MaHuang: King Of Chaos

My name is Ma A Shui. The Ma with the insect radical. I am a MaHuang — a three-hundred-year-old leech YaoGuai who learned to take human form.

For most of those centuries, I hid in the mud of Daze Lake, surviving on fish blood and fear. The one time I killed a man, the Heavenly Thunder struck me down without mercy. So I learned to stay small. To stay quiet. To never take a human life.

Then a village girl named A Xiu pulled my dying body from the shallows. She gave me a name. She fed me rice soup I didn't need and patted my head when I finished the bowl. For the first time in three hundred years, I began to wonder what it might mean to be human.

But war had already reached her village. When soldiers in yellow uniforms came, A Xiu died trying to save me. And something inside me — something older than fear — woke up.

Now I walk north, carrying the only thing she left behind against my chest. I have learned a strange truth: the Heavenly Thunder that struck me for killing a bandit does not fall when I kill the invaders. Their blood tastes different. The Heavens see them differently. But why?

I am learning that human hearts are more complicated than any hunger, and that the line between monster and man is thinner than I ever imagined.

I am MaHuang. I am a YaoGuai by birth. I can drink the blood of those the Heavens have abandoned,

But A Xiu said I could be more.  
So I am learning — slowly, painfully — what it means to be human.