Xiao-Yu slowly opened her eyes. She didn’t know where she was. Light flickered dimly through the dark, woven cloth of the bag. It almost looked like firelight, but it gave off an eerie coldness. Tentatively shifting her legs, she tried to nudge open the bag's drawstring. Suddenly, she froze.
“Make pill, not good taste. Stew good taste.” The speaker had a rumbling but hollow voice.
The other speaker scoffed. “I told you, if you just cook it, the creature will lose its spiritual energy. You must refine the living beast in the cauldron to extract its spiritual energy.”
“Huh.” The first speaker gave a hollow, skeptical grunt.
“This beast contains great spiritual power, but it must be alive. When I am King, you can eat whatever you want, but first we must have power.”
“Huh,” the first speaker grunted again. He continued, “Eat pig?”
“If you can find one,” the voice had a thin thread of impatience.
“Eat dragon?”
The voice paused, then with more apparent impatience, “If you can find one.”
“Eat human?”
“That’s easier than the others.”
The dull voice hesitated for a painful moment of thought, then grumbled, “See small human on street. Tender.” There followed a speculative, rattling slurp of saliva.
“Yes, yes, you can eat. Now just focus on stabilizing the fire.”
Xiao-Yu slowly inched her head out of the bag. The acrid smell of herbs hit her nose. The building was empty and it looked derelict. Fragments of paper fluttered in the bare frame of a window. Dust and smoke floated thickly through the air of the dim room. A three-legged cauldron made of carved, bluish metal stood in the center of the room. Underneath it flickered an eerie, cold flame. There was a hulking figure crouched beside the cauldron. His enormous hands ceaselessly pumped a small pair of bellows, puffing demonic energy at the fire. With each puff, the fire flared and then stabilized rhythmically, like a heartbeat. The cauldron emitted a pale glow.
The hulking figure yawned, “Tired.”
Across from him, a hooded figure was continually dropping various herbs into the cauldron. At this, the figure looked up. The eerie glow from the fire and the cauldron illuminated a blue face with a single horn in the middle of its forehead. The blue demon’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the larger demon across from him. He quickly concealed the sly, smug expression on his face.
“When the spiritual pill is done, you won’t be tired,” he said lightly. He dropped in another herb and quickly snatched his hand away from the vicinity of the cauldron.
Xiao-Yu trembled with fear and crept out of the bag. Her side twinged where it had been hit. She glanced over at the two demons. The cauldron’s light flickered on their faces. The blue demon gazed intently as he added ingredients for the spiritual pill. The other demon, though he was hulking, looked more and more listless, and his lips became paler as the fire grew stronger.
Xiao-Yu slipped out of the bag and towards the shadow of the wall. The door was tightly closed. There were some holes in the wall, but they were only big enough to admit mice or spiders, far too small for a fox. Xiao-Yu glanced at the window. It might as well have been the top of a mountain. Before…. After almost fifty years of cultivation, so close to taking human form…. Jumping a mere few feet would have been nothing to her. But now– since he had slashed her core from beside her heart, she was weak. Following the habit from many hopeful years, Xiao-Yu ran her awareness along her meridians and paused in shock. Her meridians had been damaged, hadn’t they?
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Gently, hesitantly, Xiao-Yu brought her awareness to what had been the painful, gaping emptiness of her core. A flood of joy and excitement washed away all other emotions. What had been emptiness was now full, a golden, pulsing well of energy. Xiao-Yu tried to circulate her Qi. It felt strange and unmanageable, but slowly it began to circulate. It was almost as if…. She was as close to the threshold of transformation as she had ever been.
Xiao-Yu glanced back over her shoulder. The fire under the cauldron blazed high, and the hulking demon slowly slumped over sideways, bellows dropping out of his limp hands. The blue demon, who had been watching with a small, contemptuous smile, suddenly glanced towards Xiao-Yu. His eyes opened wide in anger and surprise. He lunged towards her, but his fingers barely grazed the tip of her tail as she bounded lightly through the window.
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I was washing out the wok with a handful of straw and some clear water. As I dumped the water onto the ground of the courtyard, the little neighbor boy burst in from the street. “Ah-Zhou, I found her!”
“Found who?”
“Xiao-Yu! They took her!”
I seemed to be missing something. “What do you mean they took her?”
“I saw them take her! They put her into a bag. I followed them.”
I wiped my wet hands on the front of my robes and followed the boy to the street. “Wait, slow down. What do you mean?”
The boy rolled his eyes impatiently, “I saw them take Xiao-Yu. They put her in a bag and took her. Come on, I’ll show you!”
He sped up to a run and I jogged after him. I still wasn’t clear on the whole situation. Who were “they?” The black-clad figure from my rooftop escape flashed into my head. But what could he possibly want with a little fox, no matter how many tails she has?
We dashed right and left, weaving through the maze of narrow back alleys. Strangely, we drew closer and closer to the River of Moving Stars, near the Demon Market ferry. The boy stopped abruptly at the end of a street. He peeked surreptitiously around the corner and pointed at a building.
It looked abandoned--half-rotten wood splintered under the strain of a sagging roof. Scraps of ratty paper hung in the window frames. I crept closer, looking around. I didn’t see anything. I looked back at the neighbor boy with a questioning shrug. He gestured at the building again, urging me to hurry.
It was silent. I glanced around. The whole street was eerily silent. I walked up to the window and peeked in. The interior was very dim, but the center of the room emitted a cold, purple light. I blinked to acclimate my eyes.
There was some kind of large pot giving off the light. Next to it lay the motionless body of what looked like a large man. I looked back at the neighbor boy, but he must have hidden because I couldn’t see him anymore. Probably for the best.
Bracing myself, I snuck towards the door. It was slightly ajar. When I opened it further, it creaked heavily, but the motionless body in the middle of the room didn’t stir. I glanced around. The room was almost bare. A couple planks of wood stacked messily against a wall. A lot of dust. Not much else.
I walked closer to the strange light in the center of the room. It was a three-legged pot, about the size of my wok. But it didn’t look like any cooking utensil I’d ever seen. It was made of thick metal, carved with snaking figures and characters that seemed to shift and wriggle with every pulse of the flame beneath. The tip of a pair of bellows rested in the flame, but a large hand loosely gripped the other end. A vein of faint, eerie light ran from the hand to the fire, and the fire brightened and dimmed rhythmically.
Shifting my eyes from the creepy sight, I looked more closely at the other guy’s face. I froze. I knew this guy. It was one of the brawny sidekicks that had followed King Ping-Sheng that first day in my restaurant. Oh shit. I thought, Demon.
The door creaked open loudly behind me.
Oh shit. I thought. More demons.