Deja Vu

The next morning.

“Knock knock knock! Knock knock knock!”

The urgent and heavy knocking brutally tore apart the tranquility inside the house.

“Wuu… who is it?!”

Lu Qiancha, jolted awake, rolled over groggily, her small face wrinkled into a ball, instinctively hugging her fluffy tail like a pillow.

Then, she released her tail.

One paw rubbed her sleepy eyes, and the other scratched impatiently at her ears—looking every bit like someone whose beautiful dream had been disturbed.

Shangguan Yunzhu, too, had been awakened by the noise.

Her beautiful eyebrows furrowed slightly, and she yawned with the languor of someone just waking up.

She quickly straightened her clothes, took a few steps forward, and opened the heavy wooden door with a creak.

In the morning light, a wizened figure with a dark, wooden cane stood outside the door.

“Village Chief?”

A hint of surprise flashed in Shangguan Yunzhu’s eyes.

She raised her eyes to look at the indistinct light of the distant morning sky.

“So early… did someone in the village get attacked by a wild beast?”

She instinctively guessed at the worst-case scenario.

“No, no, no,” the Village Chief shook his head slowly, a smile tugging at his wizened mouth.

“The Mountain God… is always protecting us. The children in the village will not be disturbed by wild beasts.”

His turbid gaze, over Shangguan Yunzhu’s shoulder, landed precisely on Lu Qiancha, who was still dazed inside the house.

His voice was hoarse with the smell of smoke, but he deliberately raised it a little.

“This old man has come to invite you, female immortal,” his cane tapped lightly on the ground, making a soft thudding sound, “and this little girl who is also lodging here, to attend the Mountain God’s grand sacrificial ceremony.”

“Hm?”

Shangguan Yunzhu’s eyebrows twitched when she heard this, and confusion floated to her brow.

“Didn’t you say that my aura as an outsider was impure, and that going rashly… would offend the Mountain God’s dignity?”

“Heh heh heh…”

A sudden and chilling laugh squeezed out from the Village Chief’s throat, like dry leaves scraping against gravel, grating and devoid of warmth.

His withered face trembled as he tried to force out more of a smile.

“The female immortal is too modest. The Mountain God must have seen your kindness in protecting our village for nearly three months! If you don’t qualify, then probably no one in this entire village is worthy of the Mountain God’s glory!”

A nameless, strange feeling swept through Shangguan Yunzhu’s heart, but she didn’t delve into it.

She composed herself and nodded.

“Then… when does the ceremony begin?”

“Please wait a moment, female immortal” the Village Chief’s gaze roamed over Lu Qiancha.

“This old man must go and wake up the villagers in every household…”

“As soon as everything is ready, we will set off immediately!”

His eyes, hidden beneath drooping eyelids, seemed to flash with a hint of impatience.

“Do you need my help?”

Shangguan Yunzhu looked at the elderly figure and asked out of kindness.

“There’s no need for you to trouble yourself!”

The Village Chief waved his hands repeatedly.

His hoarse voice was filled with deliberate gratitude, but it sounded hollow.

“You have already done too much for us… just let this old man handle this small matter himself.”

With that, he didn’t linger, but, leaning on his cane, disappeared into the hazy morning mist with a hobbled gait that was, strangely, quite swift.

“Take care, Village Chief.”

Shangguan Yunzhu watched the hobbling figure disappear into the morning mist and gently closed the door.

As she turned around, her amber eyes, already filled with curiosity, looked at the little wolf cub swinging her legs by the bed.

“Little Qiancha, what do you think about this?”

“What is there to think?”

Lu Qiancha waved her little paw dismissively, her tone filled with the laziness of “it’s just a small matter.”

“When the boat reaches the pier, it’ll be straightened naturally. When soldiers come, generals will resist, and when water comes, the earth will block it. What’s there to be afraid of about worshipping a god?”

“I’m worried that,”

Shangguan Yunzhu frowned slightly, walked closer to the bed, and squatted down, lowering her voice a little, her tone conveying a sense of solemnity.

“What if that so-called ‘Mountain God’… has already entered the demonic path and been tainted by filth… can you and I handle it?”

She knew well the power of a mountain god—even a small mountain god in this wilderness had been conferred a title and enjoyed incense offerings, a legitimate deity under the underworld.

Even if the incense offerings were scarce, they were still a ghost immortal; the power bestowed by the ghost immortal’s position was far from something the two of them, mere Spirit Transformation realm mortals, could shake.

Lu Qiancha was now completely awake, her blue eyes clear as ice.

She stopped swinging her legs, her paw tips tapping lightly against the edge of the bed, making a soft tut, tut sound.

“Rest assured, Junior Sister Yunzhu,” her tone was steady, carrying a hint of detachment.

“A mountain god is a proper official deity appointed by the underworld. He is an employee of heaven and earth with a government position. If he really went astray and fell into the demonic path… the underworld would have exploded a long time ago!”

“There’s no need to wait for small fry like us to notice. Chains of soul retrieval would have crossed the boundary of yin and yang long ago and dragged him down to the eighteenth level to report for duty.”

Her analysis was calm and incisive, pointing to a core contradiction: “So, if the strange phenomena here are truly related to the objects of worship… then that just proves one thing—”

“What thing?”

Lu Qiancha lifted her eyelids, her blue eyes looking sharply out at the village beyond the window, her voice decisive.

“The thing that the villagers are prostrating and worshipping day and night, from the very root, is not some Mountain God!”

“Not a Mountain God?!”

Shangguan Yunzhu’s heart jumped.

“Then what could it be?”

“Heh,”

Lu Qiancha’s nostrils twitched slightly, letting out a disdainful sniff.

“Demons, devils, spirits, monsters… all the things in the mountains and wilds that crave flesh and blood, confuse the minds, and try to absorb the power of living beings’ vows in order to achieve success!”

She paused, her gaze becoming even deeper, with a nearly cold scrutiny.

“What exactly it is… is hard to say. But we only need to guess in the worst, most greedy, and most evil direction—and we won’t be wrong!”

“Little Qiancha is so smart.”

Shangguan Yunzhu praised directly and lavishly, her eyes filled with admiration.

Lu Qiancha, hearing this praise, still maintained a calm and unruffled expression on her fair little face, but the big tail behind her seemed to have been injected with a joyful soul and had turned into a small broom, constantly brushing the surface of the bed.

She shot up onto the bed, her height… uh, not high enough; this bed was too short.

Undeterred, she stretched out those small, white feet again, finally barely managing to make her line of sight… just barely higher than Shangguan Yunzhu, who was sitting on the low stool.

Her blue eyes drooped, her pink lips pressed into a deliberately arrogant arc, using what she thought was her most “condescending” posture as she said, “It’s not that I’m smart, it’s that you’re too stupid.”

Shangguan Yunzhu tilted her head slightly, looking at the little loli who had tried so hard to build up her “powerful dignity.” She couldn’t possibly not know that Lu Qiancha was deliberately retaliating for her actions last night.

Shangguan Yunzhu was not only not annoyed, but the smile in her eyes deepened, and she smiled with crescent-shaped eyes, her voice gentle.

“Yes, yes, yes, only our Qiancha baby is the smartest.”

“Thump!”

Lu Qiancha’s entire body shivered at Shangguan Yunzhu’s words, as if her feet had stepped on an invisible sheet of ice, instantly losing their balance.

The entire person fell solidly onto the hard floor.

“Ooh~”

A suppressed groan escaped her throat.

She flailed to adopt a duck-sitting posture, cowering to the ground, two small hands instinctively holding the poor tailbone area tightly, her wide blue eyes instantly filled with tears, on the verge of tears.

“Little Qiancha!”

Shangguan Yunzhu, startled by this sudden fall, felt a pang in her heart and rushed over in a panic.

“Where did you fall? Does it hurt?!”

Lu Qiancha, at this moment, simply gave up sitting and collapsed on the floor like a frightened rabbit, with her tail perked.

She didn’t dare let her butt touch the cold ground, as that would evoke bad memories of Beiju Luzhou.

Lu Qiancha looked up with difficulty, the lingering tears swirling in her blue eyes, her tone aggrieved and filled with accusatory dislike.

“Where… where on earth did you learn… these… these strange words!”

The tingling and chills brought by the words “Qiancha baby” just now were still shuddering on her skin.

“I learned it from Qingfeng,” Shangguan Yunzhu blinked and confessed with an innocent expression.

“He used to ask me if I was warm enough every day and opened his mouth and closed it saying ‘be good,’ ‘baby’ and such…”

“Eww~!”

As she spoke, Shangguan Yunzhu even made a slightly exaggerated goosebump motion.

“It was really disgusting when he said those words at the time.”

“It’s more than just disgusting!”

Lu Qiancha’s face fell, her voice as flat as a piece of wood.

“It’s indeed disgusting coming from Qingfeng’s mouth.”

Shangguan Yunzhu changed the subject, her eyes curving as she looked at the huddled blue fluff ball on the ground, her voice becoming several degrees sweeter.

“If Little Qiancha wants to call me ‘Yunzhu baby’… I, for one, wouldn’t find it cheesy at all!”

“I—thi—nk—it’s—chee—sy.”

Lu Qiancha squeezed these words out from between her teeth almost one by one, her blue eyes gazing at Shangguan Yunzhu with an expression that screamed “please let me go.”

“In the future… you should watch less of the warped scriptures left behind by Qingfeng. Learning too much… will cause your brain to degenerate, really.”

“Ahem,”

Shangguan Yunzhu coughed lightly to cover her smile, but her gaze once again fell to the area near that anxiously upturned tail root.

“…Then, really, you don’t need… to apply some ointment?”

It looked like she fell pretty hard.

“No…”

Lu Qiancha refused Shangguan Yunzhu’s kindness directly, falling on her butt didn’t really hurt that much, it was just that her psychological trauma was very large.

“Really nothing wrong?” Shangguan Yunzhu looked worried, pointing to her reddened eyes.

“Tears are falling…”

“I said nothing’s wrong.”

Lu Qiancha shook her head, little by little, slowly… propping herself up from her prone position.

However, Shangguan Yunzhu keenly observed that the little wolf cub’s two calves were clearly shaking.

“Tsk, you really like to force yourself, huh?”

Shangguan Yunzhu clicked her tongue almost imperceptibly, her brow furrowed.

Her heart was boiling with anxiety and amusement: ‘She’s clearly in so much pain that she can’t walk, but she won’t let anyone help her? Who did she learn to be so stubborn from?’

Whoosh.

Shangguan Yunzhu didn’t dilly-dally at all.

She stepped forward like an arrow, one arm already circling Lu Qiancha’s slender waist like an iron hoop that brooked no refusal.

“What are you doing?!” Lu Qiancha’s pupils shrank in shock, like a startled deer.

“Helping you apply medicine.”

Shangguan Yunzhu’s tone carried an unquestionable steadiness, her deep amber eyes filled with a heart-wrenching that was almost overflowing.

Her other hand had already deftly taken out a small, white jade bottle from her storage bag, the bottle body radiating a warm luster.

Before Lu Qiancha could protest, Shangguan Yunzhu had already sat down steadily on the edge of the bed.

“Ugh—?!”

Lu Qiancha only felt the scene before her reverse, back down, and then she was held firmly on Shangguan Yunzhu’s warm and elastic thighs.

This scene, was so familiar…