When Duoduo the parrot fluttered down from the vine archway, squawking, "We need manners, and manners look like robes!", everyone in Xiulan's Garden stopped what they were doing. Mostly because Duoduo never came down without gossip, and this announcement smelled like both drama and dye ink.
Mimi, the enormous puffball of a rabbit, blinked her sleepy eyes and asked, "Manners taste like robes?"
"No," Duoduo flapped his bright wings, his beak already halfway into lecture mode. "I mean, we need to take human form. The cultivators think we are uncouth! And I heard—I heard—someone called me 'a squawky flying rug.'"
Xiulan, who was painting a rune onto a cabbage, looked up, utterly scandalized. "Who would dare? Your feathers look very smooth today, Duoduo. I love them!"
Duoduo preened. "Thank you, my sweet pea pod. But compliments aside—this is a reputation emergency." He then goes to splash out a grin and slaps his hands… wings.
So began the legendary decision:
Duoduo the parrot, Mimi the rabbit, and the Twin Monkeys, Bo and Bao, decided to take human form and attend "human classes" to blend in with the visiting cultivators.
Uncle Hei nearly choked on his grilled beetroot when he heard. Baby Po tried to stuff all four of them in a basket to "reset their personalities." He even gave them a carrot soup, saying their personality will either reset or be gone.
The Whispering Tree merely rustled its branches and muttered, "Ah yes, idiots with two legs and too much confidence—again."
Their transformations went... about as well as one might expect.
Duoduo, in his human form, became a flamboyant boy with silky robes in clashing colors, gold trimmings shaped like feathers, and a dramatic streak of scarlet in his hair. He also had opinions and a shitty personality.
"Darling, that belt? It screams 'lost in the laundry'."
Mimi, ever soft and pink, became a sleepy-eyed girl with a bow so large it made other disciples nervous.
Bo and Bao, naturally, turned into slightly handsome chaos machines with matching smirks and different earrings "for individuality." They even carried staffs.
Xiulan clapped. "You all look like the candy fruit stand exploded into people."
Duoduo twirled. "We look stunning, thank you."
"I like being a candy explosion." Mimi beamed.
Meanwhile, Xiulan finally began his first lesson in human calligraphy.
It started with Elder Mei gently prying a soup-stained leaf from his hands.
"Xiulan, dear… Why is your diary written with bone-ash ink on onion skin?"
"It curls better," Xiulan said, earnestly. "They also have personality. Baby Po loves them."
Xiulan even shows her how cool his curly, personality-filled strokes are; they can even breathe fire sometimes.
She handed him a brush. "Let's try something the rest of us can read."
To everyone's shock—and possibly Duoduo's immense satisfaction—Xiulan mastered brush writing in one 7-leaf cycle.
(The 7-leaf cycle, of course, was not a calendar but his own time metric, based on the falling of the seventh leaf from the Whispering Tree's north branch at dawn. It was very specific. Nobody else could track it.)
"He's a prodigy!" disciples whispered.
"His wrist is more graceful than mine!" one cried.
"His brushstrokes feel like morning wind on meditation mats," gushed another.
The Whispering Tree scoffed. "His handwriting's pretty, but he once tried to cook a quill, so let's not get ahead of ourselves."
But nobody heard him, as usual.
"The quill wanted to be cooked." Xiulan beamed.
Despite being so elegant with the brush, Xiulan's way of counting time and marking locations remained... uniquely his own.
"Meet me when the moss sings," he told one disciple.
"I'll return by the second squirrel stretch," he informed another.
"Can next class be after the hamster awakening?" he asked the elder around.
Duoduo whispered to Mimi, "We need a dictionary. Or maybe a translator who is fluent in 'Xiulanish.'"
Bo suggested just following the carrots. "He always comes back to them."
The transformed beast classmates tried their best.
Mimi submitted an assignment covered in flower doodles and a sleepy message: Be good, or the moon will pout.
Duoduo argued with the calligraphy teacher. "My stroke order is interpretive, thank you. It is how I express my inner feathers."
Bo and Bao were currently writing love poems to themselves in the margins of their homework.
Meanwhile, Xiulan's characters danced. With each flick of the brush, his writing bloomed across the page like wind across a garden.
He was even given the title :Qi-Flowing Leaf Scholar. Though when they told him, he tried to actually float on a leaf to accept it and fell into the radish patch.
His earlier writing was in ancient beast script—an instinctual style that relied on movement and qi, perfectly understandable for those attuned to the forest's rhythm. But now, even when using mortal script, Xiulan had begun to unconsciously imbue it with qi. Elder Mei, horrified by this discovery, made him rewrite each character multiple times in hopes of getting him to stop infusing qi into his strokes. Unfortunately, there was one small problem: Xiulan did not even know he was doing it. To him, this was just... writing. Quiet, flowing, honest. How could he stop something he was not even aware of?
At the end of class, Elder Mei sat with Xiulan under the whispering vine arch.
"You're learning very fast," she said softly.
Xiulan tilted his head. "Because the brush listens better than a spoon."
She blinked. "Is that… a metaphor?"
"No. The spoon keeps dropping ink."
She did not press further.
As the sun dipped below the edge of the forest, Duoduo fluttered back into his parrot form, perched on Xiulan's shoulder, and whispered, "Darling, when you ascend to immortality, please take me with you. The gossip up there must be divine."
Xiulan smiled and patted his feathers. "Only if you promise not to sell my secrets."
"No promises," Duoduo chirped. "Gossips aren't biased."
And somewhere in the background, the Whispering Tree sighed, "Idiots. But talented ones."