Foxfire in the Flames of War

Republican-era setting + fantasy + espionage + a heroine adored by everyone | A naive little fox spirit comes down from the mountain, and four men vie to dote on her. In the end, she learns to love the human world. She was a naive little fox from Qingqiu who sneaked down the mountain just to see the beautiful sights of the human world. Instead, she stumbled into the most turbulent era of all. Beneath Shanghai's neon lights, espionage currents surged; inside the glittering Paramount ballroom, life-and-death struggles played out as the nation crumbled. She didn't know what money was, so she grabbed a bolt of silk and ran, with people chasing her as a thief for three whole blocks. She didn't know that her way of repaying a kindness was all wrong. She carried a mouse in her mouth and left it at her benefactor's bedside, making a gang boss leap right out of bed in fright. She didn't know what it meant to “like” someone. She only knew that the scent of the cold-faced man made her feel safe, that the scholar in the long gown smiled like the spring sun, that the officer with a scar on his face turned red at the ears when he looked at her, and that the fox spirit of her own kind always watched her with a complicated gaze. It took her three hundred years to take human form, but she would spend a lifetime learning what it meant to be “human.” When the flames of war reached her doorstep, when her beloved fell in a pool of blood, when her natural enemy, an onmyoji, laid a seemingly inescapable trap At last, the silly fox understood: Being human is hard, but being human is beautiful, too.