Xiao Mo and Tushan Jingci walked side by side along the mountain path.
The sky had darkened completely by now. The moon slipped out quietly from behind a layer of clouds and hung at the tips of the trees, scattering its clear light across the ground below.
The young girl walked with her head lowered at Xiao Mo's side, the faint blush on her cheeks making her girlish shyness plain for all the world to see.
Since leaving the courtyard, neither of them had said a single word and yet the atmosphere wrapping around them carried a quality that could not quite be named, something warm and undefined, drifting softly in the moonlight.
Not long before, Tushan Jingci had just told Xiao Mo how she felt.
Learning of the young girl's feelings had genuinely taken Xiao Mo aback.
Only, in the moment, he did not know how to respond.
As for the kind of feeling that exists between a young man and a young woman, Xiao Mo truly had never turned his thoughts in that direction before.
In his heart, he had always thought of Tushan Jingci as a younger sister and yet, deep in his heart, to say that he held no particular warmth for Tushan Jingci at all would be equally untrue.
He was of the human race and Jingci was a Nine-Tailed Celestial Fox.
It was not that Xiao Mo thought his human origins made him unworthy of Jingci.
What concerned him was this, that if Jingci were to be with him, what she would very likely face was the hostility and rejection of the entire Tushan clan.
From everything he knew, the Tushan clan would sooner see one of their own die out in the world than have them form a bond with a demon of inferior bloodline, and a human even less so.
So did he truly have the ability to protect Jingci?
At this moment, he could not give that answer.
And in the courtyard a short time before, Xiao Mo's long silence had been watched by Tushan Jingci without a word.
The young girl had not pressed him for a reply. She had only smiled gently, without asking him to respond immediately, and had asked only that he walk her home.
The two of them had now reached the small courtyard halfway up the mountain.
Tushan Jingci stopped walking and turned around.
The young girl clasped both hands behind her back, gave a light tap with her embroidered-shoed foot, and her skirt lifted slightly as she turned lightly on her heels to face Xiao Mo.
"All right, Xiao Mo. I am going back inside. You should go and rest properly too."
In the moonlight, the young girl's eyes curved into two pretty crescents, her expression full of a warm and easy smile, as though now that the words she had carried in her heart for so long had finally been said, all the tangled uncertainty and nervousness of before had dissolved at once, and she felt entirely free.
"Young Miss, I..."
Xiao Mo raised his head, wanting to give the young girl some kind of answer.
Jingci had already made her feelings known. For him to leave things ambiguous and unsettled like this would be the greatest disservice he could do her but just as the words reached Xiao Mo's lips, Tushan Jingci raised her left hand and pressed her slender index finger lightly against his.
"Shh."
She raised the index finger of her right hand to her own lips as well, indicating he should say nothing.
The young girl tilted her head very slightly, and a soft smile spread at the corners of her lips. The moonlight spilled over her, luminous as water, falling on cheeks that were cool and pale as fine porcelain yet tinged with a warm peach blush, and in the moonlight her fox eyes shone with a particular beauty.
"Xiao Mo, I know what you are like. After all, we have grown up together."
Tushan Jingci's eyes blinked softly, her voice gentle as someone coaxing a child.
"So I have a fairly good sense of what you are about to say."
"You are always the kind of person who thinks about this and thinks about that."
"I expect, Xiao Mo, that what you are about to say is not something I want to hear."
"If I do not want to hear it, then I simply will not."
Tushan Jingci lowered her hand. Those beautiful fox eyes looked at him quietly, without pressure, without question, holding only a clear and undisturbed gentleness.
"But Xiao Mo, our fox clan has one very troublesome quality, and that is that once we have made up our minds about something, we are impossibly stubborn." The young girl's voice was soft, yet it carried a certainty that did not leave room for argument. "Once we have decided on a person, we never change."
"My grandmother was like this. My mother was like this. And I am like this too."
"If you like me, I will make you like me even more in the future."
"If you do not like me, I will make you fall for me in the future."
A thread of stubbornness had crept into her voice, and in the moonlight those beautiful fox eyes grew clearer and brighter still.
"Who you like is your business. But I like you, and that is mine."
"And so, no matter what you think, no matter what you choose to do, I will like you for the rest of my life. And only you."
"That is all."
Tushan Jingci withdrew her finger from Xiao Mo's lips slowly, the warmth of them still lingering at her fingertip.
She stepped forward, and pressed her forehead lightly against his chest in a small, soft knock, the weight of it as light as a coax, or perhaps a quiet show of spirit then the young girl turned, gathered her skirt, and ran into the courtyard, pulling the door closed behind her without looking back.
Xiao Mo stood where he was, looking at that firmly closed door, the young girl's words still turning over and over in his mind, an indescribable feeling rising and falling inside him.
He stood outside the courtyard for a long while, and only at last turned and made his way back down the path he had come.
The moonlight stretched his shadow out long and longer still, until it dissolved gradually into the night.
Inside her room, Tushan Jingci leaned against the windowsill and looked quietly at Xiao Mo's retreating figure growing smaller in the distance.
A night wind moved softly past, lifting the wisps of hair at her temples.
Only when his figure had disappeared entirely into the depth of the night did the young girl slowly draw her gaze back, a faint, unhurried smile resting at the corners of her lips.
"What a fool."
She murmured under her breath, then turned and lay down on her bed, curling her graceful figure on its side, her long hair slipping from the pillow and drifting across her cheek.
She reached out one finger and traced carefully on the soft surface of the bedding, stroke by stroke, writing his name.
"I am this beautiful and he still does not want me."
She murmured the complaint in a quiet voice, yet there was not a trace of anger in her tone. What was there instead was entirely the sweet, mock-aggrieved manner of a young girl.
"What a fool."
…
He walked down the mountain path.
Xiao Mo's mind was still full of the words Jingci had just said, each one clear, as though carved somewhere deep inside him.
He was thinking so intently that his steps slowed without his noticing then a night breeze drifted past him, carrying a touch of coolness.
Xiao Mo stopped walking and raised his head to look at what lay ahead.
Not far away, a young woman in a Daoist robe was standing before him. He did not know when she had come to be there.
When he saw the young woman's face clearly, Xiao Mo's expression stilled for a moment, and he was very nearly certain he was seeing things.
"Jingci?"
The name rose in his heart and almost left his lips but he pressed the thought back down immediately. This was not Jingci and yet, why was it that this young woman looked exactly like Jingci, with only the color of their hair being different?
The dappled shadows of the trees swayed gently in the moonlight, scattering fragments of pale silver between the two of them.
Xiao Mo looked at her in a daze.
The young woman looked quietly at him.
After a moment, she took a step forward. The moonlight fell broken and scattered through the gaps in the branches, spreading across the hillside.
The young woman's expression held a note of curiosity, alongside a composed and unhurried quality.
Her gaze moved over him from top to bottom without hurry, taking him in fully.
After a long pause, the young woman finally spoke, her voice clear and smooth as fine jade.
"If I may ask, is your name..."
"Xiao Mo?"