The Twelve Zodiac Guardian Gods​

Shuiyue’s body stiffened instantly. Reflexively, her palm lashed out and struck Qi Yue’s shoulder.

Even in the haze of dizziness, Qi Yue registered the sensation in his hand—it was full, soft, and far larger than he’d expected. His fingers instinctively gave a light squeeze, as if to confirm it was real. Though he’d been intimate with Nana before, Qi Yue had always considered himself more of a flirt than a true womanizer. This—this was entirely new territory. He was just as stunned as Shuiyue.

Her small, pale hand, as smooth as white jade, landed squarely on his shoulder. Qi Yue felt an intense heat surge through his body, and before he could react, he was thrown backward by an irresistible force, crashing back onto the infirmary bed.

Shuiyue cried out in alarm. In the process, she was pulled forward by Qi Yue’s unintentional grip and tumbled right on top of him.

“You—!” Shuiyue’s angry shout died in her throat.

Qi Yue’s face had turned bright red. His body radiated heat, and even in his dazed state, steam seemed to rise faintly from his skin. Just moments after waking, he had slipped back into unconsciousness.

“Ah! This is bad!” Shuiyue’s eyes widened as she remembered what she had done. In her panic and embarrassment, she’d reflexively used her family’s Duanyang Palm technique—a martial art rooted in internal energy. Although she hadn’t applied full force, it was still a powerful move. While not inherently harmful, the Duanyang Palm was a method of channeling yang energy to stimulate the body, typically used in acupuncture-like healing. However, in the wrong context, it could be overwhelming—especially for someone like Qi Yue, who had no martial training or cultivation background.

Realizing that his grasp on her had already relaxed, Shuiyue looked down at his flushed body. The heat emanating from him was growing steadily.

The Duanyang Palm was a closely guarded secret of Shuiyue’s family. Passed down only to direct descendants, it could be used both for healing and self-defense. She had begun cultivating it as a child and had trained for over a decade. Although her strength was still modest by serious cultivator standards, she already possessed formidable internal power—something Qi Yue had never guessed when he first met her. To him, she was just a quiet, graceful girl on a journey. He had no idea that behind her soft voice was someone who could be called a budding martial master.

Anxious, Shuiyue bent down to check on him. But years of medical training quickly took over. Her expression calmed as she knelt beside him, hands moving with confidence.

Qi Yue’s blue shirt was drenched in sweat, clinging to him like a second skin. With practiced ease, Shuiyue slipped it off to examine his condition more closely.

His body was lean, lightly bronzed from the sun. There was no visible fat, though neither was he muscular. His build suggested slight malnourishment—something Shuiyue confirmed with a quick check of his pulse.

Her brows furrowed.

His right shoulder, the point of impact, was red and beginning to swell. A bluish tinge spread across the skin, and from it, a strange warmth pulsed outward in waves.

Shuiyue took a deep breath, calming her nerves. She knew the force behind her family’s Duanyang Palm. Though she’d only used about thirty percent of her full strength in that moment of panic, even that was enough to be lethal if misapplied. The Duanyang Palm, a technique passed down exclusively within her family, was rooted in strong masculine yang energy—highly potent and dangerously aggressive when used for self-defense. Fortunately, Shuiyue was a woman, and her natural yin constitution lent a gentler quality to the strike. Otherwise, that single palm might have cost Qi Yue half his life.

Her figure seemed to float lightly as she stepped to the door in a single, graceful motion. She peered into the hallway before quietly locking the door. After all, they were a man and woman alone in a room, and she had already undressed Qi Yue’s upper half in the infirmary. She couldn’t risk anyone else seeing them in this state—it would be impossible to explain.

Returning to the bedside, Shuiyue’s face turned bright red.

Qi Yue’s jeans, previously loose-fitting, now bulged noticeably. She didn’t need to ask what had caused it. As a medical student, she wasn’t naïve—this wasn’t the result of accidental groping, but rather a natural physiological reaction triggered by the sudden surge of yang energy she’d inadvertently infused into his body.

Suppressing her embarrassment, Shuiyue quickly focused her mind. She retrieved a small cloth pouch from her satchel and unrolled it, revealing an array of gleaming silver needles—her acupuncture set. Qi Yue’s body was overheating rapidly. She needed to redirect the excess yang energy before it consumed him from the inside out.

Just as she picked up a mid-length needle and prepared to insert it, something caught her eye.

A strange pattern was slowly emerging over the left side of Qi Yue’s chest—just above the heart. At first, it looked like a faint outline, but as the seconds passed, the design darkened and became startlingly vivid.

It resembled a mythical beast.

Its antlers were like a deer’s, yet its head was shaped more like a horse’s. The creature’s neck and mane shimmered with silver-brown strands, and the horn on its forehead twisted into a subtle spiral. The pattern wasn’t just artistic—it pulsed faintly with life, as if the beast itself were slumbering beneath Qi Yue’s skin.

At first, only the head and upper neck were visible. But the longer she stared, the more the black markings spread—extending across Qi Yue’s chest, shoulder, and down his back.

Driven by a mix of worry and curiosity, Shuiyue gently rolled him over. What she saw made her gasp aloud.

Most of Qi Yue’s back had turned inky black, covered by the full image of the strange beast. It looked almost alive. Its sleek, powerful body stretched across his back, silver hair rippling down its spine. The interplay of silver and black was mesmerizing.

Beneath the creature’s feet floated four cloud-like symbols. Unlike traditional depictions of auspicious clouds, these were dreamy, ethereal, shimmering with faint hues of otherworldly color—colors Shuiyue couldn’t quite name. No matter how hard she focused, she couldn’t tell what made up those clouds. They looked both real and illusory.

The entire beast now stretched from his shoulders down to the small of his back, covering nearly two-thirds of his body. It wasn’t a tattoo—not in any normal sense. There was no ink, no puncture marks, no scarring.

It had manifested on its own.

A living emblem.

Shuiyue’s fingers trembled slightly as she hovered over his skin. “What… are you?”

Shuiyue stared in astonishment. Could this be an invisible tattoo?

She recalled something her father had once said: that some tattoos, when infused with pigeon blood and special medicinal herbs, remain hidden—only surfacing when one’s blood qi surges. But even those left reddish marks, never black… and certainly not with silver detailing.

Just how painful—and expensive—would a tattoo of this size and detail be? The craftsmanship was almost inhuman.

Her initial suspicion began to ease.

Truthfully, Shuiyue had never fully believed Qi Yue’s wild claim about being a “body artist.” She wasn’t particularly worldly, but she wasn’t foolish either. That’s why she’d distanced herself from him after their first strange encounter. The only reason she tended to him now was pure medical instinct.

But now, seeing this mysterious pattern with her own eyes—and remembering how confidently he’d spoken about the “artistic value of the human form”—a flush of embarrassment crept over her face.

Maybe I really did judge him too harshly… she thought. To create a tattoo this perfect, one probably would need deep experience with body art.

What she didn’t know was that Qi Yue’s story had been nothing more than a clumsy lie meant to seduce her. But now the hunter was unconscious—and his supposed prey was proving far less gullible than he expected.

And then, the strange occurrences continued.

As Shuiyue gently turned Qi Yue over again to resume her acupuncture treatment and guide away the excess yang energy from her Fuyang Palm strike, she froze in disbelief.

The black-and-silver creature etched across his back—the one-horned beast—was now glowing faintly red. The glow concentrated on its left foreleg, half its torso, and its head—all aligned with the area of Qi Yue’s body she had struck earlier.

Even more astonishing, the swelling on his right shoulder, which had been hot and inflamed just moments ago, was gradually receding. His rapid, erratic breathing had begun to slow. Only the involuntary arousal from earlier remained.

The high flush on his skin was cooling, his complexion returning from fevered crimson to a healthy, ruddy glow. When Shuiyue instinctively checked his wrist pulse again, her brow furrowed.

The yang energy she had injected into him—aggressive and dangerous for an untrained body—was disappearing.

No… not just disappearing.

It was being absorbed.

By his own body.

This was something Shuiyue had never encountered before. She was a physician and a cultivator, trained in the art of internal energy since childhood. And yet, what she witnessed now defied both fields.

Qi Yue’s skin seemed smoother, more supple. The unhealthy pallor he’d carried earlier had been replaced with vitality. The mysterious beast mark across his back was now fading slowly, its silver threads dissolving into his skin like mist retreating before dawn.

And all the while, his breathing deepened—steady, even, balanced. Each breath flowed into the next seamlessly, without pause, like a calm tide.

Somewhere within his unconscious mind, Qi Yue had stepped into a strange new world. Yet the transformation was so subtle that even a trained eye might have missed it—if not watching carefully from the start.