Liu Xiyu’s moonstone pendant still glistened with traces of dream-saliva when she burst into the kitchen, flipping through a cookbook from the Northern Frontier.

“Moon Rabbits need a hundred years of moonlight to transform…”

Her father’s words bubbled in her mind—but she wasn’t buying it.
A hundred years? Too long.
Better to fatten the rabbit up and speed things along.

As her skirt hem swept over the cracks in the stone tiles, Yun Cangyue crouched atop the top shelf of a rosewood cabinet, her ears twitching from the herbal steam wafting through the air.

She watched the girl toss a seventh suspicious ingredient into a clay pot—
a bubbling paste of clover and honey, releasing a scent that reminded Yun Cangyue of a mislabeled IV drip from her past life.

“The Records of the Northern Frontier say Moon Rabbits love sweets!”

“Three more qian of frost sugar should do the trick…”

Liu Xiyu muttered to the fire, her golden braid slipping into a mound of powdered medicine near her shoulder.

Yun Cangyue’s ears shot straight up.

As the silver spoon inlaid with agate dipped into half a bowl of sugar, she kicked off the apothecary cabinet for momentum, her silver-gray blur arcing through the air—

—and landed a perfect strike, knocking the sugar jar clean over.

The porcelain shattered with a crisp clang against the bronze mortar, and Liu Xiyu peeked out from behind the stove, flour-dusted cheeks and a mint leaf wobbling on her nose.

“Got hungry, did you, Little Snowball?”

She blinked away bits of poria from her lashes, emerald eyes gleaming with feverish conviction.

“Hang in there—this clover honey cake’s bound to be better than yesterday’s licorice dumpling!”

Yun Cangyue’s eyes drifted to the stack of “Moon Rabbit–Only Recipes” at the stove’s edge, the parchment corners scorched by a hungry flame.

Liu Xiyu’s handwriting sprawled across the pages like the golden threadwork on her skirt; the latest entry still glistened with fresh ink:

     “Seventh Month, Eighth Day: Little Snowball refused goji porridge.
     Hypothesis: needs more meat (crossed out).
     Western texts say Moon Rabbits feed on wind and dew (circled).”

Did you even check if clover grows in the Western Regions…?

Sighing inwardly, Yun Cangyue absentmindedly scratched the wooden shelf with a claw.

Her stomach still churned from yesterday’s licorice dumpling—its texture like gauze that had been soaked in sugar water.

Liu Xiyu suddenly rose up on tiptoe, her beeswax-sticky fingertip poking Yun Cangyue on the nose.

“Want a taste?”

Before she could retreat, a warm lump of “honey cake” was stuffed into her mouth.

The moment the clover fibers lodged between her molars, she flashed back to the trauma of swallowing a stethoscope tube at age seven.

“Cough! Cough cough!”

The jolt of mint and sugar hit so sharply, she thrashed her head—her ear flipping inside out from the shock.

In a flurry, Liu Xiyu scooped the little bunny’s face in both hands.

“Too hot? Want me to cool it down?”

As her hands—still dusted with medicine—rubbed her rabbit ears, Yun Cangyue finally let loose a sneeze that shook the rafters.

“Achoo—!”

The blast from the sneeze lifted Liu Xiyu’s fringe into the air, and left Yun Cangyue’s right ear flopped over, limp as a wrung-out rag.

For a beat, the air stood still.
Then the girl burst into a peal of laughter, clear as silver bells.

“Your ear… it looks just like one of the sachet tassels Mom sewed on crooked!”

Mortified, Yun Cangyue turned her back, her tail swiping a celadon brush washer off the edge of the rack.

She heard the stove shut off with a muffled pop, followed by the shuffling of embroidered shoes over the stone floor, and then the frantic flipping of book pages.

“Volume Twelve of Essential Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold Pieces says…
rabbit sneezes might be wind entering the body…”

Muttering mixed with the sound of grinding ink.
“You’ll need mugwort fumigation, plus…”

As she strained to eavesdrop, her claw snagged the tassel hanging from the medicine cabinet.

She turned—and nearly cried from the mugwort smoke.

Liu Xiyu had bundled an entire stalk into rabbit-ear shapes, wrapped tightly in gold thread like a torture device, and was now brandishing it like a vengeful ghost.

Sensing imminent doom, Yun Cangyue exploded into motion, her fluff flaring as she launched herself toward the window lattice, hooking her claw into the Xiangfei bamboo curtain for a boost.

Liu Xiyu dove after her, knocking over the inkwell in the process—ink arced wildly through the air and splattered perfectly across the precious stack of recipes.

“My hand-copied recipe compendium!”

She gathered the soggy pages in her arms, emerald eyes brimming with tears.

“It took forever to sneak-copy these from Father’s study…”

Yun Cangyue made a break for the door—but paused as a waft of sweetness stopped her cold.

She turned and saw morning light filtering through a glass jar, dyeing the preserved lingberries inside a glowing amber.

Liu Xiyu had gathered them in the rain last month and caught a cold that lasted three days for the trouble.

Drawn in by some strange impulse, Yun Cangyue leaned close and took a sniff.

“Achoo!”

This sneeze hit even harder—her right ear drooped all the way down, sticking to her cheek.

Liu Xiyu looked up with a start, the ink on her nose crinkling with her frown.

“Wait… are you allergic to lingberries?”

The clack of the evening watchman’s clapper jolted Yun Cangyue from her nap.

Lifting her head from the velvet cushion beside Liu Xiyu, she saw the girl curled over the writing desk, her hair tips trailing into the inkwell, completely unaware.

Candle tears had dripped and hardened on the bronze candlestick, forming stalactites that glowed softly as she copied out a new recipe:

     [Seventh Month, Ninth Day – Dietary Notes for Little Snowball]
     ・Hour of the Dragon (7–9 AM):
        Fed lingberry jam — sneezed five times within three breaths; right ear flipped
     ・Hour of the Snake (9–11 AM):
        Lingberries placed thirty feet away — left ear twitched after half a quarter-hour
     ・Hour of the Horse (11 AM–1 PM):
        Drew a prohibition circle using lingberry juice — after circling it seventeen times, Little Snowball chewed through the window paper and escaped (see ink sketch of escape route)

Yun Cangyue hopped lightly onto the desk and pressed her paw over the still-wet character for “escape.”

At Liu Xiyu’s collarbone, the moonstone pendant rose and fell with her breath—its silver gleam echoing the same rhythm as the moonlight seeping through the soft translucence of her ear-tips.

“…Maybe try osmanthus next?”

The drowsy murmur disturbed the candle flame.

The ink smudge on her cheek had dried into a butterfly shape, and her pen moved unconsciously across the paper, sketching a crooked bunny face beside a string of lingberries.

Yun Cangyue reached out to push aside the girl’s messy fringe.

Moonlight spilled through the lattice window, merging their shadows into a single pocket of warm fog.

She suddenly recalled her mother, who used to stay by her bedside during chemotherapy—
that same stubbornness as she brewed one herbal remedy after another, even when the trash bin overflowed with used dregs.

At the seventh chime of the third night watch, Liu Xiyu jolted awake.

“I dreamed… of a recipe!”

She snatched up her calligraphy brush and began scribbling madly: “Osmanthus honey–soaked poria! Little Snowball will definitely——wait, where is she?”

Yun Cangyue was crouched beside a flowerpot under the eaves, calmly burying the eighteenth failed batch.

Dew trickled down her paw, turning the “improved clover cake” into a moss-colored clump of mud.

For three days now, she had noticed:
each time she buried one of the culinary disasters, a battalion of ants would arrive the next morning to haul it away with industrious zeal.

Sure enough, a dozen ants were now parading past, shouldering the crumbs like this was their personal grain depot.

“So that’s why you eat so much!”
Liu Xiyu’s voice exploded behind her.

She froze, watching the girl squat down to prod the mud dumpling.

“No wonder the kitchen’s been missing steamers——Father thought we had a rat problem…”

Yun Cangyue looked up… and met Liu Xiyu’s tearful gaze.

“I’m so sorry, Little Snowball! I didn’t know you were so hungry you’d dig for food!”

Watching the ants scatter in alarm, she chose silence.

Suddenly, Liu Xiyu scooped her into her arms and spun her around, her gold-threaded skirt blooming into a honeysuckle flower.

“From now on, I’ll cook you anything you want——no matter how much!”

Dizzied by the spinning, Yun Cangyue had to hook a claw into the girl’s collar to keep from flying off.

Their laughter shook the copper wind-bell under the eaves, joining the girl’s off-key humming as it drifted into the waking morning mist:

“Osmanthus bloom, poria frost——
Raise a bunny, plump and soft!”

Cicadas screeched like boiling water.
Yun Cangyue burped delicately, tasting mint.

Liu Xiyu’s body heat pulsed through her summer blouse.
Burying her nose into the honeysuckle scent of the girl’s collar, Yun Cangyue suddenly thought…

Maybe this ridiculous food therapy experiment could last—
at least until her ears truly turned silver.

Before the rooster crowed at dawn,
Liu Xiyu burst through the study door with such force that she startled the swallows nesting in the beams.

Clutching a yellowed Illustrated Trade Manual of the Western Regions, she shoved a mysterious oil-paper bundle right up to Yun Cangyue’s nose.

“Look!”

She flipped the book open and jabbed her finger at an illustration.

“This Moon Rabbit carried a glass lantern straight through a sandstorm——it must’ve eaten some kind of special feed!”

The rabbit in the picture was the size of a small horse, with golden eyes and upright ears, and the lantern on its back shimmered with stars.

Yun Cangyue stared at the enormous rabbit paw, three times the size of her own, then looked down at her own coral-pink pads.
Suddenly, she understood why Liu Xiyu kept sabotaging her recipes—it was a species misidentification from the start.

“Training begins today!”

Liu Xiyu pulled out her mother’s archery bracers and solemnly strapped them around Yun Cangyue’s waist.

The leather belts wrapped her up like a silver-gray rice dumpling, and the dangling brass bells jingled with every move.

“Step one: weight training!”

She waved a sprig of clover like a baton, leading the charge, her embroidered shoes striking the stone tiles with the precision of a war drum.

Yun Cangyue squatted in place, unmoved, while the girl circled the courtyard three times with The Secret to Beast Taming held high.

“The book says I have to establish dominance…”

Suddenly crouching to meet her eye-level, Liu Xiyu squished her own cheeks and pulled a monstrous face.

“Grrr! I’m the Wolf Queen of the West!”

Yun Cangyue’s ear-tip twitched.

She was reminded of the boy in the hospital bed next to hers in her past life——pretending to be a superhero while gripping his IV pole.
That same childlike seriousness, utterly unbothered by consequences.

The morning sun turned Liu Xiyu’s lashes a golden brown.
Suddenly, Yun Cangyue arched her back, bit lightly onto the girl’s sleeve, and tugged her forward.

“It worked! She understood the command!”

Liu Xiyu cheered as she was “led” down the corridor, blissfully unaware that Yun Cangyue had simply had enough——
after watching her step on the seventh food-carrying ant in a row.

Five days later, Liu Xiyu kicked open the kitchen door, dark circles under her eyes.

Clutching an oil-paper-wrapped bundle, she tiptoed up to Yun Cangyue with suspicious excitement.

“I’ve found the ultimate secret recipe!”

The moment the paper was unfolded, a familiar bitterness hit Yun Cangyue’s nose—it was Four-Ingredient Decoction, the same foul tonic that used to make her nauseous in her past life.
Liu Xiyu had ground the medicinal herbs into powder, kneaded them into dough, baked it into charred “nutritional biscuits,” and even frosted them with wonky little rabbit faces.

“Nanny Zhang says this tonifies the qi and blood, helps you grow!”

Liu Xiyu broke the biscuit and dunked it into warm goat’s milk.

“You don’t want to stay palm-sized forever, do you?”

Yun Cangyue stared at the burnt bits floating in the bowl, recalling the nurses from her chemo days saying, “Good medicine always tastes bitter.”

She stuck out her tongue for a cautious lick—
and the instant the bitterness exploded in her mouth, Liu Xiyu pinched the back of her neck.

“Don’t spit it out! I tasted it—okay, it’s only… a little astringent!”

That night, Yun Cangyue had diarrhea three times.
Liu Xiyu squatted outside the outhouse, cradling the rabbit with red-rimmed eyes.

“I swear I’ll never trust Nanny Zhang’s folk remedies again…”

The remaining biscuits were buried in the backyard, with a wooden signpost planted on the spot that read:

      Here Lies the Worst Cookie Ever Made.

The next morning, Yun Cangyue discovered a pouch of pine-nut candy tucked beside her pillow.

Liu Xiyu stood nearby, awkwardly twisting her skirt sash.

“If medicine doesn’t work, we’ll try sugar instead!
From now on, every time you eat a bite of greens, I’ll reward you with a candy!”

So when her father stepped into the courtyard that day, he was greeted by an absurd scene:

His daughter twirling like a dancer with a vegetable leaf in hand,
while the silver-gray rabbit nibbled along—and each bite earned it a flicked pine-nut candy, launched neatly into a bamboo basket.

The clink of sweets, mingled with Liu Xiyu’s laughter, startled a cascade of wisteria petals from the trellis—
and Yun Cangyue, gazing at the golden-amber mountain forming in the basket, suddenly wished this ridiculous feeding show would never end.