Blood of the Fox

Chapter 2

After all it often rained where she grew up. It was in the human realm, in the city of Liaozhou, from the Western Provinces of the Zhou Dynasty. A harbor city, Liaozhou was wet all year round which would have made it popular with the Jade Emperor had he ever considered its existence.

That was one of the first things that made her realize there was something different about her. Whereas the other children huddled under thin wooden umbrellas, or behind red leaven awnings of the shop fronts, Ruyi loved the rain. She revelled in the slick wet feeling running through her hair and up her nostrils. A wild and strange feeling would course through her veins and she would dance, her feet leaping and twisting and stomping.

And around her the people would point and whisper. There that wild girl, they would say. They say her mother is a demon.

Her mother was Zhang Daiyu, the most celebrated courtesan in the Fragrant Plum House and all of the Western Provinces. She was also not a demon. But it was small wonder people spoke thusly to her, with the way men were willing to think their fortunes for a single night with her. Her skin is white like alabaster, her eyes as brilliant and as great as a full moon. Her red lips full of unspoken secrets. That was a poem written by a young scholar, full of academic promise, who had hanged himself outside the brothel when he had run out of money and Daiyu had refused to see him.

"Are you sorry mother?" Ruyi had liked the young scholar who was handsome and who had taught her to read and told her a great number of wonderful stories about fallen dynasties and great battles past.

"No." Daiyu's hand, as it brushed her long lustrous dark hair, was steady. As it had been when the maids had come to tell her the news and she had simply drank tea, jewelled pinky finger held aloft, and nodded. Ruyi has seen the maids exchange glances with each other. Not human, their eyes said.

"Is it true what they say and that we are fox demons that don't have any feelings?"

"We are fox immortals, and that is something else entirely. And besides demons have plenty of feelings, most of them twisted and warped, otherwise they would not seek to torture humans so."

"You know what I mean," Ruyi insisted. "Tender feelings, feelings of kindness and.. love."

Daiyu put down her brush. Her eyes were large and very dark. Ruyi has just the same eyes. "I loved a man once," She said softly. "But he is dead. And now I love you. Isn't that enough?"

Ruyi thought about this. "But not Scholar Liu?" She felt awfully sorry for him.

Daiyu resumed brushing her hair. "They say we foxes are capricious and inconstant, halfway to demons, and perhaps we are in some ways. But not in love. When we love - if we be so unfortunate - it is consuming. We are like other immortals in that way."

Ruyi didn't understand so much about love but she was curious about the notion of immortality. Her mother had told her that they were 'immortals', and indeed Ruyi had never seen her age. But Ruyi herself grew up at the same pace as her peers. Sometimes when she thought about that, a fear would fill her.

"Niang," she said. "Can you do that trick with the fire?"

Daiyu laughed. She motioned with her fingertips and the candle in her lamp went out, plunging them into darkness. Another click of her fingers and the candle came up again, illuminating her beautiful, smiling face.

For the rest of the evening Ruyi attempted to try the same thing, failing miserably each time. Then in the early hours of the morning when her mother came in to join her in their chamber, she whispered her horrible, secret fear. "What if there's been a mistake? What if I'm not an immortal but only human?"

Daiyu laughed merrily. "How do you think immortals are born? We were animals once, or objects, or even humans."

"The Taoist priest say through meditation and cultivation, one day one may through a hundred karmic rebirths reach the pinnacle of an immortal."

"That is if you want to take the slow path, the path of humans. Tell me have you seen a piece of jade meditate?"

"Well- no." Ruyi admitted.

"The faster way, the way our ancestors have taken, is through contact with immortal essences and people. The Panlin Forest, our ancient homeland, is one of the Nine Heavenly Realms. Just living there, breathing in the air and all the magic it contains, all creatures large and small will one day gain consciousness and become immortal."

"Well where is it?"

Daiyu's eyes grew dark. "The Panlin Forest is gone now, lost to us. So unfortunately my darling daughter, you do not have that privilege. To those of us born beyond the forest, we will never be truly immortal as once our race was. But if you cleave to the old ways, and burn incense every day to the effigy of the Fox King as I taught you, once you come of age, you will begin age slowly as I do and you will have a long and interesting life.

But Ruyi wasn't satisfied. She didn't want to simply age slowly, she wanted to not die at all as a true immortal would have. She also wanted to move mountains and empty oceans, or create a thunderstorm so great even the Jade Emperor became lost within it. She had heard about it in the legends of Yunyang, the fox immortal who orchestrated such an enormous storm to waylay him in order to seduce and marry him.

"Well what about the other Heavenly Realms, can I go to them instead? And how can I cultivate my xiuwei so that I may become a true immortal?"

But her mother wouldn't entertain these questions and after a long time Ruyi came to think that perhaps she not know the answers. Daiyu's power seemed so little, beyond her beauty she only knew a few simple parlour tricks, good for entertaining children and not much else. And slowly Ruyi became resigned to the fact that this too would be her fate.

That was until she turned ten and everything changed.

She had been idly practicing the guzhen in preparation for the evening's entertainment. Although she was not old enough to entertain on her own, she was often summoned to sit in a corner and play while the older girls sang and danced and laughed. She was tired and listless, bored with her life.

So when the bearded man carrying an enormous book materialized out of thin air she had been wholly unprepared. She could not help letting out a sharp and piercing scream of significant duration as he glowered at her. Several people came rushing in but when she pointed with trembling fingers and a racing heart at the half-transparent apparition in the middle of the room, they only frowned at her and told her to stop being silly.

When they were gone, shaking their heads behind them, the man said, with his arms crossed and in a rather cross tone, "Do you really not know who I am?"

Ruyi had remind herself to breath in and out a few times before she was able to speak. "Er... no?"

The man tsked. "The standards have fallen lower this time than I could have ever imagined. Well it is not up to me to make these decisions. I am Master Liu, the Record Keeper of the Heavenly Imperial Realm."

"The Heavenly-" her voice came out somewhat strangled.

He sighed. "Zhang Ruyi," He said in a booming voice. "Our records show that you are of the correct age and lineage to serve as a maidservant at the Heavenly Imperial Palace."

She opened her mouth, gaping and he raised his eyebrow. She swallowed her words and then mouthed the word Heavenly Imperial Palace slowly to herself because she really could not wrap her head around it.

He raised his hands and book appeared in one and a stylus in the other. "The minimum service is for a thousand years. You will be rewarded with great advancement to your power and your spirituality, something it appears you are sorely in need of. If you should like to go, let me know so I may write your name down in the ledger. Hurry up, I don't have all day. You are my ninety-sixth recruit and I still have one hundred and twenty six to go."