ʚ 1 ɞ

There's a girl who grew up lucky, things never went too wrong. Danger had a way of sliding off her and she didn't know why.Was she the chosen one? Naturally attuned to the spirit world in ways nobody could explain. Her soul was luminous in ways the living couldn't see, and beside her, invisible and silent, walked Bai — an ancient white spirit dog who had been guarding her since the day she was born.She couldn't see Bai, she just felt that she was never truly alone. She grew up kind, dangerously kind. Helped everyone without hesitating and assumed good intentions in everyone she met. Bai considered this a full time job with unlimited overtime (and no pay).

ʚ 2 ɞ

She was ███ when it happened.Embarrassingly — it was just a puddle. Not a lake, not a river. An ordinary puddle on an ordinary street after an ordinary rain, but the █████ waiting inside had been patient for decades, and patience is more dangerous than depth.A warm grandmotherly auntie appeared, just needed a little help finding her way. Ninie, being Ninie, reached out immediately.The auntie pulled her into a sealed illusion realm. Inside, the puddle became a lake, the street became nowhere, the sky became... wrong.Outside, Bai clawed at the boundary between worlds. The realm was sealed. A guardian couldn't follow, couldn't breach, but could only wait.Inside, Ninie was completely alone.She survived on stubbornness, on sheer refusal to let go. The realm cracked under the weight of a soul that simply would not be taken.She came back gasping on wet pavement. Bai pressed an enormous fluffy head against her immediately. For the first time, Ninie saw the guardian that had always been there. She cried. Bai stayed very still and let her. Nobody believed her about the auntie. So, she stopped telling people.But something had broken open — her soul, cracked and flickering, became a beacon to every ghost in range. What had once slid off her now zeroed in.She was still polite to all of them!!This was not helping.

ʚ 3 ɞ

Into this chaos arrived a duck. Not a normal duck, a duck with centuries of knowledge, ambiguous age, ambiguous gender, and extremely unambiguous opinions about profit.Tauke duck (鸭老板) — had tracked her cracked soul with a very specific plan. Not the usual ghost business, something... far more valuable.He wanted to reincarnate into her body, take over her heaven-chosen gifts. Combined with his centuries of knowledge, the resulting person would have been extraordinary, unstoppable, obscenely wealthy.He arrived. He assessed. He prepared. He changed his mind.What changed his mind has never been confirmed. tauke duck does not discuss it. Ninie has asked many times."business decision lah. next question." 🦆Instead he offered a contract - training, protection, a cut of her earnings. Ninie, ███ years old and catastrophically bad at math, agreed. She thought the cut was 30%.No, it was 70%.She found out last year, and she is still processing this.