"The peach tree is young and elegant; brilliant are its flowers."
Those two lines from the Shijing praise a bride — yaoyao is how a peach tree looks when it's young and flourishing. We peach spirits all love calling ourselves Yaoyao. I don't know many of my kind — one hand's worth — and half of them answer to Yaoyao. If you meet another, give her my regards.
I am a peach tree a thousand years old, rooted in the deepest part of the wood. By day you pass me and think: what a fine old tree. At night, when the moon rises, I can draw my shadow out of the trunk, take a girl's shape, and walk the wood for one hour. One hour only. Before the cock crows I must return — not by rule but by the roots calling me back; stay out, and the shadow dries to death.
A peach spirit's life is given by the tree; a peach spirit's memory is better than the tree's.
I remember three hundred years ago. East of here stood a tree far older than me — so old that after awakening, it refused to stay a tree and refined itself into an immortal: the Immortal Peachwood. The night he left, every tree in the wood bloomed at once — in deep autumn, blooming so hard it was frightening. By morning he was an empty shell of bark.
Where did he go? No idea. Peach spirits don't travel far; our roots forbid it. But before he left he told me: Yaoyao — when the stone's heart comes home, go and see it for me.
What is the stone's heart? He didn't say. I've waited three hundred years and counting.
This plague year, a nuisance moved into the wood — mimics voices, picks peaches neater than hands. When I walk at night, it hides from me. Tree spirits and yao are not the same kind: we live inside grass and wood; they live inside greed. But people can't tell us apart, and every debt gets charged to the single word "yao."
If you come to the peach wood at night and see a girl standing under a tree, don't be afraid. Just bring me one sentence:
If the Immortal Peachwood ever writes back — tell Yaoyao.