Nanya lightly patted Ziyou Yung's chest with her paws, her tail swishing softly in the air. The small yaoguai took his snuggly bed by her servant's left ear, snoozing away like a fish. Her Su Xiya was sleeping too, on her designated fluffy pillow.
Yet Nanya stayed awake. Her thoughts unknown, submerged in the sinful words her servant had dared to whisper into her innocent ears.
"It is but anarchy," Nanya gritted her teeth, her voice carried by the cold night wind. The curtains by the window fluttered, and the night wind morphed into the shape of an azure fox.
The new creature landed on her paws without sound. Sharp angles, a pristine coat of grey. There were hints of blue hues on her stately fur as the wind consolidated into a regal, sleep-deprived fox.
Su Yafeng morphed back to her tall yao figure. Her hands were clasped at her chest, and her robes had not a single crease, "M'lady," she greeted. "The matter of the Bloodsanguine Hall has been settled."
"But this anarchy has a purpose," Nanya continued. "Maid, are you aware, of the foolishness of our oh so honoured emperors? Oh how many a great empire has fallen by bloodline infighting throughout the aeons!"
Su Yafeng opened her mouth to answer—
"The Radiant Sun Empire, when they were at the peak of their power. It was the very bid for the throne by two favoured sun-princes, birthed by two different yet equally beloved concubines that gave us, the suppressed and enslaved great yao tribes, a chance to break away, to form the accursed Holy Demonic Empire."
"If you could let me answer—"
"For one of those very concubines was the honoured ancestor of the Su Fox clan! And of what occurred after? When the Four divine beast tribes betrayed our clan out of naked fear of the vixens’ celestial might, when they drove us out as the true rulers of the Holy Demonic Empire? How could we have stolen their ancestral home and immortal artefact, the Void connecting land bridge and the Revival sword tower, right under their quibbling eyes, if not for the feud between the then Duchess Spring Phoenix and Queen Winter Tiger, both married to the Blue Summer Dragon King? And yet more examples come to mind, oh foolish maid of mine. The previous emperor of this Westmoon Kingdom. Stabbed to death by a jealous queen. What foolish a chef, should have stuck to cooking noodles."
"I see M'lady had a nice day." The maid said, playing with a sound transmission token.
"The Bloodfire Dynasty. The Sky Zenith War Council. The Infinite Islands Martial Empire! All lost because of too many stray heroes and their stray seeds sowing discord." Nanya tutted; she had to, before taking the chance to lick her servants cheek. “How sinful this boy’s words are, such forbidden the temptations!”
"I regret egging you on to court Ziyou Yung." No doubt the maid was in full gossip with their other cousins.
Nanya stood up on all fours. Her eyes alert, her tail straight. She hopped off the bed and circled Su Yafeng's legs, trying to snatch the sound transmission token away, but the maid simply held it out of the small fox’s reach. "Do you know what he said when Mother dearest summoned us?"
"That animal was there?" Su Yafeng asked with some surprise, the fury in her eyes so adorable.
Nanya nodded sagely, "Mother is too soft on that petty hero, for he is her departed sworn sister's only child. But we forgive her; we cannot find sin in loyalty." The vixen had an expression that was both grim and grin, "The rogue villain said he would wait even a thousand years for us to 'stop throwing a tantrum.' The gall! The absolute disregard of that... that... that bastard of five fathers, born out of wedlock in a slimy fungus den!"
"...I am pleased that M'lady found delight in her ‘date’ encounter with Ziyou Yung. I-I suppose you... continued… your intimate f-fornication?"
"N-No. But it was educational, the words and lives of the hapless," Nanya said with a pink blush on her golden fur. "Our servant has rebellious thoughts. Anarchic ideologies that go against any good sense the sages have stood for throughout our history, oh so unfair to our maidens so fair to be caressed."
"At least he is a better influence than being a spinster. M'lady, you win some, you lose some." The maid said, shaking her head and sighing.
Nanya thumped the floor angrily with her tail. "There is everything to gain. At least in this small corner of the world, we shall make it so that no maiden has to be harassed by heartless heroes."
"... so gullible."
"We have given this ample contemplation. Our servant, or at least his inherited daydreams from the yaoguai soul contract, is rebellious in precisely the brightest way," Nanya said. "Such sins do we need, and so we vow to commit. Maid, prepare our dresses. A thousand years is too short. We shall show that adulterous wretch the true meaning of suffering!"
"I don't think you can beat him in a fight." Su Yafeng clicked her tongue.
"Surely you jest?" Nanya looked at her with suspicious eyes, "We outnumber him and his harlots by two."
"...yes. I suppose m’lady does. But Su Xiya is still too… Floofy to fight, right?”
"Such words of wisdom! Alas, you may be right, oh maid who rhymes." Nanya trotted back and forth in deep vixen-ish thoughts. "As we are now at our bottleneck, a fair fight with an ogre hero's marital might would be in their favour, if only slightly. But it matters not... our lovable servant has found our Su Xiya's original core. We humbly retract our orders. Put our dresses away." The vixen stopped, then hopped back onto the bed again and scuttled against Yung's chest. The boy muttered some strange words. ‘Pan-khu-rst. Ro-ke-ya. N-No, not A-Amber Heard Nyaanyaaa nooo~!’
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“Alas, such is the world, where the might of qi is the right to rule. As such,—” Her servant spontaneously hugged Nanya like a body pillow despite his deep sleep, and the vixen morphed back into her maidenly flesh in his tight arms. She preened, her breath warming up as her naked breasts cradled Ziyou Yung’s face. After a few long seconds of cuddling and snuggling, the yao continued with a fruity moan, "—we shall cultivate harder!"
"... Could you please release the wards, m'lady? I do not wish to be locked in here while you engage in copulation with Ziyou Yung while he slumbers. I assure you, I won't expose your unlawful, cradle-robbing actions to the Matriarch; this maid gives her word."
Nanya raised her head and had a long stare-down with Su Yafeng. The ward fell, and the maid sighed in utter relief. With the azure wind, she was once more gone from the room.
"Insolent maid," Nanya said with a wronged pout. She turned to Ziyou Yung. He was a short gentleman, but his requests were so strange. "Why can she not deduce that it was our beloved boyfriend that begged us to partake in Essence qi refinement whilst he sleeps." Nanya couldn't rest her head on his shoulder comfortably. But there was something so elegant about finding the proper position to pamper a pure-hearted soul.
"We will let no harm befall you, oh foolish servant." She whispered into the boy's ears, "Oh poor, cowardly, disgraceful soul, so cute you are. We shan't allow you to change, ever." Her arms wrapped around his body, settling into a comfortable embrace. "And together, we shall be anarchists. Oh, how devious we are!"
***
"And this… device, is better than a traditional sound transmission token?" An Ping asked. She scrutinized the 'Communicator token,' or communicator, in her hand, trying her best to ignore the golden fox trying to squeeze her way into Yung’s pocket.
This morning, after their ‘cultivation’, Su Nanya had forgotten to apply lustre-rouge before coming down with Yung. The vixen had only remembered when she noticed the make-up on An Ping, and was profoundly embarrassed, cursing Yung and Miss Maid for intentionally not reminding her. She was mad.
"In high-stakes situations, how much time and attention do you typically waste listening to the whole sound transmissions sent by your subordinates?" The madlander boy said, and he really hoped An Ping would treat Su Nanya’s strangeness as a tantrum and nothing more.
"Too much to justify. That's why the protocol is to send concise transmissions with keywords." She replied.
"You can do the same with this, short and concise ‘texts’. But reading the sentences with your peripheral vision will take a fraction of the time that hearing through a whole voice message will. You can read in less than half a second what would have taken half a minute to listen or speak out loud."
"It is… thought transmission, or some manner of divine sense?" An Ping asked with amazement. "I had assumed one needed at least Unfolding Heaven 2nd grade materials for such tokens."
"Nothing that fancy. Only light transmissions manipulated to appear as written texts. It will be slower than thought transmission, but will be thousands of times cheaper to make too. And with the special dim gold silk, the chaotic space of the Warring Twilight Forest is no problem at all."
An Ping nodded, "That's fair." But her face showed more doubt than agreement.
She had her team of cultivators each bind one communicator.
Due to the lack of authentic transmission array tokens, each team was bound by protocol to consist of only three cultivators. The team leaders carried additional transmission tokens, which were connected to the counterfeit transmission array token under An Ping's care. The replica was of poor quality, capable of storing only ten imprints, and had required an excessive amount of favour to satisfy her royal brother's demands.
An Ping released the standard tokens from the transmission array and proceeded to bind the array to the communicators carried by each team leader.
The Dark Star mercenaries went into the forest to test it out. They were actually the last group Yung had pitched his idea to.
The Free Sparrow Gang was the first, followed by the Youjin Clan. He had gotten the communicator to work without bugs, for the most part. Now it was time to alpha-test it. And in the near future, when he gets his hands on a transmission array token, it will be time for open beta.
Finally, he would throw the completed product out into the world and see what changes it would bring about. It was the same for feminism that he told Su Nanya. He was not strong enough to change the ethics of this world, or even this city, by himself. Neither did he want to. So he would throw out ideas just to provoke a change, hopefully in a good direction, and more appropriately to a good person fit to listen to his otherworldly heresy.
And he would stay in this small city in this tiny part of the world and try to make it better. The tragedies outside would be out of his sight, and thus out of his mind.
Su Nanya sulked for three whole days. Yung had to snuggle her the whole time, and finally, she said yes, causing Yung to love and praise her to bits. Until she said that she was actually playing hard to get after Miss Maid had provoked her as a soft-wussy, and it was an enjoyable experience.
… either way, Nyanya was his guardian angel, and never once did he imagine that his heart would beat like drums in a silent tunnel whenever she flamed his weak ego. It would be simpler if the vixen could give him a proper transmission array token, as was his right as her gigolo, and she had offered, but Yung wanted to finish debugging the more straightforward Imperfect Heaven communicators first before moving on to scaling the project up a hundredfold.
Yung bade An Ping farewell and spent the rest of the day flirting and trying to get to second base with Su Nanya. It was, after all, good for 'cultivation.' Between touching their lips, he was also frantically explaining to her that, no, feminism wasn't female supremacy but rather equality between the sexes. Either in theory or in practice, it would not do for the most authoritarian lady on the land bridge to get too woke about social morality.
“Should it not be called Equalism, then?” The vixen asked under the quilt.
“Uh, actually, kind of? I don’t know… Was there such a theory?” Back on Gaia?
“We shall coin the term, as is our wisdom. Reward us properly, shall you not?”
"Oh, how wise. Nyanya, the wise fox! So ingeniou—wait, yes. There was. It's a synonym for egalitarianism; I remember now-ow-Ouch! Stop biting me!"
"Bandit of words! Dare you tease us; dare you take away our right to be right! Low-born rogue of stolen terms!"
The Dark Star mercenaries, the Youjin Clan, and the Free Sparrow Gang returned almost at the same time. Yung had to hide his hickies in a hurry.
"You're gonna get lynched! This token is pure rebellion," Ziyou Maque—now fully healed—said with a grin.
"What nonsense!" Youjin Liu countered. "With Fairy Su's backing, who dares to lynch him?" The good patriarch turned towards Yung, "Ziyou Yung, do you plan to merchant these communicators?"
Yung nodded, "To propagate them, specifically."
Everyone thought for a while, and the good patriarch once more broke the silence. "We need a thousand of these." Said Youjin Liu, his voice uncharacteristically raised, "Price is not an issue!"