Chapter 52: The Chronicles of Heaven and Earth (Part 1)

 

The door flew open with a bang.

Dan Shu, a ball of white fur, launched himself at the bed. Yan Dan, who had been deeply asleep and possibly in the middle of something pleasant, was dragged out of the blankets by an armful of weeping wolf demon.

"Yan Dan, Sister Yan Dan — waaaaah, it's terrible, waaaaah, it's terrible—"

Yan Dan was furious.

Dan Shu clutched her and shook her, his sobs building. "If Father finds out he'll kill me! He already says I'm a disgrace to the wolf clan, that there's no wolf demon in all the world more foolish than me, waaaah—" He hiccuped in the middle of the wail, which didn't stop it.

He was indeed quite foolish. Yan Dan had known this for a long time. His father had defended him, saying Dan Shu was just too young and didn't yet understand things, but the fact that he could already take human form meant he was probably an adult, and adults couldn't be excused by youth. Yan Dan herself had been quite young when she first transformed, which was unusual — but Dan Shu's situation was something else entirely.

She patted his back. "Tell me what happened. You've been making progress lately — you even managed to get rid of your tail. Why would your father want to kill you?"

Dan Shu hiccuped and explained in pieces: his ears. His ears weren't working right.

The small fox that had been clinging to the top of his head lifted its body, revealing the problem: his ears were lopsided, one higher than the other, and neither of them in the location ears were supposed to be.

What had happened, apparently, was that he had been trying to move his wolf ears from the top of his head to the sides of his face — the next step in a more convincing human appearance — and had applied the wrong force, and the ears had instead arranged themselves asymmetrically on top of his head, which was worse than before in every measurable way.

Yan Dan threw off the covers, put on her outer clothes, washed her face, wrung out a towel and handed it to him. "Wash your face. I'll think of something. If I can't, we'll go ask Lord Yu Mo."

The small fox on Dan Shu's head immediately wobbled and grabbed harder at his hair.

"Ouch — ouch — Zi Yan, don't pull! Sister Yan Dan, you see, I really can't go to Master Yu Mo."

So they'd do it themselves.

Yan Dan sighed and turned to the stack of cultivation texts on the table. She had borrowed these from Yu Mo over the past few days — his collection was comprehensive and well-organized. She began going through them.

Dan Shu, face now washed, squatted beside her and watched with an expression of pitiful anticipation.

Yan Dan flipped through volume after volume. Then she stopped. "This Qiankun Technique should work. There's a record here — apparently, a donkey demon once transformed into human form but ended up with its hooves on its face. The Qiankun Technique was used to relocate them to its feet, where they became quite functional. If it works for hooves, it should work for ears."

Dan Shu's posture immediately improved. He patted his chest. "I'm not afraid, Sister Yan Dan. Try it."

Yan Dan reached out and tapped him on the head. "You should be the least afraid of anyone here. The caster bears the backlash of demonic magic, not the recipient. I'm the one in danger." She pointed to the stool beside her. "Sit."

Dan Shu sat upright on the stool. His back was trembling. "But... what if it goes wrong? What if my ears end up on my feet?"

"Then you'll need larger shoes."

She read the incantation three times carefully before forming the hand seal and beginning to chant over Dan Shu's head. She was nearly at the final words when she remembered the fox was still perched up there. If something went wrong mid-incantation, with the fox in contact with the recipient — she couldn't finish the thought. She did not want to explain to Zi Lin or Lin Lang why a fox's face was now permanently attached to a wolf demon.

"Zi Yan, come down for a moment." She moved the fox to the table, refocused, and began the final words.

The fox jumped back onto Dan Shu's head.

Yan Dan's vision went strange. She looked down, with some difficulty, and saw her own body sitting on the table, beginning to fall backward as its soul departed. Her soul — half loose already — was making directly for the fox.

She had perhaps three seconds.

She cast the soul-locking spell.

Then she fell off the table and hit the floor and lay there for a moment seeing stars, making sounds she would have preferred not to make.

She opened her eyes.

Fox paw. Right in front of her face.

She looked around the room. The furniture was all in the correct place. Everything was significantly larger than it should have been.

She and Zi Yan had traded bodies.

The soul-locking spell, at least, had held — Dan Shu and the fox, both with wrong souls in them, were frozen in place and wouldn't be wandering anywhere. The soul-locking spell was a forbidden technique; not even Yu Mo or Zi Lin could use it, which meant only she could break it. Forbidden techniques typically rebounded on the caster, but she had, through considerable study, successfully redirected the backlash to the recipients. When they woke up, they would probably be unable to sleep properly for ten days to two weeks. That was their problem.

Her problem was that she was a fox.

Yan Dan laboriously climbed onto the pile of books and began working through them, paws slipping on the pages. She turned pages with the delicacy of someone handling borrowed material they absolutely could not damage — if she tore any of Yu Mo's texts, he would bury her in the lotus pond outside for his own amusement, she had no doubt.

She searched for any record of how to reverse the Qiankun Technique.

She found nothing.

She sat among the books and faced the situation honestly. Zi Yan's ability to take human form was still approximately a hundred and fifty years away. There was the obvious question of what she would do with herself for that length of time, but there was a more pressing problem: Zi Yan, in her body, would presumably behave like Zi Yan. Which was to say: cling to Dan Shu, make soft unhappy noises, and look generally pitiful. Yan Dan shuddered at the image of her own face expressing those emotions. This absolutely could not be allowed to happen.

She was still buried in the books, deeply absorbed in the problem and increasingly grim about the options, when she heard footsteps outside.

Light, even, very steady footsteps.

She knew those footsteps.

She scrambled out of the pile of books and froze, hearing her own fox-bones creak with the movement.

Yu Mo came through the door that Dan Shu had left hanging open. He paused at the threshold, looked down at Yan Dan's body lying unconscious on the floor, and then slowly raised his gaze to the fox in the pile of books on the table.

Yan Dan did not breathe.

What should she do? She could pretend to be Zi Yan — act afraid of him, which Zi Yan generally was — or she could pretend nothing was wrong, which was difficult to sustain given the scene. She was still deciding when she saw his hand move.

Long fingers reached past her and picked up one of the books.

He looked at it.

Yan Dan's entire body went cold. That was the book with the Qiankun Technique.

He set it back down without any apparent reaction, turned, and looked at her body lying on the floor. He considered it for a moment. A small smile appeared at the corner of his mouth — inexplicable, and there and gone very quickly. Then he bent down slightly and took hold of her body's fingers.

Yan Dan, on the table, released a breath. He hadn't figured it out. Good.

Then she thought: why is he holding her hand.

She toppled off the table.

She landed flat on her back. A thud. She lay there for a moment staring at the ceiling, which was very far away. Yu Mo looked at her — at the fox lying flat on the floor — stood up, and walked out.

Just like that.

Her body was still on the floor. He hadn't moved it to a more comfortable surface, hadn't done anything useful, had simply left. Yan Dan rolled herself upright, furious.

He came back.

He walked in, crossed directly to her, picked her up by the scruff, and carried her out. He closed the door behind him. After a few steps, they rounded a corner and encountered Bai Ling, who was carrying a stack of neatly folded outer robes.

Bai Ling smiled pleasantly. "Mountain Lord."

Yu Mo nodded. He turned the corner, set Yan Dan down on the ground, and walked away without a backward glance.

Yan Dan lay in the dirt.

She stretched out a fox paw at his retreating back.

Yu Mo. I hate you.

After a moment of sitting with this, she made a practical decision: she would get herself back to her room and continue searching the texts. The only one she could rely on was herself.

She had been picking her way unsteadily along the path for a short while when a rush of cold air swept past her. She curled up fast and rolled aside.

Among the scatter of leaves, Tang Zhou was practicing his sword technique. The swordwork was, Yan Dan had to admit, genuinely beautiful. She watched from the ground, rubbing her paws together.

Tang Zhou finished a sequence, looked down, met her gaze, and bent to scoop her up.

Yan Dan felt something warm move through her. Her senior brother was considerably kinder than some other people she could mention.

Tang Zhou rested his chin on his sword hilt and looked at her with a considering expression. "A three-tailed spirit fox. They're quite rare. I didn't expect to find one here."

From somewhere behind him, a cluster of small green snake demons spoke up helpfully: "This is the younger brother of the fox girl Lin Lang. She brought him here last year."

Tang Zhou made an agreeable sound, patted Yan Dan's head, and said, mostly to himself, "I thought—" He set her down and turned toward the snake demons.

Yan Dan stared after him.

He had just set her on the ground and walked away. She had been intending to use him to get back to her room. This was an absolute betrayal of their life-and-death friendship.

One of the green snake demons asked, "Young Master Tang, aren't you going to visit Miss Yan Dan today?"

Tang Zhou glanced back, unconcerned. "I ran into your mountain lord earlier. He mentioned she was still sleeping, so I won't disturb her."

Yan Dan sat in the path and absorbed this.

Yu Mo. He had told Tang Zhou she was asleep. Not Yan Dan appears to have had some kind of incident or the situation in her room is somewhat unusual — just still sleeping, don't bother. And Tang Zhou had accepted this at face value and gone to look at scenic views with a snake demon instead of checking on his life-and-death friend.

The little green snake, who had arranged particularly abundant flowers in her hair, was guiding Tang Zhou away with a sweet expression. Yan Dan watched. She and this snake demon had technically been in the same cohort of prospective concubines for the mountain lord, once, though that had resolved itself in a particular direction.

The flowers were very pretty, she conceded. But in such quantity, even very pretty flowers became a different thing.

She turned and made her way back toward her house, moving carefully on uneven ground in an unfamiliar body.

A drop of water landed on her forehead.

She looked up. The sky was clear. She continued looking upward.

A very large bat demon was hanging from a branch directly above her, drooling, its fangs slowly emerging.

She registered this.

Then she was tumbling down the hill and landing with a thud in a puddle of mud.