"Believe me," she murmurs in answer to Valerie, "aside from imprisoning it or making it a companion for a monk of the old days, I don't have the..."<br/><br/>Then the Will starts talking again.  All of the words about these demons may as well be Ancient Greek to her.  This does not keep her from absorbing it with a certain desperate need to understand.  At length, when the Will has mostly exhausted his (its?) explanation, Xiaoxing almost looks overwhelmed.<br/><br/>"How is it that these things exist and nobody know about them?" she asks, unsettled, looking from the Will to the demon-in-ten-bodies to Valerie and back again.  "Spirits and their kine are supposed to be a metaphor for metaphysical reality, not... not things that are actually here, just below the surface of the weave of the world.  If they're real, if they are things we can touch, why isn't knowledge of them... why isn't this common knowledge?"