"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
If being conscious while sliding down a humanoid entity's gullet was a ten out of ten existential crisis, what Yun Jieshi saw coming at him and the rest of the world had no measure for the level of despair, dread, and terror it induced in him. It was inconceivable.
Perhaps Yun Jieshi's vibrant mind had wondered once or twice what it would be like to experience a meteor heading for him and his little town back on Earth. But whatever conclusion or imagined scenario he conjured paled in comparison to this.
The horrid breath that flushed down onto everything, warm and moist, was the least bit of it all. It wasn't as horrible as the Stench, at least.
However, Yun Jieshi's eyes managed to see the inside of the beak of the bird, the spittle flying from it, and its tongue which hardly looked like a tongue at all, but some serpent-shaped planet. He was stuck screaming his soul out.
The beak and all that was in it was all he managed to see as the gargantuan bird drew closer and closer and closer and…
WHOOOOSH!
What might have been a hurricane blasted everything to heck, sending snow flying, hundreds of meters to even kilometers away.
And then there was a lull.
…
Yun Jieshi was huddled against the ground, shaking, his eyes closed shut but leaking tears; his nose was running and his mouth was agape, saliva slopping out.
He was half buried in mounds of snow, and for a few moments, he thought the snow was still piling, flying about, trees whipping wildly up and down in the air, but everything had calmed down. It was logical, he thought as he began to dare to rise from his fetal position.
He opened his eyes.
All was night. The pronged beam of light in the sky was gone and it was the darkness' turn to be the master – to rule over all.
Yun Jieshi was still shaking. There were no stars in the sky. In fact, it hardly looked like a sky at all. It looked like some wrinkled drape endlessly drawn over what everything below could not reach. A dull glow – source unknown – made everything seem brighter, as though a full moon was hanging about.
The little monkey lost the ability to use his words, but his mind ran wild.
That bird…
Had it… devoured everything?
That notion would have been absurd on earth, yes, but here…
Even discarding that route of thinking, Yun Jieshi's mind, constantly exposed to many fictional and religious works where supernatural events were the norm, was particularly malleable at the moment. It accepted this horrendous ordeal and even cultivated reasonings fairly better than most.
…But that didn't mean Yun Jieshi was ready to just accept that he was in a reality where night was the dark beak or belly of some fantastical, gargantuan bird.
In fact, his inability to accept this reality brought up the dread he had buried in the name of urgency. He had been thrust into this new world without a chance to even process his own death.
It took trauma to call forth trauma.
Yun Jieshi began sobbing.
He was a little monkey now, an inexplicable entity, but not even an hour ago, he had been Yun Jieshi, the young man rejected by Li Chyou, and a son to Yun Muyang.
He had been a simple English teacher trying to reconnect with his roots using the greatest crash courses known to men, a potentially pretentious poet, and…
He bawled and sank deeper into the snow. He hugged his daruan, and his tail swished wildly about in the snow.
He thought of his father and something hot and wet seemed to rise from his throat. He imagined his father coming back home with another flower pot, ready with another plant to add to the kitchen only to find…
Yun Jieshi was disgusted with himself.
As he cried, he ground his teeth.
'I'm so selfish.'
His very soul called him out. It wasn't really the thought of his father's reaction that burned him. It was his own self-pity. He could almost hear his father's thoughts. He could almost hear how the neighbors would say it.
'Poor Yun Jieshi. He was still a budding young man with a whole life ahead of him. He bought me that Fang Deng side table yesterday.'
'How will his father cope? That pair was odd, but they were truly father and son down to their horrible personalities.'
Yun Jieshi imagined his father would be comforted by his 'friends', his fellows at the local temple. They would probably tell Yun Muyang that Yun Jieshi was not lost and that he had passed into a new life; perhaps he was now a flower in a cool, safe cave.
'Yeah. I have passed into a new life. But I… I didn't want to…'
He had so much to do. So much to learn. Why was he here?
The dread did not wane until thirty minutes passed. Only then did Yun Jieshi start to feel numb. His small body grew stiff from huddling against itself for such a long time, but thankfully, it resisted the cold.
He sat up after another fifteen minutes had passed.
He looked at the dark sky. It was dark indeed.
He traced his fingers along the ruan's strings.
"Harmonising Psalm of Zhan Hao," the old sagely voice said when his finger touched the sole, glowing string. He wished he could play it. Perhaps it would soothe him. But his fingers didn't have enough strength for it yet.
Yun Jieshi wiped away the snot and saliva from his face. It was unnerving how much like a five-year-old he felt right now.
He whipped up a poem. He hoped it would make him feel better. A sad smile appeared on his face.
'I might be plagiarising, but it's all in the name of irony, winter, and sorrow,' he thought.
He looked up at the sky and recited:
"A sea of snow up to my little, witless knees
Neither blanket nor soft companion to warm my hearth
Wrestling my courage from disabled, placid trees
I bare my given blues
Against the darkness hidden in the skies."
The little monkey released a slow, warm breath.
Oddly enough, he felt a little better. He even managed a frail smile.
"I didn't think I'd be the one going into a Frost Bizarre," Yun Jieshi said with a hollow chuckle. "If this is my reality… then I hope Dad took my death well. Maybe him joining the folk religion was meant to prepare him for this."
Perhaps indeed.
The little monkey stood. He looked up again. For some reason, he kept expecting to see a huge uvula or something. He cast aside the unnecessary thoughts. He was in no way brave or strong, but he had to be. He recalled how some of the novels and folktales written by inspired Asian authors had empowered him just as much as his favorite comics.
Bravery, humility, gratitude… If there was ever a time he needed to embrace these, it was now.
He needed to act brave even if he felt like the biggest coward. After all, didn't one of his favorite proverbs say, "A true man dares to act and take responsibility"?
"I..uh…I better look around for shelter," Yun Jieshi said to himself. It was dreadfully quiet. He began making his way in the opposite direction to the stream.
For the first thirty minutes, he could hardly see where he was going. Dire thoughts clouded his ability to see ahead, and the whisperings in the wind didn't help. They had grown more severe with the coming of the night.
Soon though, the little monkey started to pay attention to the little details. They hardly gave him a chance to ignore them, after all.
He spotted the footsteps of the Jade Imps that had escaped after he came down from the sky. They were heading North from the cliff. He might have followed them, but he discarded the idea.
Yun Jieshi's nose twitched. He imagined that the faint scent of ammonia – urine – he smelled in the air belonged to the Imps as well. Given their numbers, their bestial characteristics, and temperament, he didn't think it strange that they would be the type to go around marking their territory in that manner (even though he hadn't seen any obvious genitals on them).
He wasn't sure why, but he likened them to the primates he knew to use urine to mark their territory on earth, like squirrel monkeys.
Yun Jieshi spotted the trees that had been peed on. They had been marked only a few hours earlier at most, his nose told him.
'I can't assume those creatures are normal – of course – but if they were marking this place, does that mean they haven't been here before, or are they just refreshing their marks?' the little monkey thought.
He spotted other signs of marking like ugly cuts and grooves dug into the tree barks. They had yet to be layered by ice.
'Well, in any case, that must mean there are other creatures here at least.'
But as he studied the markings, Yun Jieshi's nose twitched again. He detected an alluring scent, fighting its way against the Stench and the ammonia in the air. It was not as potent as the scent of the sap in his wineskin, but it was something – something sweet.
It was a little elusive.
Yun Jieshi started after it. He didn't let the whispers distract him. He kept wobbling and fumbling his way onward, winding through the trees and rocks.
His target soon appeared. The chilling winds spiraled around it, some sinking in, some pouring out and howling elsewhere.
It was a great pit that Yun Jieshi saw, a chasm through the snow and into the hidden ground beneath. Within it – deep, deep within – treasures he didn't know would play a tremendous role in his journey nested, waiting to be plucked.