Chapter 75: Corporate Gala Invitation
Fate had other ideas. Su Yao’s phone buzzed. The sound was unnaturally loud in the tense silence of the wrecked apartment. It was Zhang Wei. She answered. Her voice was a low growl. “This had better be a location for the black robes’ headquarters.”
There was a hesitant pause on the other end. “Su Yao, about the Deep Prince. We found it.”
A flicker of cold focus. “Where?”
“It was misplaced.” Zhang Wei’s voice was thick with mortified embarrassment. “It was never stolen. The logistics team filed it under ‘C’ for ‘Contained Aquatic Entity’ instead of ‘D’ for ‘Deep Prince.’ It was in the wrong aisle of the high-security vault behind a stack of sealed ghost jars.”
Su Yao went perfectly still. The apocalyptic aquatic threat, the reason she’d raced across the South China Sea, the potential weapon of her enemies, had been sitting in a government warehouse the entire time. It was a victim of a filing error.
The sheer, staggering banality of it was a different kind of weapon. It failed to injure the body, but it wounded the soul.
“Misplaced,” she repeated. The word was flat and dead.
“The system was updated and the new intern was dismissed. We’re implementing a new digital tracking system. This won’t happen again.”
Su Yao closed her eyes. She had faced down primordial dragons, celestial audits, and a cult of fox hunters. But bureaucracy was the one enemy she could not set on fire.
“Zhang Wei,” she said. Her voice was dangerously calm. “Listen to me very carefully. The gourd’s ‘misplacement’ is now a classified national secret. Don’t correct the filing error. You will leave it exactly where it is.”
“What? Why?”
“Because every faction in this city now believes the Deep Prince is loose. Let them waste their resources searching for it and suspect each other. The fear of a rogue, city-drowning entity is a better deterrent than the thing itself.”
A cynical smile touched her lips. “Sometimes, the most powerful weapon is a phantom.”
“So, you want us to just pretend we lost a world-ending threat?”
“You did lose it through incompetence. Now, we will weaponize that incompetence.”
She ended the call and looked around the destroyed apartment, at the lingering scent of the black robes’ anti-fox venom. One crisis was a phantom. The other was violently, terrifyingly real.
Fine, she thought, refocusing her will on the jade hairpin in her pocket. Let them hunt for their imaginary sea monster. I have a very real pack of hounds to put down.
Su Yao phased from the wreckage of Kayo’s apartment to the peak of the city’s tallest skyscraper. The wind whipped at her clothes. Below, the city glittered, oblivious to the spectral war being waged in its shadows. She held the jade hairpin in her palm. Its faint hum was a ghost of a grander age.
Enough subtlety, she thought. If they want a signal, I'll give them a beacon.
Closing her hand around the hairpin, she poured a torrent of her own power into it. The delicate plum branch design glowed, first a soft white, then a searing crimson that pulsed in time with the ancient heart of a nine-tailed fox. It was now a spiritual flare that would be visible to any hunter worth their salt on a dozen different planes of existence.
She was announcing her location, her identity, and her challenge. The Hostess of the Jade Mountain had returned, and she was open for business.
Come and get me, she projected into the burgeoning signal, lacing the invitation with a thread of pure, undiluted contempt.
Then she sat down cross-legged on the cold concrete of the rooftop, placing the hairpin before her like a centerpiece. The wind howled around her, but she was a still point in the chaos, a fixed star in a spinning universe. She would wait long enough for them to scramble and plot. Let them gather their finest weapons, their black-robed righteousness held high.
She had all the time in the world. And they were about to learn that some legends were meant to be feared.
An hour passed. Then two.
The crimson pulse from the jade hairpin beat against the night sky like a defiant heart. Su Yao sat, immobile. Her senses were stretched across the city, a net waiting for the slightest tug. She expected the whisper-quiet approach of black robes on the wind and the glint of a blade meant to unmade her.
But nothing came.
The night stayed stubbornly, insultingly quiet. Her magnificent, arrogant beacon burned, and the hunters ignored it.
A slow, cold fury began to burn in her chest, hotter than the foxfire she could summon. They're not taking the bait.
A signal that potent would be screaming on every spiritual frequency. They had seen it. And they had chosen not to come.
They were denying her the direct confrontation she sought. Either they were saying her challenge was beneath their response, or that she was not worth the resources it would take to assault her on a fortified high-ground position of her choosing.
It was, she had to admit, a tactically sound, and utterly infuriating, move.
They are disciplined. Patient, she revised her assessment. The respect she felt was the kind one gives to a venomous insect. They stick to their own plan.
Their plan was to continue culling the weaker, the isolated, and the unprepared. They were systematically dismantling her world, one fox at a time, while she sat on a rooftop issuing grand challenges they could simply ignore.
The insult cut deep. They were treating her like a relic, a museum piece to be dealt with later after the more practical work was done.
Her phone buzzed. The vibration was unnaturally loud in the tense silence. Zhang Wei.
“We're getting scattered reports from Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Macau of attacks on individuals with unusual spiritual profiles. The descriptions are vague, but the pattern matches. Black-robed figures with precision strikes. No collateral damage reported.”
Su Yao stared at the message. The pieces clicked into place with grim finality. They were working around her. While she sat as a glittering target in Duwang, they were purging her kind across the entire Pearl River Delta. They were showing her that her power was localized while their reach was regional, making it clear that she could not be everywhere at once.
She looked down at the still-pulsing hairpin. Her grand gesture had been rendered a futile spectacle.
Slowly, she closed her hand over it, snuffing out the crimson light. The rooftop was plunged back into ordinary darkness.
The direct approach had failed. It was time to stop being the beacon and start being the hunter. If they would not come to her, she would go to them. And she would not be announcing her arrival.
Su Yao’s phone buzzed again, this time with Li Xiu’s caller ID. She answered. The cold night air was sharp in her lungs.
“Xiao Ling?” Li Xiu’s voice was breathless with excitement. “Some guys in black robes just tried to force their way into the family compound. It was weird. They moved like ghosts, cutting through our outer wards like paper. They kept chanting about ‘purging the deceptive bloodline.’”
Su Yao’s grip on the phone tightened. “And?”
“And then Yumi happened.” Li Xiu’s tone shifted to something between awe and morbid curiosity. “It was over in seconds. I'm looking at the remains. She’s asking me which of their livers I think looks more tender for her to eat first. I believe she says the one on the left has a finer marbling of spiritual energy.”
Su Yao stood in the sudden silence of the rooftop, the wind whipping at her hair. The pieces snapped together with brutal, humiliating clarity.
Idiots, she thought. The word dripped with venomous contempt. Their toxins won't work on a gumiho. Yumi was a Korean fox spirit. Her metaphysical structure was fundamentally different from a huli jing's.
The black robes’ meticulously crafted ‘un-making’ blades and venoms, designed specifically for her kind, were useless against her. They had marched into the Li compound with a manual for hunting Chinese foxes and had been instantly and violently dismantled by a different species altogether.
Her direct approach had failed because there was no one left to come. The hunting party assigned to her vicinity, the ones who should have responded to her beacon, were already dead. Slaughtered on a gumiho’s claws while she sat waiting like a patient queen.
They had died because of catastrophic intelligence failure. Their grand, purifying crusade had been stopped cold by their own lack of basic mythological taxonomy.
A short, sharp laugh escaped her. It was harsh and unforgiving. The sheer, poetic incompetence was almost beautiful.
“Tell Yumi she can have the livers,” Su Yao said. Her voice was flat. “And tell her good hunting.”
She ended the call and looked out over the city. The ghost of her crimson beacon still lingered in the air. The theatrics were over. Her opponents were fools with sharp swords and a fatal lack of homework.
It would be genuinely hilarious, Su Yao thought. The irony was as sharp and satisfying as a well-honed blade. If this organization is the spiritual successor to that idiot magistrate who died mistaking a wolf spirit for a fox.
The poetic symmetry was perfect. That man’s legacy was a line of fools so committed to their flawed premise that they kept making the same fundamental error. Her old wolf spirit friend had complained for weeks about the indigestion that magistrate had caused, an upset stomach that had made her miss the final dramatic banquet before Su Yao’s first death.
That memory was a crisp, vintage bitterness. The black robes were just the latest incarnation armed with better blades but possessed the same catastrophic blindness, a fatal flaw. They studied the fox, but not the wider world.
Should I warn Yumi not to eat the remains? The thought was a fleeting courtesy instantly dismissed. Nah. She'll be fine. A gumiho of Yumi’s caliber had a digestive system that could process primordial spite. If anything, the concentrated self-righteousness of the black robes might add a piquant note to the liver.
Su Yao phased through the city’s underbelly. Her senses were now tuned to a different frequency. She was looking for the silent, frantic echoes of failure and the panic of a network that had just lost a cell. The confusion of a command structure realizing its intelligence was fatally flawed.
They would be scrambling now, reassessing. Their neat registry of targets now had a glaring, gumiho-shaped hole in it. Holes like that made organizations desperate. Desperate organizations made mistakes.
She would find their communications. Their logistics, the place where they stored the rest of their ill-gotten relics. She would dismantle their library and burn their filing system.
Or, Su Yao thought. The idea unfolded with a cold, elegant clarity. I can do absolutely nothing.
The concept was so radical it was almost seductive. Su Yao had spent centuries across multiple lives reacting to betrayal, slander, and crises both cosmic or petty. She was the eternal blunt instrument, the final argument of force. And where had it left her? Tired, and no closer to the core of her own peace.
The black robes, for all their fanaticism, were a self-correcting problem. Their doctrine was flawed, their intelligence incomplete. They would inevitably attack the wrong target and be erased by forces they barely understood. Their crusade was a snake eating its own tail.
Su Yao’s intervention would only validate their worldview, casting her as the great demon they needed to slay. By refusing to play the role, she starved their narrative. Let them flail against the indifferent, complex reality of the modern supernatural world and learn the hard way that the universe refused to conform to their simple categories.
Her role should be the foundation. The unseen, unyielding bedrock that only reveals itself when the ground itself is threatened.
I will only interfere, she decided. When the truly helpless are targeted. Like the fox kit’s parents. Simple spirits who just wanted to run a teahouse. Their destruction was mere cruelty. That was the line.
This was a more refined, more arrogant form of power. The power to watch your enemies destroy themselves through their own ignorance, and only step in to sweep away the pieces if they threatened to crush an innocent in their collapse.
Su Yao bought a stick of fish balls from a street vendor. The savory scent was a welcome anchor to the mundane world. She was savoring the simple pleasure, the grease on her fingers a witness to her temporary truce with existence, when a man in an impeccably tailored corporate suit approached her.
He had the bland, forgettable face of a mid-level manager and moved with the unassuming efficiency of someone who spent his life in boardrooms.
“You dropped this,” he said, holding out a sleek, black smartphone. His voice was neutral, devoid of any discernible emotion.
Su Yao took the phone. Her fingers brushed against his. She turned it over in her hand, then activated the screen. It lit up with a generic wallpaper. No apps were visible except for a single, unlabeled icon.
“This isn't mine,” she said, looking up to meet his eyes.
But the man was already gone, vanishing into the crowd as if he had never been there. It was a disappearance so seamless it felt orchestrated.
The fish ball stick was forgotten in her other hand as she stood still. Her mind, ever-calculating, ran through the possibilities. A trap? A message? The smartphone was likely tracked or rigged, but to what end?
If it was from the black robes, this was a clumsy approach. It was too modern and corporate. They favored relics and blades.
She considered her new vow of non-interference. This felt like a provocation designed to lure her back into the game. But was it a threat to the helpless, or merely a nuisance? Her instincts told her to discard the phone and walk away. Yet her curiosity, that ancient, insatiable itch, was piqued.
Su Yao stared at the sleek device in her hand. Her eyes narrowed. The design was unmistakable, a ghost of a memory from a digital billboard she'd absently registered in Hong Kong. Tezca Pi? The latest model? The one that wasn't even on the market yet?
Is this some kind of marketing ploy? she wondered. A fresh wave of contempt washed over her. Did some corporate espionage team just hand-deliver a prototype to a random woman on the street for guerrilla marketing?
The sheer, brazen idiocy of it was almost impressive. Did they think she was an influencer?
But the man’s disappearance had been too clean and professional for a simple PR stunt. This felt more like a corporate hand-off, a transfer of assets.
Her thumb hovered over the single, unlabeled icon on the pristine screen. It was an intriguing nuisance.
With a scoff that was half-irritation, half-reluctant professional curiosity, she tapped the icon.
Text began to scroll, white on black, in a crisp, corporate font.
You are cordially invited to attend the Tezca Company Annual Gala, celebrating a new era of integrated spiritual and technological synergy.
Date: This Saturday, 8 PM
Location: The Tezca Tower, Downtown Duwang
Dress Code: Business Formal
Your presence is requested as a guest of honor.
RSVP isn’t required. Your device is your access key.
Isn't Tezca Alan Mask’s company? Su Yao mused. The name clicked into place from the dossiers and Kayo’s rants. The Aesthetes, the ones who want to remodel reality to fit their personal fantasies.
Of the three Yamato factions, they were arguably the least problematic. They just wanted catgirls. And presumably, other aesthetic or hedonistic pursuits.
And after the corporate reshuffle Suzuka mentioned, they might be the dominant faction now, she reasoned.
A corporate gala was the perfect venue for them. It was a blend of cutting-edge technology and occult influence, all wrapped in the suffocating politeness of a black-tie event. They'd try to pitch to her.
Her first instinct was, as always, to reject the premise entirely then find Alan Mask and his tower so she could demonstrate the fundamental incompatibility of his ‘spiritual synergy’ with her fist.
But her new, more detached perspective argued for caution. I should at least listen to what they are saying and want before I punched them.
Ignorance was what had doomed the black robes. Walking into a potential enemy’s stronghold with a full understanding of their motives and capabilities was the ultimate form of strategic arrogance. Su Yao could always punch them after she got the briefing.
She looked at the smartphone, then at the city skyline, where the newly-built Tezca Tower undoubtedly formed a sleek, arrogant silhouette.
Fine, she decided, pocketing the device. I'll attend their little party. She would observe their technology, gauge their influence, and see what this ‘new era’ they were proposing actually entailed.
If their proposal was as insulting or idiotic as she suspected, then the ‘feedback’ portion of the evening would be exceptionally direct. But the decision to punch would be an informed one. That was what passed for diplomacy in her book.
Su Yao scoffed internally. I'm not at the level of telling people to go to hell and making them look forward to it yet.
That particular brand of diplomacy required a finesse she had never bothered to cultivate. Why waste time on psychological manipulation when a well-aimed fist could achieve the same result with less conversation?
Still, her recent vow of strategic non-interference demanded a slightly more nuanced approach for now. If Alan Mask and his Aesthetes thought they could woo her with canapés and augmented reality demonstrations, they were in for a disappointment. But if they had truly become the most dominant faction within Yamato, then there might be an opportunity here.
An alliance of convenience, perhaps? Or at least a chance to redirect their resources away from her interests.
For now, though, she had a more pressing concern. She had to figure out what ‘business formal’ meant for a nine-tailed fox who hadn't worn anything but hanfu or jeans in centuries. This was almost as tedious as the black robes.