The Fox Demon Came to Repay the Monk Before His Vows novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Nine Thousand Steps
A fox spirit climbs nine thousand steps to repay the monk who once spared him and is pinned to the gatepost by a staff; the monk goes grey at the bead on his throat, then says the fox may stay for the three days before his vows.
There were nine thousand steps up to Wuchen Temple, and Hu Yanzhi counted every one of them with his teeth clenched.
At step eight thousand, the first bronze bell rang on the gate above him.
The sound went through his skull.
Yanzhi was three hundred and forty-one years old.
He had outrun hunters, a flood, and two of his own aunts, and he had never been brought to his knees by a bell.
He was on his knees by step eight thousand four hundred.
He got up again, because he had a plan, and the plan did not include crawling.
He fixed his hair, which was the color of cream with honey stirred in, and straightened his orange sleeves.
He touched the black wooden bead on the red cord at his throat.
It was the one thing on this mountain that made the bells hurt a little less.
Then he climbed the last six hundred steps.
The gate was shut and its lanterns were lit.
A monk stood in the gap between the two doors with a staff held across his body.
He was very tall, with a shaved head and shoulders as wide as the gate itself.
He looked at Yanzhi with the flat patience of a wall.
Yanzhi had imagined this moment for seven years, and in every version he was charming.
"Good evening," he said, and his voice cracked on the second word.
"You are a fox," the monk said.
He said it the way a man reads a label.
"I'm a guest," said Yanzhi.
"You are a fox spirit, and you climbed through the ward-bells with a stolen charm, and in three days I take my final vows."
The monk stepped forward, and the staff moved so fast that Yanzhi only saw it after it had stopped.
The wood cracked against the gatepost beside his ear.
Then the monk's left hand landed flat in the middle of Yanzhi's chest and pushed him back against the stone.
He didn't hit him, and he didn't hurt him.
He just held him there, with a palm the size of a plate over his heart.
The heat of it soaked through three layers of silk.
Yanzhi was a virgin, and nobody had ever touched him like that.
Nobody had touched him at all.
He had spent most of his three hundred and forty-one years in a den with his mother.
The last seven he had spent alone on a cold ridge.
Every story about seductive foxes was a lie, and he was the proof.
His heart did something stupid under that big palm, and the monk felt it.
Yanzhi watched him feel it.
The monk's thick brows drew together, and his eyes dropped to his own hand.
A line of color climbed from his collar up his throat to the smooth curve of his scalp.
"Your pulse is very fast," he said.
"It was a long climb."
"It isn't the climb."
"Then take your hand off my heart before I embarrass us both."
The monk did not move his hand.
For one long, awful breath neither of them moved at all, while the bells rang overhead and the dusk went blue.
"My name is Hu Yanzhi," Yanzhi said, because he had practiced it.
"Seven years ago, on the Hanyun slope, you stood over me with a sword. Then you lowered it and told me to run."
The monk's face did not change.
"I came to repay you. A life for a life, in the old way."
"I'll cook, I'll sweep, I'll carry water, and I'll do anything else a debt like mine is good for."
"I don't remember sparing anyone," said the monk.
His voice was flat, but too flat.
"You wouldn't. You were busy being merciful."
"Fox."
"Hu Yanzhi."
"Whatever you think happened, nothing is owed. Go down the mountain."
"It's nine thousand steps down."
"Then you had better start."
Yanzhi lifted his chin to the angle that always worked on mirrors.
"Or you could tell me your name."
The monk looked at him for a long moment.
Then his eyes went to Yanzhi's throat, to the black bead on its red cord, and every drop of color left his face.
His hand fell away from Yanzhi's chest.
"Where did you get that?" he said, and his voice was no longer flat.
"I found it in the grass, where you'd been standing."
Yanzhi touched the bead.
"It's yours, isn't it? Your rosary has seventeen beads, and the whole mountain knows you're one short."
The monk took a step back, and then another.
The giant who had pinned him to a gatepost with one hand now looked like a boy who had been handed something burning.
"I'll give it back," Yanzhi said, and he meant it, though his fingers closed around the bead anyway. "After I've repaid you."
"No," said the monk. "Keep it."
Yanzhi stared at him.
A long breath went out of the monk.
When he spoke again, his face had set into a wall once more.
"Three days," he said. "You may stay three days. You will sleep in the woodshed and keep out of the halls."
"Thank you."
"You will not touch me."
"Of course not," said Yanzhi, with great dignity, though he was pink to the ears.
"And if I tell you to leave, you leave."
"Understood."
The monk turned and walked into the temple.
Yanzhi stood in the lantern light with his knees shaking and his heart going like a drum.
Someone coughed softly on the stairs behind him.
An old man sat on the ninth step from the top, a small, wrinkled person in patched saffron robes.
He had a white beard down to his belt and a wooden staff across his knees.
He had been there the whole time.
"Welcome, young fox," said the abbot of Wuchen Temple, and his eyes were bright with something very like joy.
"Jingmo has not let a guest sleep under this roof in seven years."
He smiled at the gate where the monk had gone.
"He has never let anyone stay."
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