With everything finally done, Ling was ready to head back, eager to leave this damned place that clung like damp cobwebs to her skin.

“Alright, Alicia-sis, you’re back on your feet. Let’s head home,” she said, her voice light as a paper kite in wind.

She turned, and a wave of vertigo surged up her skull like black surf. Her steps scattered like loose beads. She almost tripped over her own foot, then steadied, a reed refusing to snap.

Alicia watched her, worry pooling like stormwater in a gutter. “Ling… you okay? You don’t look great,” she asked, voice a soft drum under rain.

Ling waved it off, a willow flicking raindrops. “I’m fine. I could run a thousand meters without panting. I really—”

Her words were lanterns; her body was a felled tree. She toppled. Alicia’s heart skipped like a stone on a pond, then she sprang from the bed, her new body quick as lightning over dry plains.

Speed and sharp nerves crackled through her like live wire, and it startled her. But once Ling settled in her arms, surprise melted into worry, like frost under morning sun.

The girl in her embrace squinted her eyes, breath rising and falling like a bellows. It looked like sheer exhaustion. A stone slid from Alicia’s chest into calm water.

From the side, Shiki Eiki, who’d been sitting like a carved ornament, finally spoke, voice cool as a winter stream. “Looks like a slight wound to the soul. Her body entered sleep mode.”

—A wound to the soul?!

The words struck like a temple bell. Alicia’s fear flared like dry tinder, and she seized the only person who might know. “She hurt her soul for me?!” Her voice cracked like thunder over a ridge.

Eiki’s head swam, her courage fluttering like a sparrow before a hawk. Even newborn, a Yokai’s shout carried weight like falling stone.

“N-no need to panic, Miss Yokai,” she said, hands raised like empty branches. “It’s likely a self-repair mechanism. Earlier, when I probed her soul, I couldn’t even get numbers. Her soul’s strong as ironwood. It’s not strange she’d begin repairing herself.”

Alicia rode a storm of ups and downs, worry and relief trading places like sun and cloud. If not for her new Yokai heart beating steady as a war drum, she might have fainted.

Still… as long as Ling was fine, everything found its shore.

“Miss Yokai,” Eiki added, voice returning to stone-still calm, “don’t worry about her safety. She’ll recover on her own. I have work like a river that won’t stop, so I can’t keep you company. If you wish to tour the Underworld, I’ll send someone to guide you.”

Alicia waved it off, a hand brushing fog. She hadn’t seen the Underworld, but this small, gloomy room was a cave full of shadows. It didn’t promise beauty.

Seeing the refusal, Eiki didn’t force it. She called a guide, eager to send these two calamities away like dispersing storm clouds.

Alicia cradled Ling princess-style, the girl light as a bundle of feathers, and followed the guide to a stretch of shore where the water spread like ink.

“Please wait here,” the guide said, eyes already flicking like minnows. “A ferryman will take you across.”

He fled as if chased by plague winds, leaving only Alicia and a sleeping girl on a wide, breathless bank.

Alicia sat, careful as setting down a porcelain bowl. The small body in her arms didn’t stir, still as a curled cat.

She gazed at the endless river, a ribbon of night under a blank sky, and her mind drifted like a leaf.

What a day. First I got killed out of nowhere, cut down like grass. Then Ling, missing until now, pulled me from the brink like a hand from fog. I nodded off from sheer exhaustion, sank like a stone. Then I woke as something else—a Yokai, born between thunder and rain.

She lifted her hands into the light, pale and delicate as new petals. No calluses, no scars, only silk. Hands a connoisseur could admire for a year, and she almost laughed.

She was brash, sure, but still a woman; vanity hummed like a hidden spring. She loved these hands, loved the smoothness like river pebbles—yet the price for this change…

“I’m not human anymore…” she murmured to the empty sky, a single cloud drifting through her eyes.

She’d put on a brave face for Ling, a mask like lacquer. Only she knew how hard it was to shed the name “human,” a cloak worn for years. She didn’t know how her friends would look at her now, or whether the Empire would take her back, doors closed like iron gates.

Would I be enslaved like the Beastfolk, collar cold as frost? Or burned as a heretic, smoke rising like a pyre?

Both thoughts shriveled the moment she felt the power in her bones, a tide pressing against the shore. Unbelievable, but true as rain: even if the whole Empire came at once, they couldn’t beat her at full strength. Still, she wouldn’t let it come to that. If it meant sparing her city’s people, she’d run like wind through tall grass.

Ding-ling-ling.

The clear bell cut the air like a silver fish. A small boat nosed up to the bank not far away, quiet as mist.

Alicia rose with Ling in her arms, step steady as a bridge. The first thing she saw was a red-haired maiden on the boat, a giant Scythe resting across her back like a crescent moon. Paired with the oversized weapons on her chest, she looked dangerously balanced, like blades and blossoms.

“Oh my—another living one?” the girl called, voice lilting like a flute. “You heading back?”

Alicia had been weighing words like stones, but the girl hopped ahead of the script.

“I forgot to introduce myself again,” she said, tapping her forehead like a playful breeze. “I’m Komachi Onozuka, a ferryman.”

Yes. She was the one who’d ferried Ling before, a reed path crossing twice on the same river. Fate turned like a wheel.