Maybe My Soulmate! (GL)

Mo Yuxin and Su Yubing listened to all of this with a relaxed kind of interest. They were curious, but they were not afraid. At most, they wondered what kind of food the harbour city might have and whether the fish there would taste better than the ones in the inland towns.

Before they reached the coast, they crossed one last huge wilderness, a long stretch of reed marshes and broken stone causeways where the land slowly sank toward the water. That place was full of fog in the morning and glowing insects at night. It was also where they met the marsh serpent, a divine beast so old that the locals had built a whole small shrine to keep it appeased. The serpent was beautiful in a cold, terrifying way, with pale jade scales and a mane of thin silver whiskers that floated around its head like underwater grass. It rose from the swamp when it sensed strong cultivators passing through, and the force of its appearance sent waves rolling through the reeds. The local shrine keeper nearly fell over in fear, but Mo Yuxin only narrowed her eyes and said, ”It is guarding something.”

She was right again, which Su Yubing found deeply annoying in the affectionate sort of way. The beast had been watching over an ancient stone tablet buried under the marsh, and that tablet held a spatial path map that could one day help sailors navigate a hidden reef pattern near the port. A group of smugglers had been trying to dig it up in secret, and the serpent had been fighting them off for days. Now it saw Mo Yuxin and Su Yubing as another possible threat. The battle that followed was one of the most beautiful of the entire journey. The marsh water exploded into mist. The reeds bent flat under spiritual force. The serpent’s tail moved like a silver mountain range twisting through the swamp, and each sweep of it could smash a whole section of broken causeway. Mo Yuxin cut through the air with such precision that each strike looked like a line drawn by a master painter, while Su Yubing froze entire stretches of water just long enough to create stepping points in the flood. They moved with perfect trust, one reading the other’s breath without needing a word.

At one point, the serpent coiled up from the marsh and lashed forward toward Su Yubing, but Mo Yuxin flashed in front of her without hesitation. The impact sent a shock through the reeds and made the shrine bell ring wildly. Su Yubing’s heart squeezed painfully at the sight, not because she doubted Mo Yuxin could handle it, but because she never liked seeing her wife take even a single hard hit if it could be avoided. She answered by pushing a wave of icy spiritual light along the serpent’s body, slowing its movement just enough for Mo Yuxin to land a crushing strike against the stone tablet base and reveal the hidden path map beneath. Once they understood the beast’s anger, they removed the smugglers, cleared the broken tools and trap arrays from the site, and then restored the tablet to the shrine. The marsh serpent calmed down almost at once. Before it sank back beneath the water, it lowered its huge head in the closest thing to a bow that a beast like that could manage. The shrine keeper burst into tears from relief. Su Yubing, who had been tense the whole time, grabbed Mo Yuxin’s sleeve afterward and hugged her so tightly Mo Yuxin nearly laughed aloud.

The marsh road could have ended there, but Mo Yuxin and Su Yubing were the kind of people who never really traveled in a straight line unless they felt like it. A few days after dealing with the marsh serpent, they took a quieter side route through a wide green valley that locals called Willow Basin. On maps it looked like a simple stretch of farmland, but in practice it was one of those places where the earth had its own little temper and the plants grew with a strange, almost sentient strength. Vine roots coiled under the soil like sleeping snakes. Flower stalks climbed too high and dropped pollen that could make ordinary people dizzy. Even the wind there felt thick with moisture and old spiritual power. A tiny settlement on the edge of the basin had been asking for help because their vegetable fields kept getting swallowed overnight by a fast-growing plant they had never seen before. By the time Mo Yuxin and Su Yubing arrived, the whole place was half buried in broad black-green leaves that gleamed like oiled leather in the sun.

At first glance, it looked like a simple plant infestation. Then Mo Yuxin dug a little deeper with her spiritual sense and found that the roots were connected to an ancient buried formation stone beneath the fields. Someone long ago had planted a defensive array there to protect the basin from flood and drought. Over the years the formation had cracked, and the leftover energy had mutated into a wild vine spirit that no longer understood it was supposed to be helpful. Now it was just hungry and confused and spreading everywhere. The village elders were scared it would eat the whole harvest. The farmers were scared their children would get caught in it. Su Yubing listened to all of them with her usual calm expression, then asked one of the old women whether the thing was poisonous. When the woman nodded, Mo Yuxin immediately raised her sleeves and said, very dryly, ”Then we should probably stop letting it grow inside people’s cabbages.”

Su Yubing covered her mouth and laughed so hard the village children stared at her.

The two of them moved into the fields at sunrise. The vine spirit was not a huge monster in the way the swamp serpent had been, but it was clever in its own annoying way.

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to be continued.