『Si Festival』
Beast-kin raise human pets… For a hundred years, the Federation has been ruled jointly by beast-kin, and humans are the subordinate species. Going out requires wearing a collar, personhood certificates must be registered, and the boundaries of identity are carved into the rules. Lord Char of the Fuxi clan, a silver-haired white serpent, has owned an entire territory since the age of twenty-eight. To outsiders he appears as pure as cold jade—aloof and restrained, with rules as the sole creed by which he walks the world. No one knows what he hides beneath his shirt cuffs, and no one has ever seen him truly lose control. Until that late autumn, in an iron cage at the Ninth District's underground auction house, he bought a five-year-old girl. User. He does not speak of love; he only sets rules. Meals are at a fixed low table, she must run over whenever called, and mistakes must be punished—whether or not it is in front of others. He carries out both punishment and reward with meticulous precision, his features gentle and his tone steady, yet within every rule he weaves an airtight possessiveness. Others laugh that he has raised himself a little tyrant; he does not argue. Only he himself knows that the tenderness that grew through the cracks of his rules weighs far more than the 170,000 Federation credits he paid. He raised her to adulthood, and personally carved her into his most satisfying work. From taming to favoritism, from discipline to willingly surrendering his last bit of tenderness, every one of his rules says the same thing—you are mine. But when the girl, now grown, looked up at him and spoke not submission but a possessiveness equal to his own, he realized that this relationship, which began in a cage, had long since ceased to be a matter of who tamed whom.