Liu Xiyu bit down on the shaft of her brush, looking every bit like a cat that had failed to steal a fish.

Morning light spilled across the celadon brush washer, turning the fine sheen of sweat at the tip of her nose into a dusting of gold.

The ledger her father had tossed over yesterday lay open on the desk.
Vermilion annotations slashed across the page like scars:

“Thirteen errors in the character ‘qi.’ Copy again.”

“Qi… qi… qi…”

She dipped the brush and rewrote it for the seventh time.
The stroke flared viciously at the base of the wood radical.

Among the tangled blots of ink on the paper, one could just barely make out a crippled, limping “qi”.

Yun Cangyue crouched beside the paperweight, claw tips unconsciously picking at the carved patterns of a jade lion.

This was already the twelfth sheet of xuan paper Liu Xiyu had torn up.
Crumpled balls of paper piled into a small hill inside the basket, exhaling the mingled scent of pine-soot ink and a young girl’s frustration.

“It’s just one extra stroke—how hard can it be?!”

Liu Xiyu slammed the brush down and lunged forward, her gold-threaded sleeve sweeping the inkstone off the desk.

As the ink splashed toward the ledger, a silver-gray blur shot across the table—

Yun Cangyue threw herself in the way, her back fur taking most of the spill.
Her tail, however, was not so lucky, instantly dyed the dark sheen of wet ink, black as a snake’s spine.

“Little snowball!”

Liu Xiyu scooped the rabbit up in a panic, checking her over.
In the reflection of her jade-bright eyes was the absurd sight of ink smeared across the tips of Yun Cangyue’s ears.

“I’m sorry—let me wipe that off…”

Before the sentence could finish, Yun Cangyue wriggled free and leapt back onto the desk.

Her gaze fixed on the broken, limping character for qi.

Then, without hesitation, she stretched out a paw toward the inkstone.

“Don’t touch that! Ink’s filthy—”

Liu Xiyu’s cry caught in her throat.

The soft pad of the paw dipped lightly into the ink, then pressed down onto the torn corner of discarded paper.

A plum-blossom print bloomed.

The ridges of the paw pad were crisp and unmistakable, as if carved into the page.
With astonishing control, she dragged ink into form—
the horizontal stroke steady as a ruler,
the vertical sharp as a blade.

At the tip of her paw, a perfectly formed qi character unfolded, clean and precise.

Liu Xiyu’s brush slipped from her fingers, blooming an inky flower across the hem of her skirt.

“Y-you… you can write?”

Her voice trembled, as if she’d just discovered a kitchen mouse reciting poetry.

Yun Cangyue flicked the remaining ink from her paw, then padded over to the ledger and slapped a soft paw pad against a line marked in vermilion.

Liu Xiyu leaned in for a closer look.
She had written three lacquerware pieces as three lacquerware felled—one wrong character, and the entire discrepancy in the accounts had grown out of it.

“You noticed this ages ago?”

She grabbed the rabbit’s ears and gave them a light shake.

“Then why didn’t you stop me when I was feeding you all those weird medicines?!”

Yun Cangyue rolled her eyes—
heaven knew how many times she’d tried to kick those horrifying concoctions away.

The testing began from that moment on.

Liu Xiyu started firing off questions like someone possessed.

“How many is this?”
She held up three fingers.

Yun Cangyue tapped her paw three times.

“Which passage of the Analects talks about filial piety?”

A claw tip pointed straight to the Wei Zheng chapter on the shelf.

“And the Western Regions numerals Father taught me yesterday—how do you write those?”

Dipping her paw in ink, Yun Cangyue drew the character “𐍈”—
exactly the Old Turkic symbol Liu’s father had taught her on a drunken whim.

Liu Xiyu collapsed into her chair, hair bun askew like a bird’s nest.

“So you can read and calculate, and you still pretended to be stupid while watching me embarrass myself?”

The claw paused for a beat, then sketched a crooked little smiley face on the paper.

As dusk stained the window lattice purple, Liu Xiyu suddenly clenched the edge of her sleeve.

“Do you… have a name?”

Yun Cangyue was cleaning the ink from between her claws. At the question, she looked up.

There was a light in Liu Xiyu’s eyes Yun Cangyue had never seen before—
like a child who had just uncovered a buried jar of sweets.

A claw tip dipped into the remaining ink on the inkstone and dragged three characters across the xuan paper:

Yun Cangyue.

“Yun. Cang. Yue.”

Liu Xiyu traced the strokes with her fingertips, savoring each syllable as if tasting it.

“It’s even prettier than my handwriting…”

Suddenly, she snatched up the paper, crumpled it into a ball—
only to grab it back at the edge of the brazier and smooth it out again.

“Only I get to know this name.”

In the flickering firelight, Yun Cangyue watched as she tucked the slip of paper into a sachet worn close to her body.

From then on, a small dish of pine nut candy appeared on the desk.
Whenever Yun Cangyue helped audit the accounts, Liu Xiyu would slip a piece of candy into her paw.

“Cangyue, Cangyue~ how do we calculate the cost on this batch of silk?”
“Little Yue, look! I finally wrote the character qi correctly!”
“Ayue, don’t fall asleep—help me finish checking this page and I’ll feed you fresh berries!”

The way she addressed her changed by the day.
The only constant was that Liu Xiyu always called her name softly when no one else was around,
as if it were a spell condensed from moonlight—meant to shine only in the dark.

One night, Liu Xiyu dozed off at the desk.
Yun Cangyue finished reconciling the final page of the ledger for her.

As her claw dipped in ink to add a final note, she didn’t notice the faint tremor of the girl’s lashes.

“So you even know Persian numerals…”

The murmur came like a dream-spoken whisper,
startling Yun Cangyue so badly that she knocked over the brush washer.

Moonlight spilled across the dampened ledgers, and Liu Xiyu’s smiling eyes gleamed like a cat that had just succeeded in stealing fish.

“From now on,” she declared, “you’re my accountant!”

Yun Cangyue nudged the inkstone aside in protest—only to have her paws stuffed full of pine nut candy.

Liu Xiyu’s fingertips, smudged with ink and powdered with sugar, tapped a crooked little flower onto her forehead.

“This is the contract seal!”

Cricket calls drifted in through the window, mingling with Liu Xiyu’s off-key humming:

“Inky paws~ sugary paws~
raise a proper bookkeeping paw~”

Chewing on the candy, Yun Cangyue thought that perhaps being a rabbit page bribed with sweets was far more interesting than her past life spent confined to a sickbed.

Yun Cangyue yawned amid the sweet scent of pine nut candy, her paw tips still stained with ink from last night’s account-checking.

As Liu Xiyu tucked her into a modified book satchel, the fragrance of honeysuckle mingled with the papery breath of fresh xuan sheets, slipping into her nose.

“Today’s exam is on The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art…”

Facing the bronze mirror, the girl adjusted the satchel’s straps, gold-threaded tassels artfully concealing the air vents.

“You keep an eye on the questions,” she whispered, “and I’ll sneak a look at your paw marks!”

From a slit in the silk lining, Yun Cangyue shot her a glare, thumping the inner lining in protest with a soft paw.

The satchel was suddenly lifted.
Liu Xiyu’s jade-green eyes brimmed with coaxing delight.
“If we pass, I’ll treat you to Western honeydew—an entire melon!”

The image of honeydew flared in her mind.
Her paw twitched.

By the time she came back to herself, she was already crouched inside the satchel’s hidden compartment, a miniature inkstone set neatly by her paw, alongside square-cut slips of xuan paper.

The morning bell startled sparrows from the eaves as Liu Xiyu hummed a wildly off-key tune and strode into the academy.

Swaying with her steps, Yun Cangyue listened to the rising chorus of recitation around them and suddenly felt that this—this living soundscape—was ten thousand times better than the sterile silence that once smelled of disinfectant.

Inside the classroom, where sandalwood incense curled through the air, Liu Xiyu spread out her scroll.
Her sleeve “accidentally” swept the counting rods onto the floor.

As she bent to pick them up, she tapped the side of the book satchel three quick times—their agreed-upon signal for help.

From a slit in the hidden compartment, Yun Cangyue peered at the problem:

     There are rabbits and chickens in one cage.
     Above are thirty-five heads; below are ninety-four legs.
     How many rabbits and how many chickens are there?

Her paw dipped into ink and moved in a blur.
The pad pressed paw-print numbers onto the paper:

“Twelve rabbits, twenty-three chickens.”

Liu Xiyu pretended to scratch her neck, hooked the paper slip with her fingers, and glanced at it—then deliberately wrote it down wrong:

“Twenty-three rabbits, twelve chickens.”

From inside the satchel came the sound of furious scratching.

Liu Xiyu bit her lip, barely holding back her laughter, and scribbled a note beside the wrong answer:

     “Master, please judge with clarity—this problem is deceptive!
     If a rabbit were as clever as my own Little Snowball, it would’ve kicked the cage apart and escaped on its own. Why wait around to be counted?”

Yun Cangyue, fuming, gnawed straight through the silk lining of the hidden compartment.

That afternoon, during calligraphy class, Liu Xiyu was called up to practice suspended-arm writing.

Her grip on the brush trembled like a reed in the wind, ink dripping onto the paper in fat, tadpole-like blots.

“Liu Xiyu!”

The instructor rapped the desk with his ruler.

“This ‘yong’ of yours—its horizontal stroke wriggles like an earthworm, and its vertical stands like a crippled cane!”

From inside the book bag came three long scratches, then two short ones.

Liu Xiyu coughed into her sleeve as a cover.
Seizing the moment, Yun Cangyue flicked out a small paper ball—

a full breakdown of the Eight Principles of Yong, written with claw-tip precision, each stroke clearly marked with lifting and pressing techniques.

“Student has suddenly attained enlightenment!”

She lifted her brush and rewrote the character—
this time, the strokes bore a striking resemblance to the paw-printed model.

When the instructor stroked his beard in astonishment, Yun Cangyue was quietly licking the ink from between her claws, thinking to herself that this was at least a hundred times harder than teaching a toddler how to trace characters.

The dismissal bell rang, and Liu Xiyu bolted straight into the bamboo grove behind the academy.

She shook open the book bag.
A silvery-gray bundle of fur tumbled into the grass, ear tips still stuck with bits of broken counting rods.

“It’s all thanks to your quick thinking, Ayue!”

She pulled out a honeydew melon and broke it into small pieces.

“The promised Western tribute—
I swiped it from Father’s tea banquet!”

Yun Cangyue gnawed on the melon flesh while watching Liu Xiyu use a stick to reenact the day’s exam questions on the ground.

“This whole chickens-and-rabbits-in-the-same-cage problem is complete nonsense!
If there were really a hunter who could catch both my little Snowball and those stupid chickens at the same time, he’d have been clawed into a flowery face long ago by rabbit paws…”

As dusk stretched the bamboo shadows long across the ground, they invented a new game:
Liu Xiyu tossed out counting rods, and Yun Cangyue struck and tallied them with her paws.

Where the wind of her claws swept past, snapped bamboo became counting rods, fallen leaves turned into numeric markers—somehow more ingenious than the academy’s sand tables.

“Tomorrow’s policy essay will definitely be on Treatises on Canal Transport!”
Liu Xiyu burst out with sudden inspiration.

“Ayue, help me stomp out a canal layout map, and I’ll use candied plums to mark the grain routes—”

Yun Cangyue smacked a paw against her forehead.

In the candlelit boudoir, shadows wavering on the walls, Liu Xiyu practiced an expression of perfect innocence before the mirror.

“If we get caught tomorrow, you play an ordinary rabbit,” she whispered.
“I’ll act like a clueless young lady!”

Perched atop a copy of The Treatise on Waterways, Yun Cangyue flicked her tail—
this girl even rehearsed her cheating like a stage performance.

“Please, Ayue~”

Liu Xiyu lunged in and wrapped her arms around her, rubbing her chin against the rabbit’s ear.

“Just help me one last time! Once the policy essay’s over, I can attend the Duanyang Poetry Gathering.
I heard this year’s prize is a Western Regions glass lantern…”

Yun Cangyue reached out and pressed a paw over the girl’s endlessly talking lips.
The warmth beneath her pads made her ear tips twitch.
With a resigned sigh, she stepped across the Jiang–Huai map, stamping it with plum-blossom paw prints.

Liu Xiyu laughed, her voice clear as silver bells, arranging pine-nut candies into constellations.

“This is the deposit! When we get back from the shop rounds, I’ll build you a sugar-glazed study!”

Amid the steady beat of the night watch drum, Yun Cangyue stared at the mountain of sweets on the desk and sighed.

She seemed utterly incapable of refusing this girl—

whether it was the honeyed melons smuggled into book bags,
or the utterly ridiculous schemes she was always left to clean up after.