Little Pink Starfish

Yuan Yuanyuan kept reading with a growing sense of anticipation in her heart.

She used to read a lot of shounen battle manga… her favorite parts were always when the main character smacked people down in epic face-slapping moments.

Even though Monster Journal’s main character was technically Fan Ning, in Yuan Yuanyuan’s eyes, Yuan was absolutely the true protagonist of this comic.

What she really wanted now was to see Yuan beat the crap out of everyone—slam, crush, flatten them all. She hadn’t done it herself (yet), but she wanted to see it play out in the manga.

Sitting on her bed, she mimicked little clawing gestures mid-air like she was fighting off invisible enemies, looking absolutely unhinged.

But just a few pages in… disappointment struck. The story hadn’t even gotten past the basic exposition. It was still explaining where the scene was set.

Yuan Yuanyuan was not happy.
Yuan Yuanyuan was now… a puffed-up pufferfish.

Still grumpy, she skimmed rapidly through Fan Ning’s storyline.

No Yuan.
No Yuan.
Still no Yuan.

She flipped through half the chapter and didn’t see a single panel with Yuan in it. Instead, it was all Fan Ning wandering around the hotel, poking into corners and exploring the world of monsters.

【“Be careful. Don’t wander off,” someone warned Fan Ning. “A lot of things left behind by monsters are still around. Some are dangerous. Even after decades or a century and many cleansings, some remnants could still exist.”】

【“Huh?” Fan Ning asked, startled. “So… isn’t it really dangerous to walk around?”】

【“Why are you so scared?” his companion laughed. “You’d have to be incredibly unlucky to run into something. Hardly anything’s happened here in the past hundred years. Chill out.”】

Yuan Yuanyuan shivered inexplicably at that line.

She hadn’t known about this. Dangerous monster leftovers in the hotel? She’d been wandering around touching everything like an idiot. And with her bad luck? …Yikes.

She flipped a few more pages. Thankfully, that part didn’t last long. Soon, the timeline jumped forward a few days.

Now the monsters had arrived. She saw Fan Ning and a few others sitting in the hotel.

So originally, before the monsters arrived, the hotel was fully open to the Taoist cultivators. No headcount management needed—it was built for both monsters and cultivators to stay in, after all.

But because monsters rarely came, the human side had gradually taken over.

【Inside the hotel, people were still chatting and drinking when suddenly a black cloud swept across the sky above them. The noise quickly died down.】

【Fan Ning looked up and frowned as he saw the “Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.”】

【Monsters rarely made such a grand entrance right away. Usually, they built tension like actors in a drama—exploding onstage only after a long intro.】

【But this time… this time was different. The only other time something like this had happened… was that one exception in the historical records.】

【Fan Ning’s brows furrowed even deeper. That one exception… was at the Northwest Front.】

【Humans had preserved plenty of records from that event—texts, images… Fan Ning had seen a particular painting related to this moment. It had been painted by a very famous modern artist who, as it turned out, was also a deeply powerful Taoist cultivator.】

【That painting was known only to cultivators. It depicted the moment monsters descended on the Northwest Front.】

【Fan Ning had been a child when he first saw it. He didn’t understand it at the time. All he remembered was the swirling red and black.】

【As a kid, the painting made him deeply uncomfortable. He found it eerie, even frightening. It was only later that he learned it had been painted after the artist’s near-death experience.】

【The black in the painting was the night sky. The red on the top half was demon aura. The red on the bottom was blood.】

【Blood and demon aura had mixed so completely… you couldn’t tell which was which.】

【Fan Ning stared at the sky, falling into a heavy silence.】

【Why… were the monsters arriving so quickly this time?】

【Why… had they chosen such a method?】

【As the Taoist cultivators around him fell into panic or unease, Fan Ning was overwhelmed by a deep, bone-chilling unease of his own.】

【This time, the monsters clearly had… a major agenda. Fan Ning thought: they must be aiming for something.】

【He stayed lost in thought until the bell overhead suddenly rang out. He looked up. Everyone was heading outside—no one stayed in the room.】

【Fan Ning followed. That bell… had a lot of stories attached to it—some very dark.】

Yuan Yuanyuan fell into silence too.

She was starting to realize something wasn’t right.
This was… foreshadowing. Subtle, ominous foreshadowing. Possibly planted by Ji Qiu.

Red…
Northwest Front…

Piecing it all together, Yuan Yuanyuan could make a reasonably confident guess: The last great battle of that person’s life had taken place here.

And this hotel? It sat right on that unified war front—the infamous Northwest Line. One of the most brutal battlefronts in the war.

Today’s comic only confirmed her suspicion. It was very likely that the painting Fan Ning saw as a child had depicted that very battle.

No wonder… she thought.
No wonder they had called her here. They were baiting her.

Everything made sense now.
The monster side wanted to provoke “Yuan”—to see if he would react. Ji Qiu got to keep drawing the comic. Humans would be reminded of who they were dealing with.

Everyone wins.

Sure, bringing her here would make things awkward—but how could they resist? That person had once carved their name into this place.

From what Yuan remembered, descriptions of that final battle painted Yuan not just as powerful, but borderline godlike.

That war had turned him into a legend…
And then, days later, he died.

She only now understood.
Though “Yuan” had been killed by shady means… his fame lived on. In some ways, the humans had spread his name even further than the monsters did.

They might not know the full horror behind the blood-red storm that day…
But they remembered how it made them feel.

Yuan Yuanyuan thought of the monster yearbook. Without that war, “Yuan”—a reclusive old monster—never would’ve made it into those elite ranks.

But because of that final battle, his name alone carried enough weight to qualify.

…What the hell!

Yuan Yuanyuan wanted to curl into a ball and cover her head.

Wasn’t this just ridiculous?
Especially for someone like her—who didn’t even want to be “on screen.”

But then she remembered some of the stupid, embarrassing things she’d done recently and thought, Well, might as well commit to the cringe.

Her mind drifted back to the scenes she’d half-forgotten. It was all too complicated now—awkward and subtle and… well…

A mess.

Or as the professionals call it:
A battlefield of emotional chaos.

A Shura Field.

Ah, the Shura Field…
So intense…
So thrilling—wait, no! Focus!

Yuan licked her lips and kept reading.

Then came the grand monster entrance. The scene where the cultivators stared up at the hotel as the monsters arrived. The panel-by-panel recreation was exactly how she remembered it.

She felt a strange thrill watching these familiar moments drawn out in comic form. It was hard to describe. Like déjà vu wrapped in dramatic shading.

If she could post to social media, she’d totally share a screenshot right now.

She blushed a little.
Damn, why’s this so embarrassing? Living through it is one thing—but seeing it drawn like this? It hits different.

She zoomed in.

Bro, you better not walk like that in real life! You’re gonna get mugged.

She noted someone in the second row of the monster formation—left side—wearing a huge hood that made him look like a knockoff Death Eater. Cool, but sketchy.

Hey, wait… isn’t that supposed to be me? she thought.

Ji Qiu hadn’t drawn her face. Not yet. Her hood was still up.

Why? Hiding me for now?

Yuan couldn’t figure it out. So she kept reading.

The scene shifted again—daylight returned. The meeting had started. The same one she’d just experienced that morning: sleepy, boring, headache-inducing.

Ji Qiu, of course, drew it as sleek and elegant. Probably enough to fool people who hadn’t been there.

Yuan kept flipping.
She was almost at the end.
Just when she thought the comic would wrap up peacefully—

A panel stopped her cold.

She froze.

Eyes wide.

Speechless.

At the very end of the chapter, where everything should’ve faded out quietly… Ji Qiu hit her with that.

Yuan stood alone in a hallway.

Facing a painting.

The hallway? Unimportant.
The painting? Doesn’t matter.

What mattered…
Was Yuan’s expression.

It was terrifyingly calm.

Yuan Yuanyuan had never seen that face in the mirror. Never seen it in the comic either.

A calm so unnatural it didn’t feel human.

And then… a tear.

Just one.

It slipped down Yuan’s cheek in the panel—so subtle you could almost miss it.

Yuan stared at the page, her mind blank.

That’s not me.
That’s not me.
I didn’t cry.
So who the hell…

…is this guy?