The morning sun moved like molten honey across the city, warm and indulgent, finding the villa's terraces and pooling in the carved stone gutters. Inside, the house still smelled faintly of jasmine and the rich, honest tang of last night's feast.
Raj lay half-awake on the sofa in the living room, face relaxed for once, a shadow of sleep at the corners of his eyes. Around him, the women stirred — small noises, low laughter, the rustle of fabric. It was a domestic thing, nothing like the thunder and fallout of the world-bending nights that had come before. It was a small redemption: the world quiet, his harem close, no saints shouting and no satellites humming missiles into orbit.
A new weight shifted across his lap, and he opened one eye. White fur brushed his chest. A soft, indignant voice said, "This… where is this?"
White Bone lifted her shoulders, clutching a fur wrap to her chest, the fabric oddly domestic against her classical garments. Her eyes were sharp and slightly incredulous, like a queen finding herself in a stranger's kitchen. She had the breathtaking coldness of one born to the lonely courtly arts, and yet there was also an immediate, human vulnerability in the way she pulled the coat closer to her.
Duan — Tie Fan, the older sister — came forward with a steady smile and answered for the household, because that was how the family spoke: together, certain, and proudly possessive. "He is our man," she said simply, and a dozen faces around her lit with the twin flames of mischief and protection. "This is Earth. Sit. Breathe."
White Bone's face flushed with a complicated anger and confusion. "I don't want to be his woman! I want to kill the lecher who sullied my purity!"
A ripple of dry amusement passed among the women. Tie Shan — the younger sister — raised an eyebrow. "You could do that," she said, "but you would hate what it would do to you. Why choose a wound that doesn't heal, when a new path opens?" There was softness in her voice that contradicted the steel behind it.
White Bone's palm hovered and then fell against Raj's crown with instinctive fury. For a heartbeat she could have unleashed the force to split mountains, but there was a lag — an internal interference, an unexpected softness that rooted her hand like a root to the earth.
Raj didn't flinch. He merely, with the languid insolence of one completely practiced at certain domestic cruelties, patted her small butt and murmured, "Don't make trouble. Let's sleep."
It was a ridiculous, impossible thing. White Bone bit his shoulder in indignation, more in show than effect — his skin barely registered the teeth. But the motion snapped something in Raj's face: not anger, but pity. Tears rose unbidden in her eyes, part outrage, part shattered expectation.
"Ok—okay," he said, and the voice that followed was not rough but disarming. "I'm sorry. Little White, don't cry."
She sniffed like a child and then exploded with the same contradictory ferocity she'd lived by: "How can you say that my purity is nothing? I chased Sun Wukong into the sky and back! I have vows and bones and a path—who are you to… to… to claim me?"
Raj laughed, of the kind that is half fondness, half exasperation. "Because you walked into my arms. That tends to decide things."
The fur coat, ridiculous and intimate, was smoothed by Tie Fan's hands and replaced with warmer modern clothing. Tie Shan fussed over hems and buttons with an efficiency that made White Bone flush again — this time at the care rather than the conquest.
The errands were to be merry, the reception practical: buy clothes, learn the shape of this world, and give the newcomer a soft immersion into a household that defended itself with laughter as much as wards.
They swept into the mall like a small storm: more than twenty women in a choreographed flutter—drivers, cars, chatter, a little caravan of color. Raj sat with Guan Guan beside him, a composed semblance of domestic order, the rare smile of a man who could expend apocalypse but preferred bowls of soup.
White Bone watched and tried to understand the invisible hierarchies: Duan's quiet command, Tie Shan's quick decisions, the maid's small deferential bows to Raj, the way the women gave Guan Guan a space that was simultaneously reverent and wary.
Something about that careful caution made White Bone's brow furrow. She asked plainly, "Who is Guan Guan?"
Tie Shan answered with a lower voice. "Guan Guan was once a Bodhisattva. She is… changed. She listens to Raj, and Raj keeps her balanced. We all respect her because she is different, and because Raj requests it."
White Bone's eyes widened with the complicated compassion of someone who had known exile, loneliness, and the brittle circle of a path. She felt a kinship with those who had been reshaped by forces beyond their control.
By the time they reached the mall's first floor, White Bone's earlier fury had melted into a bruise of private shock and curiosity. Raj put his arm around her waist in a casual, un-rehearsed movement, the kind of touch that planted a flag and left it there.
White Bone blushed and scolded, then laughed at herself for being irretrievably soft. A security guard intervened, misreading a husband-and-wife tussle as harassment.
White Bone dashed in indignation, scolding the interloper with the old royal hauteur.
"Don't overstep," Raj murmured to the guard in an offhand tone that suggested he could have removed him from existence. The guard retreated, cheeks flushed. White Bone felt the first, strange comfort of being guarded — not as a commodity, but as someone he chose to shelter.
A commotion—someone shouting about a monster—cut the small scene. A wiry, frantic figure with monkey-like features swung a staff clumsily, barking righteous fury at imagined demons.
Raj's muscles twitched; his expression sharpened. He rose with the controlled ease of a man who could anchor continents and still cross the room for milk.
"Guan Guan," he said simply. "Teach him a lesson."
Guan Guan moved like silk snapping tight. Her presence folded the air; the crowd didn't shout so much as hush. With a soft cadence of incantation she wove a restraining net of demonic art — not lethal, but thoroughly chastening. The monkey man's scalp cooled; his bravado melted into terror.
White Bone's mouth dropped open; she had come here to rage and kill fools, and yet there he was, simultaneously tamed and humiliated by a former goddess now bound to the household. It was an image that embedded itself in her like an omen.
"Protection," Tie Fan said to White Bone later, when the shopping bags had been carried into the car and the private bubble of their clan settled like a secret. "You must learn two things quickly: who he protects, and how."
White Bone listened. The lessons were not in prize or territory; they were about the shape of loyalty. She felt an odd, unnameable softness creep in her chest.
Across the city, Tang Xiaojian trailed after small, absurd errands and found himself face-to-face with the monkey-man half-recovering on the lawn. The scene was comic: cultured embarrassment, interspecies misunderstanding, and the kind of civic hospitality that baffled gods. Tang decided then that he would get answers tomorrow — about Raj, about Yao Yao, about the way his quiet life had mutated into a spectacle.
That night, they returned to the villa. The living room turned into a ribbon of restful bodies and warm breathing, a congregation of people who had been stitched together by storms.
As the women dozed, sleep-bound, White Bone fell into a dream that turned the old life into shards: a forest of bone, a chorus of judges, and a single, soft hand that held fast to her wrist. In the dream, a voice said words that were not threats but promises.
She woke with Raj near, the pulse of his heart faint against the small of her back. He spoke to her then, not as a conqueror but as someone who asked consent before maps changed.
"Do you want to be here?" he asked quietly.
White Bone's fingers tightened on the fur of the blanket. Her voice trembled, then steadied. "I do not want to be a thing. I want to choose."
He smiled a private smile as if some small miracle had been accomplished. "Then choose."
The choice that followed was not a sudden surrender but a sober, private acknowledgement. By the time the next morning dawned bright and deliberate, White Bone had wrapped herself in something more than clothing — she had folded a new allegiance in her chest.
Later, the house lit up with a gentle revel. They celebrated the new sister with a meal and with many small, ritualized gifts. Raj laughed easy, a man who had seen the ends of things and still found pleasure in the mundane.
The women danced, the maids served, and Yao Yao performed a coy little fox dance that made everyone grin. The night waned and the women tumbled, staggered, and fell into sleep with the blissful exhaustion of people who had loved and been loved in return.
Between the laughter and the twilight confessions, Raj took stock in silence. The Guanyin incident had carved a scar into his mind that still burned.
He did not sleep like before; his rest was short, his vigilance long. The villa was a fortress as much as a home: redundancies in anchoring, escape vectors, emergency beacons hidden in jewelry, whispered access codes planted in lullabies. His plans unfurled like blueprints across his mind.
Each woman's safety was an equation he would spend his nights solving.
Guan Guan sat at one window, a faint, unreadable smile on her face. She looked at Raj as much as she looked at the sleeping harem. The old light in her eyes was present still, but it moved differently now: sharpened, disciplined, and strangely tender. No one joked about her position; they respected its gravity.
Her presence was a single, potent promise that whatever force had reaped and remade her would not be wasted.
White Bone, for her part, rose early and wrapped herself in quiet determination. She walked through the villa like a woman learning to inhabit a new body. Tie Fan watched with an expression of quiet approval, and Tie Shan nudged White Bone gently, as sisters do, toward a life that was messy and domestic and fiercely defended.
When Tang Xiaojian, with his fumbling courage, showed up the following day to confront the wildness that had entered his life, Raj met him at the gate with the same paradox of soft amusement and unbearable gravity. "You are Yao Yao's friend?" he asked, and Tang nodded.
Raj leaned in close enough to let the scent of jasmine brush the young man's face. "Then be careful," he murmured, voice like a steel bell. "When a man touches what's mine, small things happen."
Tang's eyes widened; fear and envy and something like awe made him take a half-step backward. He thought he understood a little of the world then: that some men wore empires like coats, and some men wore family like armor.
At night, in a quieter moment, White Bone sat with Tie Fan and Tie Shan and asked the question that never quite left her: "How do you continue after the storm? How do you keep the wounds from taking you?"
Tie Fan answered like a woman who had chosen the long road. "We keep each other. We plan. We set barriers that even the saints would think twice to cross. And when the world asks for pain, we teach it what loyalty means."
White Bone listened and tucked the lesson into the new armor forming around her heart.
By dawn the next morning, the household was steady. White Bone moved through it with the slow confidence of someone newly attuned to a different kind of life. She was no longer merely a spirit of bone and solitude; she was a woman with a choice and a place, and the pride of that place had a softness that seemed to surprise her.
Raj watched her once, standing by a window with the city waking beneath her. His face was grim for an instant, then unbent as if he had resolved an equation. He bent and brushed the top of her head once — an almost-paternal gesture, and utterly intimate. White Bone tilted her head into the touch and smiled, a tiny thing, but true.
Outside the world shifted—saints slept, continents hummed faintly with new seams—but inside the villa, the small domestic miracles multiplied.
The women planned wardrobes, taught each other odd recipes, traded stories that had nothing to do with gods or wars, and learned the small arts of keeping people alive: when to laugh, when to hold a hand, and when to be furious enough to burn the sky.
And Raj, whose temper had once been a cataclysm, balanced the scale more carefully now. He learned the difference between a war to burn the heavens and a plan to keep the ones he loved breathing. The Heartbond Eternal Spring Sutra had taught him to feel more than rage; it had taught him to anchor himself to the people who mattered. Every new sister who chose him was now also a responsibility to guard, with strategies and fail-safes and with the kind of tender bureaucracy that made love into policy.
They were a strange family—misfit, sacrificial, fierce—and in that strangeness they found a kind of home that the old myths had never promised.