@slumbernanas post about Geto having to learn about his abilities on his own had me brainstorming something AWFUL so prepare for a YAP
For Yifei, being born a world away from Jujutsu and beyond the reach of modern sorcery, was a blessing in disguise- though on paper it’d have to seem like cruelty.
Yifei's cursed technique emerged early- even by documented Jujutsu standards.
At only 4 years old, while most children were still mastering zippers and patiently waiting in line, Yifei received her very first adult teeth. Her little canines barely rounded two years when they fell out of her mouth. No ceremony. One day they were there, and the next they were gone. Replaced with raw agony that left Yifei screaming until her shredded throat overpowered the pain of what was emerging. Toothlike-things, too sharp, too sickle-like, pushing through her jaw & when it should have stopped, they grew, and grew. It defied medicine. Defied logic. There was no godly way her body had space for the bone pushing its way out of her, yet there it was, there she suffered. Weeks passed, and eventually, it stopped. She had a full rack of tusks. IDENTIFIABLE tusks.
Had Yifei been born into a society where Jujutsu was systematically organized, where there was an undercurrent of the arts of Japanese sorcery, with social safety nets designed to filter individuals like her, her story wouldn't have ended so happily.
If Yifei had been born a Japanese national. She would have been taken from her father. With the mark of the Taotie so strong on her body? The traditionalists’ hands would feel tied. A nuclear non-sorcerer couple couldn't be trusted to handle that, let alone a normal, single man. Through plucking at the bureaucratic strings, his custody would be revoked. At 4, Yifei would have lost her first teeth, part of her innocence, and, really, her entire family. She would’ve been sorted into the custody of an experienced sorcerer, not for prodigy status, but to curb the concerning elements of her nature and keep her managed. Not growing and thriving, managed, but at least she was in a place that was capable of understanding her, right?
We don’t need to ponder THAT outcome, though, because such a reality never came to pass. Yifei was not born a Japanese National; she was born on the far side of North-Western China, in a village-turned-subdistrict that still felt as comfortable and rural as it had before the greater Haidong area absorbed it during industrialization. She grew up with community farms and forests and graveyards and dead zones from the property bubble pop.
When anomalies arose in Yifei, her father and grandparents did the only thing they thought they could. They hid her, stashed her away like prize jewels to keep the world from trying to take her. They turned to folk tradition, the dying art of Shuai Jiao (essentially Chinese Jujutsu), and 民间信仰 to treat her.
For years, Yifei was cloistered away from the world- between the school and working with her father in the family funeral home- she was an enigma. She still endured the pain, but she wasn’t scared- she was home, she was safe. No matter what was happening to her, no matter the terror she saw in her caregivers- their determination to keep her safe and protect her, no matter what that meant, it gave her peace.
She might be cursed, she might be a monster, but... with everything they did, she never doubted that they loved her- even if the world might think their efforts to hide her away, put her beneath masks and wrap her in tradition seem oppressive. She feels and felt LOVED.
She did have to learn the particulars of her technique all on her own- she learned, in time, what that delicate pollen-like energy she could see in the air was. She learned on her own that she could eat it and purge it from locations/people.
The fact that Yifei learned it on her own, in her own time, gave it the tangibility to be more than a weapon in some unseen arsenal- her absorbing negative energy- it became a 7th sense. It was a part of her, a second stomach and system- then the more she learned, the more she SAW and put the pieces together. She learned it could be a gesture she could knowingly share.
That's why her first feeding ground was the endless sorrow of her father's funeral home because she CARED. She purified the funeral home; she sponged the excess grief saturating and drowning the mourners because she wanted to help; she had an appetite more than greed; and she learned, in her own time, that this was the way a kid like her COULD help. She wasn’t a therapist, she wasn’t a counsellor, she couldn’t bring back the dead, but she could chase away the excess and eat a burden only she could see. She could help them feel better. It was empowering and the first step toward self-love she could take.
If Yifei grew up in the standard world of Jujutsu, she wouldn't have been able to have this revelation; her education and exploration would have been funnelled into weaponization- her consumption would be ONLY that. There'd be no differentiation in skills from her patron; she would never be fully comfortable with her abilities or, essentially, herself!
