Yun Xiu had no father and no mother. In her earliest years she’d lived at an orphanage in the town.
Calling it an orphanage was generous, really it was just a run-down little courtyard without so much as a signboard, where an old man, elderly and ill-tempered, raised four unwanted children. Yun Xiu was one of them.
Even then she’d been very sensitive to others’ gazes, being watched by a stranger made her anxious, made her heart pound, and in crowded places she’d get dizzy and dazed, her breathing labored.
So she never played with the other three children, just squatted in a corner of the little courtyard picking at the wall plaster, and they left each other in peace.
Now and then a car would stop at the courtyard gate, and a few strange grown-ups would get out to play with them.
Every time that happened, Yun Xiu would pull her little hat low and shrink in a bit tighter.
Until one day, picking and picking, the wall collapsed.
Amid the flying dust, dazedly gnawing a blade of grass, she locked eyes with the auntie next door who was cooking a big pot of rice.
There was no telling how it looked from the auntie’s point of view, in any case, that day she earned the auntie’s heartache, a great big bowl of rice, and a scolding from the old man.
And the old man lost five hundred yuan.
The next day the old man hauled her up by the scruff, pressed her head down to make her apologize, and set her toddling on her short little legs to lug bricks and rebuild the wall for the auntie.
To make up for the money he was out, the old man turned into an outright outlaw too, dragging her off to work as child labor picking cotton in a cotton field.
The old man really must have been dirt poor.
Over the next six months, she worked more jobs in the town than she could count, tightening screws at an auto shop, hauling timber at a building-materials plant, washing dishes at a restaurant, handing out flyers on the street…
But even so, they still lived hand to mouth.
At the end of the year, snow suddenly came down hard. The little courtyard leaked drafts everywhere, and the old man said the relief supplies allotted to the orphanage hadn’t arrived, surely embezzled by that brat of a town mayor.
The mayor’s whole family had gone back to their hometown for the New Year, no one was home.
Late that night, the old man secretly slipped her into the mayor’s back courtyard.
He produced a length of iron wire, picked the lock on the house, rummaged through the kitchen top to bottom, and cleaned out every bit of food.
Yun Xiu gnawed a sausage and curled up by the stove, brazenly holing up with the old man in the mayor’s kitchen for five whole days.
And then they got caught.
During the detention and interrogation, the officer gravely lectured them, saying that breaking and entering to steal was against the law, and in serious cases could mean prison time.
The old man gave a cold snort, waved a hand grandly, and pulled out two ID cards.
One was his. Seventy-eight years old.
One was hers. Eight years old.
The officer: “…”
The old man was indeed an outlaw, but after a stern lecture the officer let the two of them go anyway.
Mainly because all they’d done was eat a little of someone’s food, a small amount, and the mayor himself hadn’t made an issue of it.
The old man took her back to the little courtyard. With no work at year’s end, the two of them knit gloves for people in a room papered over with newspaper. The factory’s gloves came with badly knit thumbs that needed to be sealed by hand.
A pair of gloves earned ten cents, the basket held a great heap of them.
The old man’s eyes were bad. He dug an old pair of reading glasses with wobbling lenses out of the bottom of a box and, crocheting away, cursed the useless glasses for being cheap knockoff junk.
Yun Xiu set down her crochet hook, took off the reading glasses, pried out the lens with her little hand, flipped it around, refit it, and put the glasses back on the old man.
The old man went quiet.
Another half-month passed. Spring still hadn’t come, and the old man went first.
It was the first funeral Yun Xiu had ever attended, she understood nothing of it.
But so many people came.
The auntie from next door, the bosses she’d worked for, the town mayor, and lots of others, all crammed into the tiny courtyard.
She squatted behind the tall coffin, head down, picking at the wood.
She didn’t dare pick hard, though. She was afraid the old man would scold her again.
The coffin was carried off with the funeral procession, and she trailed far behind the crowd.
The coffin was buried, everyone drifted away, she squatted beside the gravestone.
The mayor found her and said the old man had left her two things, and handed them over.
An envelope of crumpled money and a savings book.
And an enrollment notice from the town’s elementary school.
The mayor said the old man had sold everything he had to leave her many years’ worth of tuition, that he hoped she would go to school.
“Hoped” wasn’t quite the right word, actually.
Once Yun Xiu could read, she saw the line written on the back of that notice.
“Little brat, if you dare not go to school I’ll crawl out of my grave and break your legs.”
Yun Xiu didn’t like school one bit. There were so many people at school, and the moment anyone’s gaze lingered on her she felt uncomfortable.
But she went anyway.
Because she was afraid the old man would crawl out and scold her.
Whether it was that the old man feared she’d fall into ruin, or simply that he was too poor, he’d only left her tuition, she still had to earn her own meal money.
Since she’d basically already worked every job the town had to offer, she took whatever work she could all over town, on top of doing classmates’ summer homework for them.
As she grew up, her symptoms didn’t ease, they only worsened. Talking to people made her stutter, and it was because of this that, after graduating, she chose the crematorium, a job that didn’t deal with the living.
So in front of Lingxiao Hall, the instant she saw so many people in the hall, Yun Xiu’s first thought was to run, but she forced herself to endure it.
Xie Wuwang was pretty good to her. He was a good person.
But if she made him lose face in public, that might not stay true.
For all she knew, he’d get furious like the old man and crawl out of his grave to break her legs.
And then throw her to the snakes.
Yun Xiu hugged a pillow, nuzzling it with her soft little face, and woke from a long, hazy old dream. Her body felt light and floating, something warm coursing through her every limb and joint, cozy and comfortable.
She had no idea why she’d suddenly dreamed of things from so long ago, like the flash of one’s whole life before death (memories reeling past like a revolving lantern). Yun Xiu stirred her lashes and slowly opened her eyes.
And saw, right up close… a fair collarbone.
Jade-like, tinged faintly pink, delicate and lovely with the light moonlight falling on it. Her gaze traveled lower… and was blocked by a loosely fallen white collar.
Yun Xiu blanked for a moment, feeling that she was still hugging something. She looked down into her arms.
An arm was clasped entirely in her embrace, its sleeve rather rumpled and pushed up a bit, baring a fair, strong wrist-bone, the slender, well-defined knuckles marked with several red teeth-prints.
A picture of pitiful, thoroughly ravaged misery.
Yun Xiu: “…”
Did, did she do that?
Stiffly Yun Xiu lifted her head, tremblingly raised her lashes, and looked up, at the young man deep in sleep.
He lay languidly at her side, lashes gently closed, breathing soft and slow.
Faint mist coiled beside the cloud-bloom flower-bed, moonlight casting shadows beneath his thick, raven lashes, his skin cold and pale, brows and eyes like a painting. Call him a young man, but he was really somewhere between boy and man, features lush and striking, yet an air of cool, aloof detachment about him.
Yun Xiu: !!!
Her heart went thump-thump, skipping a couple of beats.
Before this she’d either been in her veiled hat with her head down, or too far off to catch more than a hurried glimpse, never had she seen his face up close like this.
And this close, sleeping right beside her, no less!
She could even smell his scent, light and faint, impossible to place but very pleasant, perfectly suited to his air, mingled with a floral fragrance that fogged her brain until she didn’t know what she was thinking.
Amid her frantic heartbeat, Yun Xiu felt something graze her lower back and abruptly pop out, too fast to guard against.
Yun Xiu turned her head and saw a white tail.
Fluffy, bushy, its tip stained a vivid, eye-catching red.
Swishing about very cheerfully, batting here, batting there.
She was done for, the fox tail was out!
In that instant, a whole array of deaths flashed through Yun Xiu’s mind: bitten by a cobra and dying of venom, strangled tight in a python’s coils, a rattlesnake shaking its tail and winding up her thigh…
Almost instantly, Yun Xiu reached out and clapped a hand over her own tail.
Pressing it down, she glanced back and, seeing the young man still had his eyes shut, breathed a slight sigh of relief.
Yun Xiu fretted.
When she’d first transmigrated over, she’d had no spiritual energy and couldn’t retract the tail, it had been the Hehuan Sect Master who’d tucked it away for her. So how was she supposed to retract it now…?
As the thought crossed her mind, a warmth suddenly flowed through her body, and the next moment the tail beneath her pressing palm whisked itself right back in.
Yun Xiu: …Hm?
Yun Xiu looked at her palm. It seemed she had spiritual energy now?
But there was no time to dwell on that, the more lethal problem right now was Xie Wuwang.
Just what conscienceless deed had she committed after passing out?!
Yun Xiu drew a deep breath, carefully released his hand, slowly set it back beside him, and, while she was at it, straightened his sleeve, attempting to destroy the evidence and erase all trace of the crime.
Yun Xiu’s gaze fell on his loosened collar, that little patch of exposed skin was really rather striking.
She reached toward the loose collar, pinched the edge with slender fingers, and, carefully, bit by bit, drew it up…
“What are you doing?”
Guilty as a thief, Yun Xiu jumped, her hand jerking.
Before he could finish, she’d slapped the collar flat against his neck, throttling him and turning the tail of his sentence into a strangled wheeze.
Xie Wuwang: “…”
Xie Wuwang sat up, reached to straighten his collar, and said in an unhurried voice, “If you were planning to murder your master, the method’s a little clumsy.”
Yun Xiu stammered, “…Sorry, I was only trying to help, help you fix your collar…”
The young man paused, climbed down from the cloud-bloom flower-bed, brushed off his sleeves, and explained calmly, “This is my residence, Luoxue Peak. Yesterday you fainted after leaving Lingxiao Hall, running a fever and talking in your sleep, so I brought you here to rest.”
“As for sharing a bed, I was only lowering your temperature with spiritual energy. There was no impropriety.”
Yun Xiu understood, and relaxed. So that was it, he’d worn himself out taking care of her and fallen asleep.
Good Guy Bro really was a good guy.
Even as he said this, though, Xie Wuwang lowered his eyes and knit his brows slightly.
Once a cultivator reached a certain realm, they no longer needed sleep. He hadn’t slept in a very long time, yet yesterday he’d drifted off without even realizing it.
…Strange.
Xie Wuwang raised his eyes, his inky-black gaze on her. “Does your body feel any different?”
Yun Xiu shook her head hard, then nodded, and opened her mouth in a soft, hesitant voice. “It feels like there’s something warm flowing around inside me. It’s a little… weird.”
Xie Wuwang started, and only then noticed her cultivation realm, no longer a mortal without spiritual energy, but at the stage of drawing qi into the body.
“Hand.”
Not understanding, Yun Xiu obediently held out her hand.
Xie Wuwang laid his knuckles against her slender wrist and sent spiritual energy through to examine her. Sure enough, he hadn’t misread it, she was already at the seventh layer of Qi Refinement.
He hadn’t even taught her the technique for drawing qi into the body, she’d merely spent a night at the spirit lake, and she was already nearly ready to form her foundation?
…Could she be some kind of cultivation prodigy?
Yun Xiu hadn’t dared look up at him, and so missed the change in Xie Wuwang’s expression, her own gaze was fixed on the hand he had laid against her wrist.
It was still that flawless hand, beautiful, slender, fair as jade.
Save for two things: a tooth-print on the knuckles, and a patch of red spreading across the back of it.
Strange, it hadn’t been there before.
Because Yun Xiu herself was allergic to mushrooms, she knew allergy symptoms well, she stared at this suspicious patch of red and sank into thought.
She suddenly remembered how her tail had disobediently thrashed about just now, and it seemed to have swept right across the back of his hand.
…He wouldn’t happen to be allergic to fox fur, would he?!