The Unwanted Girl Eats the Immortal Peach and Becomes the Red Fox

The Unwanted Girl Eats the Immortal Peach and Becomes the Red Fox is a tragic transformation in the Jade Rabbit’s story to Mulan: a girl seeking medicine for her brother eats a forbidden fruit, loses the remedy, and becomes the White Fox’s servant. Its turns are tightly joined: a childhood marked by rejection gives way to a rare journey with the Jade Rabbit, and the chance to save her brother ends in her loss of freedom.

Rejection and Unusual Gifts

The Jade Rabbit recounts that the girl grew up in a large family knowing that her mother resented her. She had no knowledge of the times her mother had tried to abandon her as a baby, only for beasts or woodcutters to bring her back. What she could know directly was the daily pattern of rejection: slaps that left her face red for days, a bowl of rice that was mostly empty and served to her last, and her mother’s bitter, cold gaze. Other families assumed she bore the brunt of her mother’s anger because she was the eldest and was blamed for her younger siblings’ mistakes; the story distinguishes that neighbors’ explanation from the deeper misery of being unwanted.

The girl also sensed that she was odd, and the episodes the Jade Rabbit recounts give that feeling a concrete basis. Sent into freezing winter to find fresh bamboo shoots, she wept in the snow and then inexplicably found them growing. When she fell among a stampede of oxen, hundreds of hooves passed without injuring her. When a wild beast threatened the family’s livestock, she confronted it barehanded and ordered it away—and it obeyed. These incidents establish a life in which extraordinary powers appear alongside, rather than relieve, her isolation.

The Search for Medicine

The girl’s journey with the Jade Rabbit begins as an effort to save her brother, who is ill with Qi-Ruohua sickness. She joins him on a tiger and travels great distances with him, stopping along the way. At one stop she meets the White Fox. The Jade Rabbit explains that the White Fox was interested partly because he, her old foe, had never before traveled with a mortal. She may initially have meant only to inconvenience him by manipulating the girl, but she discovered the girl could be useful and gradually gained mastery over her without the Jade Rabbit realizing it.

That concealed influence gives the medicine quest a second danger. The pair still need the last herb, and the Jade Rabbit’s attention is fixed on obtaining it in time. Yet the girl’s growing connection to the White Fox is already shaping what happens: when the final test arrives, the Jade Rabbit cannot prevent the girl from being lost to her enemy.

The Garden’s Permission and Prohibition

At their last destination, the pair reach the Queen Mother of the West’s Garden of Splendors. The Jade Rabbit asks the Queen Mother of the West for permission to pick the needed herb. She is wary of visitors, recalling that previous guests left a mess and that a monkey ate all her Fruits of Longevity, gaining a life of more than six hundred thousand years. The fruit is only now ripening again, she insists, and must not be disturbed.

The Jade Rabbit promises to touch nothing except the herb needed to cure a child. When the Queen Mother of the West asks whether both travelers seek it, the girl raises her head and says that she wants to save her brother. The Queen Mother of the West allows them to enter and pick only the herb, warning them again not to touch the fruit. The permission is narrow and the stakes explicit: the remedy is within reach, but the garden’s prohibition leaves no room for a mistake.

The Jade Rabbit soon finds the herb. When he turns to show the girl, she has disappeared. He races through the garden in dread and finds her before the Fruits of Longevity, moving one away from her face, with golden juice on her mouth and fingers. A shriek sounds; a whirlwind circles the tree and lifts them both from the ground. The herb flies from the Jade Rabbit’s paw, and the fruit bounces away from the girl. The wind hurls them out of the garden and over the palace’s golden walls.

Expulsion and Transformation

The Jade Rabbit uses his power to bring them down softly, so neither is physically hurt. But their escape does not undo the consequences. The medicine is gone, their time has run out, and the girl’s brother will die. The story marks her fate as worse still: while she and the Jade Rabbit lie gasping, the White Fox appears in the distance, smiling. She has been waiting for them.

The girl rises without speaking and walks toward the White Fox. With each step, she transforms. By the time she reaches the edge of the clearing, the Jade Rabbit understands what has happened: the White Fox has acquired a servant doomed to follow and obey her for as long as she lives. The girl has become the Red Fox. The ending turns the failed search into more than a missed cure. The brother’s death is now impending, while the girl herself survives in a transformed, compelled life under the White Fox’s control.

Embedded Story and Mulan’s Parallel

The episode reaches Mulan not as an event she witnesses, but as a tale the Jade Rabbit tells her. After hearing it, Mulan remains haunted by the resemblance to her own journey: both involve a sick sibling and a search for medicine. She recognizes that the stories are not identical, but the Unwanted Girl’s fate makes the parallel frightening. The embedded account therefore gives the quest a warning from within its own world: reaching the remedy does not guarantee that the person seeking it will be safe.

The episode also sets the Jade Rabbit’s care beside his failure to protect his companion. He can petition the Queen Mother of the West and soften their fall, but he cannot recover the lost herb, avert the brother’s death, or stop the White Fox’s claim on the girl. Its decisive change is not simply from human to fox; it is from a journey undertaken to save family to a life in which the girl must obey someone else. Her transformation connects the garden’s forbidden fruit to the White Fox’s concealed manipulation, and makes the Red Fox’s later role as servant the outcome of a personal tragedy rather than a creature’s unexplained appearance.