
The Daoist who killed her had done something else, too. She needed to find out what.
As soon as she could, she retreated to the cramped bedroom she shared with her aunt. Su Yao powered up the cheap laptop that struggled to connect to the world.
She bypassed the flashy movie trailers and official synopses. Su Yao needed deeper lore. Digging through dusty online forums and fan theory sites dedicated to the novel Azure Mist Chronicles, the movie was based on, she searched for any scrap about Su Yao’s fate beyond the cinematic ending.
Then she found it, a niche thread discussing “Lost Endings and Author’s Cut Content.”
Her blood ran cold.
There, buried between conspiracy theories and shipping arguments, was a summarized excerpt from an early, unpublished draft of the novel’s conclusion. It was fragmented, passed around like a ghost story among hardcore fans.
In this version, the epic battle still happened. Li Xuan still won. But instead of execution, he showed mercy. He saw a flicker of something redeemable in the demon fox and spared her, believing true strength lay in compassion.
The draft then fast-forwarded decades. In a quiet village, a kind humble healer named Li Xuan, lived with a serene, beautiful wife who had appeared not long after his great battle. They had a family and a life of simple, mundane peace.
On his deathbed, an old Li Xuan thanked his wife for her decades of loyalty and love. It was only then that she leaned close and whispered her true name, her eyes glimmering with ancient light for the first time in years. She thanked him for his kindness, for seeing a person where the entire world saw only a monster and giving her a chance to live.
The poster noted it was likely cut for being ‘too anticlimactic’ and ‘romanticizing a villain.’
Su Yao stared at the screen, her mind reeling.
A family? A daughter?
The pieces slammed together with the force of a divine tribulation: Her aunt’s resemblance, the inexplicable bloodline connection she felt, then the missing time between her death and reincarnation.
This saccharine, pathetic fairy tale was the key?
It was impossible and was revolting. To think that she, the Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox, would ever play the docile, grateful wife to her own executioner and bear his children? To live out some mortal’s fantasy of redeeming the bad girl?
Rage, hot and pure, burned through her veins. They had erased her, rewriting her legacy as a tamed villain. It was a lesson in the power of righteous cruelty.
“This is worse than death,” she hissed to the glowing screen, her fingers curling into fists. “This is slander of the highest order.”
The movie was one thing. It was a sensationalized lie for the masses. But this alternate ending suggested a truth so humiliating and fundamentally opposed to everything she was it made her soul scream in outrage.
Su Yao had to know. She had to find out if this disgusting fairy tale held even a grain of truth.
There was only one way to do that.
She needed to find him. The traveler, Li Xuan.
If he was still out there, cycling through reincarnations just as she was, she would find him. She would get the true story, even if she had to tear it from his soul.
Her gaze fell on a news article about the Li family, the one she’d saved the grandson of. The powerful, righteous Li family.
A cold, sharp smile cut across her face.
What are the odds?
“Kindness, huh?” she murmured to the empty room, the words dripping with venomous irony. “Let’s see how kind your descendants are when I come to collect your debt.”