Chapter 32: New Housemate
Come next morning, the clone was still in the guest room. By noon, it had emerged only to eat two bowls of congee with pickled vegetables, compliment Su Nuan Nuan on her culinary skills, and then retreat back behind the closed door without so much as a glance at Su Yao or Zhang Wei.
By evening, Su Yao had finally had enough. She slammed the guest room door open.
The clone was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, perfectly still.
“We’re not running a spiritual bed-and-breakfast,” Su Yao snarled. “Get up. We have a mask to find.”
“Tomorrow,” The clone said, its voice languid.
“There is no ‘tomorrow’! The world might end!”
“A problem for tomorrow,” the clone replied, closing its eyes. “Today, I am considering the texture of this ceiling. It’s remarkably textured.”
Zhang Wei appeared behind Su Yao, his expression grim. “It’s stalling. Or it’s recovering its strength. Every moment it spends in that body, it might be consolidating its existence.”
“Or,” Jian Feng ventured weakly from the hallway, “it’s just really enjoying the break.”
Su Yao grabbed a pillow from the bed and hurled it at the clone’s face. It bounced off harmlessly.
“Your attempts at motivation are as crude as your mortal plumbing,” the clone murmured. “I have decided that until my landlord makes a more compelling offer than frantic urgency, I shall remain here. The pursuit of a trinket held by a random mortal seems beneath me.”
“It’s a trinket that can unmake reality!” Zhang Wei argued.
“A tedious prospect,” the clone said, rolling onto its side, its back to them. “Wake me when you have a better lead. Or when dinner is ready.”
Su Yao stood there, her fists clenched, foxfire sparking at her fingertips. She could dispel the clone right now, force the echo back into the confines of her own mind. That would mean losing the only direct link they had to the mask and its wearer, however.
She let out a sound of pure, incandescent fury.
“Fine!” she spat. “Nap! But this isn’t over.”
She slammed the door shut, the frame rattling.
From inside, the clone’s voice was a soft, satisfied purr. “It never is. But for now, the silence is golden.”
Su Yao turned to Zhang Wei, her eyes burning. “We’re finding that mask without it.”
“How?” Zhang Wei asked, exasperated. “It could be anywhere on the planet.”
“Then we start by turning this city upside down,” Su Yao said, striding towards the front door. “And if that doesn’t work, we find a way to make a ‘compelling offer’ to that lazy, over-entitled echo. Starting with threatening to put it in a body with a caffeine addiction and no access to beds.”
Jian Feng, who had been quietly nursing his broken phone like a trauma blanket, suddenly spoke up. “We should split up.”
Everyone turned to look at him.
He gestured vaguely with his shattered device. “Duwang is a big city. It’s an island. And that’s assuming the man with the mask is even in this city at all. He could be anywhere. But we have to start somewhere. Covering more ground is our only chance.”
Zhang Wei nodded slowly. The logic was sound. “He’s right. We need a systematic approach. I can mobilize my government contacts to start cross-referencing tourist databases, focusing on western arrivals who fit a profile of, well, of someone who might buy a cursed mask.”
“I’ll go back to the Luo family archives,” Jian Feng offered, standing up with a wince. “If this mask is an artifact, there might be records or legends about it. Something we can use.”
Su Yao watched them, her arms crossed. A part of her wanted to dismiss it, to blast the entire city with her spiritual sense and be done with it, but she knew even her power had its limits in a metropolis of millions. “Fine, split up. Run your errands.”
Her gaze shifted to the closed guest room door. “I’ll stay here and motivate our primary source of intel.”
As Zhang Wei and Jian Feng hurried out, already planning their routes, Su Yao leaned back against the wall opposite the guest room, her eyes fixed on the door.
From inside, the clone’s voice drifted out, muffled but clear. “Splitting up, a classic tactic for the doomed in horror films. How predictable.”
Su Yao’s eyes narrowed. She pushed off the wall and shoved the guest room door open again.
The clone was in the exact same position, staring at the ceiling.
“How do you know what horror films are?” Su Yao demanded, her voice cutting through the room’s placid atmosphere.
The clone’s head lolled to the side. Its gaze landed on her with infuriating languor. “I know many things.”
“You’re a millennia-old echo of a demonic fox, freshly extruded from a void-forged abomination and stuffed into a clone of my body. Your knowledge should be of celestial battles and forgotten poisons.”
A faint, knowing smile touched the clone’s lips. It said nothing.
“Did you pull that from my memories? From Xiao Ling’s?” Su Yao pressed, stepping closer. “Or is there more of you awake in there than you’re letting on?”
The clone closed its eyes, a clear dismissal. “The source is irrelevant. The observation stands. Your companions are scattered, and the monster is waiting. It’s all very cliché.” It rolled over, turning its back to her once more. “Now, unless you wish to debate cinematic theory, I am resting.”
Su Yao stood there. A fresh wave of suspicion coiled in her gut. This was an echo of awareness. And it was clearly filtering what it chose to reveal.
“This isn’t over,” she said, her voice low.
“It never is,” the clone murmured into the pillow. “But my participation in this particular conversation is.”
A few hours later, Su Yao was systematically sharpening a kitchen knife to a razor’s edge by dragging it along her own solidified foxfire. The screech of spiritual energy on steel grated through the apartment. It was a pointedly disruptive activity aimed squarely at the guest room door.
The door creaked open, revealing the clone who stood there looking unimpressed.
“The auditory assault is unnecessary,” it stated. “If you seek to interrogate me, simply ask. Your mortal subtlety is lacking.”
Su Yao kept her eyes on the knife. “Fine. The Yamato. Tell me something I can actually use.”
The clone leaned against the doorframe, examining its fingernails. “Very well. A trivial piece of information you may find relevant: most of the lower-tier Yamato operatives you have encountered are not, in fact, Japanese.”
The sharpening stopped. Su Yao looked up.
“What?”
“Their recruitment is pragmatic,” the clone continued, its tone that of a bored academic. “Japan’s native spiritually gifted population has been in decline for generations from a simple matter of declining birth rates and cultural secularization.”
Shifting its weight against the frame, it idly tapped a fingernail against the wood. “The Yamato, to sustain their operations, have been recruiting talent from elsewhere for decades targeting desperate souls from war-torn regions, orphaned children with latent gifts, and disaffected youths from all over the world. They offer power, purpose, a new identity.”
It finally met Su Yao’s gaze. A flicker of amusement shone in its eyes. “So you are hunting a multinational corporation of the occult, hiding behind a traditional aesthetic. The man in the white mask could be from Ohio, for all it matters.”
Su Yao processed this. The new scale of the enemy settled in her gut like a stone. “So they’re opportunists.”
“Precisely.” The clone pushed off the doorframe. “Now, if you are quite finished with the noise, I believe there is leftover pork belly.” It glided past her towards the kitchen, leaving Su Yao standing in the hallway, holding an impossibly sharp knife and a far more dangerous piece of information.
Su Yao stood frozen in the hallway, the razor-sharp knife forgotten in her hand. The clone’s words echoed in her mind, rearranging the entire puzzle. Multinational corporation of the occult.
It made a horrifying, perfect sense. She mentally ran through the roster of their enemies.
The local Chinese cultivators the Yamato had recruited were renegades from the Vanishing Moon Pavilion. They were traitors to their own traditions, lured by better offers.
Yumi, the gumiho, was Korean. A freelance predator they had apparently tried to co-opt or manipulate. Korea had long since been annexed into the so-called Greater Japanese Empire, but Yumi had been around centuries before that, when her homeland still stood independent.
The only entity she could definitively pin as Japanese was Tsuneki, the fox spirit from her own ancient past, whose hatred for her was purely personal.
And the Nue, the Nue was a different category altogether. Forged from the Void, a place of absolute nothingness that predated and would outlast all nations. It had no nationality because it was a weapon, pure and simple.
The Yamato were globalists. They were spiritual strip-miners, looting the supernatural resources of the world to build their own empire.
“Practical,” she muttered to herself. A grudging respect in her tone warred with her disgust. “And utterly soulless.”
It meant their enemy was more adaptable, more insidious, and far more widespread than she had assumed. The “man in the white mask” could be hiding in plain sight within any culture, any community. His original identity was completely erased by the power of the artifact.
She looked towards the kitchen, where the clone was serenely helping itself to the leftovers. For the first time, she felt a thread of genuine, strategic fear. This was a war against a faceless, borderless corporation whose only god was power.
They had just begun to grasp the size of its portfolio.
Su Yao’s eyes lit up with a different, more modern kind of cunning. She dismissed the knife back into her spatial pouch and pulled out her indestructible smartphone.
“If they’re a corporation, they have HR problems,” she muttered, a grim smile on her lips. “And HR problems require hiring.”
She ignored the clone in the kitchen and retreated to the living room, sinking onto the sofa. Her fingers flew across the screen, pulling up a popular international freelance and job-seeking platform. She filtered for postings in the broader East Asia region, using keywords both mundane and esoteric.
Security Specialist (Spiritual Hazard Mitigation)
Cultural Artifact Acquisition Manager
Field Researcher (Anomalous Phenomena)
Personal Assistant (Frequent Travel, Hazard Pay)
She scanned dozens of listings. Her ancient mind parsed modern corporate jargon. Many were likely legitimate. A few had a strange, coded feel to them. They had vague requirements, unusually high risk allowances, and demands for “discretion” and “a global perspective.”
But nothing screamed Yamato or directly pointed to a man seeking a white mask. They were too careful and embedded in the noise of the global economy.
“They’re not stupid,” she murmured to herself, scrolling through another page of generic listings. “They won’t post ‘Wanted: Cultists for World-Ending Scheme’ on a public forum.”
She leaned back, frustrated but not defeated. It was a long shot, but it was a new vector. They had to recruit somehow. The low-level operatives who died like flies had to be replaced.
Su Yao’s finger stopped scrolling. Her eyes locked onto a posting from a very familiar corporate entity: The Li Group.
Position: Full-Time Personal Bodyguard (Female)
Assignment: Personal Security for Heiress
Requirements: Extensive close-quarters combat experience, discretion, willingness to travel. Hazard pay included.
Her brow furrowed. This was too coincidental. She immediately hit the call button next to Li Xiu’s contact.
The phone was picked up on the first ring. “Xiao Ling? Is everything alright?”
“Why is your family hiring a new bodyguard?” Su Yao demanded, skipping any greeting.
A slight pause followed on the other end. “Oh. You saw the posting? It’s standard procedure. My previous bodyguard, the one who posed as my maid, was compromised. There was a minor kidnapping attempt.”
Su Yao’s grip on the phone tightened. “What?”
“It’s fine! It was handled very quickly. She was fired, of course. No one was seriously hurt.” Li Xiu’s voice was reassuring, but a thread of unease lay beneath it.
“Handled by who?” Su Yao pressed. A sinking feeling was in her gut.
“Well, that’s the thing. My father was impressed by the response time and effectiveness of my new security detail. So we’ve made it permanent.”
“Who. Is. It.” Su Yao’s voice was flat.
“Her name is Yumi. She’s a bit intense, but she’s incredibly capable.”
Su Yao shot to her feet. “Yumi?! The gumiho? Li Xiu, that woman is dangerous! She tried to eat a man’s liver because she thought it was a romantic gesture!”
“Of course she’s dangerous,” Li Xiu replied, her tone suddenly as sharp and pragmatic as a business merger. “That’s why she’s hired. The last one was ‘safe,’ and I got kidnapped. Yumi is dangerous to anyone who threatens me. The board reviewed her performance and approved the contract. Our benefits package is quite competitive.”
Su Yao was speechless. The Li Group had just hired a chaotic-neutral, liver-eating fox spirit as their heiress’s primary protector. The Yamato was a multinational occult corporation, and now one of the city’s most powerful mortal families was employing supernatural freelance talent.
The lines between the corporate world and the spirit world were signing mutual non-disclosure agreements.
Su Yao stared at the phone. Li Xiu’s pragmatic explanation hung in the air. “Wait,” she said, the word laced with disbelief. “So the position is filled. By a man-eating gumiho. But the posting is still up?”
“Oh, that,” Li Xiu replied, her voice shifting back to its usual, slightly apologetic tone. “The postings on that site expire automatically after thirty days. Most recruiters don’t bother manually taking them down. It’s just, how it’s done.”
A cosmic kind of disgust washed over Su Yao’s face. She forgot about the Yamato, the mask, the possessed clone in her kitchen.
“That,” she declared, her voice trembling with a new, pure outrage, “is evil.”
“What is?” Li Xiu asked, confused.
“That! Leaving a posting up when the job is already gone! It’s a spiritual poison! You’re generating false hope! You’re making desperate people waste their energy, their focus, tailoring résumés and crafting cover letters for a void! It’s a tiny, bureaucratic act of pure malice!”
She was practically vibrating with indignation. “I have seen betrayals that shattered mountains. I have been poisoned at my own banquet. But this, this casual, systemic indifference to the hopes of mortals, it’s a different kind of evil.”
From the kitchen doorway, the clone, “Su Nian,” took a delicate bite of pork belly. “She’s not wrong,” it remarked to no one in particular. “It is a particularly insidious form of mortal suffering. The slow crush of hope by an uncaring system. Quite modern.”
Li Xiu was silent for a moment on the other end of the line. “I never thought about it like that. I can have someone in HR take it down?”
“YES,” Su Yao and the clone said in unison, one furious, the other amused.
Su Yao pinched the bridge of her nose. The fate of the world was potentially hanging by a thread, and here she was, having to lecture a billionaire heiress on ethical hiring practices. This was, in many ways, more exhausting than fighting the Nue.
The line was filled with the sound of a sudden, sharp crack, followed by a muffled cry and the distinct thud of a body hitting a wall.
Su Yao’s grip on the phone tightened. “Li Xiu? What was that?”
“Hm? Oh, don’t worry,” Li Xiu’s voice came through, perfectly calm amidst the background noise of shattering porcelain and a pained groan. “It’s just Yumi. We have intruders.”
Another crash, this time accompanied by the sound of splintering wood. A man’s voice yelled something in a language Su Yao barely recognize, which was abruptly cut off with a wet gurgle.
“She’s very thorough,” Li Xiu added. A note of professional admiration was in her tone. “The board is going to be so pleased with her cost-effectiveness. The last security team required a full supplemental budget for property damage. Yumi seems to keep most of the mess contained to the intruders themselves.”
Su Yao could only listen. A strange sense of surrealism washed over her. “Are you, in the same room?”
“Oh, yes. I’m finishing my tea. It’s a lovely oolong. Yumi insisted it was important to maintain a sense of normalcy.” There was a pause, and the sound of a cup being placed on a saucer. “She just threw one of them out the window onto the landscaped shrubs. That should be fine, the gardeners can handle it.”
A final, sickening crunch echoed through the phone, followed by silence.
“There,” Li Xiu said pleasantly. “All handled. She’s waving at me. I think she wants a raise. Or possibly a snack. It’s sometimes hard to tell.”
Su Yao slowly lowered the phone, ending the call. She looked into the middle distance, processing the fact that one of the most powerful mortal families in the city was now being protected by a creature whose loyalty was likely measured in delivered livers and competitive benefits.
The clone, now leaning against the living room doorway finishing its pork belly, smirked. “See? The modern world has its own charms. In my day, we simply razed villages. Now, they file HR reports and manage landscaping costs. Arguably more barbaric.”
Su Yao just sighed. The sound was heavy with the weight of cosmic irony. Their hunt for the mask suddenly felt strangely straightforward compared to the bureaucratic nightmare of the supernatural gig economy.
The phone, still on speaker, crackled with Li Xiu’s voice again. Curiosity cut through the post-violence calm. “Xiao Ling, who was that speaking? I don’t recognize her voice.”
Before Su Yao could fabricate an answer, the clone glided closer. Its voice was a smooth, practiced melody. “You may call me Mizukume.”
Li Xiu paused. “Mizukume? That sounds Japanese. But your accent, it’s not quite right? It’s very neutral.”
A gentle, understanding tone was in her voice. “It’s okay, you know. You don’t have to be shy. Wong Lei from our class is really into that stuff too. Are you a weeb? I won’t judge! It’s a perfectly valid hobby.”
Su Yao watched. A vein throbbed in her temple as the millennia-old echo of a demonic fox spirit was being psychoanalyzed as a cringey Japanophile by a billionaire heiress.
The clone merely offered a serene, enigmatic smile, though only Su Yao could see it. “A name is but a vessel for perception, much like a mask. If you perceive ‘weeb,’ then for this moment, that is what I am.”
Li Xiu sounded delighted. “Oh, that’s so deep! It’s like, performance art! I totally get it. Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Mizukume. Xiao Ling, I’m glad you’re making more interesting friends.”
The call ended, leaving Su Yao in stunned silence. She slowly turned to face the clone.
“Mizukume?” she repeated, her voice dripping with disbelief.
The clone shrugged, a delicate, infuriating gesture. “It means ‘Girl of Algae.’ I just think it sounded appropriately transient and decorative. It’s a name for a ghost, or a passing fancy. It suits this façade.”
It looked faintly amused. “And it’s far less taxing than explaining my actual, multi-millennia-long existential predicament to a mortal child who would simply file it under ‘weeb.’”
Su Yao realized with dawning horror that the echo was starting to enjoy the absurd theater of the modern world. It was getting dangerously good at playing its part.