Chapter Text
The dust of the mortal realm had a way of settling into the seams of my robes, heavy and relentless, much like the passing of the centuries.
Since my second fall from grace, I had long since stopped counting the years. Time had blurred into a monotonous cycle of walking until my boots wore thin, patching my straw hat, and sifting through the discarded remnants of lives much luckier than my own. I was a god who had forgotten the taste of offerings, a cultivator without a shrine, wandering the earth with nothing to my name.
Well, almost nothing.
"Ruoye," I murmured, leaning against a weathered stone milestone at the edge of a nameless, sleepy village. "Are you hungry too? I’m afraid all I managed to scavenge today was a single, slightly bruised turnip."
From around my wrist, the silken white band stirred, uncoiling itself just enough to brush its soft fabric against my cheek in a comforting, affectionate nuzzle. I smiled, reaching up to pat the bandage. Ruoye was my only companion in this vast, lonely world—a loyal friend made of silk and tragedy, but a friend nonetheless.
I shifted slightly, adjusting the heavy bamboo hat on my head, and took a quiet breath. The air around the village was damp, carrying the scent of coming rain, but beneath that natural petrichor was something far more personal. It was the scent of sweet jasmine and fresh rain—my own scent.
I was an Omega. It was a secondary gender that, in my youth as the Crown Prince of Xianle, had been coddled, protected, and perfumed with the finest oils. Now, after eight hundred years of wandering, it was merely an inconvenience. My biology was that of a white ferret hybrid, though you wouldn't know it at a glance. I kept my long, snowy-furred ears pinned tightly back against my skull, hidden safely beneath my hair and hat, and my long, slender ferret tail was coiled securely under the patched layers of my white cultivator robes. Without the expensive suppressants I could no longer afford, I had to rely on sheer willpower and a few bitter, wild herbs to keep my sweet scent from leaking into the air.
Suddenly, a strange, unnatural chill sliced through the humid evening.
My ferret ears twitched beneath my hat, standing at attention. Ruoye tightened its grip around my forearm, sensing the sudden shift. Just a few yards ahead, near the dilapidated entrance of an abandoned barn, a dark, miasmic fog was pooling on the ground.
From the shadows of the fog, a low-level ghost crawled out. It was a pathetic-looking creature, a mere ghoul with elongated claws and eyes glowing an eerie, sickly green. It was currently drooling over a stray chicken, preparing to terrorize the nearby village.
"Ah," I sighed softly, stretching my arms. "A small disturbance. Best to handle it before the villagers wake up."
I stepped out from behind the stone milestone, dropping my voice into a firm, commanding tone. "Excuse me, friend. That chicken does not belong to you. Why don't you return to wherever you came from?"
The ghost whipped its head around, snarling viciously. It took one look at my dusty, ragged robes, dismissed me entirely, and lunged.
I didn't even need to draw Fangxin. I simply sidestepped the creature with practiced ease. Ruoye shot out from my sleeve like a strike of lightning, wrapping securely around the ghost's torso and slamming it hard into the dirt.
"Screeech!" the ghost howled.
To my surprise, the creature didn't disintegrate into black smoke. Instead, in a desperate, thrashing panic, its claws tore at the empty air behind it. With a loud CRACK, the fabric of reality itself seemed to splinter. A jagged, glowing purple rift tore open in the middle of the empty field, humming with chaotic, demonic spiritual energy.
The ghost scrambled backward, slipping right through the tear in space to escape.
"Wait! Don't run!" I called out, taking a swift step forward to pursue it.
But my legendary, infallible bad luck chose that exact microsecond to strike. My foot caught on a perfectly round, remarkably stubborn rock hidden in the tall grass.
"Woah—!"
I lost my balance completely. With my arms flailing, I tumbled forward. I didn't hit the dirt. Instead, I pitched headfirst straight into the glowing, unstable purple rift.
The world spun violently. The scent of rain and jasmine was instantly choked out by the suffocating smell of burning ozone, stale wine, and copper. I felt myself falling through a vortex of flashing colors, tumbling like a leaf in a storm, until the rift spat me out.
THUD.
I hit the ground hard, rolling across what felt like surprisingly smooth, cold stone. My bamboo hat knocked loose, rolling away from me. I groaned, rubbing my aching hip as I slowly pushed myself up onto my hands and knees.
"Ouch..." I muttered. "That rock was entirely unnecessary."
Ruoye uncoiled, checking me for injuries, but I barely noticed. As I lifted my head, my jaw dropped. My long, white ferret ears popped right out of my hair, twitching frantically as a barrage of overwhelming sights and sounds assaulted my senses.
I was no longer in a sleepy, dark mortal village.
I was standing in the middle of a massive, sprawling city—but a city unlike anything I had ever seen in my eight hundred years of life. Towering buildings stretched so high into the sky they seemed to pierce the heavy, starless clouds. But it wasn't dark. The entire metropolis was bathed in a blinding, chaotic wash of neon lights. Giant, glowing characters in brilliant shades of hot pink, electric blue, and toxic green flickered along the walls, casting a surreal glow over the streets.
Carriages without horses flashed past on the paved roads below, leaving trails of light behind them. The air hummed with a deep, vibrating energy that made my ferret whiskers tingle with anxiety.
I scrambled to my feet, quickly retrieving my bamboo hat and placing it back over my head, though my ears remained perked up, swiveling toward the noises. I stepped out of the narrow alleyway where I had landed, checking the wider streets.
"What is this place...?" I whispered to myself.
The more I looked, the more my blood ran cold. This was clearly not a normal city of living men.
Walking along the neon-lit sidewalks was a terrifying, chaotic demographic. To my left, a group of multi-eyed ghouls in lavish silk coats were laughing loudly, tossing dice between their claws. To my right, a demonic cultivator with a pale, skeletal face and dark robes was bartering with a merchant who was quite literally selling severed, preserved hands from a glowing cart. Monsters of all shapes and sizes—some with animal heads, others with rotting flesh—mingled freely beneath the flashing neon signs.
The spiritual aura here was thick, heavy, and absolutely drenched in resentment and yin energy.
"A city of ghosts," I realized, my heart thumping against my ribs. I subconsciously tucked my long, white ferret tail tighter beneath my robes. "I've stumbled right into a demon realm."
As if things couldn't get more complicated, the sheer shock of the fall and the oppressive, heavy Alpha scents lingering in the city air caused a sudden, warm ache to bloom deep in my abdomen. A tiny, sweet puff of jasmine-scented pheromones escaped my collar before I could stop it.
I choked back a gasp, quickly covering my nose. An unbonded, defenseless Omega ferret ferret ghost-hunting in a literal metropolis of monsters and demonic Alphas?
If I didn't find a way out of here soon, my twenty-year debt was going to be the least of my worries.