Hanliun: Cultivation Saga (Love Is Stored In The Chickens)

[Chaotic Moth]

The Resentment... She always needed more. Hungry, lurking, eating. Fangs always wanting to consume. Prey had happened upon her trail somehow. Perplexed, and more excited than she had any right to be... hungry. A fox, but something yet human. Smirking, Yi Ai moved around in her Blood Pool, memorizing the scent. Giddy, and thrilled already at the idea of a chase, she set upon the fox. They would be hers.

Nose lifted, Yi Ai smelled the power growing stronger, and she hissed with excitement. Bubbles in the Blood Pool rippled around her, her bloodlust growing. Hers, power, consume. Her head was fully out of the pool, white eyes trained dead on the target. Silently, stalking, she raised herself out of her hidden place, and was out of the pool. Hiding behind a nearby boulder, she slithered, and crawled soundlessly, leaving a small trail of resentment behind her. A low, dark glow of red began to emanate, and she lunged.

Pulling the fox, she wrapped her small, lithe body around them. Resentment growing, her power was growing, and nothing could stop her. Into the pool they went. Hers.

"Yes, yes, yes," she hissed in happiness to no one. As they sunk below, already one of the foxes tails, consumed. She laughed, feeling herself grow more mad.

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​

Leaving the used corpse along a forgotten trail, Yi Ai floated back to her pool. It didn't matter if she had left the body a mile from her, or two towns over. The scent was forever hers. Yi Ai became the foxes scent, the feast had finished. She could track them anywhere now. Hers.

 

[sassafras]

"Aiya! I hear you, I hear you," Shen Mingli huffed, waving a hand dismissively at the tendril of smoke wrapping about his arm. Countless more, thin but demanding wisped between the thick fur of his tails, whispered past his ears. "Why don't you tell me what you're hiding here, hm?"

That was the thing about resentment, it was always hiding something. Protecting something. After all, it had to come from somewhere.

And the resentment here at the edge of a blood pool was massive, all encompassing really, compared to the little tendrils nipping at his heels.

"Ancient burial grounds? Oh! A fell dragon, perhaps?" His own curious eyes were all that looked back at Shen Mingli as he pondered the red lake. It was too thick to see anything below the surface. Shen Mingli's tails swished in excitement at the thought; what a meal that would be! His ninth tail may finally be within reach! Surely the power of such a magical creature would fuel his cultivation well beyond his years. "I've never eaten dragon before! How do you think it tastes?"

The resentment, as usual, didn't answer him.

Or perhaps it did, with a sudden silence. No more whispers or tempting caresses against his skin.

Golden eyes blinked back up at him, the distorted reflection of fluffy ears swiveling atop his head. And behind that, a blink of a shadow, "Hu-" Shen Mingli didn't see his attacker coming before he was being dragged beneath the surface with a shout.

A low growl tore from his throat and with it precious air as whatever it was that had him coiled and squeezed and clawed mindlessly at the resentment that precariously wrapped his golden core.

Weighed down by water, by blood, and the relentless need for oxygen, just the tips of a clawed hand breached the surface, reaching for those tendrils of grief and hatred that had dogged his every step through the surrounding wasteland.

But there was none to be found.

That was the thing about resentment, after all. It was always hiding something. Protecting something --

The struggle didn't last long. Magic sealed - stifled, stolen - Shen Mingli's claws and fangs did nothing to deter the predator that held him in it's grasp, sipped at his carefully cultivated resentment, played within his long nurtured core.

-- And it knew when that something should be itself.

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Shen Mingli drifted at the side of a road, lifeless but for the weak pulse in his veins and an inescapable pain, until a gentle hand pulled him from the darkness and a feebly whimper from his throat.