A Zoologist’s Guide to Surviving Magical Creatures

I blinked hard at the page. Re-read the first paragraph just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating from too much caffeine and existential dread.

"…What?"

The more I read, the more everything I thought I knew about the Nian unraveled like a badly tied shoelace. This beast—this supposed monstrous terror that haunted New Year legends and village scare-stories—wasn't a villain at all.

It was sacred.

Sacred. I leaned back slightly, the weight of that word hitting harder than expected. My fingers hovered over the sketch of Nian on the page—its towering form etched in sweeping strokes of lunar silver and obsidian ink. The image was feral, yes, but regal too. Like a storm in stillness.

All this time… they got it wrong.

Before the world had smartphones, spellmaps, or even functional plumbing, Nian existed—born from a collision of time, chaos, and memory itself. A cosmic mistake, or maybe a correction. I wasn't sure.

Each New Year's Eve, when the veil between yesterday and tomorrow thinned to a whisper, evil energy called Yinsha would bleed into the world—poisoning the land with decay, misfortune, and the kind of bad vibes that curdled even the bravest souls.

And Nian?

Nian wasn't the reason those bad things happened.

It was the one preventing them.

I don't remember when the page stopped being a page.

One second, I was tracing the elegant brushstrokes of the Nian beast's description—half curious, half caffeine-jittery—and the next, everything around me melted into silver mist. Ink bled into moonlight. The parchment hummed under my fingers, like it remembered something before I could.

Then the ground shifted.

The chill bit first. Then came the wind, mountain-born and ancient, laced with silence so heavy it made the stars feel distant.

And suddenly, I wasn't me anymore.

I was inside the Nian.

Not looking at the memory.

Living it.

Snow crunched beneath massive claws that weren't mine. The air tasted metallic, sharp with something wrong. Evil energy.

My muscles—no, its muscles—rippled with tension as we stood at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the sleeping village below. The moon above pulsed like a heartbeat.

I felt the ache deep in my chest—an ancient pull that wasn't hunger, but duty.

Holy crap.

What just happened?

Am I—am I becoming one of the Divine Emperor War Beasts?

My heart pounded like a war drum, adrenaline still burning in my veins. I staggered back from the book, chest heaving, lungs forgetting how to be lungs.

That wasn't just a vision. That was me. I was there. No, not just there—I was in it. Inside the Nian. Breathing through its lungs. Thinking with its mind. Feeling with its soul.

"What the hell...?" I gasped, running a hand through my hair, fingers tangling in the strands. "Did I touch some kind of celestial fragment? An echo? Was that even legal?!"

This wasn't a hallucination. It wasn't imagination. Something deeper—older—had latched onto me. Dragged me into memory like it remembered I didn't belong.

But the craziest part?

It didn't hurt.

It felt... right.

I could still hear Nian's voice in me, like distant thunder echoing through hollow mountains. Not words exactly—something deeper than language.

Sorrow, thick and endless, curled around my ribs like smoke. Urgency pulsed beneath my skin, a heartbeat that wasn't mine.

And then—unexpectedly—there was love. Not the glittery rom-com kind.

The raw, aching, unbearable love of something ancient watching a child walk toward a fire, knowing it can't stop them without scaring them away.

Nian loved humanity.

It didn't just protect—it felt.

The Nian's inner voice resounded.

Every year, on this night, the Yinsha crept in through the cracks between hours. Shadows that didn't belong. Whispers that shouldn't exist. Corrupted memories feeding on grief, poisoning the land.

And every year, I—Nian—came down from the Deep Mist Mountains.

Not to kill.

To cleanse.

But they never understood.

They only saw the fire.

They heard the roar and not the reason. They saw the tremble of the earth, not the sickness beneath it that I came to purge. They feared me, not what I was saving them from.

Every drumbeat on New Year's Eve, every red lantern, every child who hid under their bed during the celebration—that was his tradition. His legacy. And they had no idea.

I clutched the edge of the table as the last threads of emotion pulsed through me like an aftershock. It was overwhelming. Beautiful. Horrifying.

"I was reliving as a Nian beast..." I whispered, awestruck.

That wasn't just a memory.

That was a soul.

And somehow… it touched mine.

That sentence stopped me cold. I whispered it aloud without meaning to.

"They feared my roar…"

Gods.

They lit lanterns, beat drums, painted doors red—not knowing it wasn't to keep the Nian away, but to guide it. It had nudged them gently toward these rituals, woven them into their instinct. The beast was never their enemy. It was their unseen shield.

I let out a slow, unsteady breath, dragging a hand down my face.

This… this was rewriting everything I thought I knew about what made a creature good or evil.

When Nian's original world fell—burned in the First Collapse—others perished. Nian didn't.

Because chaos didn't break it.

It made it.

And when the final Yinsha of its world came for the heart of creation, Nian did what no god, no war beast, no arch-sorcerer could. It devoured it. Absorbed the foulness. Survived it. Transcended it.

Not corrupted. Not hollow.

Changed.

It became one of the Divine Emperor War Beasts—one of the rare few that walked the razor-thin thread between annihilation and harmony.

Its horn like a shard of comet glass, pulsing with lunar fire. That fire didn't just burn—it purified. It could erase memories of evil, the way the moonlight drowns out nightmares. Nian's breath turned chaos into aurora winds, breathed ruined terrain back into fertility, turned curses into prayers.

And etched into the margins, barely readable, a quote in ancient celestial script translated below it:

To welcome the new, one must burn away the old.

It wasn't just some dramatic philosophy. It was a cosmic law. The Divine Emperor War Beasts, like Nian and Indrik, weren't just survivors of ruined worlds—they were their balance, born from calamity, forged to prevent it from repeating.

That kind of power…

That kind of responsibility...

And here I was, stupidly thinking it was just another oversized threat with bad PR.

I ran a thumb over the ink of Nian's form. Felt a weird ache in my chest—part guilt, part awe.

"Maybe," I murmured, "you weren't the monster we needed to fear…"

Maybe the real monsters were the ones who refused to see you.

I leaned back in my seat, eyes scanning the last paragraph again, but this time… something clicked.

It wasn't about finding a weakness. Not really. That's where I'd gone wrong.

What I needed to understand—was them.

Not as monsters. Not as war machines. But as beings. Creatures forged by calamity, shaped by grief, bound by purpose. I needed to know how they thought, what they feared, what made them hesitate—or fight harder.

Their habits. Their instincts. The scars they carried from the worlds they lost.

"I get it now," I murmured, voice low. "It's not that they don't have weaknesses. It's that their weakness is their strength. It's the paradox that keeps them standing."

I sat on the sofa, the memory still simmering beneath my skin like embers refusing to go out. My hands trembled—not from fear, but something else. Recognition. Connection. The kind that rewires you without asking permission.

And then it hit me.

This… this is the key, isn't it?