On the first morning of autumn, 2022, A-Fei woke a little earlier than usual, like a bird startled by crisp dawn frost.

She floated up from sleep and felt something off, like a tide pulling the shore the wrong way. Long hair spilled over her shoulders, her arms had thinned, and a soft curve rose on her chest.

“Whoa. I turned into a girl—”

She didn’t look all that shocked, calm as a pond holding the early sky.

“I’ve heard girls feel things way stronger than guys. No time like now, let’s verify—”

Hold it, A-Fei! You’re not even of age. You can’t do that!

But A-Fei had already yanked her shirt off faster than thunder could find its voice.

Right-then-right-there, a bar of morning sunlight slid in like a curtain and fell across her chest. Not too high, not too low, covering the forbidden like a law of nature.

“So that’s a thing too…” A-Fei said, dry as sand.

She pulled her clothes back on and slid off the bed, but the line of her mouth still bent in a dissatisfied crescent.

Maybe because the world had flipped without warning, she’d risen at an hour she never did. She probably wouldn’t get Xiaoqing’s wake-up kiss today.

“That’s whatever,” A-Fei said, as if batting away a drifting leaf.

She’ll be heartbroken if she hears that.

“She won’t. She didn’t get heartbroken when she saw me mess around with a bunch of girls.”

If every heroine demanded a verdict every time the lead tangled with someone else, most harem stories would implode. You don’t need to map out everyone’s philosophy of love!

“Fine, fine,” A-Fei said, like wind shrugging through bamboo.

Rare chance to be a girl, so she chose to strike first. She’d make Xiaoqing a surprise.

She padded downstairs into her living room. Her parents worked overseas three hundred sixty-four days a year, so the house was a quiet island she ruled alone.

She opened the fridge, drew out milk and bread, and moved with the automatic grace of morning.

Hold it, A-Fei! You’re planning to let Xiaoqing break in and see some stranger girl eating breakfast like nothing’s wrong? She’ll go berserk!

“She won’t! Thinking gets slow on an empty stomach. Priority one is eat.”

That… made a stubborn kind of sense.

A-Fei wolfed the bread down in two-and-a-half bites, like a street cat protecting a find.

Right then, Xiaoqing slipped in, the door lock clicking open under a flick of Mind Energy.

Xiaoqing was A-Fei’s childhood friend, two saplings grown in the same yard. They both denied it, but something delicate hung between them. Mostly from Xiaoqing’s side.

“Huh?” Xiaoqing froze, eyes wide as saucers.

“Morning,” A-Fei said, voice light as steam.

“Shouldn’t you still be asleep?”

“Look at that. I didn’t say a word, and you knew I’m A-Fei.”

“Eh—eh—eh?”

Xiaoqing’s mind tangled like ribbon in wind.

Somehow she attacked herself instead!

“Bo—cough! W-what am I supposed to say here?”

“Just smile.”

Xiaoqing bloomed a smile that could melt winter.

You wouldn’t notice at first glance, but Xiaoqing was startlingly beautiful. Every frown and smile felt like a fairy touching down. She was the school’s top beauty, with suitors in the triple digits and a fan club to boot. Yet for reasons no one knew, her heart belonged only to A-Fei.

Even though A-Fei was a baffling creature. Even though A-Fei strung her along in a fog. Xiaoqing never left, never loosened her grip.

That’s the kind of tenderness she carried. If she shed a tear, a thousand men would swear to die for her.

Except A-Fei.

A-Fei was a blockhead to the core. She didn’t know Xiaoqing liked her, and she took that devotion like sun on her skin.

“I’m done. Let’s head to school,” A-Fei said, like setting a cup down.

“O-okay…”

They stepped outside. Thunder rolled like drums, and a sweep of black cloud drowned the light. Morning street turned to night in a breath.

“What’s happening?” A-Fei asked, calm as a blade laid flat.

“No idea,” Xiaoqing answered, calm mirroring calm.

From a seam in the cloud… something uncoiled.

An eastern dragon.

“Is that eastern dragon the real deal?”

The sky-drake loosed a long cry, then melted into a blonde girl. She drifted down like a falling petal before A-Fei and Xiaoqing.

“Good day, classmate A-Fei. This humble one was on the way to school and happened to pass your door. Since fate aligns, shall we go together?”

“Liar. You picked your landing from up there.”

“N-nonsense! Pure coincidence! Co-incidence!”

“Your tempo just got a bit… fast, didn’t it?”

“…Ahem. I lost composure.”

A-Fei didn’t move. She stood and measured the girl with a slow up-and-down, like weighing a blade.

“What are you staring at! Pervert! H!”

“Oh, I just think it’s… pretty convincing.”

A-Fei nodded like she’d learned a craft trick, then finally set off, flanked by two girls toward school.

Hold it, A-Fei! You just turned into a girl this morning! You’re just gonna head to class like that?

“Yep.”

Don’t “yep” me!

“Relax. We’re students. Going to school is what we do,” A-Fei said, as if stating weather.

“A-Fei, who are you talking to?” asked the dragon girl on her right.

“Not your parents, that’s for sure.”

“You barely even go to school,” Xiaoqing muttered on the left.

Truth is, A-Fei was a chronic truant (new!). Her knowledge had a kind of pure, feral grace… but after “that thing,” “that thing,” and “that thing,” she’d changed a lot.

So much that even turning into a girl barely ruffled her.

A neat reel-in of earlier foreshadowing.

“You’re saying the foreshadowing out loud. Getting desperate?”

A-Fei started talking nonsense to the sky.

“In that case, I’ve got an announcement.” She stopped, turned, and faced the dragon girl’s blank look. Her tone went gentle as a neighbor’s aunt.

“I hate your type most. A loser supporting heroine plastered with trope tags. Even as one of those ulcer-inducing melodrama lanes, it’s a joke. There was never a winning route for you.”

……

“W-what… A-Fei, I don’t get it…”

The dragon girl’s hands fluttered, helpless as moths. She saw A-Fei step back and shelter Xiaoqing behind her like a shield.

“Ah… ah—ah!”

The dragon girl got mad.

She showed her true flood-drake form, and one iron-shearing claw came scything at them.

“Celestial Speech — Levitation Spell!”

A-Fei scooped Xiaoqing up and rose, cutting through air like a swallow, the claw raking empty cloud.

Hold it, A-Fei! You’re just an ordinary high schooler!

“An ordinary high schooler can’t use magic? Don’t underestimate high schoolers!”

Up they went, higher than the dragon’s crowned head, higher than the hushed buildings, higher than the black clouds. They broke into a boundless sea of light.

She kept climbing.

A-Fei’s gaze pierced the blue canopy and fixed on the dark beyond, deep as old space.

She spoke in a chant-soft tone, words like lanterns.

“The place we’re heading next… is a world with no roads.”

“We might not be able to live there either.”

Xiaoqing took both her hands, warmth against wind.

“I understand…”

“We were born of an unbound universe.”

“So really, we’re just going home.”

Their figures shrank into distance and vanished among burning stars.

Fin.

…

…

“I thought it would turn into The Truman Show. Instead it morphed into an edgy young purist drawing a line from harem lit.” Yekase slumped in a backstage chair like a emptied coat and watched the footage drain out.

“Why the hostility? What did harem stories do to you? And I got swept by the mood too. Ending on that ‘I’ve seen this somewhere’ dialogue… is that okay?” Ling Yi sounded spent, mostly spooked by Yekase’s goblin streak.

Her field manual was still with Lin Xiaomo, so she had to wait. Luckily the greenroom had AC and a TV, even an all-you-can-drink machine. No rush, just the hum of freon.

Since a bit ago, Ling Yi had become the vending machine’s guardian spirit. She clung to it and sipped without budging. That’s what happens when you’re raised by “soda is bad for you” parents.

Yekase tapped the remote on-and-off, mind drifting like dandelion fluff. Maybe buy a TV for Mom. But satellite means no privacy. Maybe set up an encrypted relay. Her knowledge of comms engineering was a tragedy in three acts.

Ask Fang Tang… She didn’t know if computer and TV encryption overlapped. Ask and find out.

Knock, knock, knock.

A crew member who’d met Yekase once pushed the lounge door, Ling Yi’s field manual in hand.

“Good work, you two. The director says your performance was weird plot-wise, but some narration and lines were interesting. With polish, it could be a low-budget art film.”

“Thanks,” Ling Yi took the manual. “The narrator wasn’t one of your people?”

“It’s part of the [Stage Apparatus] too. Miss Yekase, the director needs you. Please come with me.”

The crew turned to Yekase. She’d already packed to leave, got called back, blinked, then followed.

Back to the stage they’d used.

“So… that true form of the second female lead you triggered? Her power exceeded the director’s control. She’s entrenched in the stage. We can’t reel her back.”

“…Exceeded control?”

Yekase slid the curtain aside and walked onstage again.

The clouds and lightning from before hadn’t thinned an inch. Lin Xiaomo stood on the street set, facing off with an eastern dragon hanging in the sky.

“You brewed this thing. You can’t control it?” Yekase asked, disbelief like ice.

Seeing the culprit arrive, Lin Xiaomo stopped the standoff. She turned back, came to stand behind Yekase, and folded her hands.

“I respect the [Stage Apparatus]’s free development, so I impose no restraints while casting!”

“So you can’t control it.”

“This is an attitude toward art—”

“Polaris Staff.”

An iron staff appeared in Yekase’s hand.

To a prop master, it looked plain, a length of steel pipe that had nothing to do with its starry name. Not a wizard’s staff. More like something salvaged from a job site.

To a mage, the instant that odd iron rod dropped into Yekase’s grip—even from behind—Lin Xiaomo felt a flash of cold like metal glare on winter water.

It smelled like a battlefield.

This high schooler on winter break… had a combat staff. And yes, she had killed.

“In case, let me ask. If your [Stage Apparatus] ruptures from energy overload, will it spill into the theater outside?”

Mention “the theater,” and Lin Xiaomo couldn’t hold it. She flared, voice hot as a live wire. “What do you think?! Of course it’ll spill! It’s not some sealed reality marble!”

“Easy. I ask so we can prepare.”

Yekase smiled, and plucked a grip from the air.

It looked like a dagger hilt, its metal plates ground to shape for channeling Infinite Power.

She fitted the hilt onto the tip of the Polaris Staff, turning it into something closer to a traditional staff head.

Her gut finally caught up with her: it was clearly a staff, yet tipless, like a bare branch stripped of blossom.

And still, without a tip, her mind accepted it as a staff—form whispering function like wind through reeds.

“Starbreaker,” Yekase said.

She gripped the staff with both hands, held it level, and lifted her gaze to the sky’s colossal arcane construct, a leviathan coiled in cloud.

A prickle ran along Lin Xiaomo’s spine. Was she about to cast?

She’d asked if it would rupture—so, evocation? A magic cannon, or the Flame Burst Spell?

—Shing!

From the Polaris Staff’s tip, a sakura-red sheet of light sprang forth, longer than Yekase was tall, a petal honed into a blade.

Lin Xiaomo, a traditional mage, stood stunned, like a heron frozen in rain.

Yekase hauled the iron staff, now a scythe of light, and burst upward, a swallow breaking from the eaves.

She didn’t even use the Levitation Spell.

“Take this—Witch Hunt!”