Suddenly, there's a cat. His face is shaped differently than the local ones, and he's an unusual tawny color, if one happens to pay enough attention to cats to notice such things. Of course, the fact that he wasn't there a moment ago may get him a little more scrutiny than usual.

Did that cat just appear out of nowhere, or did Wei Wuxian just fail to notice it earlier?  He is a bit tipsy.  He's had... how much has he had?  Not that much; not enough to be hallucinating cats, surely.

"Hey kitty kitty," he greets.  Wei Wuxian is tapping his fingers against the flute resting on his thigh, but makes no other movements.

The cat tilts his head at him, and then approaches; all at once, as he does, it becomes obvious to Wei Wuxian that he's unnerved and confused, just as if he was a human with human body language indicating that.

He sits, just out of reach, sets his ears attentively.

Wei Wuxian notices how easily he can tell this cat's mood.  Interesting.  Some kind of cat spirit, perhaps?  Or a mundane cat who had eaten mice that had eaten from the lotus from the innermost ponds of Lotus Pier, and received some manner of spiritual power in doing so?  Either way it doesn't seem hostile and he can't sense any resentful energy off of it. 

"I haven't seen you around here before.  Are you one of the Jiang Sect's new recruits?  I'm Wei Wuxian."

Wei Wuxian is not expecting even a magical cat to understand him.  That doesn't mean he isn't going to talk anyway.

"I'm - more lost than that." The sound doesn't come from the cat, who's still watching attentively, but from all around them, a hundred voices speaking a hundred languages and yet somehow it's perfectly comprehensible and not even at an unreasonable volume for a private conversation. "Deviskaryl."

A very magical cat.  Wei Wuxian's fingers stop tapping and he becomes perfectly still for a moment, then resumes.  The other hand reaches up to scratch at his nose in thought.

"How did you get here?"

"I'm not entirely sure. There was a snake monster, eating my followers except not exactly, and I went to try to figure out what it was doing to them, and it ate me, and then I was here. - I don't think they're here, but I'm too small here to be very sure." His tail lashes in frustration. "I have the snake contained now, at least."

"Are your followers also cats?  Wait, how are you smaller here?  Were you a cat before today?"

"I'm lots of cats, at home, and a forest, and I don't have a human avatar but I could. Do you not have gods here?"

"You're a god?"

"We have gods, though none I've heard of take the form of cat colonies.  Forests are a bit more of a thing.  Cultivators don't deal with them much, other than when they're involved in something we've been hired to solve."

"Goddess, but yes. I don't think I've heard of cultivators before."

"Cultivators are people who train in martial and mystic arts.  Then we go out and use the abilities that our training grants us to solve supernatural problems.  Ghosts, walking corpses, monsters, and curses, mostly."

"And you don't usually deal with gods, you said? I must be very far from myself. I could imagine a god having a monstrous avatar or using their power to make corpses walk, but I don't know of anything else that could do it, or any other way for humans to gain supernatural abilities."

"The dead rise on their own if they have enough emotion holding them to the physical world, or if their bodies are buried improperly or disturbed.  Or if a demonic cultivator wakes them up."  Wei Wuxian is smug as he mentions demonic cultivation. 

"I've heard that places far outside of the empire don't know about cultivation and had to come up with other ways of dealing with supernatural dangers.  If gods do it where you're from... but no that wouldn't explain how the undead weren't ever rising.  Unless you always bury everyone perfectly and never have unsolved murders."

"I'm pretty good at making sure people get the funerals they wanted and murderers get caught, but not because I expect the corpses to walk away if I don't. And not all of my neighbors are as attentive, and there is unclaimed land." The cat licks his paw, as a human might chew on their lip while thinking. "It sounds like this might be a different world entirely."

"Cultivators know of the mortal world where we are now, the underworld where souls go between incarnations, and the heavenly realm where immortals and the heavenly court live.  The other two are supposed to be very different, enough that it would have taken less than a second to recognize you're in a different one.  Though that's information at least a thousand years out of date; there's legends of the heavenly officials coming down or people returning from the underworld - with their memories, I mean, not reborn as babies - but no one has done so in ages."  Wei Wuxian wants to now.  He'll add those to his list of impossible tasks to complete.

"That doesn't sound familiar at all. Even the reincarnation." The cat's tail twitches as Deviskaryl thinks. "You seem to be using your wetlands, just here; is there anyplace nearby that you wouldn't mind being drier?"

"It depends what you're looking for, and how much drier it's going to get.  Or - oh, for making a shrine or being a forest?  We have existing forests all over the place, up in the hills.  Exactly where will depend on how close you want to be to inhabited land.  And how safe the area will be for people who wander in by mistake - it's going to be taken really badly if a kid wanders too close while hunting pheasants and gets killed for it, so if that's the sort of thing that's normal for your kind of god to do you'll want somewhere hard to reach by accident."

"For being a forest. The area doesn't have to be a forest already, I can take care of that myself, and it'll be - well, not perfectly safe, but much safer than an uninhabited forest certainly, for anyone who isn't trouble themselves. And more fertile and better for mining and such, too, I'm really more the type of place someone might want to settle than the type of place they might worry about wandering into, by preference.

"I have a place in mind, if that's the case.  It's uphill about 15 li, past the nearby farms, not too long of a walk but not immediately at our doorstep.  The forest keeps going for a good long way, though does eventually get pretty rocky and hilly."

Wei Wuxian stands and stretches.

"I'm not sure I'll be able to keep the hills, fair warning." The cat stretches as well and then rears up, bracing himself on Wei Wuian's leg, pretty clearly expecting to be picked up and carried.

He makes a noise of assent.  The hills over that way are nice enough but not especially outstanding examples of hills.

Wei Wuxian will of course pick up and carry Deviskaryl.  And then they're off! 

He was already near the back edge of Lotus Pier.  It doesn't take long at all before they're passing the low wall out and onto the road leading to their destination.  They cross an old stone bridge, some lotus lakes, some root vegetable fields, some rice fields, a farm growing tea...  Wei Wuxian knows every local farmer and has enough amusing anecdotes of childhood mischief or decade-old gossip to easily fill the time it takes to reach the end of the farms and the beginning of the forest.

Deviskaryl listens attentively, commenting approvingly the attention he pays to his neighbors and sharing a few anecdotes of her own that various stories remind her of; it seems like she's similarly aware of the goings-on in the lives of her followers, though rarely directly involved for more than the time it takes to send a letter or a cat to direct them to some task or resource that's suited to them.

What a good conversation partner.  And a good new neighbor.

The path veering away from the farms turns from a road wide enough to bring a cart down into a narrow dirt trail.  Soon enough after that the trail passes the thick bushes at the edge of the forest.  Wei Wuxian sets Deviskaryl down when they reach the clearer portion beneath the forest's canopy and can see the trunks stretching out for a ways.  It is spring and a number of plants are blooming.  At least as far as can be seen the land is approximately flat.

"All right, let's see." The cat settles comfortably in the center of the path and the surrounding plant life starts changing, beginning near him and spreading out from there. Some of the changes are subtle, leaves taking on a color that's a shade healthier, and some are more obvious, whole bushes coming into fruit or withering away. "I'm not going to invest too heavily here just now - a few dozen square li, I think, until people get to know me. That'll give me a nice little base to work from and I won't miss the investment too much if I need to abandon it for some reason. And - you mentioned shrines, are they typical here? I'm not big on temples, I don't like to set myself above other people like that, but if people will expect a shrine it seems prudent to have one, at least until I'm more inhabited. - you could tell people I like offerings of poetry, especially poems they've written about themselves, if you'd like to do me a favor. And speaking of favors, would you like another blessing, for your help?"

As she's speaking, two more foreign-looking cats appear, from behind a tree and under a bush, and join the first one. One of them has a small green glass vial full of dirt on a ribbon around her neck.