Around the time Shu lost his father, Zuki learned of her biological family, and their dark legacy. Her grandmother, the infamous and very first malicious Kitsune, Kyubi, used her immense kitsune magic to lure human males to her and taint their souls. Her daughter, Zuki’s mother, Akane, believed there was a better life than filling one’s bed and awaiting damnation. This life was revealed to the woman, Tama Hosokawa, renamed Gracia as a testament to how she stepped into the light of God’s grace. Knowing full well that Akane was a kitsune, and spawned by the most evil, and at the time, the only evil, kitsune seductress only propelled Gracia to help her even more. Akane followed her into the light. After Gracia was eventually killed by her own servant at her request, to avoid being taken prisoner by the Toyotomi’s’ Western Army, who had banned Christianity.

Not long after the start of her mourning, Akane found peace in the form of love, the true love for a human male, as opposed to her mother’s impure lust. The man was a traveling swordsman named Jubei, the famous Jubei Yagyu, who had embarked on the traditional Musha Shugyo, the Warrior’s Pilgrimage. In time, she won him over, both to her and God, but after conceiving the child who would be named Hirozuki, Kyubi slithered back into Akane’s life, haunting her and promising to take the child from her, and from it, grow the successor to the unholy practices of Kyubi. Like Gracia before her, Akane knew that only death could save her. And also like her departed friend, she would not dare take her own life and be robbed of eternal life in Heaven for it. She revealed her true form to Jubei, and the revelation appalled him. But just as Kyubi began the wicked way of the kitsune, to seek only pleasure and lust, Akane began the pure practice of seeking true love and acceptance.

Over three hundred years later, the sword used to kill her would be uncovered by a tribe of man-like wolves in China known as the Langren, and from the the sword, Jubei and Akane’s child would be spawned, as an anthro fox, combining her human and fox forms. Raised as a member of their Heaven’s Fangs tribe, Hirozuki Kitsune grew up alongside the alpha pair’s only cub, Lang Shu, and his friends the Hao Twins, Ling and Yu. As she grew up, questions arose as to way she stood out. Her fur was brighter and her tail thicker than the others in her tribe. Her fangs and muzzle were more narrow, and her frame was not as bulky, not to mention she had more pointed ears that were slightly angled differently. As she grew into a young adult, the lure of these questions had her in the Heaven’s Fangs Archive, where all the knowledge of the world from the Langren perspective was stored. She learned of her true origins, and shortly thereafter detected hints that Shu had grown romantically fond of her.

As she realized this, the voice of Kyubi haunted her, taking advantage of the feelings Zuki began to develop for Shu as well. But for his well being and the salvation of his soul, she had to deny herself love. Defying the destiny her grandmother had tried to shape for her, she only fought alongside Shu as an ally. Her resistance was tested when a foreign Langren in Europe asked for aid from Shu, and Zuki and her adoptive father Lang Zan accompanied him to the distant relative’s homeland of Wales. Tracking down the Langren’s immortal enemy, the feral wolf Xun, it was the destiny of Shu and his new cousin Evan to put this hateful beast down to stop him from killing the humans as he had for over a thousand years. The two new Langren allies declared victory too soon, turning their back and allowing the feral wolf to revive. He wounded Evan an had Shu pinned, awaiting his demise. With her dark family magic as all that could match up against him, Zuki became a lion-sized nine-tailed fox.

Snatched from the jaws of death, Shu looked at his would-be lover with both amazement and horror. Zuki’s grandmother took her over, and had both her and Xun dragged down to Hell. Shu was forced to leave Wales without the female of his dreams. But in the dead of night aboard the ship taking him back to China, he leapt into the ocean and swam back to Wales, finding the catacombs where he and Xun had fought, and discovered a rip in reality, a window to another plain of existence. He passed through, coming upon the anthro world, where other creatures, besides wolves such as him, spoke and walked like man. A world where no longer had to hide. In the Lakes of Fire, Zuki did not suffer as the others like Xun had, the deceased and damned. Kyubi informed her that her kitsune powers were all that allowed her to remain there. Convincing her to surrender them, Kyubi gained her power and expelled Zuki from the fiery pit. Free of her evil power, she no longer feared to love Shu and set out to find him.