Maybe My Soulmate! (GL)

Mo Yuxin saw that ripple and struck directly through it. The sword light split one fake body, then another, until the real beast finally launched at her in frustration. At the same time, Su Yubing sealed the heat shimmer around the salt flats with a thin curtain of frost, making the illusions much weaker. The fight lasted only a few moments before the mirage lion realized it could not win. Instead of killing it, they learned the beast had cubs hidden under a salt ridge farther east, and the spirit lamp crystal was only a problem because the caravan had unknowingly driven too close to its den. Once the lamp was moved, the lion calmed down. Madam He was so relieved she offered them three crates of tea at a ridiculous discount and insisted they take the best room at every inn for the rest of the route.

As the caravan journey continued, the nights became one of the loveliest parts of the whole trip. The desert sky was so clear that the stars looked close enough to touch. Su Yubing liked lying on a blanket and naming constellations she thought matched random animal shapes. Mo Yuxin always pretended not to care, then quietly remembered every one of them and later used the same names just to make her wife smile. They would share peeled melon, dried nuts, and warm tea while the caravan fires cracked nearby. When the others had fallen asleep, they would slip away for a walk under the moon, holding hands and talking about nonsense things like what kind of fish the harbor might have, whether the sea breeze would ruin Su Yubing’s hair, and how many markets in the coastal city would be worth visiting first. Those conversations often ended with kisses. Not rushed, not hungry, just soft and familiar and full of the kind of trust that only long companionship can build.

By the time they reached the edge of the salt flats and the land started turning greener again, they had picked up one more friend from the road. Her name was Wen Zhu, a small boat builder from a lakeside village who was traveling west because she wanted to see the sea before she got too old to do it properly. She had a practical mind, calloused hands, and the sort of fearless curiosity that made her ask the exact right questions at the exact wrong time. She was the one who finally said out loud what many people had been too shy to say: that watching the two of them was like seeing one perfect answer to every bad love story ever told. Su Yubing asked her to explain that once she had finished laughing, and Wen Zhu spent nearly an hour trying to describe how strong and tender they looked together. Mo Yuxin listened with one eyebrow raised and then, to everyone’s surprise, thanked her very seriously for the compliment. Wen Zhu looked so startled she nearly forgot how to breathe.

The road then wound toward a chain of low coastal hills dotted with windmills and fishing villages. The smell of the sea arrived in the air before the actual ocean did, and it made everyone in the caravan sit up straighter. Fishing nets hung on poles near the roadside. Gulls became more common. The people they met now spoke in quick, salty slang. Their clothes changed too, becoming lighter and better suited to the damp coast. Even the food tasted different, with more pickled vegetables, dried shrimp, seaweed cakes, and spicy shellfish soups. Mo Yuxin and Su Yubing helped in small ways along the way, fixing a collapsed seawall for one village, clearing a giant crab spirit from a tidal cave for another, and making sure a storm-battered ferry was repaired before sunset so the fishermen would not lose their catch. By now, news of their arrival had spread well beyond any one road. People started recognizing them at inns and asking cautiously whether they were really the famous couple from Azure Dragon City. Su Yubing usually smiled and said yes. Mo Yuxin usually added that they were only famous because they worked hard. That answer made the listeners like them even more.

It was on one of those coastal hills, with the wind strong enough to tangle sleeves and the sea finally visible in the distance, that they encountered the last divine beast before reaching the harbor city, a sea-winged white tiger that had been nesting on a cliff island connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. The creature was massive, with fur like moonlit foam and wings that spread out from its shoulders in feathered arcs of pale silver and blue. Local fishermen believed it was a guardian of the coast, but a recent shift in the tide had exposed old reef tunnels beneath its nesting island, and a pack of reef hounds had begun harassing the tiger’s cub. The cub was not weak, just young and scared, and the tiger was furious enough to turn the entire shoreline into a battlefield if nobody stepped in.

Mo Yuxin and Su Yubing arrived at the island just as the sea-winged tiger launched into a rage-driven dive over the tide pools. Its wings drove up sheets of spray. Rocks shattered under its claws. The reef hounds scattered in panic, but their trap formation around the cub was already half set, and the tide pools themselves had become dangerous from the sudden force of the disturbance. Su Yubing used a wide ring of ice to stabilize the slick stone causeway while Mo Yuxin cut through the reef hounds’ formation with swift, practical strikes. The tiger was too strong to subdue easily, and it fought them at first because it thought they had come to interfere with the cub. So Mo Yuxin actually had to take one hard leap into the air, meet the beast head-on above the spray, and force it to understand that she was not there to take its child.

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TO BE CONTINUED.