Chương 1Chapter 1: The Dog That Isn’t

Chapter 1: The Dog That Isn’t

The Ironback Boar King hit the Beast Hall wall hard enough to shake dust from the rafters.

“Out of the way! OUT OF THE WAY!”

Someone screamed. Someone else was already running. Lin Xiaoyu stood very still in the middle of the courtyard with her broom in her hands, because running was the one thing she had learned never to do around a frightened beast.

She couldn’t see it. She had never seen anything.

But she could hear it — not the crashing, not the shouting. Underneath all that, like a low drum under a thunderstorm, she heard the boar.

“Little Yu, move!” That was Bai Xue’s voice, sharp with panic.

The boar king charged.

Xiaoyu knew the courtyard by heart. Thirty-two steps from the well to the beast shed. Nineteen from the shed to the stone lion. The ground trembled under her thin shoes, and the air filled with the iron-and-smoke stink of a beast’s rage.

Everyone else heard a monster roaring.

Xiaoyu heard a creature screaming for help.

She dropped her broom.

“Hey,” she said softly, to six hundred pounds of armored fury bearing down on her. “Hey. I hear you.”

The suppression talisman on the boar’s forehead flared red. Someone had over-tightened it — she could smell the burnt-spirit stink rolling off it, like meat left too long on a fire. No wonder it had gone mad. It must have felt like a nail driven through its skull.

Xiaoyu did the thing she always did when something was hurting. She hummed.

It was an off-key lullaby, the one the old cook used to sing in the kitchens. Her voice wobbled. She stepped toward the sound of thundering hooves, hands open at her sides, and she let her own qi — thin, untrained, barely Qi Gathering stage two — unspool from her chest like thread.

The heart meridian. The healers said it was withered in her. Crippled. Useless.

They were wrong. It wasn’t withered. It was just open in the wrong direction — not inward, for cultivation, but outward. Listening.

The boar king was three strides away. She could feel the heat of it, the wet-earth reek of its breath.

She matched her humming to the rhythm of its pain. I hear you. I hear you. It’s the wire. I know. Shh.

The courtyard went silent.

Not quiet — silent. The kind of silence where fifty disciples all stop breathing at once.

The Ironback Boar King stood with its tusks an arm’s length from Xiaoyu’s chest, trembling head to hoof. Slowly, slowly, it lowered its massive head. Its bristled flank pressed against her small hand.

Xiaoyu reached up — she had to stand on tiptoe — and touched the edge of the suppression talisman. It burned her fingers.

“Someone put this on too tight,” she said conversationally, as if she weren’t standing in the shadow of death. “Hold still, big fellow. This will sting.”

She peeled it off.

The boar shuddered once, whole-body, like a dog shaking off water. Then it made a sound no one in the Verdant Beast Sect had ever heard from an Ironback Boar King.

It whimpered. And leaned against her. And went to sleep standing up, its huge head resting on her shoulder.

—

The silence broke all at once.

“Seize her!”

Elder Mo Shan’s voice cut through the babble. He strode across the courtyard, his lame leg dragging, his one good eye fixed on Xiaoyu. Behind him, two enforcers moved in.

Xiaoyu’s heart sank. She knew that tone. That was the tone for punishment.

“Elder Mo, I—”

“You interfered with a grade-two spirit beast containment,” Elder Mo said sternly. But his voice — his voice had a strange warm-grain smell under the sternness, like kindness wearing a mask. “You could have been killed. The punishment yard. Now.”

“Yes, Elder.” Xiaoyu bowed her head. It was always the punishment yard. She picked up her broom.

Whispers followed her as the enforcers marched her past the beast sheds.

“Did you see that? The blind girl—”

“She must have used some trick—”

“Zhao Feng’s face! Did you see Zhao Feng’s face?”

She had not, of course. She never saw anyone’s face. But she could imagine it: Senior Brother Zhao Feng, the genius of the Beast Hall, who tamed beasts with pain contracts and never once had a beast lean on him.

The punishment yard was at the far end of the sect grounds, past the eighth yard, where the old and dangerous beasts were kept. Xiaoyu had swept every yard in the sect for eight years. She knew them all by smell and sound.

Except the ninth.

The ninth yard sat behind the eighth, behind a wall covered in warding script. Disciples were forbidden to go near it. The elders said it held nothing but an old guard dog — a scarred black mastiff, too vicious for the kennels, chained for everyone’s safety.

Xiaoyu had always thought that was strange. She had walked past that wall a hundred times, carrying wash water. And every time, from behind the wall, she had felt something vast. Like standing at the edge of a deep lake at night. Like the dark had a heartbeat.

Today, as the enforcers left her at the punishment yard gate with orders to scrub the flagstones, the vast thing behind the ninth yard’s wall moved.

The air changed. The hairs on Xiaoyu’s arms stood up.

And then — clear as a bell struck underwater, inside her skull, in a voice like grinding stone trying to be gentle:

Xiaoyu froze, scrub brush in hand.

Her heart hammered against her ribs. She turned slowly toward the ninth yard’s wall. The warding script on it buzzed faintly, like angry wasps.

Nobody had ever spoken inside her head before. Beasts spoke in emotion, in scent and sound and pressure. This was words.

“Who—” she whispered. “Who’s there?”

A low sound rolled through the stone. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a growl. With something that big, it was hard to tell the difference.

Xiaoyu’s mouth went dry. “You’re — you’re the mastiff? In the ninth yard?”

“Lin — Lin Xiaoyu. Everyone calls me Little Yu.”

Xiaoyu frowned. “What are they for, then?”

Behind her, the punishment yard gate creaked. One of the enforcers was coming back.

The presence withdrew — like a tide pulling back, leaving her standing alone on the shore of herself, shaking.

“Hey! Blind girl!” the enforcer shouted. “Are you scrubbing or napping?”

“Scrubbing!” Xiaoyu said quickly, and bent over her brush, her hands trembling.

But all through the long afternoon, while her knees ached on the cold flagstones, one thought circled in her head like a moth around a lamp:

And underneath that, a smaller, warmer thought she didn’t dare say aloud:

That night, lying on her straw pallet in the servants’ loft, Xiaoyu made a decision. She took the two cold steamed buns she had saved from dinner — her whole supper — and wrapped them in a cloth.

Tomorrow night, she would go to the ninth yard.

Tomorrow night, she would feed the “dog.”