Xiulan stared at the parchment with great concentration.
Then he squinted.
Then he frowned.
"…What are these chicken scratches?" he asked.
The female disciple, who had the achieved the patience of a meditating turtle, gave him a kind smile. "That's human script."
"This is what humans write like?" Xiulan blinked again. "It is so… dry. Where is the flair? The pulse? The screaming lines? The crawling snakes fighting the dancing ones?"
She hesitated. "Screaming… lines?"
His fingers hovered over the human calligraphy, as if expecting it to wriggle or cry out in protest. When it did not, he frowned.
"It doesn't even bite," he whispered, deeply offended.
"Bite?" She wondered out loud.
"Yeah. You know, like when the brush fights back." Xiulan held up one of his homemade brushes, forged from porcupine whiskers and cloud-hare fur. "See? It bites."
The disciple wisely took a step back.
Xiulan had never been taught human language. Not really. His Leaf Diary was written entirely in what he called 'Beast Spirit Rune Script'—a flowing, living script made of symbols he absorbed through instinct and divine mischief. It looked like a child had made calligraphy while spinning in a circle.
Which, to be fair, was exactly how he wrote it.
Each symbol took energy to form. Each line required qi, spiritual resonance, or emotional chaos (which he had plenty of). His writing was not just letters—it was a language laced with meaning, will, and spirit. A single swirl could tell a deer to move left. A hooked curve might cause mushrooms to bloom early.
It was, to put it mildly, terrifying to human cultivators.
"Your writing bleeds qi," the sect scholar had said, after trying to copy one of Xiulan's pages. "It nearly drained my entire dantian!"
Xiulan pouted. "So, I shouldn't lend my leaf diary to anyone?"
"No. Please do not. One of our outer disciples used it as a pillow and accidentally awakened his third meridian."
"Oh." He blinked. "You're welcome?"
"No, he exploded."
"Oh." Another pause. "But he's okay now, right?"
"He survived. He is just… not interested in books anymore."
The scholar stared hollowly into the distance.
"Now he talks to bricks."
Xiulan clutched his leaf diary a little closer. "I will only use it for very important thoughts from now on." And would not lend it to you guys. Too weak.
When they finally brought him his first human script primer, Xiulan approached it with reverence and suspicion. There were lines. Squares. Characters made of uniform strokes and structured corners.
It made him itchy.
Still, he tried.
The first letter he formed—well, the paper caught fire. The second—his brush snapped in two. The third—Baby Po came running in asking if someone was summoning a tree spirit by accident again.
Turns out, he was not writing human script.
He was instinctively channeling beast-rune qi into every stroke, which meant even something as harmless as "sun" in his hand became a glowing talisman that summoned… well, actual sun.
Uncle Hei watched him struggle and huffed under his breath. "Humans always need things to be square. Cannot even read a Soul mark without rules."
Baby Po, ever supportive, said, "You are doing great, little seedling. At least you only set three things on fire today!"
Xiulan groaned and buried his face in the table.
"I don't get it," he mumbled. "Why do I need to learn boring letters when my runes work perfectly?"
The disciple hesitated. "Well… the cultivation world is mostly human. You need to learn to communicate. And… your writing? Most cultivators cannot read it."
"Why not?"
"Because most cultivators do not have to channel spiritual qi into every letter just to write 'hello.'"
A cultivator patted Xiulan's head and said, "Humans doesn't use qi in everything."
Xiulan blinked. "So, they don't bleed when they write greetings?"
"…No." The cultivator blinked.
"…And they don't cough up fog if they sign their name?"
"No." He blinked again.
"…And they don't accidentally draw worms from the soil if they add extra curls?"
"…What?! No!!"
Xiulan leaned back in horror. "Your writing is so boring!"
Still, he tried.
He practiced the characters for sun, mountain, and radish. (That last one may or may not have come to life and wiggled away.)
His strokes were wild and messy at first, but soon, something clicked.
Not in the human way.
In the Xiulan way.
He did not write like humans did.
But he did translate what he knew.
And that is when they discovered something remarkable: His ancient rune-script could not be replicated by anyone who didn't have spiritual qi bleeding into their pen naturally. That meant most cultivators, even if powerful, could not form his runes unless they deliberately sacrificed qi—something that took time, effort, and skill in rune cultivation.
In short, Xiulan's writing was alive.
And human writing was paperwork.
"Your script is basically a walking formation," the sect's talisman elder said with a mixture of awe and despair. "It's like trying to write while doing acupuncture and reciting the Dao backwards."
"I thought it was just pretty." Xiulan said, a little pleased.
Later that night, in his Leaf Diary (written, of course, in his own indecipherable beast-rune script), Xiulan wrote:
"I learned humans do not like their writing to scream or glow. They like it boring and quiet. Also, they get headaches reading mine. I think I am special. Humans are weird."
He added a small drawing of a carrot trying to write with a squirrel.
And then he wrote in neat, humming script:
"Note to self: Do not sell leaf diary to humans unless they enjoy seizures."
The disciples agreed to let Xiulan continue with his own writing style for now.
But once a week, he would be forced to sit down and write five boring characters in a row, without glitter, without spiritual explosions, and most importantly, without carrots writing back.
(Yes. That had happened once.)
Still, the boy with the leaf diary and explosive pen strokes did not mind. Because even if his writing could not be used by anyone else—
—it was still the most beautiful part of himself.
A language only he could speak, but that the whole forest and his mates understood.
And that, he thought, made it very him.