Clumsy Beast, Keep Your Paws Off

The dumb female Xuan Long had protected was now a broken beggar on the verge of total madness.

An Mo stepped closer, his nose wrinkling at the smell, but his eyes narrowed as he looked at her forehead.

He saw it then...the faint, pulsing veins of black energy crawling under her skin.

"Black magic..." An Mo muttered, his expression stiffening. "What have they done to you? Why has this black magic been infused into your frail body?"

And most importantly...how was she still alive with such a large amount of black energy in her body? If it were anyone else, they would have died long ago.

He reached out a hand, his fingers glowing with a soft, golden light.

As he touched her matted hair, a bright flash of light erupted between them, enveloping the small, dirty figure of the past Su Qinglan.

In that moment of contact, An Mo’s consciousness was pulled into the whirlwind of her life.

He saw the cave. He saw the dirt grave of Wang Mulan. He saw the tiny, bloody tiger cub and the ten years of wandering with Han Jue and twenty years of life with Xaun Long.

And he realized the horrific truth: Su Qinglan’s soul was incomplete.

When Wang Mulan had performed that desperate, forbidden spell in the moonlight, she had tried to send her daughter’s soul to another world to save her from the Black Temple.

But the spell was too weak. And it had actually sent her in a very far-away world, from where returning was impossible without any external help.

"You poor, broken thing," An Mo whispered, his heart aching with a pity he had never felt before.

"Your mother tried to save you, but she didn’t realize she was sentencing you to a half-life. You couldn’t live, and you weren’t whole enough to die. You’ve been a puppet for sixty years because you were never truly here."

The past Su Qinglan looked up at him. For a brief second, the golden light of An Mo’s power cleared the fog in her mind. Su Qinglan regained a tiny spark of sanity. She heard his words. She understood the tragedy.

My mother... she thought, a wave of bitter realization hitting her. She tried to protect me, but she left me in pieces. I wasn’t crazy... I was just empty. I was never whole.

A deep, dark root of resentment began to grow in her heart...a resentment directed at the mother who had accidentally cursed her to this miserable existence.

"Why... why did you do this to me?"

Her voice trembled, cracking under the weight of years of suppressed pain. "Couldn’t you just let me be? It’s not like I ever had a good life to begin with... I was always tormented... always suffering..."

Tears streamed endlessly down her pale cheeks as the old Su Qinglan finally broke. Her shoulders shook with quiet, helpless sobs, the kind that came from a place too deep to reach, too broken to mend.

In her mind, her life had been nothing but a chain of misery...one that, somehow, always traced back to her mother.

To her, it felt like a curse. A cruel, unrelenting curse placed upon her existence.

She didn’t understand.

She didn’t remember.

Not the long night her mother stayed awake, whispering desperate prayers into the darkness.

Not the blood that had once stained her mother’s hands...not from violence, but from the price she had willingly paid.

All the past Su Qinglan knew was pain.

And pain, when left alone for too long, twists into blame.

"You ruined everything..." she whispered hoarsely, clutching her chest as if trying to tear out the ache lodged within. "If you hadn’t... if you hadn’t done whatever you did... maybe I wouldn’t have ended up like this..."

Her cries echoed in the empty silence, filled with bitterness, grief, and a longing she refused to acknowledge.

What she didn’t know... what she couldn’t possibly understand...

Was that the very "curse" she despised had once been her only salvation.

The current Su Qinglan looks at the resentment in her past self and now understands why, when she met her mother, a part of her refused to accept her. It was the resentment of the old Su Qinglan.

An Mo looked at her trembling form and sighed. "This is worse than death. To be trapped in a body that won’t give up, with a mind that isn’t yours... it’s a cruelty no beast should endure."

He smoothed her hair back, his gaze softening.

"I will give you another chance, little fox. This life was a mistake, a tragedy written in blood. But in the next one, you will be whole. I will bless you so that when your other half returns, you will finally have the strength to fight back."

He pressed his palm against her forehead, pouring his divine energy into the cracks of her soul.

"In the next life, you will achieve something great. You will have your family. You will have your soul. Sleep now, Su Qinglan. This nightmare is over."

Su Qinglan felt a sudden, cool peace washing over her. The hunger vanished. The pain in her bones faded. She looked at An Mo one last time, a tear tracing a clean path through the dirt on her face.

Next time... she thought. Next time, I won’t let them break me.

With a final, shallow breath, her body went limp in An Mo’s arms. The skinny, hunched figure finally became still.

An Mo held her for a long time, looking at the tiny orange fox she had turned back into upon her death.

"A life worse than death," he murmured, his voice echoing in the alley.

"Wang Mulan, you tried to save her from the darkness, but you never thought it would backfire like this. But don’t worry. I’ve paved the way. When she wakes up again, she will be the storm that destroys everything that hurt her."

He stood up, carrying the small fox body toward the mountains, leaving the filth of the city behind.