Clumsy Beast, Keep Your Paws Off

The years stretched into decades, but the flow of time meant nothing to a soul that was already broken.

For five more years, the past Su Qinglan lived under the silent shadow of Xuan Long. He was different from the others; he didn’t demand words or smiles. He looked at her as a strange, quiet companion.

Eventually, a cold sort of protectiveness grew in his heart. He decided to adopt her, treating her like a lost child who would never grow up.

Xuan Long thought that perhaps if he took this "dumb" female to a large city, the sight of other people and the noise of civilization might wake her up.

He moved her to a bustling beast city, and though she remained as silent as a stone, their life was peaceful.

Xuan Long was a solitary figure, used to centuries of loneliness, so he didn’t mind her stillness.

To him, she was a quiet presence that filled the void of his long life. He was simply happy to have a companion who didn’t fear him or ask anything.

They lived in that city for twenty years. Su Qinglan never spoke a single word to him, not once.

She simply became dependent on him, just as she had once been on Han Jue.

She followed him like a shadow, eating when he fed her and sleeping when he pointed to a bed. But the peace in Su Qinglan’s life was never meant to last.

One day, Xuan Long went out and never returned.

Su Qinglan grew restless. For the first time in years, a flicker of emotion crossed her face.

She didn’t understand the politics of the city or the dangers a man like him faced, but she knew her anchor was gone.

She waited for days, but the house remained cold. Driven by a frantic, wordless need to find him, she stepped out into the crowded streets of the big city. Within hours, she was lost.

Xuan Long never found her again. Perhaps he died, or perhaps he returned to an empty house and searched until he gave up.

Su Qinglan never knew. She became a beggar, a lonely figure haunting the dirty back path of the beast city.

To the other beastmen, she was just an infamous, abandoned female.

She grew thin, her back hunched, her hair matting into a gray mess. No one even knew what her face looked like anymore.

People would occasionally toss her a scrap of food out of pity, but no one cared for the "madwoman" of the beast city.

As she huddled in the dirt year after year, a dark resentment began to grow in her mind.

She wanted to die. She wanted the coldness to take her so she could go to her father and her lost child.

But death was a cruel master; it took everyone she loved and refused to take her. Even when she starved herself for weeks, her heart continued to beat. It felt like a curse.

"Why?" she would think during her rare moments of clarity. "Why is the Beast God punishing me like this?"

In these moments, her memory would sharpen like a knife. She remembered her father’s weeping face. She remembered the warmth of Hu Yan. And then, the most agonizing memory of all surfaced...the cave.

Through the fog of the Witch Doctor’s old spells, she finally saw the truth of that bloody night.

She hadn’t killed her cub. She hadn’t wanted to hurt Hu Yan.

The Witch Doctor had come to the cave while she was in labor, hoping to snatch a cub with a "great destiny."

When he realized the small tiger cub didn’t have the power he craved, he had cruelly killed the infant right in front of her eyes before vanishing into the night.

The Witch Doctor’s magic had then seized her mind, forcing her to stay in that cave and blurt out those hateful, lying words to Hu Yan.

He had used her mouth to shatter Hu Yan’s heart. He had turned her into a murderer in the eyes of the man who loved her.

The past Su Qinglan collapsed in the dirt of the alley, weeping without a sound. She looked up at the moonlight and wished with every fiber of her being to disappear.

She had lived sixty years of misery, a puppet of fate and dark magic. She had ruined everyone’s life.

She fell asleep in the cold mud, her body trembling. She didn’t know if she would wake up the next day with her sanity intact or if she would drift back into the mindless void.

She only knew that her life was a tragedy that refused to end, a long, dark road paved with the bones of those she had lost.

When Su Qinglan woke up the next day, she became lost once again, forgetting everyone.

This was the cruelest thing for her, stripping away every layer of her humanity until she was nothing more than a skeletal figure huddled in the shadows of a dirty alley.

Her mind was a fractured mirror, reflecting only darkness and the heavy, cold residue of the Witch Doctor’s ancient spells.

She didn’t know who she was. She didn’t know where she came from. She only knew the hunger in her stomach and the weight of a soul that refused to leave her body.

Suddenly, a pair of bright, observant eyes looked down at her.

An Mo stood in the middle of the filth, his colorful robes looking out of place in the back of the dirty beast city.

He looked at the small, hunched figure covered in layers of grime. He couldn’t believe this was a female, let alone the one Xuan Long had asked him to find months ago.

"Is this her?" An Mo whispered to himself, his voice carrying a rare gravity. "Is this the companion Xuan Long spoke of with such worry?"

By the time he was able to find Xuan Long, many days had already passed, and in this lower domain, even years had gone by.

But Xuan Long had not been worried about himself or his imprisonment. His greatest regret was that she had been left behind alone. He had only asked An Mo to find her and take care of her.

An Mo had been searching for her for a long time, but by the time he finally found her, many years had already passed.