Of Foxfire and Cultivation Ch.14 (Patreon)

Onari and Yu Wu sat in silence next to Yu Long’s comatose body for nearly ten minutes.

“The worst part is that I can’t even bury her,” Yu Wu eventually said. “She’s not dead. This isn't closure. It’s just… false hope.”

“Mhmm,” Onari hummed, rubbing Yu Wu’s back.

“She’s a bitch of a mother. I wish she never came back into my life. I wish I didn’t want to love her so badly…”

“Hmm,” Onari hummed again. “Remember all those times my mother said you were as good as family?”

“Yeah?”

“The way I see it, you already have a mother. Even if Yasaka is only your mother-in-law, she’s still your mom. Don’t let Yu Long’s sudden appearance stress you out too much. You’ll always have a place in my family.”

“... Thank you,” Yu Wu said in a quiet voice, burying her face in Onari’s chest. “Still, we should do something with her body.”

“Yu Long? What would we even do with her?”

“... I want to return her to her sect. At the very least, the people who care about her should be the ones to take care of her body while she fights her Heart Demon. And I also want to see what she made… What she abandoned me for.”

“We don’t even know where to find her sect,” Onari pointed out.

“I know… But… I feel like I’m supposed to do this. Not just because she’s my mother, but because the heavens are driving me forward.”

“So, what? We just go looking for the sect, and we’ll find it eventually? I’d call bullshit, but that sounds exactly like something the heavens would do.”

Yu Wu nodded, “The heavens are fueled by BS and strange coincidences.”

“What do we do with Lavinia while we look for the sect?”

Yu Wu was quiet for a couple of seconds, “... I feel like I jumped the gun with Lavinia. Don’t get me wrong, I still like her. But I don’t know if we’re ready to expand our relationship to someone we barely know.”

Onari shrugged, “Then we just drop her back off with the Grigori and promise to keep in touch. After we get back, we can take her on an actual date and get to know her.”

“That will work… Can you make something to seal Yu Long in for ease of travel?”

“Of course, love. It won’t even take me that long. You gonna go deal with Lavinia while I’m doing that?”

Yu Wu took a breath to pull herself together, “Yeah… Do you think she’ll be angry?”

“Nah,” Onari waved off Yu Wu’s worry. “Lavinia seems like a pretty easygoing person. I don’t think ‘angry’ is even in her vocabulary. Besides, it’s not like you’re breaking up with her. You’re just… taking a rain check because of personal issues.”

Yu Wu stood up and stretched before leaning down to plant a peck on Onari’s lips, “Right, I’ll go take care of the hard part. As always, thanks for everything, darling.”

Onari smiled at her back as she left the room. Glancing back at Yu Long’s comatose body made him sigh. He took out his formation tools, laying out a small slip of Qi-saturated metal as the base of his sealing formation.

“I should really hate you more than I do… Everything about you offends me, but I can’t bring myself to completely hate Yu Wu’s mother. You even brought Yu Wu into this world. So… I guess I even have something to thank you for,” Onari mumbled to Yu Long as he got to work.

Yu Wu made her way back to the party. The event was just now starting to die down. She found herself having to weave around dancers as she navigated the crowd. She quickly found her target once she entered the indoor half of the party. Lavinia was still with Yasaka and the other Shinto faction VIPs.

She was currently being politely interrogated by the goddess Amaterasu, “And what made you choose Onari? When did you know it was love?”

Lavinia cocked her head cutely, “Love? I’m pretty sure it’s not love yet. I like Onari. I like Yu Wu too. Maybe we’ll fall in love later, but for now I’ve just enjoyed the time I’ve spent with both of them.”

Yu Wu sighed. Amaterasu had always taken an unhealthy interest in Onari’s love life. She sometimes treated the young Kitsune as a character she could ship with whoever she liked, but Yu Wu knew she had good intentions… Probably.

Yasaka was the first one on the VIP dais to notice Yu Wu’s approach. She was about to invite her into the conversation before she noticed the expression on Yu Wu’s face. Yasaka didn’t know if she had ever seen Yu Wu look so emotionally exhausted.

“Lavinia? Can I speak with you for a moment?” Yu Wu asked, too drained to even put up her young mistress persona.

“Oh! If it isn’t the beautiful fiancee! Come, come, you must join us, Yu Wu,” Amaterasu said before Yasaka stopped her with a hand on her arm.

Amaterasu looked at her friend. Her confusion faded at the small head shake Yasaka gave her. She looked back at Yu Wu, noticing the young mistress’ mood.

“Oh… Maybe at a later date, yes?” Amaterasu corrected herself.

Yu Wu bowed to Amaterasu, “My thanks, Lady Amaterasu. Now is… not a good time.”

She grabbed Lavinia and dragged her off into the party. As Yu Wu led her away, Lavinia gazed at the back of Yu Wu’s head with concern on her face. She hadn’t known the young mistress for very long, but even she could tell something was wrong. The energetic young girl who had spirited her away just earlier that day was nowhere to be found.

“What’s wrong,” Lavinia gently asked.

Yu Wu sighed as she once again left the party, this time with Lavinia in tow, “I won’t lie to you and say ‘nothing’... Something personal came up. Onari is helping me deal with it. Unfortunately that means we’ll have to cut our date short though. I’m sorry if you think we’ve wasted your time. We both really like you-”

Lavinia cut Yu Wu off with a tight hug. Yu Wu had stopped and turned to face Lavinia when they were far enough from the party to have a sense of privacy.

Lavinia stroked Yu Wu’s hair like a caring older sister, “Shh, it’s okay. You don’t have to apologize. Things happen. I don’t blame either of you for that. I like you too, and I’d be willing to try this again sometime.”

At a loss for words, Yu Wu sunk into the older girl’s embrace, “... Yeah. That’s basically how Onari and I feel as well. We’d love to do this again, but now… really isn’t a good time.”

They stayed like that for a while. Lavinia’s soothing hug helped to revitalize Yu Wu. Even with Onari’s reminder, she had been so focused on her mother and her ‘perceived’ one chance for a biological family that she had almost forgotten that she had other people who cared about her. Yu Wu had a little smile on her face when Lavinia broke the hug.

“Do you need any help getting home?” she asked.

Lavinia shook her head, “No, I’ll be fine. I think I’ll stay here and talk to Yasaka and Amaterasu for a while longer, but I can teleport home when I’m ready.”

Yu Wu nodded. A slightly nervous look came into her eyes. She leaned in, quickly seizing Lavinia’s lips. Lavinia let out a little surprised squeak, but she didn’t protest the kiss. She leaned in as well, deepening the kiss and exploring Yu Wu’s lips with her tongue.

“We’ll be in touch…” Yu Wu whispered as she broke the kiss.

Onari hummed softly as he worked. His brush strokes were smooth, carving lines of ink into the metal slip before him. Every one of his movements was infused with Qi.

Slowly, the brush strokes began to come together. An invisible framework settled into place within the metal. Thin strands of Qi danced along the forming formation.

His mind drifted as his body went through the comfortable and familiar motions. Surprisingly, his mind didn’t linger on Yu Long or the journey he and Yu Wu were about to embark on. Instead, his thoughts drifted back in time to the first formation he ever activated.

He had drawn formations in his previous life, but without the Qi to activate them, his mastery of the art never went far. He had mainly used it as a form of active meditation. It helped soothe his mind and gave him something to do during the days when the world shunned him completely.

In this life, he had been crafting formations as soon as he could walk. Something about how simple brush strokes could control and alter the physical world just spoke to him. With ink, paper, time, and enough effort, a person could conquer the heavens.

A flex of will and Qi was all it took for the sealing formation Onari had been crafting to finalize. The Qi he had infused into the lines of ink reached inward and twisted. A pocket space formed within the metal. The metal base of the formation flashed lavender for a moment as the whole thing stabilized.

Sighing, Onari pulled himself out of his thoughts. He stood, taking the metal seal over to Yu Long’s unconscious body. A single thought and a strand of Qi was all it took to pull Yu Long into the formation’s sealed pocket space.

Onari spent the next several minutes thinking and waiting for Yu Wu to return. He hoped that Yu Wu didn’t want to leave immediately. He hadn’t told his mother that he and Yu Wu were leaving for an indefinite amount of time. Kunou needed to be told as well.

“I think that went well,” Yu Wu said as she walked back into the room. “Where’s Yu Long?”

Onari held up the metal seal, “Present and accounted for. So… how were you planning on doing this?”

Yu Wu slumped against him, “... I don’t know. My best guess is that the sect is somewhere in China. Other than that… I have no idea.”

“Hmm… What if we try something a bit… different?”

“What do you mean?”

“Divination. I know it’s not something either of us specialize in, but maybe we’ll be able to get a general location of the sect.”

“It’s… possible. But how much do you know about divination?”

“Not as much as I would like. We’ll probably need something important to Yu Long or her sect… But it just so happens that we have the most important thing to both: Yu Long’s body.”

“So, we use Yu Long as an anchor? And then what?”

“That’s as far as I had gotten with that idea… We might have to enlist the help of Amaterasu…” Onari shuddered. “Or worse, Tsukuyomi.”

Yu Wu winced as well at the mention of the moon god, “Yeah, let’s just stick with Amaterasu. If she can’t do anything, we’ll just go find it on foot. No ‘fated mission’ is worth asking Tsukuyomi for a favor.”

“Sounds like a plan. Did you want to do that now? We might not be able to catch Amaterasu before she leaves otherwise.”

Yu Wu sighed, wrapping her arms around her bondmate, “I guess so… Just… let me stay like this a little bit longer.”

“Sure thing, love,” Onari said, pulling Yu Wu tighter into his chest. “The party isn’t over yet anyways.”

The Dao Companions stayed like that for almost an hour. After the eventful night they had had, both of them needed to destress. Being connected to someone on a metaphysical level certainly helped. They could feel what the other was feeling, send support through their bond, and even help each other process their more confusing emotions.

Over the course of the hour, they went back and forth on how Yu Wu thought she should feel about her mother. Yu Wu expressed her honest anger at being left with Da Shuizhi. She expressed her hope at the prospect of her mother still being alive and wanting her back, and how misguided she felt that hope might have been. She expressed how her mother’s actions had done the woman no favors, from her cowardice to her poor choice in underlings.

Onari was forced to play the unbiased third party. He certainly had his own opinions on the situation. They even lined up very closely with Yu Wu’s opinions. But he knew that Yu Wu didn’t need a ‘Yes Man’ right now. She needed someone who would question her reasoning and actually make her think about how she felt about the situation.

They didn’t actually come to any conclusions after their short, literal heart to heart. Yu Wu was thinking about her relationship with her mother more closely, but she wasn’t anywhere near complete forgiveness or closure. It didn’t need to be said, but Onari had promised both Yu Wu and himself that he would support her, no matter her final decision.

They made their way back to the party. The festivities had started to wind down. Of the earlier crowd, only scatterings of nocturnal Youkai remained. The pair made their way inside, where they saw that Yasaka and Amaterasu were the only two people remaining on the VIP dais.

Yasaka and Amaterasu had broken out the sake at some point as the party wound down. Two empty bottles sat between them, and they were working on a third. As powerful beings, it wasn’t easy for them to get drunk. But the supernatural wine they were drinking was enough to at least affect them.

A beautifully musical, tipsy giggle rang out as Onari and Yu Wu approached, “Onari~ Come drink with me and your mother~”

Onari glanced at the foxy grin on Yasaka’s face, “Lady Amaterasu, you know I’m not old enough to drink.”

“Bah! Who’s stopping you? I’m a goddess. I’ll decide whether my favorite god-child can drink or not.”

Onari sighed as Yu Wu replied, “We’d be honored to join you, Lady Amaterasu.”

After their first bottle, Yasaka and Amaterasu had abandoned their thrones for cushions on the floor. Onari and Yu Wu joined them on the floor. Yasaka poured them both small cups of sake. They all raised their cups.

“Kanpai!”

They drank, filled their cups, and drank again. The rice wine tasted sweet and went down smoothly. Onari and Yu Wu’s cultivator constitution prevented them from getting drunk too fast. Still, a low buzz settled over their minds.

Drinking with her found-family helped Yu Wu put her thoughts in order. It wasn’t much, but sitting there, drinking and listening to Yasaka and Amaterasu gossip was relaxing. For a brief moment, she forgot about her mother.

They slowed down after the second round of drinks and Onari eventually broached the subject he came to talk to Amaterasu about, “Lady Amaterasu? May I ask a favor?”

“Of course, Onari! What can your god-mother do for you?” Amaterasu excitedly said, happy that Onari was relying on her.

“How good are you with divination? Specifically, finding something that is potentially hidden?”

“Hmm, I’m proficient enough in the art of divination… I see everything the sun touches after all. May I ask what this is about?”

Onari glanced at Yu Wu, clearly saying this was her story to tell with his eyes. Yu Wu sighed, downing her cup and pouring another. She fiddled with her cup for a moment before starting to speak.

“Something… interesting happened to Onari and I tonight,” Yu Wu said. The absence of her young mistress persona made both Yasaka and Amaterasu perk up and pay closer attention. “... I received a visit from my mother. Apparently, she is not dead. She was just… separated from me at birth.

“She came to meet me in an attempt at reunion. She claimed that she wanted to be a part of my life. It was not an ideal first meeting. I left to take a few minutes to think. She took my leaving as rejection. She was then struck with some sort of emotional attack. Long story short, she is now in a coma…”

Yasaka scooted over to comfort the obviously distressed Yu Wu as she continued, “My mother said she runs an organization. I’m still not sure how I feel about her… But I think it’s only right that her body is taken care of by people who actually knew her. Of course, we have no idea where this organization is, and since my mother is in a coma, we no longer have anyone we can ask directly…”

Amaterasu nodded, following Yu Wu’s train of logic, “I see… Well, it’s certainly possible for me to locate your mother’s organization. Especially if you have some of her belongings.”

“We have her whole body…”

Onari’s words made Amaterasu blink, “That… will work as well.”

Yu Wu leaned back into the soft embrace of Yasaka’s breasts as Onari pulled out the metal seal containing Yu Long. He tapped the seal on the ground and pulled back. Yu Long’s body sort of flopped out with an impossible twist of space.

“You seem to be getting better at that,” Yasaka commented, referring to Onari’s formation work.

Onari smiled at his mother, “I’ve been practicing a lot lately. Not just seals either. There’s a bunch of stuff my formations can do. I’ve only explored a fraction of the art.”

Amaterasu ran her hands along Yu Long’s body, keeping them about a foot above the skin to avoid touching. She hummed as she got a feeling for Yu Long’s essence. The goddess honestly didn’t like what she felt, but she continued for the sake of helping Yu Wu.

Amaterasu began to shine with each pass of her hands over Yu Long’s body. A light that could only be compared to the sun seemed to rise from behind her. A ray of light connected Yu Long’s body with Amaterasu’s forehead.

Visions appeared one after another in the sun goddess’ mind’s eye. The more she saw, the more complicated her feelings toward Yu Long became. Yu Long was the product of a tough and isolated life. She had done her best to give hope to other girls in her situation, and had even succeeded with many of them.

That didn’t change the fact that Yu Long had become a coward though. Fear had ruled her life since Yu Wu’s birth. It had twisted her into a shell of her former self. There was still light within her, but Amaterasu genuinely didn’t know if Yu Long was worth redeeming anymore. That would be up to Yu Wu and Yu Long to decide…

After a solid minute of visions, Amaterasu slowly stopped shining. The sun behind her set and she opened her eyes. She sighed. Even as the head of a pantheon, she didn’t always know the correct path in a given situation. And this situation relied on a complicated choice that only Yu Wu could make.

Amaterasu reached out to Yu Wu with her divine powers. She imparted a small blessing of clarity upon the emotionally confused young girl. Just as the sun shined bright on a clear day, Yu Wu’s mind would be clear of distracting clouds, allowing her to make the choice that was the most true to her feelings.

“Come, my children. Let me share what I saw,” Amaterasu said, beckoning Onari and Yu Wu closer.

The pair complied, kneeling in front of the goddess with their heads slightly bowed. Two of Amaterasu’s fingers touched each of their foreheads. A flash of light seared a specific location into both of their brains. The information Amaterasu had taken from Yu Long put the sect in Manchuria, near the border of China and North Korea.

Amaterasu’s vision also granted Onari and Yu Wu a bird’s eye view of the sect. It was built at the base of a lush valley, separated from the outside world by geography and Yu Long’s hard work. The river that formed the valley ran through the center of the sect compound. The compound itself looked more like a sprawling village than any kind of fortress.

The whole scene was unexpectedly beautiful. Considering Xiao Li was a member of the sect, Yu Wu had been expecting more darkness and creepy lightning. Or at the very least, more obvious displays of wealth and elitism.

“Well, teleporting directly there is out,” Onari said, noting the bounded field that surrounded the valley.

From the vision Amaterasu had given them, they knew the bounded field was actually a series of overlapping arrays. It was possible for them to force their way through it, but they had to physically be there to do that.

“Hmm,” Yu Wu hummed before smirking. “Road trip?”