Chapter 39: Uncanny Resemblance
By the time the minutes bled away, Su Yao’s patience was already thinning. The door to the Floating Lantern Lounge chimed softly twenty minutes later. A man stepped inside. His arrival caused the air in the room to still.
Su Yao’s glass froze halfway to her lips. Her blood ran cold, then hot.
He looked exactly like Li Xuan.
The man had the same ageless features, the same calm, and penetrating eyes that had once watched her drink poison. His posture carried the ease of a traveler eternally at rest. It was him, the man from her memories and the movie, standing in a tacky bar in modern Duwang.
Foxfire erupted around Su Yao’s free hand, scorching the bar counter. “You!”
That word was a lethal promise. In her other hand, the glass shattered. Her ignited spiritual energy hit the cheap imitation brew and it sizzled.
The man simply raised an eyebrow, completely unfazed by the display of primordial power. He brushed a non-existent speck of dust from his impeccably tailored modern suit.
“Ah, that reaction,” he said. His voice was a smooth, cultured baritone that was almost Li Xuan’s, but with a layer of theatrical polish. “I get that a lot. But I believe you have it backwards.”
He took a few casual steps forward, stopping at a safe but conversational distance and gestured to his own face. “I was the actor who portrayed him in Azure Mist Chronicles. The makeup and effects team did such a phenomenal job, they based the legendary Daoist’s appearance directly on my features. Quite the honor, really.”
Su Yao stared. Her foxfire sputtered in confusion. The sheer, monumental absurdity of the situation short-circuited her rage. The man who had haunted her for millennia, whose betrayal was the cornerstone of her current existence, was a reference for a movie makeup artist?
Mizukume, who had been observing the newcomer with intense interest, murmured, “The copy has now informed the original that it is, in fact, the source. The recursion is aesthetically pleasing.”
“You’re the actor?” Su Yao repeated. The words felt alien.
“Li Xue,” he said with a slight, performative bow. “And you must be the enthusiastic fan who called.” His eyes glinted with something unreadable. “I must say, your method of seeking an audience is dramatic.”
Su Yao’s mind raced, trying to reconcile the cosmic with the commercial. This man, this actor, owned the bar. His face was the blueprint for her betrayer’s visage. He served drinks that could unravel ancient souls.
“The drinks,” Su Yao demanded. Her voice was tight. “How?”
Li Xue’s smile remained pleasant, but his eyes grew sharper, more assessing. “A family recipe, passed down through a very long line. We’ve always been in the business of, hospitality.”
He looked at her. His gaze seemed to see through her modern vessel to the ancient fox within. “I had a feeling they might resonate with someone of a particular vintage.”
The man knew. He might lack complete knowledge, but he knew she was a customer of particular importance.
“The real Li Xuan,” Su Yao pressed. The name was ash in her mouth. “What do you know about him?”
Li Xue’s smile remained, but it became a mask. “The real one? Oh, I’m sure he’s nothing like the character I played.” He turned to survey his bar, effectively ending the line of questioning. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I should check on my stock. So lovely to meet a connoisseur.”
As Li Xue retreated, his polished dismissal hanging in the air, Kitty leaped back onto the bar. Her tail lashed. Her cat ears were flat against her head. Her eyes glowed with a faint, divine light.
“He speaks the truth,” she hissed. Her voice was a low growl. “About Li Xuan, at least. I sense no deception there. His knowledge of the ancient Daoist is superficial, gleaned from scripts and directors. The man is a hollow shell wearing a famous face.”
Before Su Yao could process this, Li Xue paused near the end of the bar. The man’s gaze fell upon Kitty and his detached, professional demeanor shifted instantly. His eyes lit up with a spark of genuine, unadulterated fascination.
“Well, hello there,” he said. His voice dropped into a smoother, more intimate register. He leaned casually against the bar, completely ignoring Su Yao and Mizukume. “That is an absolutely stunning presentation. The ear articulation is flawless and the tail mobility is fluid. Is it animatronic? Or a truly magnificent prosthetic? The blend of the humanoid form with such distinct felinity is breathtaking.”
He was hitting on her. Or rather, he was hitting on the cat ears and tail.
Su Yao stared. A memory surfaced from the depths of her mind. The original Li Xuan, in the quiet moments before the betrayal, had always shown a peculiar, quiet fascination with the animalistic aspects of her true form. Everything from the texture of her fur, the flick of a tail, to the sharpness of a canine tooth, things other cultivators feared or despised, he had studied with the focus of a naturalist.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me, Su Yao thought. The absurdity crystallized into a perfect, horrible diamond of understanding. The original was a furry. And this copy, this actor, is too. It’s a multigenerational, cross-millennia fetish.
In modern terms, the man upon whose face her legendary betrayer was based, and potentially his entire bloodline, were furry enthusiasts.
Kitty, for her part, looked less offended and more, disgustedly intrigued. She flexed a claw. “The tail is real, you insignificant speck. I could sever your spine with it.”
Li Xue’s smile only widened. A gleam of pure, unhinged appreciation shone in his eyes. “Feisty! I love it. The commitment to character is impeccable.”
Su Yao decided she had had enough. The cosmic mysteries could wait. She needed to be anywhere else.
“Let’s go,” she announced, standing up and tossing a few bills onto the bar, enough to cover the drinks and the scorched counter. “The crazy is too concentrated here.”
Mizukume, who had been silently observing the entire exchange like a sociologist studying a new tribe, gave a final, slow nod. “The attraction to hybridized forms is a well-documented psychological archetype. To see it manifest so blatantly across a temporal and spiritual schism is statistically significant.”
As they filed out, leaving a fascinated Li Xue staring at Kitty’s retreating tail, Su Yao made a mental note. The Li family was even weirder than she thought. That was saying something.
“Wait! You can’t go yet!” Li Xue called out, actually taking a few hurried steps after them. His eyes were locked on the twitch of Kitty’s tail as it disappeared through the doorway. “I haven’t gotten your number! Or at least the contact for your costumer! The craftsmanship is revolutionary! We have to collaborate!”
Kitty paused at the door, turning her head just enough to fix him with one glowing, slitted eye. “The ‘costumer’ is my divine creator, you mewling mortal. The waitlist for an appointment is several eternities long. And you aren’t on it.”
“Even better!” Li Xue exclaimed, completely missing the threat and latching onto the mythology. “The world-building is impeccable! Is it a LARP? A live-action role-playing game? The dedication! The method acting!”
Su Yao had finally reached her limit. She raised a hand. A wall of shimmering, silent crimson foxfire erupted between Li Xue and the door. Its heatless flames cast dancing, demonic shadows on the walls.
The actor stumbled to a halt. His eyes were wide with awe. “Incredible! A hologram? Projection mapping? The special effects budget must be astronomical!”
“He is remarkably resilient to existential context,” Mizukume observed, stepping through the fiery barrier as if it were mist.
“He’s an idiot,” Su Yao corrected, striding out into the night. The foxfire vanished behind her as if it had never been.
The last thing they heard was Li Xue’s voice, fainter now, still calling out, “My card! At least take my card! We could do a photoshoot!”
Once outside, Kitty shuddered, smoothing down her fur. “The audacity, to reduce my glorious form to a cosplay critique.”
“He was more interested in your tail than your divinity,” Mizukume noted. “What a fascinating hierarchy of values.”
Su Yao took a deep breath of the polluted city air, finding it strangely grounding after the surreal encounter. “The Li family,” she declared, “is a fractal puzzle box of crazy. And we are no closer to any real answers.”
The actor knew nothing, the drinks were a dead end, and they were back to waiting for a factory tour form.
All they had accomplished was confirming that the face of her greatest enemy was now being used by a man with a very specific and persistent fetish.
“This,” she muttered, “is the worst timeline.”
The image of Li Xue’s utterly sincere, aesthetic fascination with Kitty’s cat ears lingered in Su Yao’s mind. It was a perfect, irritating key that unlocked a deeply buried memory.
She stopped dead on the sidewalk. The pieces, ancient and modern, slammed together with the force of a divine revelation.
The real Li Xuan, he asked me for relationship advice once.
It had been centuries ago, during the early days of his stay at her banquet. He had been uncharacteristically pensive, watching the lesser fox spirits and celestial maidens flit through her halls.
“They are all so, volatile,” he had murmured. His serene face was troubled. “How does one choose a companion without inviting chaos?”
She, the ancient Nine-Tailed Fox, hostess of the most hedonistic court in existence, had given him her most sincere, hard-won wisdom. She had leaned in. Her voice dripped with the gravitas of millennia. “Don’t stick it in the crazy.”
It was, she had believed, the foundational principle of a peaceful, long life.
Now, standing under the neon glow of a modern city, the horrifying truth dawned on her.
With me gone, poisoned, there was no one left to give him that advice. No one to stop him.
Her mind raced, connecting the dots with terrifying clarity. The Li family’s “curse.”
The men dying young of systemic failure was a classic symptom of a spiritually unstable bloodline pushed to its limits. But the women being naturally attractive to spirits was a trait common in descendants of unions between powerful cultivators and other things like fae, demons, and other chaotic entities.
He didn’t find a nice, stable cultivator girl to settle down with after I was gone, she realized. A slow, horrified dread filled her. He went out and found the craziest women he could. Because I wasn’t there to tell him not to.
The Li family’s entire existence, their bizarre spiritual genetics, and their entanglement in every supernatural crisis in the city, was a burden of a different kind. It was a consequence. The consequence of Li Xuan, unmoored from her influence, procreating with a series of increasingly powerful, unstable, and likely non-human women.
“Oh, you fool,” she whispered into the night air. “You absolute, hopeless fool.”
Mizukume, sensing the shift in her aura, tilted her head. “A new variable has been calculated?”
“The variable,” Su Yao said. Her voice was hollow with the weight of the realization. “Is that the Li family’s legendary ‘curse’ is probably just a collection of terrible genetic and spiritual inheritances from a long line of, ‘great something grandmothers’, that I specifically told Li Xuan to avoid.”
She looked back in the direction of the Floating Lantern Lounge, where a man with Li Xuan’s face was probably still dreaming of catgirls.
“The chaos is their birthright,” she concluded. The irony was so thick it was suffocating. “And I am, indirectly, the one who made it possible by getting myself poisoned.”
The thought was a poison-tipped needle, sliding smoothly into a crack in the millennia-old narrative she had built.
Who was the mother?
The question echoed, unsettling everything. She had always framed her betrayal as a transaction between herself and Li Xuan. His ambition and righteousness versus her power and nature. But what if it had never been so simple? What if there had been a third point in that fatal triangle?
Li Xuan, visiting her palace, seeking her counsel, enjoying her company, while another waited for him elsewhere. A woman he had chosen against Su Yao’s advice who was powerful enough and perhaps jealous enough to see the ancient Nine-Tailed Fox as a rival for his heart or his attention.
What if, the idea crystallized, cold and sharp. She was the one who put the poison in the ‘Enlightenment’ brew?
The image reformed in her mind’s eye. Li Xuan offering her the cup. His expression was as unreadably calm as ever. Had there been a flicker of resignation or guilt? Had he been a pawn as well who drunk from a similarly tainted cup of trust?
The ‘Enlightenment’ had never felt like his style. It was too direct, too visceral a betrayal for the serene traveler. But for a spurned, chaotic consort? It was perfect. It removed the rival and potentially bound Li Xuan to her through shared guilt, or by making him reliant on her in the aftermath.
It would explain everything. The Li family’s inherent instability, a direct inheritance from a mother capable of such a subtle, devastating act. The “curse” was the spiritual fallout of a primordial crime of passion. And Li Xuan’s own fate, had he discovered the truth? Had he spent his remaining life trapped in a gilded cage with the true architect of his greatest sin?
Mizukume, sensing the seismic shift in Su Yao’s spirit, turned from her contemplation of a flickering streetlamp. “The equation has been rewritten,” she stated.
“The variables have multiplied,” Su Yao corrected. Her voice was low. “I’ve been hunting the wrong betrayer for a thousand years.”
She looked at her hands, the hands that had held the poisoned cup. “Li Xuan might have just been the delivery system. The hand that brewed it could belong to the ‘great something grandmother’ herself.”
Their quest for the mask, the Yamato, and the man in white, it all suddenly felt like the current, chaotic flowering of a seed planted centuries ago. The root of the corruption was the poisonous love of the woman he’d chosen after Su Yao was gone.
“We still need to find that factory,” Su Yao said. The words now carried a new, grim weight. “But now I have a new question for the Li family archives. I need to find out who the hell Li Xuan married.”
Su Yao’s mind, a library of ancient grudges and celestial gossip, began flipping through its darkest indexes. Who? The question was a drumbeat in her soul. Who was powerful enough? Knowledgeable enough? And crazy enough?
She started with the obvious candidates, the ones with animalistic features she knew Li Xuan found intriguing.
The Azure Dragon of the Eastern Sea?
No. Too aloof, too bound by elemental dignity. Poison was beneath her. She would have just drowned the entire Jade Mountain in a tidal wave and been done with it.
The Vermillion Bird of the South?
A possibility. Fiery, prideful, and notoriously possessive. But her methods were pure, cleansing flame. This Enlightenment brew was subtle and insidious. It required a patient, brewing kind of malice.
The White Tiger of the West?
All brute force and martial honor. She would have challenged Su Yao to a duel to the death under the full moon.
The Black Tortoise of the North?
Too slow, too methodical. The plot would still be in the planning stages.
Her thoughts spiraled outward, beyond the Four Auspicious Beasts. The Moon Rabbit?
Too busy pounding elixirs of immortality.
The Jade Maiden who tended the Peaches of Immortality?
Possibly. She had access to all manner of celestial ingredients. But her jealousy was focused on other maidens.
Then, the more unsettling, obscure names surfaced. The Phoenix who nested in the Fusang Tree?
She was certainly chaotic enough, and each of her different personalities held a different, often contradictory, opinion. But her poison would have been flamboyant and showy. This was too clean.
The Serpent Goddess of the Forgotten Swamps?
Her venom was legendary, but it caused immediate, agonizing paralysis. It was a far cry from the slow, soul-altering transmutation Su Yao had experienced.
A disgraced Qilin?
Their purity was a lie. A fallen one could be bitter and vengeful. But their power was one of blessing and curse.
It could have been a collaboration, a new, chilling thought emerged. A tangle of spite.
The Serpent Goddess provides the base toxin, the Moon Rabbit refines it, the Vermillion Bird imbues it with a hidden, smoldering fire, and the Jade Maiden smuggles it into the celestial kitchens. All for different reasons: a past slight, a stolen recipe, Li Xuan’s attention, and the sheer joy of watching her fall.
So many people wanted me gone, she realized. The scale of my own legend was working against me. My hedonistic court had made enemies.
Her power had inspired fear and her mere existence was an affront to order. Li Xuan’s new woman might have been the final, willing instrument. She was the one who had the most to gain and the opportunity to place the cup in his hand.
Mizukume, watching the play of emotions on Su Yao’s face, finally broke the silence. “The list is long, isn’t it? To be so magnificent is to cast a very long shadow. And many creatures lurk in shadows, waiting for a chance to extinguish the light.”
“It could have been any of them,” Su Yao whispered. The certainty she had carried for centuries crumbled into dust. “Or all of them.”
What began as a quiet clash between a Daoist and a Fox had spiraled far beyond that single betrayal. It was now a conspiracy spanning ages. The Li family, with all its chaotic, cursed blood, was the living, breathing evidence.