Yung left the sword and the short spear with the house. Too cumbersome to carry, too many bad memories for his pacifist psyche.

Besides, Yung convinced himself rather forcefully, I don’t have a storage artefact.

The auction house elder promised to prepare a Heart qi-powered one the next time he visited.

Yung bound the pink heart ring. Immediately, he felt the change.

The excess Heart qi drained away into the ‘profane artefact of discord,’ as the elder had referred to it last, and Yung felt like he had dumped the largest turd in his two lifetimes.

“Worth it!”

***

Su Nanya cast one disgusted look at Yung’s new addition, then threw a pillow at him, “Loathsome pariah, remove your sinful intentions from our presence at once!”

“Wait, no, I didn’t buy this for you.”

“Perverted low-born. Lustful bandit. Beastly night crawler!”

Explaining his innocence consumed more time than Yung could tolerate. But as long as Su Nanya was holed up in his room, he’d have to make peace and be honest.

It's not like he hadn't tried changing his abode. But as was her power, the vixen promised to stalk until she got her validation. Or in her words, "We shall grant you our presence, and the utter pleasure to reject your heart!"

Said vixen now turned his room into a mini girly-girl palace.

"We commend your honesty. But it has occurred to us that you haven't spoken good of our beauty even once today." She said.

“Wow, you have a fluffy tail.”

“We are pleased.”

Yung sighed, then sat down. It had become their daily routine to talk about a particular puzzle. How to make Yung feel alright pursuing Su Nanya without her having to promise any commitment.

“If you want me to pursue you, you must also be honest,” Yung said. He had a matter to reveal today.

“We are listening.”

“You said you wouldn’t subject your body to our ‘ugliness,’ but haven’t you been doing it all along?” Yung stood up and pointed at Nanya dramatically, his face the image of an assured, cheeky grin.

“Have you been touching us in our sleep, you malevolent ne'er-do-well?!” Su Nanya bristled.

“I have, as a body pillow.”

“You lie,” Su Nanya scoffed, “You are weak as a worm. How can our supreme might ever fail to sense your advances.”

“Hehe, hehehehe,” Yung laughed, pushing the invisible glasses up his nose. “I have finally figured out your secret.”

“We do not like your tone.”

“You’re Su Xiya in disguise!” Yung laid bare his accusations, and Su Nanya gaped.

“Pardon?”

“I know it. You two, I have never seen you in the same place even once. You both have Su and Ya in your name. While you have ‘Nan’, which means south, Floofy has ‘Xi’, which means west.” And you both have the exact same sized celestial link, “The coincidences are too many. If you wanted to let me floof you, you could just be honest and—”

“Woof!”

Su Xiya crawled out from under the bed. She looked up at Yung with shocked googly eyes, then scratched the door. Su Yafeng opened it, and the floofy fox jaunted out.

Yung facepalmed, sitting down.

“Do you desire to wipe your perspiration, new servant?” Su Nanya asked, her voice mellow. There was something in it that ground Yung’s gears.

He looked up, “Why are you sweating too?”

“What nonsense. Princesses don’t sweat! This is but mere moisture attracted upon our fair skin after it fell prey to our beauty.” Said the vixen as she hurriedly wiped said moisture.

Yung rolled his eyes and pondered what he should do.

He was in a position to change Su Nanya’s mind about the sect recruitments. And it wasn’t like the vixen was forcing him to do her bidding. Not really. If she wanted to, she could’ve blackmailed him by threatening to annul the Su fox clan’s blood spirit contract, and he’d be absolutely done.

She did not. All she wanted was for Yung to feed her vanity.

In other words, she was being a selfish little bitch. That wasn't malicious, but it did cause problems for others.

Youjin Chao and Ziyou Ling had prepared for literal years, hoping to pass the sect recruitments. As had thousands of other youths from the city. Yung could give them a helping hand.

He could help Su Nanya out with her insecurities too.

So Yung chose to listen to his conscience despite his raging hormones begging him to play into Su Nanya’s flirting, to push her down and suck those glossy red lips dry.

But after an intense emotional battle between man and beast, he chose to stay legal.

“The age gap is too much.”

Su Nanya’s fox ears perked up like they sensed big bad tigers under the bed.

“I… I really can’t. Even if I really really wanna get my first ever girlfriend, the age difference is such a turn-off.”

Silence.

Before the storm.

The old wooden bed frame released an ear-piercing crack, a noise that resonated throughout the room and seemed to shake the building's very foundation. The harsh sound was accompanied by the shattering of the window panes, breaking apart like a million delicate crystals tumbling to the floor, echoing the bed's demise in an eerie harmony.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Within mere moments, the pressure in the room surged, the air grew heavy and stifling as if an unseen force was exerting its wrath upon every object. The bedside table disintegrated, the decorative books reduced to fluttering pages dancing in the chaotic whirlwind. A vase that once sat gracefully atop the Chinese dresser burst apart, its glittering shards pirouetting in the dim room light. The force of the disturbance even ripped the hotel curtains from their hold, turning them into wild spectral apparitions flapping fiercely.

The frenzied spectacle didn't spare the wall-hanging paintings or the once-cosy bamboo couch either, which exploded into fragments, adding to the unsettling symphony of destruction.

Within the blink of an eye, everything was reduced to dust particles hanging in the air, frozen in a moment of shocking silence.

"Oh dear," Su Yafeng exclaimed, her voice carrying a tinge of adorable vexation. She held down her hanfu, treating the situation like she was merely contending with a slightly troublesome breeze.

Yung remained on his disintegrated bed in the midst of the violent disorder, seemingly untouched but deeply shaken. With his palms pressed against something soft, he clung to the only thing that hadn't crumbled.

Su Nanya, the eye of the storm.

But the vixen was angry.

Yung looked up with deeply disturbed eyes.

And Su Nanya screamed.

“Dare you call us old?!” She snarled, her golden eyes gleaming red, and the oppressive, heavy aura pressed onto Yung like the maddened nails of a wronged lover.

“M’lady is so wasteful.” Su Yafeng said before closing the windows with her azure qi. The curtains were ripped, but she was a maid, and maids always had spare curtains on hand.

Yung swallowed, letting go of Su Nanya’s marshmallow waist, then looked at Su Yafeng, who averted her gaze.

He quickly turned to the angry vixen again and hurriedly denied, “No, no, it’s not you; it’s me!”

“That is what all cowards say. That the problem must lie with their own unresolved inner demons. We reject such notions!”

“Christ! I literally mean my age, not some deep seeded psychological issue—”

“For there is no doubt, though we have reached our second century, our skin remains softer than infants’. Our hips tighter than—”

“Wait!” Yung raised his hand.

Su Nanya waited.

“You said you were two hundred years old?”

“We are not ashamed. Age is but a number.”

“Prove it!” Yung felt two different things rising in his body. One on his mind, one on his lower torso.

“What right have you to distrust our words?!” Su Nanya said.

“If you prove it to me now and here, then I promise I will turn the oceans and mountains upside down if it means I can make you my girlfriend.”

“That means nothing to us. What use would us being a female ally to one of such simple birth as yourself be?”

“Wife. Lover.” Yung made a circle with his right thumb and index, putting his left pinky in and out of it.

Su Nanya looked at him with outright suspicion. She then brought out a crystal sphere from her storage artefact.

“You know of this, boy?” She asked as she injected qi into it.

A misty radiance shone inside the sphere before settling into a rune.

A character.

Displaying two-hundred and twenty-nine.

“I don’t.” Yung said.

“We would use this in the first phase of the sect recruitments. It is the apparatus that measures one’s bone age.” With a disgruntled pout, the vixen expounded, as if the very circumstance was utterly beyond her comprehension.

Yung went silent. He mentally berated little Yung to hanker down. If he were going to do this, he would do it properly.

Finally, all those books on dating, relationships, and romance would come to good use.

Sue Johnson, watch over me!

Yung—

“Oh boy.”

—Yung chickened and ran out of the room.

***

For the second time that day, the Dim Gold Hotel quivered as though caught in the grips of an earthquake. Alarmed patrons and other guests dashed outside, glancing anxiously at the trembling edifice.

The shy waitress and the sweaty manager both stood outside with trembling legs. The Youjin guards gathered, sending sound and scene transmissions to other places. Even the chefs in the kitchen escaped, mid-cooking, with ladles and knives still grasped.

Yung felt a pang of guilt for disrupting their business. But he ran without looking back.

He ran past the jade slip shop where he worked, and across the upper town where every house had looms to weave Dim gold silk on their veranda.

He spotted Youjin Chun in the Dim gold citadel, the heiress looking behind her in confusion. But Yung didn’t have the mind to talk.

He kept running; the ground under his feet turned from stone paths to brown topsoil, to finally weed-covered earth with scattered tombs.

Yung looked at his grandfather’s grave. With everything happening, he’d forgotten to clean it recently. Silky rushed out of his dantian.

“Kii?”

“I’m fine. Thank you, buddy.”

The critter chirped, then buzzed around its old home.

Yung cast his gaze upon his parents' final resting place. The graves, proud but worn by the passage of time, stood as silent sentinels amidst the overwhelming growth of nature. Incense sticks, their charred remnants testimony to prayers offered and tears shed, lay nestled in a bed of ash. The cinders scents, sweet yet hauntingly sombre, wafted in the air, mingling with the damp musk of the earth and the fresh tang of wild grass.

The vegetation had grown uninhibited, a sea of verdant that swayed gently in the breeze, a nature's lullaby for the departed souls. It was as if the grass was guarding the graves, a testament to the enduring cycle of life and death, growth and decay.

Heroism and cowardice.

A tiny wasp nest had found its home among the rough-hewn stones of the graves. It was nestled in one of the cracks. One wasp buzzed, then charged at Silky with lances bared.

Yung sighed, then picked up the stray broom leaning on the shrine and got to cleaning. Silky had no trouble fending off the flying interloper.

You promised her, Jung said.

In the heat of the moment! I really didn’t think she’d… Yung replied. It was an excuse. He knew.

And Jung pointed it out. Are you going to break your words?

You don’t get it. This isn’t a novel where a princess will magically fall for a stable boy without rhyme or reason. It will get me killed.

More excuses. The Su fox clan means you no harm. They protected you until now, and they will in the future.

So what? Become a kept man? Run to them the moment anything goes wrong? Where’s my pride?! Yung shouted.

Jung scoffed like he had heard the funniest thing ever. Since when do you, we, care about pride?

As of five seconds ago…. I really don’t. Ugh, okay, you win. I just, don’t know what to do from here.

We’re the same person, Jung said. This is just us doing psychological self-talk to work the problem out.

Yeah, I guess you’re right…

Yung kicked a pebble out of the way. He crouched down and pulled up the weeds encroaching on the graves. He'd leave the wasp nest for Silky; the critter had called dibs. Strangely, the foxmoth had stopped fighting with the wasps and seemed to be playing a game of tag.

It’s like, this paralysing feeling, Yung said. Does she like me? Does she not? Am I being delusional, thinking I have a real chance? What if she rejects me like she said, and I become a laughingstock?

Jung paused at the confession, then pondered the matter. Men far wiser than us have gone insane overthinking stuff like that. Why not take her words at face value? She seems to be using us to solve her personal trauma, so why not lend her a helping hand? If it works out, great. Suppose it doesn’t; then move on.

Wouldn’t that be me taking advantage of her insecurities? Like comforting a drunk girl at a party after her companion left her? Self-help books are one thing, but approaching a girl in real life… It’s scary.

I know. That’s why we always take books with a grain of salt. We choose for ourselves what works and what doesn’t. So choose, because you are a cultivator. What, exactly, do you want? Jung asked, exasperated. He hated this teenage part of himself that over-analysed every little issue.

I wanna put my face between her boobs and motorboat. Her arse too. I’ve been having wet dreams of losing my virginity to her. Gawd, I almost lost control of my hard-on back there.

Too honest! Jung gaped, speechless.

How can I be honest with anyone else if I'm not totally true to myself?

Point taken, Jung still facepalmed customarily. It was all happening in his head, so all manners were maintained. In actuality, nothing is standing in your way of dating her. If you're clear about your intentions, it's not taking advantage of her. She's not a child.

That’s a great idea! Yung clapped. How about I ask her out on a dinner date first? Well, I need to explain what a date is. I’ll say it’s to get to know her better.

So that’s that? Jung smiled.

That it is. I won't break my promise. Let's help Nyanya sort through her issues. Even if we can't use John Gottman's Seven Dating Principles, we can try Carl Jung's Analytical Psychology.

Can’t shame our namesake, can we? I’m cheering for you. Jung smirked.

Because she’s legal?

Heh. With that, Jung and Yung came to an accord, and the teen stood up.