The unnamed guardsman was a teenager from a moderately wealthy merchant family. Being the second son, he was not expected to inherit the family business, and not much effort nor money was invested in his education or general upbringing. Thus, he was free to actually have a life, and pursue various hobbies at his leisure.

Ever since he was little, he loved stories of warriors and martial heroes. Unfortunately for him, he had no talent to cultivate qi, and would never be accepted to train alongside the esteemed warriors of the Wuyun sect. Possessing a naturally optimistic soul, he didn’t get particularly depressed by it and went for the second-best option: joining the city guards. At the very least he’d get to train with spear and perhaps some other weapons a little bit, and the citizens will treat him with respect his family didn’t quite give him.

Today was the day of his first assignment. He was to patrol the market square in the morning and look out for any trouble. Now, the market square is usually bustling with people, so it was quite a high-level first job, but not as difficult as paroling the dreaded slums. He was confident he can do it, and if any problems arose, he could always run to his senior guards nearby and ask for help.

And just luck had it, that on that very first assignment he got a chance to prove his worth. Just as he was passing a medicine stall, he noticed a dog-kin xiaren sneaking up behind a medicine stall! Pretending not to notice, he carefully circled around and got behind the supposed thief, curious what he’s going to do next. And his intuition proved right! When the shopkeeper turned around, the man reached for one of the expensive medicines from the top shelf, and quickly turned around to run…only to almost bump into the guardsman.

“Please…” pleaded the miscreant “this is for my daughter! We don’t have money….”

“I understand your plight, but law is law. You committed theft, and need to answer for that!”

A small crowd of onlookers gathered, curious what’s up. The shopkeeper was mad and kept screaming at the thief to give back the medicine. The man in question kept glancing left and right nervously, clenching the bottle tightly to his chest, not knowing what to do next.

Suddenly he charged!

The young guardsman, bewildered, blindly swung his spear forward, trying to keep the potentially dangerous offender away. Unfortunately, either the man was charging too fast, or his swing was a tad bit too energetic. The bottom line is, he ended up skewered like a rat, and what followed was a lot of blood and screaming.

The xiaren who witnessed that had only one thing to shout.

“Murderer!”

Before he knew it, he was surrounded by a group of fellow guards, who, seeing the commotion, blindly leaped to help their comrade. In a similar fashion, the group of enraged xiaren kept growing, possibly joined by others who heard of what’s going on and wanted to help out with what looked like was about to turn into a full-blown riot.

Not many among the rioting animal people paid attention to the stabbed man, in fact, it seemed that a lot of them didn’t even know what started the event. However, there was an outlier- a young fox man, possibly no older than himself, who ran to the body and tried to give first aid. As valiant an effort as it was, the wounded man was already gone, his cold, dead palms still clenching the bottle with medicine.

His hands stained with blood, the young fox slowly rose up, an expression of rage painted on his face. He made his way in front of the enraged crowd, almost in range to get stabbed as well, and pointed his right arm in direction of the young guardsman. There was some kind of expensive-looking ring on his finger, probably stolen, mused the youth, before a most unexpected thing happened.

Suddenly, there was a lot of noise, accompanying quite a strong explosion. The cordon of guards was blown away like ragdolls, and they rolled over the hard stone of Plum Blossom street, not unlike pieces of discarded, bloody meat a merciful butcher might throw to a pack of hungry street dogs. Some of them broke a limb or two, some had a limb or two missing, and some were blown into smithereens. In the epicenter of the explosion there was now a fresh, fuming hole, not unlike what might one expect as an aftermath of a significant amount of black powder detonating in a single spot.

Yet, the young guardsman-who was lucky enough to roll away just before the explosion hit them-felt that it can’t be so. It’s something that the young fox guy did, with that ring of his! Panicked, but morbidly curious, he ran his sight through the crowd of equally bewildered yaren, trying to find the suspect.

There he was! But curiously enough, the fox boy didn’t seem unaffected, either.

He was screaming almost as loudly as the scattered guardsmen, clenching his right arm with his left hand. What could be amiss with it?

Before the guardsman could assess the situation more clearly, the offender turned around and disappeared among the enraged xiaren, who, already recovering from the initial shock, took the opportunity to jump at the fallen guardsmen with less than friendly intentions. A desperate retreat followed, and for a while after that, the market square was controlled by yaren. Before the reinforcements arrived, and order was restored, a lot of stalls were looted and vandalized, as the tensions between humans and not quite humans reached their peak.

…..……..

Fuhei was running, trying to get away from the center of the events as fast as possible. This is bad, this is so bad! He shouldn’t have done this in public, he lost his cool! Scratching his head furiously with his left hand, he tried to figure out what to do next, where to go.

The sewer hideout? No, he can’t risk that, no one must ever learn of its location, there is a possibility he is being traced right now.

Where else? His house? No, if they figure out his identity, that’s where they are going to knock next!

Uncle! Uncle Yuhei’s workshop, that’s a great idea!

He should be safe there, and maybe also have someone take a look at his right arm, which was now dangling along uselessly. The initial pain was slowly disappearing, and the entire limb was getting more and more numb with every step he made. He took off the ring, and put it in the pocket-just in case it’d slip off his unfeeling finger and he wouldn’t even notice!

……………

When Annu returned to their room, panicked, Fengli was sitting on the floor in a lotus position. Was she meditating? How uncharacteristic of her! But it doesn’t matter!

He approached her quickly and shook her. Granted, he had no idea whether its safe or whatever is the proper way to take someone out of deep mediation, but it didn’t matter now.

“Fuhei is in trouble!”

She opened her eyes slowly, a weird fog clouding her hazel pupils.

“Oh, that’s not very good” she answered, her voice unusually calm.

Then Annu noticed a weird medallion strapped to her forearm. It had a heart-like shape in the middle, and a floral pattern surrounding it, filled with blue and purple substances of unknown nature. She was clenching it tightly with her left hand, her fingers trembling ever so slightly.

“What…is this?”

She explained that it’s a magical artifact she received from master Lan; a cultivation help, so to speak.

The heart represented the golden core; and the blue and purple colors around it internal and external qi energy. With the help of that, she was able to enter deeper meditative states and was positive that eventually, she will break through the current bottleneck and be the first yaren in history to manifest the golden core!

He found this explanation both believable and suspicious; for example, if such wonderful devices existed, why didn’t anyone use them until now? Why didn’t she tell him or Zhanzhan anything?

She said they are extremely rare, and precious. It was worth much more than all the money the old master gave them. She was afraid someone could go after them if they learned that they possess such a wonderful amulet, after all, a secret known by more than one person isn’t a secret.

Annu accepted all these answers as he was in a hurry to help Fuhei. And also because…he didn’t want to doubt his wolfgirl friend who matters so much to him.

…But in truth, not a single thing she told him was a lie. She merely withheld some information that might have been too shocking or disturbing for him.

…For example, the name the cultivation world assigns to unorthodox cultivation paths such as the one she was undoubtedly treading.

….Or how the newly forming golden core within her was pitch black.

……………………………………………………………………………..

Several hours later, the young guardsman found himself in quite a pickle. In fact, the way things are developing, he might even end up court-martialed. As he pondered the worst possible scenarios sitting on the cold floor of the dungeon, he was called for another interrogation session by his superiors.

What now? He already told them everything twice! However, in his position, he couldn’t quite refuse.

However, this time, something was different.

For one, he was one on one with his interrogator. There weren’t any papers in the office, and it didn’t seem like she was going to attempt writing down his confession or making a report.

But perhaps what was more terrifying, was the very identity of the woman in charge of the interrogation. He recognized her instantly!

From the stories of other guardsmen that is, as it was actually the first time he saw her face to face. Dark skin, dark uniform, and most importantly, an ugly and fairly fresh-looking scar running from the top of her forehead, through the left cheek, and all the way down to the jawline…..yes, this was the one the called Scarface. The new leader of the secret intelligence department of the Wuyun sect!

She waved at him in an overly friendly manner and invited him to sit down. He did as he was told, trembling in fear.

“He attacked me” the young man mumbled “it was s-self defense”

To his surprise, she laughed, showing pristine white teeth contrasting with her skin tone.

“Haha, don’t be silly. Do you think I care about some xiaren getting murdered in a broad daylight and starting a riot of a scale unseen in this city for years, if not decades?” her tone of voice was friendly, but for some reason, he was feeling terribly uneasy.

“N-no?” he asked, timidly looking at her if the answer he provided is correct.

“Yes! I mean no! I mean…” she stood up and gave him a heavy back pat, so hard it almost knocked the air out of his lungs “of course not! Why would I care, I am here for important sect business!”

W-what? Important sect business? But what could be….

“You know, I read your report~ and there was something curious there. Can you guess what?”

“The..ring on the hand of the orange-haired xiaren, before black powder explosion?”

She laughed again.

“Haha, correct again. Well, frankly speaking, just between you and me, I don’t think it was a black powder-related incident~” she leaned over and winked “Ok? Just between you and me…our little secret!”

He gulped and nodded, then gave a detailed account of everything that happened, making sure to describe both the miscreant and the ring he was wearing to the best of his ability.