Chapter 40: Disaster Level Dragon
Of course it couldn’t just be a simple vendetta. Nothing in her life ever stayed small. A grim, wry smile finally touched Su Yao’s lips amidst the swirling suspicions. At least, in the vast, murky ocean of potential betrayers, there were two islands of absolute certainty.
“Well,” she muttered aloud. The words were a dry rasp. “At least I know it couldn’t have been Jinse or Kitty.”
Mizukume tilted her head. “The Goddess of Contracts and her feline herald? You eliminate them so readily?”
“Jinse’s power is about binding. Poison, especially a subtle, soul-altering one, is beneath her. It’s messy and lacks elegance. If she wanted me gone, she would have drawn up a celestial contract so air-tight I would have voluntarily marched myself into the void just to avoid the paperwork.”
A faint, almost fond memory of Jinse’s frustratingly precise nature surfaced. “And Kitty, Kitty would have just scratched my eyes out. She’s never had the patience for poison. She’s a creature of immediate, violent feedback.”
The logic was flawless. Their forms of malice were straightforward. Jinse’s was bureaucratic and absolute while Kitty’s was primal and direct. The Enlightenment brew was an artist’s toxin, a philosopher’s weapon that required a mind that enjoyed the slow unraveling and perversion of essence.
“No,” Su Yao concluded. A strange sense of relief lay in the admission. “Somehow, those two are among the few beings in the cosmos I can confidently rule out.”
It was a small comfort, but in a conspiracy that seemed to encompass gods, monsters, and corporate logistics, she would take any certainty she could get. The list of enemies was long, but at least she could draw a clear line through two names.
Now, she just had to figure out which of the other thousand possibilities had decided to ruin her life and how their legacy was now entwined with a mass-produced plastic mask.
“Precisely,” Kitty stated. Her voice was flat as she finished cleaning a claw, as if discussing the most mundane of topics. “If I wanted you discorporated, I would have shredded your spiritual core, draped your intestines over the Jade Mountain throne as a festive garland, and used your favorite tail as a feather duster.”
She finally glanced at Su Yao. Her cat-like eyes were utterly devoid of malice, which made the statement even more chilling. “Poison is for those who lack conviction and flair. It’s the tool of the insecure and the indirect. I have never been either.”
Mizukume gave a slow, approving nod. “A commendable philosophy. Direct action possesses an aesthetic purity that deception lacks.”
Su Yao almost smiled. In the twisted cosmology of her life, it was perversely reassuring to have at least two entities whose homicidal intentions were refreshingly straightforward without hidden agendas or centuries-long plots. Only the simple, stark promise of visceral dismemberment.
It narrowed the field, ever so slightly. The real betrayer was still out there, hiding in the shadows of history and the chaos of the modern Li bloodline. For now, she could cross “Divine Messenger” and “Goddess of Contracts” off the list of suspects with absolute certainty.
“Noted,” Su Yao said. “I'll consider my intestines forewarned.”
Mizukume’s voice cut through the night air. Her tone was one of detached, clinical analysis. “A thought occurs. This ancient poisoner, this spurned consort or cabal of plotters, where are they now?”
Her hollow gaze turned to Su Yao. “If they truly saw you as an existential threat, a rival to be eliminated, their work is incomplete. You are here, awake and regaining power. The logical course of action for any competent adversary would be to finish what they started and make sure the threat is permanently neutralized.”
She gestured with a slender hand, encompassing the quiet, mundane street. “Yet, we see no evidence of their hand. Only this new, brash threat calling themselves the Yamato with their crude soul-forging and mass-produced masks.”
“The conclusion,” Mizukume stated, “is that your original enemy is either long departed from this realm, or they are no longer interested. To them, you are a concluded matter, a closed file. There is no strategic value in revisiting it. So I ask you, landlord. What is the point of digging up these particular bones? It isn’t as if they are involved with the Yamato or something so conveniently interconnected.”
The logic was cold, precise, and utterly deflating. Su Yao stood there, the wind taken out of her sails of vengeance. Mizukume was right. If the original poisoner was still around and still cared, Su Yao would have been dead ten times over by now. Her return to power had been noisy and blatant.
The past was just that, the past. And her past was a personal tragedy.
As the thought settled, a new, more insidious connection began to form in Su Yao’s mind. Her eyes widened slightly.
…Or something so conveniently interconnected.
The Enlightenment brew had been about soul-alchemy. It was an attempt to transmute her, to rewrite her very essence.
The Yamato and the man in the white mask were soul-forgers creating echoes, building monsters from stolen spiritual parts.
Li Xuan, the common thread, had been deeply interested in souls, in transformation.
“You’re wrong,” Su Yao said. Her voice was low but sharp with newfound certainty. “They might not be involved directly. But they pioneered the method. The poison was an experiment in soul manipulation.”
She looked at Mizukume. Her gaze was intense. “What if the Yamato and the forger was using the same foundational research? What if my poisoning was the first successful trial of a new, terrible art? An art that has now been industrialized?”
The point of dealing with the past was no longer about revenge. It was now about understanding the blueprint of the current plague. The original sin had spawned a lineage of heresy. To stop the Yamato, she might just need to understand the first laboratory where their dark science was born.
Kitty, who had been idly examining her claws, froze. Her tail, which had been lazily swishing, puffed out to twice its size. She stared at Su Yao, her ears flattening against her skull. Her glowing eyes were wide with something akin to horror.
“Who are you?” Kitty hissed. Her voice lost its usual lazy menace and sharpened into genuine alarm. She took a hesitant step back on the bar. “What have you done with the real Su Yao?”
Su Yao blinked, pulled from her dark epiphany. “What are you mewling about?”
“The real Su Yao,” Kitty repeated. Her fur was still on end. “Doesn't trace heresies back to foundational research. She sets the library on fire and dances in the ashes!”
Kitty pointed a trembling claw. “The Su Yao I know sees a problem and hits it with the nearest celestial body! She doesn't stand on a street corner pondering the philosophical underpinnings of soul-forging conspiracies! That’s what Jinse does! Or Zhang Wei! This is overthinking! It’s unnatural!”
Mizukume observed the feline’s meltdown with interest. “The observation has merit. Your operational parameters have visibly shifted. The brute-force application of power has been supplemented by, strategic recursion. It’s a significant deviation from your established behavioral pattern.”
Su Yao opened her mouth to retort, to deny it, but the words died in her throat. Kitty was right. The ancient Su Yao, the one from the banquet, would have already been storming the heavens or razing the Yamato’s last known location on a vengeful whim. She would have just assumed it was all Li Xuan’s fault and been done with it.
This methodical tracing of patterns, this patience to wait for bureaucracy, and this willingness to consider she might have been wrong about the fundamental nature of her betrayal, was new.
A faint, familiar sensation echoed in the back of her mind, the stubborn, pragmatic will of a mortal girl who had to think her way through problems because she lacked the power to smash them.
You just do the next thing.
She looked from the horrified divine messenger to the analytically intrigued echo.
“The ‘real’ Su Yao got hit by a truck. She had to share headspace with a teenager who worried about a calculus test and wished for the moon to crash into the Earth, extinguishing all life in a glorious, instantaneous fireball, so she wouldn’t have to study for it,” Su Yao said. Her voice was quieter, laced with a grudging acceptance. “Maybe a little overthinking is the price of not being dead.”
The wish belonged to Su Yao. But she was sure Xiao Ling wanted something similar to happen at least once.
Kitty stared for a moment longer. She let out a distrustful “Hmph.”
“Just don't make a habit of it,” she grumbled, turning her back to clean a paw with excessive focus. “It’s unsettling. I preferred you when you were just a straightforward homicidal menace.”
Su Yao almost smiled. “Noted.”
Kitty, having finished her meticulous paw-cleaning with an air of offended dignity, swished her tail. “Before our untimely separation,” she began. Her tone shifted to one of professional reportage. “Jinse and I did manage one productive reconnaissance. We visited the new museum.”
Su Yao’s eyebrow twitched. “The one giving away the masks as party favors?”
“The very same, the Museum of Folklore and the Supernatural,” Kitty confirmed. “It is remarkably thorough. And oddly specific. Before today, I was unaware of the existence of a ‘Girtablilu’, a fascinating, if aesthetically challenged scorpion-man hybrid from Mesopotamian myth. The placard was most informative.”
She paced with a lecturer’s air. “The museum contains exhibits on dozens of creatures, spirits, and deities from across Asia and beyond. Each is meticulously categorized. But the most, illuminating, feature was the classification system.”
Kitty’s ears flicked in distaste. “Each exhibit has a displayed ‘Disaster Level’ rating. The lowest is ‘Wolf’. The highest is, ‘Calamity’.”
A beat of silence hung in the air.
Mizukume, who had been listening with her head tilted, was the first to break it. Her hollow eyes showed a flicker of what might have been genuine amusement. “They are ripping the classification system from One Punch Man,” she stated.
Her voice was utterly flat. “A shonen manga and anime series. The Disaster Levels are: Wolf, Tiger, Demon, Dragon, and God. ‘Calamity’ is likely a localization choice for ‘God’-level threat. How derivative.”
Su Yao stared, first at Kitty, then at Mizukume. A museum, funded by heaven-knew-who cataloging mythological beings, was using a power-ranking system stolen from a comic book.
“Let me get this straight,” Su Yao said slowly, pinching the bridge of her nose. “The Yamato, or whoever is behind this museum, is systematically gathering intelligence on every major supernatural entity they can find, and grading them like they’re characters in a fighting game?”
“It would appear so,” Kitty said. Her nose wrinkled. “I found our exhibit. Jinse and I were listed under ‘Dragon’. The sheer audacity. To reduce divine authority and primordial power to a placard and a rating, it’s the ultimate act of bureaucratic arrogance.”
“They're profiling assets and threats,” Su Yao realized. The pieces clicked into a new, terrifying configuration. “For what? Acquisition? Neutralization?” Her eyes narrowed. “For their soul-forging projects. They're shopping for parts.”
The museum was a catalog for a supernatural black market. Someone had decided to rank every god and monster in it using a system designed for a manga about a bald guy who wins every fight with one punch.
Su Yao had to admit that the sheer, staggering absurdity of it was a masterpiece of modern evil.
Mizukume’s head tilted. Her form radiated a sudden, intense focus. “A question. In this catalog, what Disaster Level was assigned to Tamamo-no-Mae?”
Kitty answered immediately. “Dragon.”
A wave of cold, offended silence emanated from the clone.
“Dragon,” she repeated. The word was flat and lifeless. “A being who brought empires to their knees, a calamity woven into the very fabric of a nation’s history, is deemed equivalent to a oversized lizard that breathes fire? The lack of nuance is appalling.”
“Don’t feel too slighted,” Kitty added. A hint of feline smugness was in her voice. “Nothing from the entire Japanese pantheon or bestiary was rated higher. The ‘Calamity’ tier appears reserved for entities of a, different scale of cosmic destructiveness, mostly from India. The Asura King Vritra, for instance, who is said to have choked the heavens and starved the world, is listed as a ‘Calamity’.”
Mizukume was silent for a long moment, processing this. The personal insult of her rating was suddenly overshadowed by a larger, cultural one.
“I see,” she said. Her voice dropped to a whisper that seemed to siphon the warmth from the air. “So the curators of this museum possess a distinctly continental bias. How provincial.”
The implication was clear. The absurd system judging them was potentially flawed by the limited worldview of its creators. A Japanese ‘Dragon’ was apparently different than an Indian ‘Calamity’.
“It seems,” Mizukume concluded. A new, dangerous edge was in her monotone. “That we are dealing with soul-forgers who have terrible taste in both power-ranking systems and cultural anthropology.”
“Don’t worry,” Su Yao said dryly. “I’m sure we can arrange a live demonstration to have our ratings, adjusted.”
The museum, with its stolen classification system and its collection of supernatural blueprints, had just become a much higher priority. Anyone who ranked gods on a manga scale and gave out cursed masks as souvenirs deserved a personal visit.
Kitty, with a flick of her wrist, produced a white Hannya mask from, somewhere. It was identical to the one Li Xiu had, and the thousands of others currently infesting the city.
“See?” she said, holding it up. “I also acquired a souvenir. For research purposes.”
Su Yao’s hand shot out. “Don’t put that on.”
Kitty looked at her, then at the mask. Her feline curiosity visibly warred with centuries of experience. “Why not? it’s just a cheap plastic trinket.”
“That ‘cheap plastic trinket’ was a prison for a kijo,” Su Yao snapped. “We have no idea what other spiritual garbage is tied to these things. Put it down.”
Kitty’s tail gave a defiant twitch. “I am a divine messenger. A mere vessel can’t contain me.” Before Su Yao could stop her, she slapped the mask onto her face.
There was a moment of tense silence.
Nothing happened.
Kitty stood there, wearing a cheap oni mask. The plastic looked utterly ridiculous on her on porcelain face.
She pulled the mask off after a moment. Her expression was one of disappointment. “It is inert, a hollow shell.” She tossed it onto the bar with a dismissive clatter. “What a complete waste of a promotional item.”
Mizukume glided closer, peering at the discarded mask. “Fascinating. It would seem the vessel requires a specific key, a compatible spiritual signature to activate. The kijo Momiji was a match. This one,” she gestured at Kitty, “is not. Her divine essence, while potent, is of a different register entirely. The mask is a lock, and she is the wrong key.”
Su Yao let out a breath she was unknowingly holding, a mix of relief and fresh frustration. This meant the forger was even more precise, and more dangerous, than they thought.
“So the mask is harmless by itself,” Su Yao summarized. Her mind raced. “It’s what’s loaded onto it. And it only works for specific recipients.” She looked at the innocent piece of plastic with new wariness. It was a delivery system, like the Nue.
“How utterly disappointing,” Kitty sniffed, turning her back on the failed artifact. “I expected more from a potential apocalyptic artifact. The quality control is abysmal.”
They returned to the government headquarters to find the walls repaired, the scorch marks gone, and the air smelling faintly of fresh paint instead of mapo tofu. The rebuilding speed was almost unsettling.
“Please tell me someone here has been doing something productive,” Su Yao said by way of greeting, striding into the newly reconstructed operations room where Director Hao was monitoring several holographic displays.
“We have, in fact, been conducting controlled experiments on the artifact.” Director Hao gestured to a sealed containment field on a nearby lab bench. Inside floated Li Xiu’s white Hannya mask. “Using Miss Li’s recovered specimen.”
“And?” Su Yao prompted, crossing her arms.
“The results are precise,” he said, finally turning to face her. “The mask is inert for virtually everyone. Our agents, our researchers, even individuals with high spiritual sensitivity, elicited no response. However, when placed near Miss Li, it exhibits a low-level resonance.
“And when she willingly puts it on with the intent to ‘connect’, the entity known as Momiji manifests. No one else can trigger it, and the possession isn’t hostile or forced. It is, for lack of a better term, an invited occupancy.”
Su Yao processed this. “So it’s a designated spiritual interface.”
“Precisely,” Director Hao confirmed. “The mask is a keyed access point. It finds a specific spiritual ‘lock’, in this case, Li Xiu’s unique bloodline, and only activates for that user. Even then, it requires user consent to fully boot up, so to speak.”
“It is a delivery system for a very specific parcel,” Mizukume mused, examining the mask through the field. “The forger is sending registered mail.”
“Which means,” Su Yao concluded. The implication settled heavily. “Whoever did this knows exactly who his ‘recipients’ are and customized them for specific targets. He knew Li Xiu’s spiritual signature well enough to code a kijo specifically for her.”
The room fell silent as the scale of the operation shifted again. This was a targeted, intelligence-driven campaign. The forger had a list, and the Li family was clearly at the top of it.
“So your ‘productive’ research has just confirmed we're up against a meticulous psychopath with a deep understanding of spiritual genetics and access to a plastic factory,” Su Yao summarized. “Wonderful. Now, about that factory tour form.”