July 4, 2020, 08:07 AM
Shanghai Port – Rainy Day
The raindrops pelted down like bullets, stinging painfully against the skin. Ye Jingqiu pulled her oversized black raincoat tighter around her body and tugged the hood low over her eyes, weaving through the shipping containers crammed together like sardines in a can.
The wind sliced like knives, the downpour arrowing in like bullets. Iron-dark clouds pressed low over the entire city, and amid the thick fog, thunder rumbled ominously.
“The meteorological station has issued a red typhoon warning, elevating the typhoon emergency response to Level One. Typhoon Number 11 is expected to move northward off the Zhejiang coast…”
“Move it, people! We’re sealing the harbor any minute now!”
“In accordance with the unified deployment from the flood control office, the pilot station has suspended vessel entry and exit navigation services as of 07:52 on July 4…”
“How did it start raining this hard all of a sudden this morning? It’s a nightmare.”
The air buzzed with noise—broadcasts blaring from loudspeakers, the grumbled complaints of workers, and the roar of machinery engines all blending together. But Ye Jingqiu seemed oblivious to it all. She kept her eyes downcast and quickened her small steps, pushing against the flow of the crowd straight toward the sea.
She slipped through the gaps in the throng with the agility of a fish, her wide raincoat brushing past others’ clothing like a whisper.
Yet everyone around her went about their business as if blind, uniformly ignoring the girl flashing past them. The surveillance cameras along the path blinked with red lights, but their footage captured not a trace of her.
It was as if…
As if they simply couldn’t see her at all.
But she was still over a hundred meters from the coast. Silently counting the seconds, Ye Jingqiu realized she was running out of time.
From past experience, the [Hide] command would expire in eight seconds. If she hadn’t broken free of the crowd by then, this high school sophomore—who had no entry permit and no way to explain her presence here—would be hauled off to the nearest police station.
And then she wouldn’t be able to deal with that exotic beast herself.
What a pain.
Ye Jingqiu sighed, feeling the weight of responsibility on her shoulders. Seizing her chance, she suddenly leaped into the air, her muscles uncoiling as her legs propelled her forward like an arrow loosed from a bow!
“Ding.”
Her right knee tapped lightly against a container. In the final second before the hidden command failed, Ye Jingqiu rolled successfully into a narrow gap between the boxes, dodging the surging crowd and the cameras—for the moment.
She arched an eyebrow in self-satisfaction and let out a long breath. With brisk efficiency, she yanked off the raincoat and turned—
To lock eyes silently with a passing worker.
Ye Jingqiu: …Crap.
The worker stared blankly at the “No. 45 Middle School” lettering on her blue-and-white school uniform, pinching his own arm.
Wait! Had he gone stupid from work?
Who could explain how an utterly ordinary student had slipped through layers of checks on a day like this—typhoon raging—and made it all the way to the pier entrance?
Thanks to his training drills, he snapped to action, reaching to key his radio and report the situation. But just as his right hand was about to touch the earpiece, the student’s lips moved, murmuring something inaudible.
He looked up instinctively, his gaze meeting hers across the curtain of rain. He clearly saw molten gold flowing through the depths of her eyes.
Light swirled in a thousand turns.
The gears of fate meshed once more, and amid the distant misty rain, a sigh-like wind echoed—
In an instant, the remote signal cut out, and the live feed from Waigaoqiao Port went black. The worker froze stiffly in place, silent as if gripped by a nightmare.
“Sorry…”
Someone said.
The next second, he jolted as if waking from a dream, blinking in confusion at the empty space between the containers.
“What was I… just doing?”
No one answered.
~~~
The rain grew even heavier, bringing all activity at the pier to a halt.
As the last Malta-flagged international vessel departed the port to ride out the storm, the berths at Waigaoqiao Port stood empty, the harbor seal successfully completed.
Having escaped the crowd and encountered no further obstacles, Ye Jingqiu reached her destination. She watched the ship fade into the distance and exhaled deeply.
She glanced toward a distant crane, then looked away, calmly wiping the rainwater from her face.
She began seriously contemplating the odds of convincing her desk mate to burn some incense for her tomorrow.
Why couldn’t she have had that dream any other night but tonight?
She had a math exam today!
She’d planned to wrap this up before the test, but with rain like this…
Ye Jingqiu sighed.
This thing was going to be tricky today.
It all started half a year ago.
That night, she’d had an incredibly vivid dream—like the end of the world. Creatures from myth poured out, rampaging unchecked: China’s Candle Dragon, Slavic undead, the steel giant beast from the Bible…
They crushed her mercilessly, a powerless girl without so much as a chicken’s strength to bind.
Ye Jingqiu could only watch in horror as the horde devoured her, the terror and agony feeling all too real.
She jolted awake, suddenly realizing she’d forgotten nearly everything. As if in exchange for her memories, she gained the power of Word Manifestation.
The legendary Mouth Holds Heavenly Law, One Word Life and Death.
It sounded impressive, but the reality was brutally harsh.
This flashy-seeming Word Manifestation was unreliable, growing stronger against stronger foes.
Simply put, her sincere everyday wishes—like skipping PE because the homeroom teacher took the slot, pausing time for a few minutes after oversleeping, or cramming cone curve problem-solving into her brain—never worked.
At best, she could buff her running speed by 1.2 times.
But against certain bizarre creatures…
“Roar—”
The rain stopped abruptly.
Far off, where the sea met the low sky in a straight gray-blue line, a piercing shriek tore it apart.
The sound was like dozens of wolf-blooded hounds howling in cacophony. Ye Jingqiu frowned and bent over, her eardrums threatening to shatter from the sudden clamor.
The already restless sea surged with waves, ripples exploding outward. Something “fishlike” moved silently at high speed beneath the surface. In a flash, Ye Jingqiu—eyes narrowed—could make out its iron-gray tail.
It wasn’t a fish.
That thing was a grotesque patchwork of various animals: two meters long, with a snake for a head, a leopard’s body, deer’s hooves, and a crocodile’s tail. Up close, it bore a striking resemblance to the Afanc, the Welsh water monster from legend—one said to unleash devastating floods by thrashing about, drowning hundreds of thousands of acres of land.
But its goal clearly wasn’t to flood the world anew. A glance at its trajectory through the water told Ye Jingqiu it was heading straight for her.
And sure enough, ever since unlocking her “Word Manifestation” superpower, she’d been plagued by “Warning Dreams” every few days, alerting her to exactly when and where a particular monster would show up.
This creature had definitely appeared in that first chaotic mishmash of a dream, either ripping at her arm or lunging for her head.
It felt like someone had handed her an enemy roster as a table of contents, then updated her with a fresh page every few days for guidance.
Intuition screamed at Ye Jingqiu that she had to slay these unidentified beasts with her own hands. Each one she killed seemed to sharpen the edges of her murky past just a little.
Over the past six months, she’d successfully dispatched three exotic beasts to the Western Paradise ahead of schedule. This Afanc might just be the fourth she’d have to send off with the Great Compassion Mantra.
How did a scrawny high school sophomore pull that off?
With her superpower, of course—the one that only kicked in during true emergencies.
The Afanc had already hauled half its body onto the surface, its beady little eyes sizing up Ye Jingqiu while its scarlet snake tongue flicked in and out. A savage, predatory glee twisted its hideous face, as if it had finally spotted a meal worth devouring. It threw its head back and bellowed in excitement.
Ugly didn’t even begin to cover it.
Ye Jingqiu had no patience for banter. She needed to save her tall tales for her beloved math teacher and the dean to explain skipping the exam. Instead, she neatly folded her umbrella, straightened her spine, fixed the creature with a steely glare, and said coolly, “Copy.”
Nothing happened.
The Afanc froze for a split second. Then, realizing the seventeen-year-old human in front of it posed no threat, the legendary water beast exploded with excitement.
She was bluffing! She was powerless!
It unleashed a deafening roar, its bizarre, doglike bark reverberating across the human port like a final warning to the trespassers invading its domain.
The torrent of rain, paused just minutes earlier, resumed with a vengeance. The layered clouds darkened to an ominous gray-black as dozens of towering waterspouts erupted behind it, howling toward Ye Jingqiu.
Human works of concrete and steel shattered into powder wherever they rampaged.
Ye Jingqiu stared in shock.
“Why doesn’t English work? Isn’t this from Western mythology?”
After her direct “Please die” had flopped, “Copy” was the most reliable trick she’d found so far. It let her duplicate an exotic beast’s ability straight onto herself.
But apparently, foreign languages were a no-go.
Ye Jingqiu panicked. She snatched up her rain poncho and bolted, stumbling through the deluge in a pathetic, tear-streaked sprint. She swore she’d never pull that chuunibyou badass act again.
People only died when they courted death. Curiosity was what really killed the cat.
Shredded metal hurtled through the thirty-meter waterspouts, the rushing air shrieking like a swarm of bees. Ye Jingqiu stood no chance of outrunning it. As the breath of death bore down, she skidded to a halt, whirled around, and spat out her lifeline in a frantic rush:
“Copy copy copy!”
This time in perfect Mandarin. A gleam of molten gold flashed in her eyes.
So when the Afanc hauled itself smugly onto dry land, coiling for a leisurely second strike—
The frail eighteen-year-old human was floating in midair.
The command had activated.
Omnipresent water elements heeded her call, submitting to her in perfect, humble obedience. Currents converged from nowhere to cradle her, positioning her to confront the gloating, low-rent beast.
Strands of jet-black hair drifted around her. Ye Jingqiu drew a deep breath, wrestling down the wild surge pulsing through her veins.
Every time she invoked “Word Manifestation,” she struggled at first to keep control, as if something exotic was stirring to life inside her.
Side effect, probably.
Ye Jingqiu pushed the thought aside. This was her fourth time wielding the power to commune with elements. She had plunged into the Huangpu River beneath the veil of night, vanishing into the boundless sea amid the churning chaos. She had soared to Chongming Island at dawn, vaulting through layered mists from the edge of the heavens…
Her soul, long caged in steel and concrete, was finally free. The sky and sea—those were her true home.
“Now the fight’s fair.”
The compliant water elements coalesced around her, a lethal edge forming in her clenched fist. Ye Jingqiu whispered the words and charged headlong once more.
~~~
Lost in their elemental fury, she and it had both overlooked the third presence on the battlefield.
Dozens of meters away, atop a massive crane, a woman in form-fitting gear stood unmoved amid the storm. She had swept her cascade of black hair into a hasty ponytail, baring a pair of cool, fathomless dark eyes.
Her perch was the crane’s arm—a bright yellow iron beam scarcely eight centimeters wide—with a bottomless drop below. Yet she balanced there as casually as on solid ground.
After a beat, she tapped her earpiece and cocked her head. Her voice was flat, mechanical: “Aether?”
The AI known as Aether chimed in right away, its childish tone jarringly upbeat amid the tension, brimming with cheer:
“Meow~ Good morning, Captain Shi!”
Shi Zui’s eyes flicked toward the distant, leaping blue-white figure.
“Log new exotic species: suspected Afanc water-seeker from European myth, Hua She from the Classic of Mountains and Seas.”
“Target Ye Jingqiu. Submit level assessment request to Center Group.”
“Update C-Class Mission: Estimated direct contact with target in 15 days.”
Interesting