When Xue Yao opened her eyes again, the first thing that came to mind was a dull, throbbing pain in the back of her leg.
The second thing in mind was the fact that the world looked bigger around her.
For a few seconds, she struggled a bit to push herself up, surveying her environment and discovering that she was stuck in some autumn toned forest with muted orange and yellow shades. Right. In the mortal realm, that was the current season. The floor around her was nestled with yellowing leaves and twigs, and the instantly dull colors compared to the overly bright, glowing heavens reminded her that she was no longer at her home.
Why was the world so big?
It wasn't to the point where a tree was several times larger than her body, but she could tell that there was a significant difference in the proportions that she was used to. As far as she could remember, the mortal realm was not like that. In fact, things seemed smaller in the world, not larger.
Xue Yao looked down at herself, and the answer came to her.
Instead of seeing the traditional set of white robes that Yue Lao issued her to wear when she was at the mountains, she was covered with white fur. Her arms were legs, her hands were small, furry paws, and her legs were just as furry as her arms, one of them with an awful looking stick protruding through it and blood slowly leaking out, staining the floor with its red.
Xue Yao winced at the sight, but what bothered her was not the fact that her left leg was impaled by a stick but rather the fact that she was the shape of a fox again.
The fox was her original form, a simple white-furred fox with a single tail, but during her beginning years in the mortal realm, she had sneaked into large sects to view their lessons and cultivated her spiritual energy slowly. By the time that she reached four thousand years old, she had cultivated enough spiritual energy to the point where she had a total of nine tails and that she could take on a human form. It was also at that age that Yue Lao took her in as his disciple during an occasion where she was exploring the heavens.
Ever since then, Xue Yao had never returned to her fox form for the most part. It was just easier for her to be in a more human, deity-like shape, and even if she did return to her natural state, she had nine tails, not… one singular tail like how she was now.
If she lost her eight precious tails, was that a cause of the spiritual energy that she lost from eating the six peaches?
Shutting her eyes tight, Xue Yao focused on her human form, recalling her slanted eyebrows, rosy soft skin, and silky black hair. Could she transform back to her human form, by chance? Perhaps she only lost eight of her nine tails from the drain of spiritual energy, and not the human shape that she favored…
Xue Yao opened her eyes, looking down and seeing that she was still stuck in the form of a small white fox.
A groan of frustration escaped her mouth inadvertently, but instead of the sound and voice that she was familiar to, it sounded more like a squeak.
Skies, she hated this form.
Closing her eyes again, Xue Yao attempted to measure the amount of spiritual energy she had left within her. Even though she was six thousand years in age and spiritual energy was measured in years, the two only had the slightest bit of correlation. For every year that passed, she would automatically gain one year of spiritual energy, but there were other means to gain the energy as well.
Most of the time in the heavens, Xue Yao would just beg for some from her teacher and get some years as a gift, and whenever she cultivated, the amount of years of spiritual energy she had would go up as well.
If she were to think about the amount she had before she ate the peaches, she would estimate just around eight thousand years. The low number was a result of the fact that she never focused on cultivating in the heavens, spending her days on drinking wine with Yue Lao and sleeping for the entire day.
Now that six thousand years were gone, she was only left with two thousand. A mere two thousand years.
At this moment, Xue Yao regretted her past laziness to the extreme.
Why did she make those irresponsible decisions? Why was she such an idiot in the past?
If she had known that a day like this was to come, she would've been the hardest working disciple that Yue Lao would've ever seen. If she had known that a day like this was to come, she wouldn't have snuck to the Queen Mother's orchard to gorge herself on peaches. If she had known that a day like this was to come, she would've just hid herself in Yue Lao's mountains and to never show herself to anyone else. At least in there, she could live the way she wanted to live with a proper amount of spiritual energy.
Xue Yao regretted everything.