ALL NOVEL 2
Homeless Bunny 2
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I moaned, clutching my poor head. My own yelling sent agonizing pangs through my skull, like that fucker Surtr took a club of magically-condensed magma to my head… again…
I took a deep breath and reined in my power. The poor bunny I’d been petting was frozen solid, scared out of its wits. I reached out and filled it with healing wood qi before letting it scamper away. Slowly, the world began to breathe a sigh of relief, as though a great disaster had passed it by.
“This is… bad…”
Godslayers were creatures of habit. Voban, centuries old geezer that he was, was still every bit the hunter. Luo Hao was a xianxia-nut. Aisha was “eternally seventeen or else.” We were creatures of obsession, of an all-consuming passion that defined the core of our being. We were defined firstly by our natures, and secondly by our Authorities. And of our Authorities, the very first god we slew tended to have an outsized influence on our souls.
I was the Jade Rabbit. It wasn’t just a title I inherited or a name I adopted to pay homage to Jade. I was the Jade Rabbit in a very literal sense. Because Jade gave me “all of her estate,” it affected me in ways no one could have predicted when I first ascended.
For starters, Maxa’xak wasn’t the last snake-god to try and eat me. Hell, I probably fought all of the strongest ones, except Yamata who was flavoring some shitty sake. Apophis? He was a chump. Typhon? Better, but a hundred times the bitching didn’t exactly make for a good time. Jormungandr? Probably my least favorite. Fucker ate me! Again!
Half of these weren’t even in my territory either. They just liked to show up at random points to “eat the biggest rabbit” and none of the others interfered because “he’s your prey, Tianyu.” By the gods, I hated my siblings sometimes…
My unfortunate encounters with snake-deities aside, many of my Authorities were heavily associated with my status as the Jade Rabbit, which meant cooking (or alchemy), the five elements, yin and yang, or… the moon.
Which some fuckwit broke.
I took in a deep, fortifying breath. Losing control of my temper really wasn’t healthy… for everything else around me… I reached into my pocket and produced the white rabbit’s foot which acted as the key to the Lunar Palace. I tossed it into the air and… nothing.
“Figures… Broken moon, broken key.” Sighing, I climbed into the sky. My Authorities would be greatly hampered here. Not all of them, but I couldn’t just pick up every body of water in the world as the Master of Tides and club a bitch to death with the ocean anymore. At best, I could pull off a tidal wave or five.
Anything associated with the moon was heavily weakened. Which, unfortunately, also meant any easy access to the Netherworld. The Lunar Palace was the vector by which I crossed dimensions. It was my home and waypoint all in one and the moon in the mortal plane was its representation.
“Shit… May as well take stock of the damage I guess…”
I shot up into the sky, racing on gathered clouds. Speed was very much a concept associated with bunnies and training with the zodiac beasts really helped me get in touch with my bestial side. Godspeed, that causality warping “I’m faster because I say so” phenomenon, was something I could touch on at will now, no Authority required. Laura joked that I was a Loony Toons character and she wasn’t wrong.
I felt the air thin out as I climbed higher but paid it no mind. If Doni could survive taking a meteor for a joyride, me hopping to the edge of space was hardly anything noteworthy. More pressing was the thick divine mana that cloaked itself around the moon.
It was… light…? The sun…? It held the celestial body together, keeping the fragments from drifting off, or worse, falling to the earth below and causing an extinction-level event. Someone did this to protect the mortals below but I could find no further trace of their mana. Did they just… leave? Why?
I stood on one of the fragments and looked around. It was a strange feeling, knowing that this should be mine, was mine, but also not. Then I felt it, a second presence. Where the first held the moon together, the second reeked of destruction and darkness.
“Must be the one who broke it,” I muttered darkly. “They’re not around either. Did two gods fight and mutually kill each other? No, then the mana signatures would have faded by now. They’re both alive…”
The more important question was how I was going to enter the Netherworld. It didn’t have to be the Lunar Palace. Over a century of cooking for gods and exalted guests earned me quite a bit of goodwill. I was often called “Divine Chef” or “he whose hall is filled with laughter” if you were Chinese because they liked being pointlessly wordy and vague about things. Something about poetry? I had no idea, it was one of the few things Luo Hao and I disagreed on.
Point being, I was welcome in virtually every sector of the Netherworld because I welcomed most of them in mine. I had a reputation as a gracious host and, should there be a need, the lord of the foremost neutral ground in the Netherworld. The Lunar Palace had been used by warring parties to negotiate terms of peace before.
If I could just get to the Netherworld, I could find friends, call in a few favors, maybe use the fey roads to get back to the Lunar Palace.
The question was, how? How would I cross over? Dimensional magic just wasn’t my thing.
I poked and prodded at the moon. It responded weakly, as though it was reaching out through the dark one’s mana. Could that be why the key to the Lunar Palace didn’t work? Some sort of divine Authority equivalent of a lead box around the moon? If so, the world would change to suit me in the absence of the god of darkness. Slowly but surely, I could feel my own conceptual weight asserting itself over the moon. It was shaving away at the layer of their mana, but I had no idea how long it’d take until I had my moon back, or if that’d fix the problem.
Maybe I had to physically put the moon back together again? “God, I hope not. I really don’t want to play Humpty Dumpty with the whole moon, damn it… There’s got to be a better way… Think, Tianyu, prove you’re more than a cooking idiot… Information… I need information on this world and its magic…”
I looked down at the earth below. The continents were definitely not of earth, which meant I could be forced to follow natural laws that were foreign to me. The magic crystals were certainly strange. I wasn’t afraid for my safety, but it could get annoying pretty fast.
Down below, I saw twinkling lights. Just four of them, which meant there were only four metropolitan areas worth mentioning in this world. That there were lights at night alone implied a certain level of technological advancement, but that there were only four suggested something was keeping these people from expanding to the rest of the world. It wasn’t geography; I could see plenty of rivers and lakes where civilizations tended to develop.
“Right, something unusual is keeping civilization small despite a decent tech-level. Probably something magical. Some kind of megafauna? A curse?” Information. Information was key and I wouldn’t get that by lounging around on a hunk of rock. “Goals, Tianyu. Step one: Figure out which bastard broke my house so I can kill him. Step two: Find a gate to the Netherworld. And… And a new world would mean new ingredients… right?”
That thought made me pause. Did I need to go back right away? This was a whole new world! Which meant a whole new culinary culture. I knew from the local wildlife that there were some commonalities, but there had to be different cooking styles, right?
I felt a fire light inside my heart at the thought. I was an explorer! A pioneer of new culinary horizons! How could I let this chance pass me by?
I saw the four cities and took careful stock of each location. The first seemed to be in the desert. That probably meant they were used to preservation techniques such as drying, smoking, or cheesemaking. They would have to rely heavily on imported vegetables or stress trade with various oases. Specific techniques like that could be interesting, but they’d probably lack variety in their cooking so I crossed them out. The northernmost city, filled with ice and snow, got eliminated for the same reason.
Between the eastern city which was near rainforests and the central city that seemed to be more temperate, I of course went for the central city. Temperate climates tended to have the best ingredients in terms of variety thanks to an even distribution of the four seasons. More, since it was central to the other cities, if there was any trade between them, I wouldn’t miss out on culinary styles from the others.
So decided, I hopped back down towards the earth. I’d repair the moon once it was done cleansing itself. Until then, this was to be an adventure!
X
“Kaw!” I heard something cry.
I ignored it. Crows were good for the environment. It wasn’t until the damn thing flew closer that I noticed something similar to the dark god’s mana signature. It wasn’t exact, more like a heavily watered down variant, a cinder of a cinder of the god’s power, but it was still enough to fuel this creature’s life.
The not-crow was as large as a school bus, with an appropriately wide wingspan. It had a skull-like mask that made me think of the edgiest of Comicon attendees.
I was going to fly by. Born of the home-wrecker or not, it deserved to exist. I could feel its malice, but it probably played an important role as the local apex predator. It didn’t deserve a god-tier bunny slapping it into the sun.
Then it opened its mouth and tried to swallow me. An obese crow tried to eat me. Me. The temper that had been simmering boiled over. Getting eaten by a snake-god responsible for the apocalypse was one thing. It had been a necessity, even if Annie never stopped calling me the streaker-Campione in private. I could even tolerate doing it twice more to Jormungandr and Leviathan. But a crow?
Not even a divine beast, a crow?
I’d never live through the shame if anyone back home heard I allowed that. I skidded to a stop in the middle of the sky, sending a plume of clouds in all directions. I reached up and pinched its beak in two fingers, bringing the bus-sized creature to a screeching halt. It fluttered its wings futilely and I let it struggle for a while as it tried to pull away.
“Oi, mister crow, carve this in your fucking head.” I slammed its beak closed with an audible crack. Then, pulling out my Wooden Spatula of Righteous Rebuke, trademarked with great trauma by Laura, I gave it a good smack on the nose.
“Bunnies.” *slap*
“Are.” *slap*
“Not.” *slap*
“Food!” *slap*
I held it in my hands for a moment longer and flooded it with divine qi. Its crimson eyes that had been so filled with malice widened with utter, instinctual terror. With a final slap, I sent it plummeting to the earth below. It was someone else’s problem now.
A few minutes later, I alighted down in the woods a mile out from the city. It turned out to be a walled settlement roughly the size of Los Angeles but divided into several districts. I could see farms near a floodplain with irrigation channels dug into the soil. I could also see an industrial sector that hugged the coast and a forest of crimson leaves to the north. There was also some kind of castle in the distance, presumably the home of the local lord or monarch.
The farmland gave me a good idea of the local cuisine and it was… disappointing. Oh, there was a fair bit of variety as I’d expected, but none of it was foreign to me. Wheat and barley seemed to be the main grain crop. I saw chickens, cows, sheep, and horses, fairly generic animals. This world was shaping up to be remarkably similar to earth despite the initial impressions granted by its geography.
“Ugh, what a letdown,” I muttered as I walked to the main gate. “Still, they should have a library or something…”
I stood in line. The gate guards seemed to be checking caravans for some kind of ID. The caravans themselves were a strange mix of cars and horse-drawn wagons, as though some didn’t have access to modern technology, or perhaps found horses more convenient. That suggested a wide gap in available resources, which itself suggested a striated society. Unpleasant.
Worse, many people took once glance at my bunny ears and gave me a wide berth. Even the ones who weren’t shooting me dirty looks looked like they didn’t want to associate with me for some reason.
It was honestly kind of refreshing. Everywhere I went on earth, it was “Aww, he’s soooo cute!” and “Can I pet you? Do you want a carrot?” Having people dislike me for my ears was a novel experience.
Then it stopped being funny when I was immediately singled out from the crowd. “Hey, you,” a guard called, jabbing his rifle my way.
I pointed at him, then at myself. “Me?”
“Yeah, you. Let’s see some papers.”
“I have none.”
“What? You from some hick village? Menagerie?”
“What’s the difference?” the second guard said with a mocking laugh.
“Nomad,” I replied cooly. “Is there a procedure for getting into the city?”
“Papers will be 400 lien,” the first guard said. “No papers, no lien, no entry.”
I gathered that “lien” was their form of currency. I glanced at another wagon. There were more guards who waved it by. Both the owner of the wagon and the other guards refused to meet my eyes, the bystander effect at work. There seemed to be some level of racism concerning people with animal-like traits, or at least bunnies.
I felt personally offended. What did they have against bunnies? “Somehow, I doubt that’s how it works.”
“It is if you’re a fucking animal. You get all your shots?”
“I’m immune to all illnesses.”
“Yeah, of course you are. Go fuck off down to whatever burrow you came from. We don’t need more of you in Vale.”
I took a deep breath. “I’ve had a long day. I want to visit your library. You will let me in.”
“Yeah, how ‘bout no?”
I reached into my pocket, making them stiffen up. The Wooden Spatula of Righteous Rebuke? No, that was too harsh, they wouldn’t survive. I instead opted for its little brother, the Wooden Spoon of Gentle Guidance, also named by Laura amidst great struggle. I held it in one hand, bracing it between my pinky and thumb for easy flicking.
“Last chance.”
“That’s a spoon,” guard number two said with a laugh.
“It is.”
“Heh, look at this clown.”
“Suit yourself.”
My hand blurred forward. The wood, enchanted peachwood of course, made two satisfying cracks against the guards’ foreheads. It launched them into the air, knocked out with the barest hint of my strength.
And that was how I became a terrorist.
What the hell was a “White Fang?”
Author’s Note
No moon = No moon-based Authorities. Otherwise, Tianyu would just hop back to his dimension and sleep off the hangover before going straight back to cooking and that wouldn’t be much of a story.
Thank you for reading. Believe it or not, this is the seventh website I've crossposted to. I want to make sure this site catches up with the others, but it's slow, tedious work. Until then, other sites will have a much more updated library of my works. If you want to read ahead, or check out other stories I've written, you can find them all on my Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/fabled.webs.