Ji Ying was running. She leapt over raised roots and ducked beneath heavy branches as she swiftly moved through the red forest and towards the plains beyond. She did not need to stop and rest and was therefore able to continue running at full tilt even while carrying a sleeping child in her arms. There was a certain giddiness in her chest as she ran however. It kept threatening to bubble up into a laugh. The moonstone necklaces had allowed her to have a general idea of where Zhu'er would be, and since there had only been one building in the forest, it had been obvious where the child was stashed. Ji Ying's journey was finally going to come to an end. She was so close now!

Every time she had been stymied, or something had gone awry. All of it was in the past now as she carried the child out of the forest and into the plains. She could faintly hear someone yelling. It was probably that idiot dog.

What was a mortal going to do though? Could he run for hours or days on end non-stop?

She doubted it.

So she finally laughed, continuing her run. She was swift already, but out of the busy and crowded forest she became more like the wind. The sun was crawling down to take its well deserved rest and the moon peeked out from the purpling sky that wrapped it up like a veil. Yet the moon's gaze still managed to lay squarely upon them. A slowly growing pressure on her spine. Ji Ying's sprint brought her to a somewhat familiar meadow at the bend of a river and she slowed down for a moment.

"Uhnn?"

Zhu'er was beginning to wake up, stirring slowly. More like a dying person trying to grasp onto the fleeting flames of life than a child shaking off sleep with how she slowly opened her eyes and weakly moved her arms.

Ji Ying came to a complete stop and then got to her knees as she placed the girl down in the wildflowers of the meadow. A pallid hummingbird flittered by merrily diving headfirst into one of the wildflowers.

Zhu'er opened her eyes fully and they immediately locked on Ji Ying in alarm.

She raised her hands, "hey! Hey, what's wrong? What's with that look? It's me! The others-"

The little girl got to her feet and immediately tried to make a break for it, but Ji Ying grabbed her by her collar and hauled her backwards. "Let go!" Zhu'er demanded, still trying to move forward.

"What is wrong with you?"

"You're bad!" Zhu'er screamed, "I don't like you! Let go!"

Ji Ying felt stunned, why did Zhu'er suddenly believe her to be bad? "D-don't be ridiculous! Why do you think I'm a bad person? Why don't you like me?"

"You're not my friend! You're a liar and I don't like liars! You're very bad!" Zhu'er ranted, her words trembling and falling back into more simple phrases from the sheer amount of anger and fear in them. Her little face was puffing up with exertion.

"Why do you think I'm a liar?" Ji Ying raised her voice slightly. Zhu'er twisted in her grip and then suddenly latched onto her arm, digging her teeth into Ji Ying's bracer. Fortunately the stiff cloth and thin leather held up to a child's teeth but Ji Ying felt alarm trickle through. "Don't bite me! Who told you I'm a liar? Was it Bo?"

"Mmmphhh!"

"I can't understand you, and let go!" Ji Ying extricated her arm from the little girl.

"Shuang Que said you were bad!"

Ji Ying looked down at the little girl in both confusion and worry. She had no idea who 'Shuang Que' was, she was fairly certain that Zhu'er's grasp of language was not great enough to make up names yet even if the name did sound a bit too eerie for a person to give to their child. "Who is this person? I don't know them, you just believe some random person and not me? Look, the others-" her mouth had been running faster and now she had to think up a lie. "The others had to go and leave you with me-"

Zhu'er shook her head, "you're lying!"

"You seem to be having issues," a voice rasped behind Ji Ying with cold amusement. Ji Ying snatched Zhu'er back up into her arms and held her tightly as she stepped back, turning quickly on her heel to find Wang Huaqing standing behind her. His smug and blandly smiling face was still there but it looked like his clothing had been horrifically mauled by some wild animal that had then promptly bled all over it.

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"What happened to you?" Ji Ying hissed, "and go away! I'm trying to talk-"

"LET GO!" Zhu'er dug her teeth into Ji Ying's arm again, this time managing to bite through cloth and flesh, blood bubbling around her teeth. Ji Ying yanked her arm away but did not put the little girl down, grinding her own teeth in frustration.

"Are you having trouble with a child?" Wang Huaqing asked, his lips quirking slightly into a sneer.

Ji Ying snorted, "avoiding my question? I guess whatever happened to you is worse than you want to admit." Her white sleeve was turning red as blood trickled down her arm. It hurt, but only dimly. The body was not a real one after all, and had not been made with the intention of being able to fully experience things like 'pain' or 'exhaustion'. A doll, really. The thought annoyed her a little bit, but now she was actually rather grateful for it. She could not imagine getting a bunch of teeth in her arm would have helped her situation much at all.

"Nothing has happened to me," Wang Huaqing laughed like he was talking to a child, "why would you think so?"

"Because your clothes look like you tried to fight a tiger, and lost," Ji Ying observed with acid in her tongue. How could this man be so blase about walking around with such tattered clothing? Wang Huaqing was always well dressed, clean, and presentable.

Wang Huaqing finally looked down at his clothes, nonplussed, his head hanging low for a moment before he looked back up at her. "I see nothing wrong?"

"Stop messing with me!" Ji Ying barked, angrily shaking the still squirming child as well. "Do you think this is funny or something? What is wrong with you?" As the words left her mouth she watched as a thin white worm like thing slithered over Wang Huaqing's eye and down under his eyelid. She immediately pursed her lips as her eyes swept back down to the tattered clothes, then back at Wang Huaqing's face, which had abruptly slackened. It was as if whatever force had been controlling him had released him... then his face became serene again. "Are you... are you playing a joke?" She was not sure who she was truly talking to anymore.

Because what was in front of her was not Wang Huaqing anymore.

It was simply a corpse, animated with enough White Flame to give the appearance of life, to allow Wang Huaqing to believe he was still alive. She glanced back at Zhu'er, who was still squirming and crying in an incomprehensible mish-mashed gibberish of two languages. Her face was pallid, completely bloodless, and she was producing no tears even as she cried herself into a hoarse coughing mess. Her state was not much different from Wang Huaqing's at the moment, Ji Ying thought with a tinge of guilt. When was it that she had died? Had it been in the forest with Face Eater Ghouls? Or when she got kidnapped in the city? The guilt was smothered by anger. That was none of Ji Ying's fault. It was Liu Xie's fault, and the others! What could she have done back then?

She hauled Zhu'er over her shoulder, ignoring the child's rampant kicking and cough-sputtering. "I'm leaving," she declared, walking away from the animated remains of Wang Huaqing. He said something to her, but she ignored it completely as she continued towards the growing shape of the First Palace in the distance.

"...Le-let me go," Zhu'er coughed.

"No."

"Why!?"

Ji Ying did not put the girl down, continuing to walk at a brisk pace along the sinuous coursing of the river. "Because... because I was promised something."

"What!? What dumb thing!?"

She threw the child onto the ground without even thinking about it, her chest bursting with a brief surge of anger while the girl bounced as a tumble of limbs on the grass and sat stunned. "Dumb!? You don't know anything! You're just a child!" Ji Ying said sharply. "I didn't even make a choice to be your friend! Even when I was a pig, I didn't get to make a choice! Then the Amber Emperor decided to give me to you and ordered me to be your friend, and when the idiots let you go, he let me have a human shape again-but only under the condition I find you!" She yelled, the words falling again like a torrent. She remembered saying similar things to Li Chunning, but he was gone and now there was no one else. "Once all of this is over, I get to go back to SERVING TEA FOR THE REST OF EXISTENCE!"

Zhu'er sniffed, staring up at her with her reddened eyes and holding her head. "That hurt..." was all she managed to mumble.

"Good! I'm glad it hurt! You've been nothing but an annoying dead weight to everyone!" Ji Ying continued her tirade, now that she was going she felt like she was boiling over with poison and it had nowhere to go but out. The little girl looked like she was about to try crying again, coughing and wheezing as she curled up into a little ball under Ji Ying's furious gaze. "But see, I got an option. Someone said if I just brought you to them, they'd free me from this stupid life of being bound to gods or ugly little kids like you! All I want is to be free, and I'm so close now and you're making it a pain to get what I want! If I do what he says, I finally get my freedom and then I don't need to follow what anyone tells me to do ever again!"

Her anger spent, Ji Ying was left feeling somewhat hollowed out and watched the little girl cry and cough for a moment, unsure of what to do. The girl was coughing up splatters of blood, white petaled flowers working their way out of her mouth that she wiped away with a shaking hand. "Wh-why..." she managed to sputter out.

"Look, I... I didn't want to hurt you," Ji Ying said.

"Then why did you!?" Zhu'er snapped, hiccupping and coughing. "I... I want... I want Mama... and Liu Xie..."

Ji Ying could not answer her. She really did not want to hurt Zhu'er at all...so why did she? She was just a little girl, and for all her fierce biting she was still reliant upon adults. Ji Ying had not wanted to hurt her at all, but she still wanted her freedom. Baichan promised it, so she waited a moment longer for Zhu'er to exhaust herself, then she picked her up and began walking briskly again.