I am NOT a Demon Queen!

Something in Anastasia’s expression, a fleeting shadow of calculation, told Su Yao the real danger hadn’t even been mentioned yet. Her phone buzzed violently in her pocket, shattering the tense silence. She maintained eye contact with Anastasia as she pulled it out and glanced at the screen.

It was from Zhang Wei. The message blazed with urgency.

Zhang Wei: A.D. is Ashiya Dōman! Seimei’s greatest rival! The second most powerful Onmyōji in history! Records are unclear but he is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. Don’t engage! Get out of there!

Su Yao’s eyes slowly lifted from the phone back to the girl sitting across from her. A cold, understanding smile touched her lips.

“Ashiya Dōman,” Su Yao said. The name hung in the dusty air. “I should have guessed. The only one who would know Seimei’s secrets well enough to spot a forgery is the man who spent his life trying to surpass him.”

Dōman sighed, as if mildly inconvenienced. She closed her tablet with a definitive snap. “Now you know. What a pity. You were a fascinating one.” She stood up. The air in the archive began to thicken, the temperature dropping. “I’m afraid you won’t be leaving this library alive.”

Su Yao sat on her chair. Her posture was relaxed. “One question. The history books say Ashiya Dōman was a man. So why are you a girl?”

Dōman looked genuinely confused for a split second. Her head tilted. “What? I have always been a woman. The chroniclers were presumptuous. They saw a rival to Seimei and assumed I must share his aesthetic. They labeled me a ‘femboy’ by association, a gross mischaracterization.” She said the word with distilled contempt.

Dōman extended her hands, fingers contorted into a mudra. Dark, crackling energy coalesced around her palm, aimed directly at Su Yao’s chest.

Su Yao exploded backward. Her chair shattered against a bookshelf as she flipped through the air, landing in a crouch. The space where she had been sitting was now a swirling vortex of dark tendrils that dissolved the wooden carrel into splinters.

Dōman pressed the attack. She was a blur. Her movements were a brutal fusion of esoteric hand signs and devastating close-quarters combat. She flowed into a grappling hold, attempting to lock Su Yao’s arm while simultaneously chanting a binding spell refined over a millennium.

A bookshelf behind Su Yao exploded as she barely dodged a curse that manifested as a shrieking, spectral claw. She countered with a whip-crack of crimson foxfire, forcing Dōman to break her combo and deflect it with a barrier of shimmering hexagons.

The archive was becoming a warzone of shredded paper and spiritual backlash. Yet, as they traded blows, a realization dawned on Su Yao. She’s not even trying.

Dōman was terrifyingly skilled. Her every move was precise, every spell potent. But there was no killer instinct or raging desire to win. It was like she was going through the motions.

Su Yao ducked under a scything wave of darkness that cleaved a marble bust in half. “You’re holding back!” she accused. Her voice cut through the din. “Why?”

Dōman launched another complex assault, a continuous barrage of cursed energy that would have vaporized a lesser spirit. But Su Yao saw the lack of fire in her eyes and the clinical detachment behind every devastating move.

The greatest Onmyōji after Seimei was fighting her with the cold, resigned precision of a master completing a tedious but necessary task.

And that made her more dangerous and intriguing than ever.

The air in the archive was filled with shredded paper, swirling foxfire, and crackling curses. A bookshelf toppled over with a deafening crash, spilling centuries of knowledge onto the floor. Through it all, Dōman moved with an infuriating, placid efficiency.

She deflected a blast of crimson energy with a flick of her wrist. The hexagons of her barrier barely shimmered. “Excessive force is unnecessary,” she stated. Her voice was calm as she sidestepped the exploding remains of a study desk. “The objective is termination. This is already proving messy enough.”

Su Yao landed amidst the wreckage. Her chest heaved from pure, undiluted fury at the other woman’s condescension. The dismissiveness was a sharper insult than any curse.

“You're holding back because you think you don't need your full power to deal with me,” Su Yao snarled. Her voice was layered with an echoing growl. “This is just pest control for you.”

Dōman began forming another mudra. The cursed energy coalesced into a dozen spinning, serrated wheels of darkness. “An accurate assessment.”

“Then let me clarify the situation for you,” Su Yao said. Her eyes bled completely into pools of molten crimson.

Around her, the air began to warp. The very light bent as her ancient, true aura started to bleed into the world. Xiao Ling’s human form flickered. For a moment, the vast, shadowy outline of a nine-tailed fox superimposed itself over her.

“If I go full power, you will have to fight me with all you have.”

An instantaneous change occurred. The clinical detachment in Dōman’s grey eyes shattered, replaced by a flicker of sharp, professional alarm. She saw the reality of the power she was facing.

The spinning cursed wheels halted in mid-air.

“Understood,” Dōman said. Her voice lost its flat monotone for the first time, gaining a layer of grim respect. “Then there will be no further restraint.”

She brought her hands together in a final, complex seal. Gravity seemed to surge inward, forcing shelves to groan and bow as if the library were being dragged beneath a black tide. Papers skittered across the floor, igniting into curling shadows before they could settle.

What followed was a crushing void that smothered sound itself, announcing that Dōman’s technique had fully deployed and escape was no longer an option.

And then, the world unmade itself. Everything dissolved into a swirling, formless void of deepest black.

The only light came from Su Yao’s own crimson foxfire and the cold, intricate patterns now etching themselves into the nothingness around them, forming a terrifying, rotating mandala that encompassed everything.

“Domain Expansion: Hell Realm Mandala.”

Su Yao felt the rules of reality rewrite themselves. The air became thick as syrup, resisting her every movement. A crushing spiritual pressure bore down on her, whispering insidious doubts and fears directly into her soul.

“What does it do?” Su Yao gritted out. Her foxfire flared defensively against the oppressive darkness.

Dōman’s voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. It was calm once more, but now with an undercurrent of absolute control. “Whatever I wish it to. Within this domain, my Cursed Techniques are guaranteed to hit. The environment is my weapon. Your spirit is my canvas. I can make you relive your worst memories, shatter your will, or simply unmake your existence, layer by layer.”

“That’s broken,” Su Yao complained. A genuine note of outrage was in her voice as she fought against the domain’s psychic assault.

A faint, weary sigh echoed through the Hell Realm. “Seimei’s is more broken,” Dōman replied. For the first time, a raw, human bitterness seeped into her tone. The clinical analyst was gone, replaced by a frustrated rival.

“You have no idea,” Dōman continued. The mandala swirled faster. “Do you know what it’s like? To dedicate your entire life, every waking moment, to mastering your art, pushing the boundaries of human potential, only to be perpetually overshadowed by a man who was given his power as a birthright?”

She intensified the pressure, focusing on Su Yao’s own memories of her poisoning and Li Xuan’s betrayal. “He had a Heavenly Fox for a mother! A celestial being who poured her divine essence into him from the womb! His foundational power was inherited! How is that fair? How can a mere human, no matter how brilliant, no matter how hard they work, ever hope to compete with that?”

Her complaint was so humanly petty amidst the cosmic horror of the Domain Expansion that Su Yao almost laughed. Ashiya Dōman, the second most powerful Onmyōji in history, was ultimately just a bitter overachiever raging against the nepo-baby who always came in first.

The crushing pressure of the Hell Realm Mandala remained, but Su Yao’s focus shifted entirely from the spiritual assault to the sheer, baffling absurdity of the revelation.

“The worst part,” Dōman’s voice echoed. The bitterness was now raw and unfiltered. “The most maddening part, is that no matter how many techniques I perfected, no matter how many curses I unraveled that senpai couldn't be bothered with, he never saw me as a true rival or an equal! I was just Dōman, a persistent, slightly irritating footnote in the glorious story of Abe no Seimei!”

The oppressive domain seemed to pulse with her frustrated anguish. Su Yao stared into the swirling, terrifying void. Her own traumatic memories were momentarily forgotten.

“...What the fuck,” she said. Her voice was flat with utter disbelief. “Is that what this is all about? All of this? The centuries of rivalry, scheming, and the fact that you're currently trying to unmake my soul in a pocket dimension is because your senpai didn't notice you?”

That was the most cosmically pathetic motivation she had ever heard. It made Li Xuan’s betrayal look Shakespearean.

“He didn't just ‘not notice’ me!” Dōman’s voice shrieked through the void. The mandala flared with violent, spiking energy. “He'd ask for my opinion on minor spiritual fluctuations! He treated me with the same polite, distant respect he gave to the court chamberlain! It was condescension! I wanted him to hate me! To fear me! To see me as the only one worthy of standing against him!”

The psychic assault shifted, now trying to bombard Su Yao with feelings of being overlooked and insignificant. It was the very core of Dōman’s own eternal complex.

Su Yao, who had been the center of attention at the grandest banquet in celestial history and was currently the primary target of a legendary sorcerer (fake or not), found the entire concept utterly alien.

“So you're doing all this,” Su Yao summarized, waving a hand at the soul-crushing domain, “to prove a point to a guy who’s probably been dead for a thousand years? To make a ghost finally acknowledge you?”

A colossal, shadowy hand, woven from the very fabric of the domain, formed above Su Yao and slammed down. She met it with a concentrated sphere of foxfire that exploded outwards, shredding the construct but straining her power against the domain’s absolute rules.

“This is the most unhinged, pathetic reason for a world-ending grudge I have ever encountered!” Su Yao yelled over the roaring energy. “And I was poisoned at my own party!”

“IT’s NOT PATHETIC!” Dōman screamed. The Hell Realm trembled with her rage.

Her domain’s assault redoubled, but now it felt different. It was no longer a controlled, clinical termination. Instead, it was a spectacular, universe-bending tantrum thrown by the world’s most powerful and overlooked overachiever.

Su Yao, trapped in the middle of it, could only come to one conclusion. “You need therapy!”

The Hell Realm Mandala convulsed as swirling blackness and crushing pressure reconfigured themselves around a new, horrifying purpose. Intricate patterns warped and buckled, twisting inward toward Su Yao, as though an intelligent cage were being engineered for a very specific kind of harvest.

“Recognition is a secondary concern now,” Dōman’s voice echoed. All traces of her earlier hysterical bitterness were gone, replaced by a chilling, resolute calm. “The core problem was always one of foundational equity. He began the race with a divine head start. I intend to level the field.”

With that, the dark energy of the domain began to coalesce into arcane, pulsing symbols that smelled of blood. They swirled around Su Yao. She felt a deep, instinctual revulsion. It was a violation that went beyond physical threat.

“You are a Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox,” Dōman stated, as if reading from a textbook. “The same as Kuzunoha. Your essence, your very womb, is a crucible of celestial power. It can birth gods and shape destinies.”

A cold, sharp terror, one she hadn’t felt since the “Enlightenment” brew had touched her lips, lanced through Su Yao.

“You...” Su Yao breathed. Her foxfire sputtered against the symbols now etching themselves into the space around her, trying to define her, to claim her. “You don't want to kill me.”

“Killing you would be a waste of a perfect resource,” Dōman corrected. Her form materialized in the center of the mandala. Her hands wove a ritual that was part spell, part obscene midwifery. “I will use you. I will harness the ‘womb of a heavenly fox.’ I will be reborn from your essence, carrying your power as my own birthright. I will have the same ‘cheat’ Seimei was given. Then, when I find him, we will finally compete on equal terms.”

Su Yao stared at the utterly serious, utterly insane woman before her. The pettiness was gone, burned away in the furnace of a deranged, ultimate ambition. She was a megalomaniac who intended to upgrade her entire existence, using Su Yao as the necessary hardware.

A laugh burst from Su Yao’s lips, sharp and wild and filled with a fury that could scorch galaxies.

“You,” Su Yao snarled. Her form began to flicker uncontrollably between girl and fox. Her power strained against the domain’s binding ritual. “You think you can just take it? You think my power, my very being, is just a tool for you to steal to settle your thousand-year-old schoolyard rivalry?”

Around her, the crimson light intensified. It burned the symbols away through sheer, incandescent rage.

“I am not a womb for your rebirth, you delusional harpy! You want my power? Come and try to take it! Let’s see if your ‘hard work’ can digest a primordial force!”

Dōman’s eyes widened a fraction in recalculated respect as the Domain Expansion shuddered. Her opponent was fighting back with a will that defied being used as a mere ingredient.

Their battle was now about the sanctity of self against the ultimate entitlement of a scorned prodigy. Su Yao had never been more ready to break something, even if it was a pocket dimension and the insane woman inside it.

The oppressive symbols of the ritual wavered and the crushing pressure of the Hell Realm Mandala stuttered. For a single, crucial moment, the absolute certainty behind it faltered.

Su Yao, her form still flickering with volatile power, saw the opening and seized it with cold, brutal logic.

“Think, you obsessed fool!” Su Yao snarled. Her voice cut through the ritual’s hum. “You want to replicate Seimei’s advantage? To be reborn with the power of a Heavenly Fox? Then you need a vessel as strong as Kuzunoha was!”

“I am wounded, betrayed, stuffed into a mortal coil, and running on millennia-old spite and cheap liquor! Do you truly believe this,” she gestured at her own flickering, unstable form, “is a worthy crucible for your grand rebirth? You'd be born stunted! A flawed copy of a flawed copy!”

Dōman froze. Her hands paused mid-incantation. The swirling mandala of cursed energy to slow its rotation as the clinical analyst in her was forced to confront a critical flaw in her grand design.

Her grey eyes, sharp and calculating, scanned Su Yao up and down. She saw the spiritual scars from Li Xuan’s poison, the patchwork nature of her existence fused with Xiao Ling, and the exhaustion that even primordial power failed to fully mask.

“You have a point,” Dōman conceded. Her voice was quiet, almost disappointed. “That vessel is suboptimal. The resulting product would be statistically inferior to the original benchmark.”

The Hell Realm Mandala dissolved with a sound like a sigh and the library archives snapped back into existence around them, utterly destroyed. Books and furniture were reduced to confetti as the two of them stood amidst the wreckage. The tension shifted from apocalyptic to absurdly pragmatic.

Dōman looked at Su Yao with a newfound, terrifying sense of purpose.

“Very well,” she said, brushing a stray piece of parchment from her sleeve. “The plan is amended. You will get stronger. Purify your essence, heal your spiritual wounds, then reclaim your full power.” She stated it as a simple, direct order. “We will conclude our business once you have restored yourself to a state worthy of being the vessel for my rebirth.”

She turned and began to walk away through the debris, as if dismissing a subordinate.

Su Yao stood amidst the ruins. Her jaw was slack with pure, unadulterated disbelief.

“...What?” was all she could manage.

Dōman paused at the shattered archive entrance and glanced back over her shoulder. Her expression was utterly serious.

“Grow stronger, Su Yao,” she said. Her tone was that of a project manager setting a deadline. “So you can become a worthy mother for the new me.”

With that, the second most powerful Onmyōji in history walked out, leaving the Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox standing in a demolished university library, having just been told to power-level so she could adequately serve as someone’s mom.

“What the actual fuck,” Su Yao whispered to the empty, book-strewn ruin. She slowly raised a hand to her face.

A wave of spiritual and physical exhaustion, more intense than any she had ever known, finally crashed over her. The strain of fighting within a Domain Expansion, the raw output of power to counter Dōman’s cursed techniques, and the sheer psychological whiplash of the entire encounter converged into a black tide at the edges of her vision.

The last thing she saw was the splintered remains of a bookshelf tilting at a crazy angle before the world dissolved into nothing.