The Hunter

(九尾, jiǔ wěi)

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

The Hunter does not speak in Chapter 15. He follows. He appears at the Lincoln Memorial; he appears, the next morning, at the Friendship Archway in DC's Chinatown, watching the lion-pillar from across the street; he is the figure in the corner of the diner where Jackie eats breakfast. The shadow is always one tail too long. Jackie, who has by Chapter 15 begun to hold the Universe Ring the right way and the wrong way in approximately equal measure, registers the Hunter as a problem he cannot quite focus on — the way one registers a tooth that is not yet hurting.

The Hunter is the Chronicles' first signal that not all of the older world's interest in Jackie is benevolent Council interest. The book carefully does not resolve him in Jackie Vs. AI; he is a thread that runs forward into later volumes, and his nine tails are how the reader is told to expect him again.

Backstory

The nine-tailed fox — 九尾狐, jiǔ wěi húli — is one of the older figures in the East Asian mythological commons, attested in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and threaded through Chinese, Korean, and Japanese tradition. The fox accumulates tails with age and cultivation; nine is the upper register, the form in which the fox has lived long enough to have become something the human moral vocabulary can no longer fully describe. The Chronicles draws on this ambiguity — neither villain nor ally, but a being whose presence on the page changes what the page is about. The hunter motif is also a deliberate echo of Journey to the West, run with the polarity reversed.