"How can I protect them?" Xueshan immediately asked.
"Yes, what must we do?" Chang-o added.
"Fenlan is not as much in danger as the baby, as she is sleeping. She needs no food nor water," Pi-hsia-yuan-chun explained the precautions for the young mother. "Now, for the baby—she's the daughter of a god but that means nothing until she's grown up. Right now, she's as human and mortal as her mother. She's also the only infant on the moon. So you should send her where she isn't unique. Who can find a particular grain of sand on the beach, or drop of water in a rainstorm?"
"You mean we should send her to Earth, to live among humans," Chang-o said.
"It is the traditional thing to do," Xueshan looked at his daughter. "May I hold her?" He held out his arms.
"Of course." Chang-o passed the swaddled bundle of baby to him.
"Little one, I thought that I would hate you," he said, looking into her face, "because your birth meant danger and death for her. Yet I can't hate you…" His face creased up in anguish. "You have her eyebrows already. I would keep you if I could, but Pi-hsia-yuan-chun is wiser and far older than I am. So we will choose a temple and leave you where you will soon be found, and some childless couple will be blessed with a daughter.
"But your name…" he murmured to the baby. "What do you think you would like to be called? Should it be Scented Snow? Or Snow Orchid?" Fenlan meant 'Scented Orchid', so the two names which could most easily be made from his name and hers were Fenxue or Xuelan.
"I like the sound of Xuelan," Chang-o said, her heart half breaking for them. "Since this is how it must be, Tu'er Nainai, come here."
The rabbit goddess came closer. She was almost all white, except for black rings around her eyes, which made them look enormous, black outlines around her ears, and a big black spot on her nose. "Yes, my Lady?"
"Tu'er Nainai, I am appointing you as this child's guardian. You will watch over her until she can protect herself. That includes all manner of threats: supernatural, natural, and infernal. You'll need to disguise yourself as some small object that can go with her everywhere."
Nainai twitched her black nose adorably, and turned herself into a jade pendant carved in the shape of a rabbit.
"That's the idea, but jade is too costly and someone will try to steal you. Try something else." Chang-o instructed.
The next thing Nainai became was an infant-sized rabbit skin jacket with a hood. Half the fur had fallen out and it was stained.
"No, too cheap. Also, she'll have grown out of you in no time. Try again."
This time, Nainai became a small stuffed toy rabbit only three or four inches long and playfully dressed in traditional country clothes.
"Perfect," Chang-o nodded. She picked up Nainai and took her over to Xueshan, who was now holding his daughter as she curled her hand around his little finger.
"Xueshan, since this must be done, it would be best if it were done as soon as possible. Every hour spent with her will only make the separation worse."
"I know," he said. "Yet—I did not know I would love her like this."
"I understand." When Chang-o was still mortal, she had borne children, but life back then was so harsh and so brief… she had not thought of them for years. "Give her your blessing, and let her go."
A few hours later, a monk of the Jing'an temple in Shanghai was praying in the Mahavira Hall when heard what he thought was the yowling of a cat. "Where is it? Can't have it pissing in here," he muttered. He had reverence for all living things, but he also gagged whenever he smelled cat urine. Getting up, he investigated, and found that it was coming from the Guan Yin Hall.
The yowling was sounding less and less like a cat and more like a baby. Puzzled, he looked at the camphorwood statue of the goddess of compassion, who was depicted with an infant in her arms, but of course the wooden baby hadn't come to life. Instead, on the altar among the offerings, there was a very small baby, no more than a day old, if that. The baby was wailing and thrashing feebly.
The monk picked it up. There were words written on the blanket she was wrapped in. "Her name is Xuelan," he read. There was a small soft toy rabbit wrapped up with her. "Come on, Xuelan. Let us go and see the abbot.
The abbot adjusted his eyeglasses as the monk came into his study. "Another one? And a girl, of course. Well, I'll call the authorities. This is the third one this month. What I'm wondering is, how did they smuggle her in here? We're closed to the public on Mondays."
Late that night, in front of the state run orphanage, Shaonu gripped the hair on the head of the little mogui she had ensorcelled. "You are sure this is where they brought the whelp?"
"Yes, yes, great lady!"
"Then let us go in." As it was an orphanage, not a business, there were adults on duty all around the clock, but it was quieter at night than during the day. The goddess and the little demon had no problem slipping past the humans using magic, but once they were inside—the situation changed. There were too many babies. Dozens, perhaps even hundreds of babies. Crying, gurgling, sleeping, eating, pooping babies. And furthermore—.
"They're all girls?" Shaonu asked in disbelief.
"Not all, great lady. But the few which are boys are very, very sick."
"How can this be? Even if there are this many orphans, half should be boys!"
The little demon knew more about the human world than Shaonu did, and it tried to explain. "A few years ago, the human authorities made a law that no couple could have more than one child."
"Why would they do that?" the goddess asked.
"Who knows why humans do anything?" the mogui shrugged. "They are incomprehensible."
"Even if these are excess beyond the law, they still shouldn't all be girls," Shaonu regarded the crèches.
"There is an old belief that girls are worthless, that women have no souls and cannot carry on a family name or honor the ancestors," the mogui explained. "Under these laws, in order to have a son, the humans hide their pregnancies and get rid of the girls so no one knows about them. They induce miscarriages or abandon them. The authorities gather up the ones they find alive and put them in places like this. Then they sell them to couples in other countries who can't have children of their own."
It was a very minor demon and only knew a little more than Shaonu did about what went on, on Earth. It was not surprising that it misunderstood some things.
"This is—if everybody has sons and no daughters, who do they think their precious sons are going to marry?" Shaonu asked. "If their sons can't have sons, nobody will be able to carry on the family
name or honor the ancestors."
The mogui shrugged again. "They're humans. Humans don't think ahead."
"Never mind. Xueshan's daughter must be one of them, so I'll just kill them all and be done with it."
Shaonu's features twisted into something uglier than the little demon's.
"Great lady—great lady, Heaven and Hell will both take notice of such a terrible deed!"
That made the goddess pause. It was true. So many newly reincarnated souls returning to the wheel of rebirth all at one time, from one place, would call for an investigation from the relevant authorities, all of whom made one small weather goddess look like as tiny a bug as humans looked to her. Besides, she wasn't nearly done with her revenge yet.
"Tell me about these countries where the girls go to," she commanded the mogui.
"Well, most of them go to Emerica," the little demon said, as accurately as it had explained everything else, which was to say, only halfway accurately.
"Don't they have orphans of their own?"
"I don't know," replied the demon.
"What sort of place is Emerica?" Shaonu asked.
"Most of the people there are of European descent, and they're fat and rich and rude and lazy," the mogui repeated what it had heard. "Their morals are bad, and their manners are worse, and no one there respects the law or their elders, and they're so crazy about their guns that they don't care if children get killed."
It was not a fair or balanced picture of America, but Shaonu smiled like a shark. "This might even be better. Let her go to Emerica, and let her turn out badly. She may even be killed there without my having to lift a finger. By the time Xueshan finds her, she'll be ruined beyond repair."