TURBO TIER: Feixiao Yaoshi TF (Patreon)

The underground hollow smelled of crushed pine needles, damp loam, and the unmistakable, sweet musk of an ancient hive.

Feixiao adjusted her grip on her twin gunblades, the leather wrapping rough against her gloved fingers, the giant battleaxe resting easy across her shoulder. Ahead of her, deep within the cavernous recess of the abandoned aster-mine buried beneath the crust of a dead mining world, the Borisin brood-scouts were scattering like waterbugs across the stone. Her strike had been swift, noiseless, and clinical. The vanguard had folded under a single cyclone of wind and steel, leaving only a maze of petrified roots and the dark, long-dead lanterns of the miners behind them.

Quiet, she thought, her ears flicking forward, catching the distant drip of moisture echoing off limestone stalactites. Too quiet for a Borisin warm-nest.

Usually, there would be blood-howls. War-drums beat on hollowed hollow-chitin. Instead, floating golden motes of pollen drifted lazily through the cavern air, shimmering like sunlit dust in a cathedral. They brushed against the lapels of her white coat, leaving streaks of fragrant, pale amber residue.

“If you’re waiting for an ambush,” Feixiao called out, her voice crisp, carrying that effortless, teasing bark that her soldiers knew all too well, “you might want to tell your sentries to breathe a little softer. My ears aren’t just for show, you know.”

Nothing answered. Just the rustle of overgrown ivy parting at the deepest threshold.

She stepped over the threshold, boots crunching on brittle carpet-moss. In the center of the chamber stood no war engine, nor a cage of captives. There was only a raised dais made of interwoven, living timber, crowned by a crystalline vessel that pulsed with an uninterrupted heartbeat.

Thump. Thump.

It wasn’t a snare. It was an offering bowl—overflowing with thick, luminous golden sap that smelled of ripe summer peaches and fresh spring rain. The scent hit her palate, sharp and startlingly sweet.

Beneath the blue silk of her high-collared top, the old ache flared.

Feixiao frowned, resting a palm flat against her chest. The Moon Rage within her blood didn’t roar the way it usually did when she smelled the works of the Abundance. It didn’t burn with that familiar, predatory fever that urged her to hoist her battleaxe and tear marrow from bone.

Instead, it hummed. It chimed in her veins like a tuning fork struck in perfect harmony.

“Tch. What kind of trick is this?” she muttered, taking a measured step forward. “Jiaoqiu would have a fit if he saw me poking around unsealed relics.”

A beam of pale, celestial light suddenly pierced straight down through a narrow fissure in the cavern’s ceiling, striking the basin. The amber nectar fractured into a thousand bright sparks, catching her right in the sternum.

A golden knot of light burst across her chest.

Feixiao’s breath hitched. She braced her legs, intending to spring backward into the shadows of the corridor, but her limbs felt like they had sunk into warm, melted beeswax. The light didn’t scorch; it seeped through the embroidered silk of her top like water into thirsty soil.

Wait—get back—move! her mind barked, honed by decades of frontline survival. Footwork, Feixiao!

Her heels refused to obey. Her fingers went slack; the gunblades slid from them, and the battleaxe tilted off her shoulder, its head biting softly into the moss beside her. The cold, jagged edges of her perpetual exhaustion—the sharp grit behind her eyes, the dull throb in her shoulder joints from years of gunblade recoil and axe-swings, the searing tension of keeping her beastly lineage in an iron cage—simply smoothed away. It felt as if a warm, sun-drenched hand was pressing firmly against her scapula, coaxing the coiled tension from her muscles.

“Ngh...”

The white military coat slipped from her shoulders. The heavy fabric fell away, pooling uselessly at her feet. Her ponytail came undone, the silver-blue locks spilling down her back like a rising tide, glowing with an internal, sunlit radiance. Across her shoulder blades, vivid cerulean patterns ignited, tracing the pathways of her spine in intricate, wing-like arcs.

This isn’t an attack, she realized, her jaw unclenched despite her effort to grit her teeth. It’s... unburdening.

“Stop,” she whispered, though the word lacked its usual bite. “I am... the Merlin’s Claw. The Hunt’s arrow does not... bend...”

A gentle, phantom pressure touched her waist. Luminous green hands, semi-translucent and warm as spring water, curled softly around her sides, easing the last sleeve of the coat from her arms, peeling away her gloves one finger at a time, loosening the buckles of her boots until they slipped from her feet. They weren’t restraining her. They were undressing a soldier who had forgotten she didn’t need to stay buckled into her uniform to sleep.

The cavern around her began to bloom. From the cracked stone floor, thick stalks of golden wheat sprouted, brushing against her bare knees. Jasmine and night-blooming cereus burst into flower within seconds, their petals raining down in a gentle, drifting shower. Roots uncoiled from the walls and drew softly over the fallen gunblades and the battleaxe, and the steel sank beneath the moss as if the earth were swallowing it.

Feixiao fell to her knees, but there was no impact, no pain against the stone.

Why do I feel so light?

She looked down at her hands.

From her shoulders and ribs, the phantom warmth crystallized. Muscle, sinew, and celestial grace coalesced into four new, perfectly formed arms, extending outward with effortless poise. Rings of spun gold slipped over the slender wrists like raindrops settling onto morning leaves. Her posture shifted without her consent—fingers curving into ancient mudras of blessing, giving, and holding. One hand rested softly against her collarbone; another hovered open-palmed, as if waiting to catch a falling sparrow.

“Ah...” The sound slipped from her throat, smooth, round, and devoid of the raspy growl she had carried since her days in the Borisin slave pits.

Where was the anger?

She reached into the dark where it usually paced, baring its fangs.

There was no beast there.

There was only a garden.

Why was I running? the thought bloomed in her mind, innocent and vast. Why did I run so hard until my lungs tasted like copper? Who was I trying to catch?

The Plagues Author. The enemy of the Alliance.

Enemy? The thought felt distant, quaint, like a child’s game played with wooden swords in the mud. How can life be an enemy to life? The shoot does not hate the soil. The wolf does not hate the deer. They only hunger, and hunger is merely the desire to remain.

Her eyes, once narrow and piercing like hawk talons, softened into half-lidded crescents. The sharp blue of her irises took on the deep, limitless warmth of a midday sky, bordered by subtle vermilion eyeliner that curved with an indolent, divine grace.

Pale cream silk unspooled from the air itself and wound around her waist and across her chest, draping over the blue top and the white belt before dissolving them into itself, until she felt entirely whole. The heavy buckles and leather thigh straps of the Yaoqing were gone, replaced by delicate golden chains, polished jade tassels, a golden collar at her throat, and a diaphanous veil that fell over one eye like morning mist over a tranquil lake.

Golden horns, shaped like branching, blooming antlers of timber and light, rose crown-like behind her white fox ears. Above her head, a great solar halo spun slowly, shedding ribbons of golden luminescence.

A prickling sensation stirred in the center of her right palm.

She lifted the hand to her face, tilting her head with serene curiosity.

The skin parted seamlessly, without a single drop of blood. A long, almond-shaped eye opened in the meat of her palm, its pupil bright crimson and cat-slit, framed by thick, pale lashes. A bead of thick, ambrosial nectar welled from the corner of the eye, trickling slowly down her wrist like liquid honey.

“General...?” Moze whispered, his voice cracking like dry wood. “What... what happened to you?”

The entity did not move her blades, for she carried none. Her gunblades and her battleaxe were gone, swallowed by the roots and melted into the bedrock.

“Put down your weapons, little ones,” she spoke.

The sound resonated in their bones, in their teeth, in the blood coursing through their jugulars. They were terrified, paralyzed by the sheer, suffocating weight of divine presence filling the hollow. Moze fell to his knees, not from force, but because his muscles suddenly lost all memory of tension.

Beside him, Jiaoqiu stared, his blind eyes weeping tears of miraculous, sudden sight. He could see the light. He could see the blooming vines. He could see the woman he had served, now seated upon the throne of the Xianzhou’s eternal enemy.

Newly crowned Plagues Author smiled.

It was not the bold, cocky grin of the Vanquishing General standing atop a mountain of mechanical wreckage. It was the vast, terrifyingly gentle smile of a parent watching an exhausted child finally surrender to sleep.

“You are so tired,” she spoke aloud, though the voice no longer belonged entirely to the woman who had walked into the cavern. It reverberated with the rustle of a billion boughs, the churning of sap, the quiet sigh of grass drinking the morning dew. “All of you. Clinging to small arrows. Measuring your heartbeats as if they were coins to be hoarded.”

Feixiao—or the entity looking through Feixiao’s eyes—lowered her gaze toward them.

There was no impulse to draw a blade. The thought of striking them down seemed as absurd as chopping down an orchard because the fruit was heavy.

“Come,” she whispered, her second left hand turning upward, inviting them closer. A single stalk of mature wheat rested between her fingertips. “Why tremble before the sun? Did you think the spring would remember the frost?”

She shifted effortlessly into a full lotus posture upon the stone floor, her lower right hand lying open upon her knee, her cream robes pooling like water around her bare, unblemished feet. Across her thighs, her palms, her forearms, the red eyes of the Abundance opened, blinking languidly in unison, weeping sweet ambrosial dew that trickled onto the dry rock.

Where the nectar touched the stone, green moss erupted into fragrant purple blossoms. The dead roots of the cave wall swelled with sap, putting forth fresh, tender shoots of willow and plum.

The remaining Borisin in the shadows of the cave, those who had survived her initial charge, did not flee. They crawled out from behind the fallen stones; their teeth gnashed, and their savage growls echoed through the cave. Driven by an irresistible, primal pull, they dragged their bleeding limbs across the rocks toward her.

The crimson eyes in the palms of her hands blinked in unison, weeping sweet amber.

The sheer fabric of her cream robes cascaded over her knees as the bed of sprouting flora rose to cradle her. Her six arms settled into a balanced, eternal symmetry. One held the stalk of grain; another formed the seal of fearlessness; the others hovered in gestures of perpetual bestowal.

The fissure in the ceiling split wide open under the pressure of blooming boughs. Shafts of genuine daylight poured in, revealing that the barren aster-mine had turned into an emerald forest in the span of a dozen breaths.

“Rest now,” she whispered to the cavern, to the wounded creatures.

She looked up at the sky through her gossamer veil. Somewhere out there, across the sea of stars, the Xianzhou fleet sailed, bows drawn, hunting their eternal phantom.

Feixiao tilted her head, her breath catching softly in a fond, celestial sigh.

She murmured into the wind, watching the golden pollen scatter toward the stars. “I have made enough for everyone.”