chapter 3 : her life .... since then

During lunch break, Qin Chen joined her on the rooftop with two bento boxes and a suspicious grin.

“Minya looked like she wanted to challenge you to a duel.”

“She can’t. School rules prohibit public exorcisms.”

He blinked. “...That was a joke, right?”

She didn’t answer.

He stared.

“Wait. Ruqing—what do you do after school?”

She sipped her juice. “Homework. Obviously.”

“You said that with the confidence of someone who’s never done homework.”

She smiled, and for the first time that day, Little Spirit whispered from her wrist talisman, stifling giggles.

“Master, you’re scary when you lie~”

The rooftop was their sanctuary.

Far from the chaos of noisy classrooms, cliques, and Minya’s pettiness echoing like a cursed flute, it was the one place no one bothered to climb — maybe because the stairwell creaked like a haunted house or maybe because Feng Ruqing gave everyone the impression she’d hex them for stepping on her shadow.

But Qin Chen wasn’t “everyone.”

He plopped down beside her on the edge of the rooftop, lunchboxes in hand, sleeves rolled up, hair a tousled mess courtesy of a failed science experiment earlier that day.

“Lunch delivery for my perpetually unimpressed friend,” he said grandly.

Ruqing raised an eyebrow. “You sure I’m not secretly your emotional support cryptid?”

He grinned. “Nah. You’re far too elegant for that. Maybe a chaos phoenix with anxiety issues.”

She stared.

He shoved a bento box into her hands.

---

As they ate, a gentle breeze tugged at their uniforms. The city spread beneath them like a painted map — glinting windows, honking cars, clouds like sleepy beasts above.

Qin Chen tapped his chopsticks against the lid of his lunchbox. “So.”

Ruqing gave him a sidelong glance. “So?”

“What would you be if school wasn’t a thing?”

“A hermit. In the mountains. Brewing tea and misanthropy.”

He laughed. “Sounds about right.”

A pause.

“...Seriously though.”

She looked up at the sky, thoughtful. “I’d want to heal people. Quietly. Without the pressure of grades and pretending to care about the history of spiritually unimportant rocks.”

“Unimportant? Those rocks built our economy.”

“Those rocks built my boredom.”

He laughed again, and for a moment, her shoulders relaxed. Around him, she didn’t have to dodge suspicion or stitch up spiritual wounds under fluorescent lights.

But still.

She never told him about the realm.

Never told him about ghosts whispering from sewer grates or demons lurking in mirrors or the way her hands burned with lotus fire at night.

Not because she didn’t trust him.

But because once he knew, everything would change.

---

Qin Chen stretched out on the concrete, arms behind his head. “You ever think we’re all just... barely surviving this teenage circus?”

She looked at him — hair in his eyes, a smudge of ink on his cheek, still smiling despite it all.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “But some of us hide it better than others.”

He cracked open one eye, sensing something behind the words.

“Hey, Ruqing.”

“Hm?”

“If you ever wanna run away and be a mountain hermit… I’ll carry the kettle.”

She blinked.

And, for once, smiled without sarcasm.

---

Beneath her sleeve, the talisman glowed faintly. Little Spirit murmured inside, voice barely audible.

“Master… do you like this human boy~?”

Ruqing nearly choked on her rice.

“I—I tolerate his stupidity. With grace.”

Little Spirit giggled. “You’re blushing~”

“I will banish you.”

Qin Chen glanced over. “You okay?”

She cleared her throat. “Just considering setting someone on spiritual fire.”

He nodded solemnly. “Totally normal lunch thought.”

After lunch, the school day faded into a quiet hum of routine. Teachers lectured. Students pretended to care. Notes passed. Sleep threatened.

But Feng Ruqing was somewhere else entirely.

Not physically — she sat at her desk, half-listening to Mr. Wang's passionate explanation of “cultural spirit residue in early civilization”— but her mind wandered. Backward.

To then.

---

She was ten when she saw her first ghost.

A real one.

Not the “I think I saw something spooky in the closet” kind — but a wailing woman with no eyes, hovering over her sick grandmother’s hospital bed.

She hadn’t screamed.

She’d stared.

Until the ghost stared back.

Then the lotus flame ignited for the first time — a flickering gold spark in her palm. It seared the spirit with a hiss and sent it fleeing through the window.

Her grandmother recovered three days later.

But the nurses said the machines had gone haywire that night. Cold spots. Shadows. Odd burn marks on the floor.

They didn’t know what happened.

But her uncle did.

Uncle Shen.

---

He found her in the temple ruins two weeks later, sitting alone with herbs in her lap and candle wax on her fingers, trying to recreate the fire.

“You’re not supposed to have it,” he had said. “The lotus flame chooses no one anymore. It’s cursed.”

She had looked up at him, confused.

And he had knelt, touched her head gently, and said—

“From now on… you’ll need to learn to hide.”

---

At twelve, she purified a cursed doll from a neighbor’s house. It nearly shattered her soul. The family never knew. Her uncle stitched her hand back together with talisman ink and grit.

At fourteen, she was chased out of a street fair by a spirit dog no one else could see. She laughed it off. They thought she was weird.

At fifteen, she bled out in an alley, soul fractured from a ritual gone wrong. That was the night the realm awakened.

That was the night she stopped trusting the world.

---

Back in class, someone called her name.

She blinked and looked up.

Qin Chen.

He’d turned around in his seat, brow furrowed, tapping his pen on her desk.

“You zoned out,” he said softly. “Everything okay?”

Ruqing nodded, masking the old ache with her usual smirk. “Just mourning the death of my attention span.”

He relaxed. “I was about to start making bird noises to wake you up.”

“Do it and I’ll summon a spiritual chicken to chase you through the halls.”

He grinned. “You have a lot of oddly specific threats.”

“I’m a woman of oddly specific experience.”

---

But as she watched him laugh and turn back around, her chest tightened for a heartbeat.

Because he didn’t know.

He didn’t know how deep the fire ran in her.

How many curses she’d bled under. How many nights she’d screamed in the realm with no one to hear her but a floating spirit who liked tea and teasing.

“Normal boys like him…” she thought, “don’t belong in a world like mine.”

So she stayed quiet.

She always had.

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