"Zhuò took Chúnhú as his wife. Entranced and smitten, they plotted together. Why then did Yi bend his bow against the hide, and swallow with measure?"(Chuci: Tianwen)
[My adopted son — well done.]
[Now allow this mother to step in and finish what you couldn't — and put an end to these hideous deities.]
The Lunar Capital's barrier shuddered and cracked. And in the deeper, more desolate void beyond, a pair of crimson eyes watched it all unfold — seven tails blazing like living torches behind her.
Junko.
In the mythology of the Central Plains, the wife of Hou Yi — and also the woman who killed him.
She had ascended from pure resentment, yet was not a vengeful spirit in the conventional sense. Her power was "purification" — an authority capable of refining gods, buddhas, and all living beings in bulk.
She had once had a physical body. She had once known the most ordinary and most precious happiness that the land of the Central Plains could offer.
She had once had a child. Bone of her bone, blood of her blood.
But then the man called "Hou Yi," to earn the favour of the haughty Chang'e, to seize a fleeting chance at divinity, drew that bow — the bow that had shot down nine suns.
The shriek of the arrow through the air became Junko's eternal tinnitus.
Her child fell in a pool of blood, felled by a father's arrow shot to court another woman.
The sheer extremity of her grief drove her forward — her spirit ascended, and purified.
The agony of losing her child and the burning hatred of having her flesh taken from her intertwined and refined themselves inside her soul, until she had forged herself into an undying flame of vengeance.
Perhaps by chance or perhaps by fate — in that moment, she finally broke through an invisible shackle she hadn't even known was binding her, and became something whose true magnitude even she herself could not yet fathom.
Her existence caused the Buddha to lower his eyes. It made the Three Pure Ones sigh in commiseration. Even the Three Noble Children of Takamagahara had to step back from the edge of her brilliance when they faced her.
She had thought the rest of her existence would be nothing but this endless, consuming revenge. Until the strange entity called the "chat group" appeared in her divine consciousness.
At first, Junko thought it was some kind of cheap illusion conjured by the Lunar Capital's deities.
She could sense that while this illusion's tier was not low, it was still somewhat inferior to what she had become.
But when she truly stepped into that eerily silent chat group, she was able to sense, through her perception that could span the heavens, the faint scent of kindred spirits behind those blurred avatars.
They were all the same in essence.
This chat group was not a lively place. It was solemn and heavy — every message felt like squeezing blood from a parched heart.
Here, Junko met women who, like herself, had been ground to dust by the millstone of fate.
The first group member was called [Lord of the Lands Between].
Junko had occasionally heard her murmuring late in the night — an eternal queen unwilling to name herself — who had shattered the ring that held the world together out of despair, having lost the most beloved of her eldest children. For the sake of a mother's love that could never again be whole, she had chosen to let the entire world plunge into endless chaos and ruin, chewing on solitude day after day within the cage of the Erdtree.
The second group member was called [Queen of Britain].
A fairy of paradise who called herself the Winter Queen, struggling through cycle after cycle of betrayal and repetition.
Through the chat group's livestream, Junko had once caught a glimpse of that queen's heartbreak — watching her beloved daughter's limbs cut away by vile fairies, discarded into a black abyss like refuse.
And then there was the most obsessive one — the one fixated on the annihilation of humanity — [Great Witch of the Wind].
She had gone mad searching for her Latia, releasing "viruses" in the most brutal manner to purify the surface's humans one after another, declaring that when the surface was truly clean, her child would return in the holy light of God.
This was a graveyard where the grieving huddled together for warmth.
Junko quietly observed them. They rarely communicated — more often than not, they were simply confirming that the others were still "alive," confirming that there were still others in the world who bore the same pain.
Until one day, someone appeared and broke the silence:
[Yearning to Become the Perfect Human Being].
When the special mission called "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter" was posted, Junko had intended only to watch from the sidelines.
Because the mission required cooperating with the "Moon Princess" — and the word "moon," even in passing, was enough to make her hatred boil over again.
Then she saw the knight dispatched by the [Queen of Britain] — a knight who bore that queen no true loyalty.
That was the Fairy Knight called Melusine. Junko could feel the weight behind that girl's armour-clad heart — a lost child, tangled up in loyalty and confusion that didn't truly belong to her.
But what held Junko's attention most, of course, was the young man whose chat nickname was [Yearning to Become the Perfect Human Being].
When Lord Tsukuyomi sent down the divine famine — the punishment that stripped the Japanese islands of all food — the young man did not choose to end the mission and leave. He stayed.
Junko watched the young man cut open his own flesh, turning blood and body into beasts and grain, to feed the mortals who didn't even know his name.
"Take it and eat. It's all right — I'll grow back."
That willingness to do good without hesitation, that gentleness extended to the weak — it sent ripples through Junko's cold divine consciousness.
How much he resembled her child, who never grew up.
And what happened next?
Junko didn't even need to count the strands of fate — she knew that this young man, who came from a world of lower power levels and carried nothing but a "biological database" as his essential nature, had no way forward from there.
The starving civilians he had saved — driven by fear and greed — not only felt no gratitude but rose against the weakened young man with knives in hand, incited by the Lunar Capital's emissaries. They wanted to "kill the goose for the golden eggs" — to seize this body capable of producing infinite food and claim it entirely for themselves.
The assassination attempt was stopped by the young man's companion, but it broke something inside the young man's consciousness.
The fragment within Junko's soul — the one she called "the maternal instinct" — was finally, completely ignited.
And time at last arrived at the fifteenth day of the mission.
When the divine light cut across the stars and illuminated Heian-kyo once more, when that oppressive full moon reappeared — Junko's divine nature descended.
She took the form of a woman with the ancient grace of the Central Plains, dressed in flowing wide-sleeved robes over a qipao, and stepped onto the stairs of the gold-and-silver pavilion. Every lurking scoundrel hidden in Heian-kyo fell into a void of blank unconsciousness the instant they laid eyes on her.
And at the top of the pavilion, Junko met the Kaguya who called herself "Yachiyo."
Yachiyo had clearly recognised her — this uninvited guest.
[You are… Lady Junko?]
Yachiyo's voice trembled. Not from fear of the Lunar Capital's sworn enemy — but from the sight of hope.
Junko's "purification" was the authority of creation itself. If she were willing to act…
Junko's expression was calm. Her gaze passed over Yachiyo and fell on the young man, who had been reduced to something barely above a living corpse.
The group chat was utterly silent. Perhaps the others all had their own matters to attend to — even with the livestream running, Junko didn't see a single viewer.
Yachiyo suddenly knelt before Junko:
[Lady Junko — since you are here, please save him.]
[He should never have been pulled into this wretched story. If you want your revenge, if you want the Lunar Capital brought down, I will cooperate with everything. I can offer you anything. Whatever you ask of me, I will do it.]
[Please.]
Yachiyo pressed her forehead to the floor, that cascade of black hair spreading across the boards beneath her.
Junko looked at the young man. The more she looked, the more he resembled her child.
Even without Yachiyo saying a word, she might have acted anyway:
[From this day forward — you are this mother's adopted son.]
She turned her head, looking at the flickering chat group interface.
With a casual sweep, Junko stripped her own chat group access and pressed it into the centre of Yachiyo's brow.
At the same time, she refined the strands of fate — purifying all the possible outcomes of the chat group's posted special mission down to this single one: The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.
[Lady Junko…?]
[Let this mother do what you couldn't, little one. You've always feared loneliness — you don't need to fear it any longer.]
[No price is needed. Your story is a good one. The story that gave this mother a chance at revenge — that is the finest price you could ever give.]
Junko rolled up her sleeves, her form dissolving into the air. Seven brilliant tail-flames streaked like meteors toward the Moon.
There, at the barrier already on the verge of shattering, her supreme divine nature revealed its true face — and she laughed at the deity who had dared, once again, to hurt her only child.
"Well done, my adopted son."
"Chang'e — Tsukuyomi—"
"Are you watching—"
To be continued…
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