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Chapter Text

Shen Yuan had been living in the setting of Proud Immortal Demon Way for about ten years before he caught so much as a glimpse of the titular Proud Immortal Demon, Luo Binghe.

He’d been working in a ‘teahouse’ -read: barely disguised brothel- for most of it first as an errand boy and then later as a server, which was what you apparently called the courtesans while they were still in training. By day he learned to dance and sing -both of which he did badly- and by night he poured wine for old rich people while his senior siblings entertained them with conversation, music, and dance.

His conversation was better than his performances and the madam seemed to think his face was better than average so Shen Yuan was one of the more exclusive dining companions. On the one hand that was good because it meant he got tips every so often and that meant he could pay his debt down faster, but on the other hand that was bad because it meant he had potential as a future courtesan so if the madame was smart then she’d be on the lookout for every opportunity to increase his debt to keep him from slipping away into freedom.

To be honest, he had only figured out that the Xianxia fantasy world he’d transmigrated into was Proud Immortal Demon Way in the past few years when Luo Binghe had really begun to make a name for himself in places where normal mortals were likely to hear about it. He’d probably been a big deal in cultivator circles for longer, but the common folk had trouble telling cultivators apart when they weren’t wearing helpfully color coded uniforms so it took longer for them to start remembering names.

He wasn’t available when Binghe’s party arrived and took over Birdsong Hall -the best entertaining room in the tea house- because one of the more obnoxious regulars was in and Shen Yuan was better than most at walking the tightrope of that guy’s temper so he’d drink and leave without throwing anything. Even so, the patrons who reserved that room frequently could go for days though so his time arrived soon enough.

The madame dismissed him for a power nap and a wardrobe change as soon as his client left then loaded him down with a tray of their most expensive wine.

“You’ll be serving the woman in red,” the madame informed him, briskly making last minute adjustments to his robes and swapping one of the step-shake ornaments in his hair for a slightly nicer one from the jewelry box in the small desk she used as a deployment station. “Most of the party are full demons except the leader so watch yourself.”

If most of them were full demons did that mean one of them was a partial demon?

“Oh wow," he murmured to himself. “Is it that half demon?” They did not use names in the teahouse for confidentiality purposes, especially when cultivators were around. You never knew what security magic they had going on.

The madame pursed her lips and nodded once as she considered his wrists and added a pair of enamelled bangles to each wrist. “Alright, go.”

Birdsong Hall was uncharacteristically quiet when he entered. There was the sound of voices and music, but the room took its name from the long ornamental aviaries full of songbirds that lined the long walls. The birds were all clustered high along the ceiling as far from the guests as they could possibly get. 

There were four guests and Shen Yuan could identify all but one of them. Sha Hualing was unmistakable in red gauze scarves, silver bells, and nothing else. Across from her sat a forbidding demon in black and dark blue. He was pale with black hair and light eyes. The frost spiderwebbing across the glass wine cup in his hand told him that one was Mobei-jun. He was being attended to by someone Shen Yuan didn’t recognize; an unremarkable man dressed like a cultivator, albeit barely. He looked more like a minor clerical official than anything else except he had that ethereal prettiness that you could only attain when you became immune to sun damage and all the other physical ailments of mortality. Their server knelt at a slight distance, closer to the wall, as the unknown cultivator took point on topping off Mobei-jun’s cup and placing food in his bowl. 

Luo Binghe -there was no mistaking his aura, his black and silver wardrobe, or the red huadian between his brows- lounged at the front of the room on a black lacquered couch like a grumpy lion flanked by the shop’s two premier female courtesans. He was a little surprised that Sha Hualing wasn’t up there herself, but then again she was a demonic saintess. She was a little above pouring drinks even for a demon lord. You wouldn’t know it from the way she acted in canon sometimes, but she was.

Shen Yuan didn’t have the luxury of staring despite the fact that he really wanted to. That was the Luo Binghe! The protagonist himself!

She Hualing had to be his premier concern though. For one, she was his client for the rest of the event and for another he knew she had no problems opening up someone’s face if they irritated her.

He sank to his knees on the abandoned cushion at her side and asked quietly. “May I refresh your cup, dear guest?”

She Hualing was stunning in person; beautiful as the glittering edge of a knife. She gave him a lazy and slightly drunk smile full of very sharp teeth as she held her silver cup out. 

“Aren’t you a precious morsel?” She leaned in as he poured. “Where were they hiding you when I got here?”

“This servant was detained at another table earlier," Like everyone in the teahouse, Shen Yuan had his own style of dealing with guests. Some people flirted. Some people were bashful. He just talked and the guests who liked him appreciated his candor. “Am I to your liking?”

“Very," she purred and he had to squash some surprise that she was flirting this hard in front of her probable husband. He wasn’t too sure where they were in the PIDW chronology, but Sha Hualing got locked down pretty early on hadn’t she? “I like a pretty boy who can look me in the eye. If you aren’t careful I might just carry you away in my pocket.”

“The servant looks forward to it," he chuckled and began to clear the delicate little dishes that lay empty on her tray, replacing them with the new ones he’d brought with him. He noted that she’d left the majority of any vegetable that wasn’t pickled. Actually, going by her teeth she probably couldn’t digest plant material all that well. “May I bring you more meat dishes?" he asked before he thought better of it. 

Her gaze sharpened, losing a little of her tipsy ease. Then she smiled. It still looked a little bit like she was thinking about eating him, but was slightly more genuine. “More of the brined fish," she directed. “The sour chicken as well.”

From what he recalled from the novel a lot of demons ate carrion as a matter of preference so maybe it made sense that she leaned more towards bitter and fermented meat dishes. The kitchen wouldn’t have sent that sort of thing out without a direct request since it was all stuff that was on the cheaper end of the menu. Who would want to offend these guests with anything less than the best? “This servant will return shortly.”

The madame made a thoughtful noise when Shen Yuan scurried out to make his report, but didn’t argue with him. She issued a series of curt orders to the kitchen runner that sounded about right so he left her to it. She didn’t need him holding her hand, but Sha Hualing would take note of any neglect she received.

However, the mood in the room had changed drastically by the time he arrived. The conversation had come to a dead halt. His two senior sisters were hurriedly collecting their instruments and backing away from Luo Binghe’s couch. They scurried past him with apologetic looks, but no explanation. 

He didn’t get a chance to look in his own guest’s direction to gauge her mood. 

“You," a low-pitched, commanding voice rolled through the hall. 

When he followed the sound, Luo Binghe was looking straight at him. A wave of cold swept through Shen Yuan’s entire body. 

Yes, he’d wanted to get a peek at the infamous stallion protagonist, but he hadn’t wanted to draw the man’s full attention.

“Come here.” Luo Binghe pointed at the soft cushion at his right side, the one recently vacated by their top performer. “You will attend to me for the rest of the evening.”

Ah.  

This was because Sha Hualing had been flirting with him. They were definitely hitched and her husband did not appreciate her harassing the waiter. At least he didn’t seem like he was interested in taking it out on Shen Yuan.

“It will be as my lord wishes.” Shen Yuan curtseyed. It was a weird affectation that the madame had forced on him. Most of the male courtesans bowed like normal people, but anyone who was on the prettier or more delicate end of the spectrum had to adopt feminine manners; hence his elaborate hair ornaments and extra jewelry.

Luo Binghe handed Shen Yuan his cup without looking as soon as he’d taken up his new position. The dishes on his tray were largely untouched and Shen Yuan recognized the wine in his jug as one of their better vintages, albeit not one of the most expensive ones.

Slowly the guests began talking again. Shen Yuan carefully did not pay attention exactly to what. In these circumstances it was best to let the guests’ voices meld into white noise. He paid attention to the face of his main concern. 

There was a little crease between Luo Binghe’s brows. It was camouflaged by his demon mark, but present. Shen Yuan considered what could be the matter. Maybe it was lingering annoyance with his wife, but Shen Yuan couldn’t help but look at the untouched plates on the tray. They were all rich foods; heavily spiced and a bit greasy. Tranquil Bamboo Grove wasn’t really known for their kitchens so much as their wine cellar and with good reason.

Come to think of it, Luo Binghe was a bit of a foodie in canon. He cooked most of his own meals so his standards were probably hard to meet. Was he hungry? It was a bit late in the evening and neither Sha Hualing nor Mobei-jun were acting like they’d already eaten so probably their leader hadn’t either. 

Shen Yuan considered it and decided, yeah, that was probably the issue. If he was still mad at Sha Hualing then he’d have shown it somehow. He was fully capable of disguising his irritation in the name of eventual retribution, but as Shen Yuan recalled the protagonist of Proud Immortal Demon Way did not lower himself to wreak vengence on wait staff for bad service unless they tried to do something really dumb like poison him. 

He got his chance to test his theory when the wine pitcher ran dry. “May I exchange these dishes as well?" he asked and was rewarded with a weird look from Luo Binghe. 

The man had been ignoring Shen Yuan for the most part, but stopped to look at him every so often when Sha Hualing and the forgettable man looking after Mobei-jun went off on a side tangent. 

“Go ahead.” His tone was unreadable, but Shen Yuan felt eyes follow him out of the room. 

Luo Binghe’s expression was still opaque when he returned with more of the same wine and a selection of the kitchen’s more tolerable offerings; namely stuff like fruit and other delicacies that were too much trouble to make in house so were brought in from other, better shops. It wasn’t a proper meal, but it’d be better than drinking on an empty stomach.

His guest watched in silence as Shen Yuan arranged the dishes on his tray and poured another cup of wine. Then he made really weird and intense eye contact as he knocked back the wine and took something from each dish. Luo Binghe continued to stare for a long while afterwards like he was waiting for something until Shen Yuan finally had to say something. 

Did he think the food was poisoned? Why? Who would bother? Even without his reader’s cheat-level knowledge of this world, word had spread about Luo Binghe’s immunity to poisons. 

“Are these new dishes to my lord’s liking?” He pretended like he hadn’t noticed that he was being stared at by a weirdo. He’d always wondered if action heroes were as cool in person as they were in a carefully curated presentation about their lives and so far his conclusion boiled down to ‘sort of.’ It was more unnerving when you were the person being stared at and didn’t have access to the protagonist’s inner dialogue.

On the other hand, he was still really physically intimidating and also neat to look at. People in real life were rarely that attractive or put together on a regular work day.  

“...yes.” The admission seemed to cost Luo Binghe part of his very soul and he thrust out his cup for a refill with his gaze averted. Maybe he was regretting calling the male server over. Sometimes people mistook Shen Yuan for a woman in this get up, but he was surprised to realize that Luo Binghe might have been one of them. Wasn’t he supposed to have godlike observation skills?

At least he wasn’t being a jerk about it.

From there it was a bit more like business as usual. 

Shen Yuan still noticed the occasional lingering look from his guest, but felt less anxious about the extra attention than he normally would have. The courtesans were available for overnight service for an astronomical fee. So were the servers, but their price tag was even higher since most of them were genuine virgins and the madame didn’t want her trainees picking up bad habits before their formal investiture so she tacked on a steep nuisance fee to the base cost. 

That didn’t mean it never happened. Luo Binghe could afford him easily, but was also intensely straight if canon was to be believed so Shen Yuan didn’t think he was in danger of anything except some lost sleep.

The party broke up somewhere around midnight when the human cultivator started nodding off. Mobei-jun hadn’t shown much interest in his companion up until that point, but reacted to that first stifled yawn like a dog who’d just caught a scent. He stood without ceremony and ripped a hole in reality with one clawed hand. There was snow on the other side and cold air slapped at Shen Yuan in his thin silk robes. Mobei-jun scruffed the protesting cultivator, stepped through the hole, and they were gone just like that.

“I suppose we’re done.” Sha Hualing rolled her eyes then turned a hungry look in Luo Binghe’s direction. “Shall we retire as well, my lord?” She purred with carnal intent clear in her eyes.

Luo Binghe made a surprisingly noncommittal noise that made Sha Hualing pout, but she didn’t linger behind either when he stood up to leave. 

Shen Yuan and the remaining servers all lined up to bow them out of the room. It was probably his imagination, but it almost seemed like Luo Binghe paused for a second when he passed Shen Yuan at the door. Given the fact that he was in a low bow, Shen Yuan couldn’t see anything except his guest’s booted feet and the way his pace hitched for a second right in front of Shen Yuan’s face. It likely had nothing to do with him.

They took a few minutes to bus the room. None of them were dressed to do a proper clean, but it was early enough that someone else might want the room and anything they could do on the way out meant they’d be able to turn Birdsong Hall over faster. Their earnings were based on the night’s take rather than a flat per diem, which made everyone work harder and pay attention to the teahouse’s books. The madam had to be more transparent in her dealings this way, but Shen Yuan suspected she made better money overall.

To his surprise the woman in question was waiting for them outside Birdsong Hall with a pinched expression. He didn’t like that look.

He could not say that they were friends. She owned his debt and him by extension until it was discharged. Even so, she wasn’t the worst. He knew how bad debt peonage could get from his time in the brokerage while waiting to be sold on. She might charge his debt ledger for things like new clothes, training, damages, and medical care, but she didn’t charge him for basic food or water or bed space. Some people did that. He got paid for each day he worked and the numbers made it theoretically possible for him to work his way out from underwater in the next few years if he was smart, careful, and lucky.

Not all the courtesans at Tranquil Bamboo Grove were debt slaves. In fact, very few of them were still in the hole after their first few years out of the servers’ rank. They stayed because by then it was the work they knew and a stable lifestyle that would let them save against old age. It was the servers who had to be careful and who the madame had to be careful of, lest they get loose before she’d made a decent profit off her initial investment.

Even so, she didn’t send any of the teahouse workers into danger if she could help it. Sometimes, though, she couldn’t help it and when she couldn’t help it she often looked just like that.

“A-Yuan, stay.” The madame jerked her head towards the scullery. “Everyone else clear the hall and report downstairs for your next assignments.”

Shen Yuan gulped as the others left him behind. Had he messed up?

No. No, he hadn’t. It was worse than that.

“Go to the wardrobe master and get changed. Then report to the Room of Earthly Delights," she instructed and that explained why she looked so ticked off. “You have a private guest.”

Someone had bought him for the night. 

Chapter Text

At first Shen Yuan thought this was the latest power move in whatever weird standoff Sha Hualing was having with her husband, but the very abbreviated Gay Sex for Morons talk he received while the wardrobe master -a retired courtesan of the cutsleeve persuasion- stuffed him into the Ancient Fantasy Chinese version of a pale green and white negligee put paid to that delusion. 

The person who had bought him was for sure a man and the odds were good it was that guest he’d had to hustle out the door in order to free himself up to take over a station in Birdsong Hall. No good deed goes unpunished! Although if he could afford Shen Yuan’s Maiden Fee on an impulse then clearly he should have been pushing more expensive booze on the man. 

The Room of Earthly Delights was one of the Tranquil Bamboo Grove’s two bedroom ‘stages.’ The other wasnamed the Room of Heavenly Delights. The bedroom stages were intended exclusively for fucking in. Nobody slept in there except for a brief nap after the main event. Earthly Delights was decorated all in red and black. Even with all the lamps lit it was always a little dark in there since they were shaded with red paper. 

Walking into the room, even Shen Yuan thought he looked like a woodland nymph who’d gotten lost in a dark corner of the red light district. 

He’d been stripped of his jewelry and shoes. His hair hung loose down his back and the wardrobe master had deliberately mussed it around his face to soften his features. He wore a long gauze overrobe that trailed on the ground behind him over a thin white silk robe that was only just barely not translucent.

The Room of Earthly Delights was meant to serve one purpose and one purpose only so the only real furniture in there was a massive canopied bed draped in layers and layers of black gauze curtains. Someone was lounging on the bed waiting for him and Shen Yuan took a deep, shaking breath.

He was not, strictly speaking, a total virgin. He’d had one (1) girlfriend and they’d gone far enough to end up in a pregnancy scare despite using both condoms and birth control. They’d broken up shortly after and the experience had put him off dating until he’d finished college by which point he was out of practice and had no idea how to get back into it. In any event, his clumsy teenage heterosexual fumblings had in no way prepared him for this.

So long, second virginity. It was nice knowing you.

‘This is a good thing,’ he tried to convince himself. The percentage of the Maiden Fee he could expect would take a huge bite out of his remaining debt and hasten the day when he’d be a free man –he’d just really been hoping to make it out of the teahouse on his own two feet instead of on his back.

“This servant greets you.” Shen Yuan was proud of himself for not stammering or falling over when he went to bow.

He was not prepared for the voice that greeted him from the recesses of the big bed.

“Come here.” Luo Binghe instructed.

Shen Yuan clapped a hand over his mouth before more than a whimper could escape him and a wave of very confused arousal shot through his body. This had to be a mistake right?

No, it was not a mistake. 

The actual protagonist himself was laying shirtless on the massive black mattress with one leg laid long and the other bent at a casual angle when Shen Yuan parted the curtains. He’d stripped down to a loose pair of dark burgundy pants and Shen Yuan could only muse that he had never seen abs like that in real life. 

He was alone, too, so Shen Yuan’s hasty theory that he was headed into a steamy reconciliation threesome was shot dead on sight.  

“Very pretty.” Luo Binghe got to his knees and reached out to trace the collar of Shen Yuan’s flimsy nightie. His lazy smile grew fangs and he growled. “It’ll look better on the floor.”

Shen Yuan had been doing a good job of keeping his cool right up until that point, but the godawful pickup line pushed him over the edge into semi-hysterical laughter. The offended look on Luo Binghe’s face only made it worse. He laughed until he got a stitch in his side. 

“Seriously?" he asked, clutching his stomach and trying to wipe a tear. “That was terrible.”

The offense drained out of his… guest’s expression at some point while Shen Yuan was still getting a hold of himself. The aggressive seduction energy seemed to have left him too. Instead Luo Binghe sat back on his heels with his hands gripping his knees in consternation. His hair was down too, Shen Yuan noticed, and had a definite and pronounced wave when freed from its previous sleek braid.

It looked… fluffy. 

He wanted to touch it. Probably the only good thing about this scenario was the fact that he would very likely get to if he played his cards right.

“Please forgive this servant, dear guest.” Shen Yuan made himself sober up and sat on the edge of the bed.

Luo Binghe reached out and dragged him in closer. Whatever game he’d been playing was evidently over because his tone was all business when he asked, “What is your name?”

“Ah… forgive me.” His playful mood abandoned him as it dawned on him he might have just fucked up. This was going to get reported to the madame and she for sure was going to find a way to work this into a fine. Luo Binghe was not someone you offended without paying it back eventually, somehow. He’d probably just set himself back by years. He pulled his top layer tighter around himself. “This servant has no professional title, but I am the only one serving in these rooms this evening. If you would like to make a complaint then there’s no danger the owner will confuse me with anyone else.”

Luo Binghe scowled at him. “I asked you a question," he rumbled. “You will answer it.”

They didn’t give out their real names, but a thread of real fear tugged its way through his chest. “S-shen Yuan," he gulped. “This servant was only nervous. I didn’t mean to…” He fell silent at the look on the protagonist’s face.

“How old are you, Shen Yuan?” Luo Binghe’s voice dipped back down into the seduction range. His fingers circled one of Shen Yuan’s comparatively thin wrists and if he hadn’t been so conversant with Xianxia tropes then he might have missed the significance in how the protagonist’s two index fingers pressed down onto his pulse. He was checking Shen Yuan for spiritual energy.

Hah. If he could use the spiritual arts he’d either be out of debt already or have been pushed so far down the hole that he’d never be free again. Either way his current circumstances would have been very different.

“T-twenty-five?" he stammered, thrown off by the way Luo Binghe had leaned into his space and trying to remember how old he told people this body was. He’d forgotten for a second how devastatingly beautiful the man was, but this new proximity reminded him. Up close Luo Binghe smelled like expensive perfume; ambergris, leather, or maybe soft musk. It made Shen Yuan’s head spin. 

“You sound unsure,” Luo Binghe observed, all but crooning.

“I was sold to the teahouse by a debt broker after I came down with a bad fever and couldn’t pay a doctor for the treatment I got.” Shen Yuan dropped his gaze. He could not take another second of that heavy attention. No wonder this guy ended up with something like four hundred wives! Who could resist that? Living in a brothel had turned Shen Yuan very nearly sex-phobic, but even he was fighting off an ill-timed erection after a few minutes of the progatonist’s dedicated focus. “It’s a guess based on how old I looked at the time.”

Luo Binghe flinched back a bit. His fingers eased off Shen Yuan’s pulse, but he adjusted his grip rather than letting go so his thumb brushed back and forth along the thin soft skin of Shen Yuan’s inner wrist. He looked confused.

It was time to move this along.

Shen Yuan made his best attempt at looking sexy. It was nowhere near Luo Binghe’s level of effect, but better than nothing. Probably. “Dear guest, do you still want this servant to attend to you?" he murmured, looking up through his lashes.

Luo Binghe nodded once, but then reached for his shirt and shrugged it back on. Shen Yuan felt a little cheated by the loss, but it was for the best because his intellectual processing power had taken a major hit from the sight of all that bare skin.   

“I don’t require sex. I only require the room and some company," he said bluntly, but then gave Shen Yuan a searching look as he covered himself back up. “What are your skills?”

“I can recite poetry.” Shen Yuan offered because his singing was mediocre and he didn’t want to walk through the dormitory area in his current getup to retrieve his instrument.

“Good enough,” Luo Binghe sighed as he laid back onto the bed and gestured for Shen Yuan to get on with it.

Shen Yuan adjusted himself so that he was kneeling next to him.

“Gushan Temple is to the north, Jiating pavilion west.” Shen Yuan picked one of his old favorites to begin with; one of Bai Juyi’s poems that had gotten him into classical Chinese literature in the first place. “The water's surface now is calm, the bottom of the clouds low. In several places, the first orioles are fighting in warm trees, by every house new swallows peck at spring mud. Disordered flowers have grown almost enough to confuse the eye, bright grass is able now to hide the hooves of horses. I most love the east of the lake, I cannot come often enough; within the shade of green poplars on White Sand Embankment.”

“I don’t know that one.” Luo Binghe’s eyes were half lidded but he still managed to sound annoyed. 

Bai Juyi didn’t exist in this world, near as Shen Yuan could tell, because Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky was a hack and a philistine so that wasn’t exactly a surprise. “It’s one of the few things I remember from my childhood. It’s probably not well known.”

Luo Binghe made a thoughtful, but sleepy noise. “Another," he said.

Shen Yuan obliged. “The mountain road is hard to travel, the sun now slanting down. In a misty village, a crow lands on a frosted tree. I'll not arrive before night falls, but that should not concern me. Once I've drunk three warm cups, I'll feel as if at home...”

Luo Binghe did not sleep, although he did close his eyes. 

He was certain now that the little doppelganger really wasn’t his former teacher working undercover in a high end brothel for some deranged reason, but he wasn’t quite comfortable enough with the small man to go totally to sleep and, anyway, this Shen Yuan had a soft melodious voice that was good for recitation. He’d told the man to recite just so he wouldn’t end up spending a small fortune on essentially an inn room, but actually the experience wasn’t bad. He found himself relaxing into the mattress in a way he might never have had the luxury to do before in his life.

He’d never really gotten to study the scholarly arts at Qing Jing peak. Even if the Hallmasters had permitted him into classes, Shizun wouldn’t have. He’d learned to read and write a little from his shijie, but never had the wherewithal to practice calligraphy afterwards. Similarly his attempts at self-guided study were chaotic at best. 

Binghe knew, in theory, that many people said that poetry was the foundation of the four arts. He’d never really gotten into it or been able to see the emotions that other people found in it so easily.

Listening to Shen Yuan recite changed his mind.

“A strip of water's spread in the setting sun," the courtesan had softened his voice, but kept reciting even though Binghe had closed his eyes. “Half the river's emerald, half is red. I love the third night of the ninth month. The dew is like pearls; the moon like a bow.”

It was simple, but poignant imagery. The majority of the poem books Binghe had found to read were mostly people writing about banquets and rivers of wine or worse; tragedies where everybody died and then talked about it for verse after verse after verse. The first he’d found hard to care about. The second was unbearable. Clearly he’d been reading the wrong books. This was actually quite soothing and meditative.

Despite Binghe’s best intentions, real sleep dragged at him as the night wore on and tension drained out of his limbs like water.

He startled fully awake when long, slender fingers slowly threaded into his loose bangs. Only force of habit and past experience kept him still. He braced for pain or an attack, but those fingers just carded gently through his hair letting the strands slip between them. 

The courtesan was petting him.

He should have put a stop to it, but there was a bizarre and buoyant feeling rising in his chest that he had absolutely no basis of comparison for. The only thing he could say for sure was that he wanted more of it.

It was hard to say how long he let it go on for. One moment he was laying almost boneless on the bed pinned in place by the feeling of fingertips against his scalp and –then it was morning.

Shen Yuan was asleep next to him, curled up on top of the blankets neither of them had used. At some point in the night he’d migrated over and pressed into Binghe’s side where he looked exactly right. His face was flushed and soft with sleep. His hands were tucked between his own chest and Binghe’s ribs.

Binghe had slept with many, many people in recent years but he could count on one hand without using all the fingers the number of women who’d shared a bed with him the whole night without anything happening. It was always stolen passion or repayment for a debt or enticement for his aid or… or anything that wasn’t this. In fact the only time he could think of offhand was shortly after his shijie received word that her last relative had died and she cried herself out next to him in the woodshed. He’d felt ashamed afterwards how grateful he'd been for the circumstances. She’d been grieving, but for a little while he’d felt slightly less alone.

Shen Yuan snorted in his sleep and wormed closer, possibly attracted by Binghe’s body heat and no other reason except that on some level he clearly wanted closeness and believed Binghe was someone who’d give it to him.

He –liked that.

He liked it a lot.

Binghe covered his mouth with one hand as he stared down at the young man in total confusion. How was it possible for two people to wear the same features so differently?

If Shen Yuan had been smiling or laughing when Binghe had first spotted him then he might never have noticed the uncanny similarity between the two men. As it was, his first impulse had been to enjoy a little roleplay. It wasn’t a bad feeling to have someone resembling his asshole former teacher wait on him, but the attention he received wasn’t what he’d wanted –or rather, it had been something he hadn’t known he wanted.

He’d thought he wanted to see Shen Qingqiu’s resentful face as he was lowered to menial labor, to making nice with someone he thought belonged underneath his boot.

Instead Shen Yuan had made a warm little presence at his side; pouring his drinks with pretty hands, clearing away the fatty, over-rich dishes Binghe had left untouched and somehow replacing them with things he actually wanted to eat. 

He couldn’t really remember the last time someone had taken care of him instead of the other way around.

Binghe had noticed men before. It had rarely gotten past noting this person’s fine features or that person’s slender figure. If he did try to flirt with a man, it rarely went well. Either they didn’t notice or they took it as a challenge and not the kind Binghe had intended it as. Otherwise he liked his romantic partners to be delicate, beautifully dressed, and sweet smelling. Most times that was a woman. He glanced at Shen Yuan’s delicate shoulders draped in thin silk and textured gauze, his fine-boned hands, and the dark sweep of his lowered lashes against smooth cheeks. 

Most times.

“What things am I learning about myself?" he mused, watching Shen Yuan curl up a little tighter much like a sleeping mouse or possibly a kitten. It was –it was cute.  

Outside the room, he could hear the early morning bustle of a business setting itself to rights after the night before. Soon there’d be a knock at the door and a subtle cue for him to get out.

He didn’t know if he was quite ready to be done with this yet, but he had business of his own to attend to. 

Binghe was dressed when the knock came and gently woke his sleeping partner. He regretted immediately having let Shen Yuan doze because he sat up rubbing his eyes like a child, clearly not entirely awake and unlikely to be for a good while. It took a powerful effort of will not to follow the man out of the room once he’d bowed -soft and clumsy from lingering slumber- and made a slightly meandering exit. He was half afraid Shen Yuan would walk into the doorframe and half hoping he would just so Binghe could prevent it and have the excuse for a little more touching.

This was the only bad thing about paid companionship, he decided. When your time was up it was up. 

Mobei-jun had returned from the northern desert to join Sha Hualing in the inn where they’d agreed to meet up. Shang Qinghua was nowhere in evidence, which was to be preferred because it meant that he’d have both his generals’ undivided attention.

Sha Hualing bared her teeth at him when he arrived. It wasn’t quite a show of defiance, but she had not liked it when he stayed back at the teahouse. They’d been lovers in the past and likely would be again if nothing changed, but courtship among demons was a complicated matter that Binghe didn’t always like all that much. 

She was a valuable ally and had made it clear that she was interested in marriage, but she couldn’t help testing him. It was in her nature. Sometimes he thought he liked her back and he’d marry her to secure her loyalty if he had to, but the prior night had reminded him that in some ways he was still very, very human. Falling asleep next to her feeling comfortable and warm the way he’d slipped off under Shen Yuan’s hands last night would be impossible. 

He wanted safety and trust even if -before now- he had no real practical examples of what that would look like. Even the temporary illusion of it from a prostitute had nearly undone him. 

So he bared his teeth back at her. If he let her cow him in any regard she’d take it as a sign that she was the dominant personality and then he’d never be able to turn his back on her again.

“You smell like cheap perfume," she told him.

“Jealous?” Binghe shot back, vaguely annoyed because nothing about the man he’d slept next to last night had seemed cheap to him.

Sha Hualing snorted. “Maybe," she allowed. The scarves wrapped around her arms shifted a little in a mute, but very real threat. “He was a treat. Don’t think I’ll let you snatch all my toys, Luo.”

“Try and stop me," he replied and let his qi slip its leash a bit. The shadows around them darkened and even the strong morning sunlight grew dim. “I need the entertainment." He turned to look at Mobei-jun who only looked a little bit like he was considering ripping open a portal and fucking off back to his own realm and disasterous attempt at courtship. “Report.”

“Our quarry is still in the area.” Mobei-jun grunted, probably mad that Shang Qinghua was doing something somewhere and he couldn’t go interrupt it. “He’s likely gone to ground and is waiting for us to leave.”

“Then let’s go find him and pay him a friendly visit.” Binghe grinned cruelly and led his generals forth.

Chapter Text

Binghe expected to forget about Shen Yuan, but not even capturing the saboteur who’d been harrassing one of the three human towns outside Huan Hua territory who’d voluntarily come under his protection quite managed to shake his desire to go back the the Tranquil Bamboo Grove and listen to more poetry. 

Preferably while lithe little hands played with his hair some more. 

Binghe gave it up as a bad job when his quarry quit breathing and his generals departed for their own affairs, leaving him at loose ends again. He had some interesting rumors to chase -a miniature realm would be opening in the West soon and someone had spotted a Cloud Ape to the North- except that all suddenly sounded like work instead of fun.

‘This is a harmless indulgence.’ He told himself as he approached the teahouse. Wasn’t his shijie always telling him that he worked too much? True, she’d been trying to get him to pick up a non-violent hobby. This was non-violent, right? He was cultivating a new interest. Poetry. Wine appreciation. Something.

The teahouse’s proprietress concealed her look of sudden surprise when he entered before she bowed. “Welcome back, dear guest.”

“I want a private room, a jar of the Hazy Golden Moon Dew, and the same server from last night," he ordered.

The proprietress flinched. She was good at controlling her features so it was nearly imperceptible, but he caught it. “Forgive me, dear guest. Little Sparrow is currently unavailable. May I introduce you to…” her voice died when Binghe dropped a pouch on the ground in front of her. The neck was a little loose and broken gold spilled out to sparkle in the light of the red lanterns flanking the door. He’d anticipated this response and loaded a pouch from his treasury in advance. Everyone listened when money spoke. “...I will have him fetched. Please, follow me.”

It was early enough in the evening that the common area of the teahouse was only sparsely occupied. He had no doubt that the proprietress had intended to hustle him right to his private room, but Shen Yuan was in full view on the mezzanine level sitting next to a red-faced man and doing his best to look interested as his guest vented about something.

He was dressed more simply than last night in a pale lavender robe. His hair was pulled back in a tail and decorated with ribbons folded to look like trailing wisteria. It was simple. It was pretty. 

It was totally unworthy of him. 

Shen Yuan’s charming smile turned tense as his soon-to-be-former guest leaned into his space. Binghe caught the flash of foreign fingers curving around the young courtesan’s back and sliding down to…

The sound of splintering wood brought him back to reality and Binghe realized he’d crushed the elegantly carved wooden balustrade under his hand. 

A larger, burly-looking server (likely a hidden guard) hurried over and removed the offending hand without nearly enough force and began the process of forcibly ejecting that customer from the premises.

“P-please," the proprietress stammered. “Pay no attention to that, dear guest. Little Sparrow will be with you soon. May I…”

It felt like someone else was handing over Binghe's wallet and they were just using his hand to do it as he pulled it out of his sleeve and handed the entire thing over to the flustered woman. “I want exclusive access to him for however long that will last," Binghe said, unable to shift his gaze. 

Shen Yuan had gotten up, but his gaze was still rooted to the ground and his cheeks were blazing with embarrassment. Even at this distance, Binghe could see his hands were shaking. He hadn’t been afraid last night. He’d laughed in Binghe’s face. It had been charming. It had been brave. It had been interesting.

What was so different between this and that?

Binghe wasn’t sure, but until he figured it out the idea of letting the man be pawed at by filthy strangers was unbearable.

The madame made a soft, but shocked noise as she opened the wallet to reveal more jade coins than she’d probably ever seen in one place at the same time. “A-a month.” She pulled herself together. “This servant must count properly, but it is likely this would support Little Sparrow’s exclusive attention and needs for a month at minimum.”

Good. Binghe was probably being ripped off, but he didn’t care. He’d bought himself a month. He had a whole month to figure out these feelings.

They made him wait a while in a small, but luxurious room that seemed to be predominantly cushions. It wasn’t a bedroom like the one from the night before so no one was expected to make love in there probably, but it seemed to be the deliberate setting for some spontaneous heavy petting.

His collar felt a bit tight all of a sudden. Had it been so hot in here when he first entered? He couldn’t recall.

Plainly dressed servers (the lavender gowns and wisteria ornaments seemed to be the theme of the day, everyone had been wearing green and pink the night before) hurried in with his requested wine, a tray of snacks so inoffensive to his tastes that they must have consulted with Shen Yuan, and a guzheng of all things.

The wait was explained when ‘Little Sparrow’ appeared. He’d been changed out of his server’s uniform and into a gauzy jiaoling ruqun with long sleeves decorated with painted red-crested cranes in flight. His hair was held up in silver ornaments made to look like tree branches with clusters of red pearls meant to look like budding flowers. A three-petal vermillion huadian sat between his brows and he was shielding the lower half of his face with a translucent round wan shan fan that had been hand painted with lazy little black and red fish that did nothing to hide the nervous expression behind it.

Binghe consoled himself that it wasn’t the look of nauseated humiliation from before. Shen Yuan was relaxed, but perhaps a little confused; about the look one might expect from a courtesan who’d received a second visit and outright patronage from a guest they hadn’t actually had sex with yet. It was understandable. Binghe didn’t know what he thought he was doing either.

Shen Yuan dipped a curtsey. “Dear guest, you’ve returned.”

Binghe patted his thigh lest his target try to sit in front of that instrument. The guzheng required both hands to play and if those hands were occupied by music then they weren’t on Binghe’s head, which was unacceptable. 

“Yuan-er has a title now," he observed as Shen Yuan settled in his lap. He didn’t seem like he’d done it much before and Binghe had to set that knowledge aside for later consideration before he let himself really think about how much he liked the sound of that. 

That observation knocked a bit of the nervous energy off him the way Binghe had intended it to and Shen Yuan went so far as to bop him lightly on the shoulder with his fan. “I can tell you have no plans to use it," he replied drily. “Just don’t use my real name where the madame can’t pretend she didn’t hear it or else you’ll get me in trouble.”

“We don’t want that,” Binghe agreed. “You didn’t mention you played.”

“I thought you might be bored of poetry.” Shen Yuan shaded his indulgent little smile with his flimsy suggestion of a fan. It was nearly transparent and did nothing to hide the amused curl of his red lips. “No?”

“No," Binghe agreed.

There was an art to negotiating touch without words, he’d found. Shen Yuan tensed slightly when Binghe rested his fingertips in the small of his back but relaxed after a second when he failed to replicate that earlier grope. Instead Binghe was rewarded by a light yet positive shiver as he traced his fingertips up the length of his partner’s spine. He halted the touch between Shen Yuan’s shoulder blades and then traced his way back down, ending it where he’d started and in doing so he established the limits of the caress.

Faces and necks were more intimate places, he’d found. He’d need to work up to that as he gentled his latest target and got him accustomed to Binghe’s large dangerous hands. 

He’d already taken sex off the table for now and only regretted it a little. He knew just enough about things between men to know he needed to learn more before bestowing that particular favor on such a delicate frame. 

Shen Yuan likely had enough experience in that arena for both of them even if he wasn’t used to being coddled and petted, but Binghe wanted to think on it a little longer while he enjoyed the more sensual options available to them. It had occurred to him that he’d never gotten to enjoy an extended seduction before. Wooing was the part of taking a lover that he liked best, but his life and the lives of the women who passed through it didn’t really allow for him to take his time with it. 

That kind of selfishness –would it really be so bad under the circumstances?

“A longer one this time,” Binghe instructed as he settled them back against the cushions and guided Shen Yuan to lay against his chest.

“Whatever you like.” Shen Yuan had a knack for sounding indulgent when he said that rather than ingratiating, which took some talent. Binghe liked it. 

Shen Yuan thought for a moment and settled on a poem.

“ My heart is in a world of water and crystal, my clothes are damp in this time of spring rains. Through the gates I slowly walk to the end, the great court the appointed tranquil space. I reach the doors- they open and shut again, now strikes the bell- the meal time has arrived. This cream will help one's nature strengthen and grow, the diet gives support in my decline. We've grasped each other's arms so many days, and opened our hearts without shame or evasion. Golden orioles flit across the beams, purple doves descend from lattice screens. Myself, I think I've found a place that suits, I walk by flowers at my own slow pace. Tangxiu lifts me from my sickly state, and smiling, asks me to write a poem.”

Binghe frowned as his lack of education needled at him again. “Who is Tangxiu?”

“A monk and a writer.” Shen Yuan subtly coiled a lock of Binghe’s hair around his index finger; exactly what Binghe had hoped would happen with them laying like this. “The poem is called In ‘Abbot Zan’s Room at Dayun’ and the poet is comparing Abbot Zan to Tangxiu.” Shen Yuan replied as he set his fan aside and finally began to relax. 

“Who was the poet?” Binghe was no scholar. Qing Jing Peak’s concentrated efforts had made sure of that, but he was pretty sure it was different from the poems of the previous night. He’d liked those better.

“Du Fu. His works tended to be more autobiographical. That poem was written during a period of political unrest during Du Fu’s lifetime. It’s the first in a series of four.” Shen Yuan propped his narrow little chin up on Binghe’s chest, but rested it on the back of his hands so as not to hurt him. “No good?”

Binghe shook his head. “I liked the others better.”

“Bai Juyi, then.” Shen Yuan gave Binghe a secret, conspiratorial smile over his knuckles. “He’s my favorite too.”

Thud went Binghe’s heart and he knew then that he was in trouble.

Luo Binghe didn’t appear every day, but it had been most every day for the past three weeks that he’d appeared in Shen Yuan’s life to get cuddles, listen to poetry, get his hair played with, and nothing else.  

Well, when you had a magical sword that could make tesseracts then maybe visiting a hooker you weren’t even sleeping with on the other side of the continent from your palace wasn’t such a big deal. Shen Yuan knew that Binghe had been back to his own house between visits because he’d finally worked up the nerve to start asking the protagonist questions about his adventures.

It was only partly because he wanted to hear real first-hand accounts of all the cool Xianxia monsters Luo Binghe had encountered and subsequently slaughtered. If Shen Yuan’s health issues hadn’t made field work outright impossible for him in his first life (his second life also, annoyingly) then he’d probably have gone into marine biology. He loved creepy weird monsters and deep sea research had those to spare.

Also he wanted to get a sense of where he was in the narrative. It turned out to be earlier than he’d expected. Luo Binghe had no wives yet. Off-and-on lovers? Yes, dozens. Overpopulated inner courtyard? Not yet. They were still in the part of the novel where Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky still had delusions of a cohesive plot with occasional titillating sexy-times and had yet to let the novel devolve into an elaborate game of Waifu Pokemon.

Generally he could expect a visit every other day or so. Sometimes he’d go as many as two days without a visit. He still felt Luo Binghe’s patronage even in the man’s absence. 

He was now formally a courtesan. Even if Binghe got bored with him, he wouldn’t be moved back to the rank of a server. They’d taken advantage of Binghe’s first multi-day absence to have him shadow one of his senior brothers in the teahouse. Normally that would have entailed entertaining alongside his senior, but Shen Yuan’s patron had managed to impress upon the madam that if any hand other than his own touched Shen Yuan then it would be removed at the wrist and fed to its owner. 

So Shen Yuan had observed through the kind of translucent screen that usually concealed musicians in the private rooms and now he knew a lot more about gay sex than he’d ever expected to. Not only that, but he was also slowly coming around to the idea that he didn’t totally hate the idea of being touched like that. In theory. By a specific person.

Unfortunately, his silver lining came with a rain cloud. 

The madam had him moved to a single room that was really going to hurt his bottom line if Luo Binghe wandered off too soon. Unlike the servers, full courtesans had to pay for their room and board. So much of their upkeep was focused on the maintenance of their youth and beauty that the teahouse couldn’t afford to eat that cost even if the madam was inclined to that level of generosity. 

On the other hand, Shen Yuan was sleeping better without five snoring roommates so maybe it was worth it in the long run.

His debt still wasn’t paid off, annoyingly. The madame had gotten a huge windfall off Luo Binghe, but cleverly sunk everything she couldn’t take for the teahouse or was obligated to remit to Shen Yuan’s debt ledger into a new wardrobe and accessories for Shen Yuan before he could tell her not to. Plus side, he had personal ownership of those things and the material alone would sell well later on if he ever had to cash out his belongings. 

He probably could have hawked some of the earrings he’d received and wiped out his debt once and for all, but the balance was hanging by a thread and if he paid it off then he’d have to sign a work contract to retain his rooms. That would keep him here longer. The safest bet was to wait out Luo Binghe’s bizarre –crush? Interest? Then he could leave.

For the moment it was better to stay in place and walk the tightrope between the teahouse and crazy Proud Immortal Demon Way adventures that he -a male prostitute- probably would not survive as a narrative lesson to Luo Binghe to stick to the ladies.

There’d been no male courtesans -nor any courtesans for that matter who didn’t turn out to be Secret Assassins or Lost Princesses- in canon, but he wasn’t about to risk it.

Being neither a secret assassin nor a lost princess, Shen Yuan didn’t like his chances.

As it was, he had his own problems to deal with at present.

There’d been a big party the night before. Some local bigshot official had bought out the entire teahouse. It wasn’t anyone Shen Yuan knew, but the madam went around with that expression she got when there was a guest around that she couldn’t say ‘no’ to. Even Luo Binghe’s presence didn’t wind her up so badly so that meant it was someone who was both powerful and liked to throw his weight around.

That guest threw a banquet attended nearly entirely by the courtesans and a small handful of nervous looking people in nice clothes. The relatively small number of guests and their lack of ease with their host suggested to Shen Yuan that everyone who could tell the guy no had so the people who were left had no more ability to rein him in than the madam did.

Shen Yuan was lucky. The bigshot guest liked girls, which sucked for them because nearly every female courtesan and server had to go up to the top of the room and fawn on him for a while, but also meant that the male courtesans could hang back and pad the number of ‘guests’ to fluff the host’s ego that way instead. Unfortunately for Shen Yuan, though, it meant he had to be seen to eat and drink and have a good time.

Not all his physical ailments had followed him from his first life. He breathed easier in pre-industrial air and the commoner’s diet of rice, vegetables, with occasional meat suited his dietary restrictions pretty well. It was when he was presented with luxury foods that he started to have a problem.

The teahouse had been very accommodating in this regard. For one, the things Shen Yuan could eat safely were cheap and usually the sort of thing the servers got anyway so he didn’t need special meals. For another, doctors were expensive and his debt contract stipulated that if the madam deliberately made him ill then he could sue for the cancellation of his debt and have the balance returned to him. It was unenforceable, near as he could tell, but so far she’d been respectful of their agreement since it cost her literally nothing extra to do so.

Being forced by a guest was a different matter that she had no control over. 

They’d debated whether or not to just hide him in his room for the evening, but the bigshot seemed to have a nose for details and a powerful need for control. He got his hands on the madame’s most recent roster of performers somehow and then he sent a lackey over before the banquet started to make sure everyone was present, dolled up, kneeling, and smiling prettily just in time for his arrival. They even did a roll call.

Shen Yuan could have refused, but he knew from experience that someone like that would just escalate if he started his ego party in a bad mood at which point his senior sisters and brothers would pay for it –and they’d make sure he paid for it in return later.

There was no sense making enemies or setting his coworkers up for trouble when there was very little chance he’d be noticed in the crowd at all.

He’d been fine -one face in a cloud of them- until one of the jackasses that their ‘guest’ had towed along with him drunkenly pointed out that Shen Yuan was just picking at his food, all of which was antithetical to his tolerances. The little guy had all the hallmarks of someone who knew they were easy to bully and had only figured out how to deal with it by pointing out other targets before anyone could start picking on him.

That set the tone for the rest of the night. If he wasn’t eating then he was looking down on them. If he wasn’t drinking then did he think he was special?

Shen Yuan was nauseous by the time they could finally bow their guests out as they staggered off into the early dawn. Two of his juniors took him into the rear yard and made him throw up whatever he could, but it was too late. He woke up the next morning cramping, pale, and unable to keep anything down except a few sips of water.

The madam was in a full panic. She’d wanted to call a doctor, but Shen Yuan knew what his problem was and while there might be a miracle doctor somewhere in this fantasy universe could cure an autoimmune disorder he didn’t think it was going to be the kind of overpriced hack who’d answer the madam’s summons. Shen Yuan would just rack up more debt for no good reason, but she was terrified his demon lord patron would show up and raze the teahouse to the foundation if he found out.

All they could do was pray that Luo Binghe was busy today. The odds were in their favor. He’d mentioned visiting a miniature realm and that would probably keep him occupied for a couple of days. He’d even promised to bring Shen Yuan back a souvenir.

It’d be fine.

Someone knocked at the door the very second he thought that.

Shen Yuan glared at it.

No.

He’d been the recipient of some comedic narrative timing before, but this had better not be…

Luo Binghe let himself inside.

...it was.

Chapter Text

Shen Yuan sat up in bed, fuelled by a bolt of adrenaline. He patted at his hair and tried to straighten his crumpled bed clothes like either was going to help when he couldn’t see what he was doing.

“My lord!" he squeaked and subsided when Luo Binghe made a gesture for him to stay put.

The man was disheveled and a little dirty. His hair was mussed and he sported a prominent hickey on the underside of his jaw that Shen Yuan hadn’t given him, but he looked annoyed about it so that miniature realm must have been The Land of the Tender; one of the more upsetting sexcapades of the early novel and about as close to non-con as Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had ever gotten. There’d been ameliorating circumstances, but only just barely.

“The shop owner said you were sick.” He approached with zero concern for contagion, which you could only really do when viruses of either species didn’t quite know what to do with you. He sat down on the edge of the bed and placed the back of his wrist against Shen Yuan’s forehead. “You feel warm.”

“It’s not that kind of sickness.” Shen Yuan absolutely did not have a fever. He was just a little warm from bed and maybe the hot dude who’d just walked into his room. Shen Yuan’s patron was, as usual, just the right amount of messed up to be sexy instead of plain old dirty.

Shen Yuan had kind of come to terms with the fact that his sexuality had a big Luo Binghe shaped exception. He probably wasn’t even unique in that regard. In fact he was willing to bet that was a fundamental law of this world; if Binghe wanted you then he got you and you liked it enthusiastically. It had been that kind of novel after all. 

“She said you refused a doctor so I’m curious to know why you think that," he replied.

Shen Yuan pouted. “She ratted me out.”

“She did.” Luo Binghe shrugged his coat off and tossed it onto the ground before kicking his boots off. It was too wrecked to bother with hanging up. “For some reason she thought you might listen to me if I asked you to see one.” He crawled onto the mattress and straddled Shen Yuan’s thighs. He was on top of the blanket so no hanky panky was forthcoming. He was just using his looks to get his way because the expression he followed it up with could only be described as the smolder. “Won’t Yuan-er indulge me? Let me call you a doctor.”

Shen Yuan covered his face with his sleeves as his resolve melted. “Why is that working?” he complained.

“Because Yuan-er is a good and obedient child for me.” Luo Binghe replied smugly. His expression softened as he brushed the hair out of Shen Yuan’s face. “What caused this?”

“It’s happened before,” Shen Yuan admitted and made a softly pleased noise as his patron laid down beside him. He’d missed his personal space heater and body pillow. He got increasingly annoyed every time Luo Binghe left despite knowing that getting attached would be the stupidest decision he’d ever made. “Overindulgence, rich food, and alcohol will do this sometimes and then there’s nothing to do except wait it out. Imagine calling a doctor out for that? It’s just a belly ache.”

It was actually a bunch of micro lesions in his stomach and intestines with some ulcers thrown in for spice, but Luo Binghe didn’t need to know that.

Unfortunately, he failed at reassuring his patron because Luo Binghe’s expression darkened. “So my Yuan-er, who barely eats enough to taste it and acts like even that is an annoying burden, just decided to overindulge for no occasion whatsoever and made himself sick despite knowing better?" he asked with ominous skepticism.

Fuck.

“Not… exactly?” Shen Yuan covered his face with his sleeves again and peeked out, hoping that being cute might divert the imminent Elaborate Revenge Plot simmering to life on the other side of them.

A broad calloused hand pushed his arms down from his face to reveal Luo Binghe’s unamused expression.

Shen Yuan deflated and fessed up to the events of the banquet. All of them.

“...we did what we could, but it was too late.” He didn’t like the way his eyes were burning. He felt stupid. Binghe was right. He had known better and should have just accepted the consequences for protecting himself, assuming there would have been any. It wasn’t like his seniors hadn’t seen him get sick before or weren’t aware that offending his patron could have wide-reaching consequences for all of them.

His new body was stronger than his old one so he didn’t think this disease would kill him the way it had in his old life, but that didn’t mean he could be reckless.

Shen Yuan was so busy kicking his own ass he missed the look that flickered across his patron’s face; upset, anger, and then sympathy followed by what might have been steely resolve. He was unaware of anything except his interior dialogue until he felt warm, soft lips pressed against his forehead and Luo Binghe’s hand came up to cup the back of his neck.

“I would never fault you for protecting someone else," he said and pulled Shen Yuan into a solid embrace. “This wasn’t your fault or even theirs. No one made that filth insist on your presence. He made that choice for himself. Does Yuan-er think I have never been powerless or forced to endure?”

Trick question. Shen Yuan did know, but he shouldn’t.

“I don’t like that you’ve had to," he said instead of ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ It was time to change the subject. He pressed his thumb against the hickey under Luo Binghe’s jaw. “Was the miniature realm very exciting?”

Luo Binghe made a dissatisfied noise. “Too exciting," he confirmed grumpily and his hold on Shen Yuan tightened. “Does Yuan-er know what spring medicine is?” 

“Oh, you mean sex pollen?” Shen Yuan answered without thought and winced. One, that was a crude way to put it and two, he tried really hard to keep modern world anachronisms out of his speech. He wasn’t always successful, but usually he was better at it than that.

Luo Binghe stilled. “I…" he rasped and sounded sort of agonized about it. “...had never heard that term for it, but yes. That is a very good description; unfortunate and accurate. There were many –stimulating plants there with fragrances and spores that were hard to escape. My traveling companions and I had to… vent the effects.”

By ‘vent’ he meant they’d engaged in an impromptu orgy, which was one of the few canonical events that left the protagonist without a new partner. He’d gone into the Land of the Tender with a few former lovers from previous arcs -not Ning Yingying, Sha Hualing, or any of the other first string wives- and they’d all been partners with each other individually in the past so no one was having sex with a new person under too dubious of circumstances. 

Honestly, Shen Yuan had read it as a comedic way for Airplane to shed some of the female extras in a positive way because all three of the women who went off with Luo Binghe that day ended up in a dedicated and loving throuple that, for once, did not include him.

No wonder Binghe’d come straight to the Tranquil Bamboo Grove. He was probably feeling the rejection right about now.

“How’d you end up in such a place?” Shen Yuan asked like he didn’t already know. They’d mistranslated the name of the realm in the document that one of his now ex-girlfriends had found that recorded the openings and closings of the realm. They’d all mistaken it for another, more exciting pocket world with all kinds of treasure and secret arts to reclaim, which was of particular interest to the ladies since they all came from defunct sects whose own secret arts were lost long ago.

“A mistake.” Luo Binghe’s ears turned a fascinating shade of mortified puce. “It was a mistake," he sighed. “I’ve arrived empty handed. There was nothing there that Yuan-er would like or that would be safe for you to have.”

“You’re here,” Shen Yuan replied with total honesty and rolled over to cushion his head on Luo Binghe’s shoulder. Nothing could really help with the pain, but having someone to lay down with helped nevertheless. “That’s enough.” 

Binghe waited until his sweet burden was properly asleep, not just catnapping, before slipping out of the bed and availing himself of the wash basin. He’d been considering leaving some of his own clothes here so that he’d be able to change after paying his A-Yuan a visit under circumstances like these, but given his recent revelation there was now no point.

He’d been expecting too much from the teahouse. It was unfair of him, really. 

It had been a month and his feelings had only gotten worse –or better, depending on how he looked at the situation. He wasn’t getting tired of A-Yuan’s presence nor losing interest the way he’d expected to. Every visit stoked the fire in him and now going as long as he had without A-Yuan’s touch or hearing his voice had left him irritable, resentful, and snappish.

It had gotten to the point where even Sha Hualing had once told him to ‘go see his whore before he crossed the boundary of unbearable.’ The ensuing fight had probably closed the door on any future romantic entanglements between them, but he’d taken her advice afterwards and then apologized for his moody behavior once he returned because -annoyingly- she’d been correct. The change in his attitude had been noticeable even to him.

Then there was what had happened in the miniature realm. He was happy for his friends and former lovers to have been able to use the experience to break through the barrier of their mutual embarrassment and just be honest with each other. The unrequited pining had been unbearable and he was glad that was over. It was good for them, but for him their sexual encounter had been difficult in a way that it had never, ever been before.

Luo Binghe liked sex. It was an enjoyable pasttime with people who also liked sex and didn’t take it too seriously. Even when he’d gotten dosed with spring medicine -something that happened with alarming frequency in the life of a cultivator- he never felt embarrassed by the act itself. 

This time he’d felt ashamed after his head cleared. Worse, he’d felt guilty. He’d wanted to hurry here and beg forgiveness despite knowing full well that A-Yuan wouldn’t even be angry with him.

Yes, he’d had multiple lovers and was very likely to have more in the future what with the way his Path seemed to meander. What he’d never done was involve himself with anyone who didn’t know that or hadn’t wholeheartedly agreed to be with him while knowing it. 

Lady cultivators were liberal in that regard and more or less safe to go to bed with. They hardly ever married unless it was to someone who wouldn’t tie them down with domestic responsibilities or interfere with their cultivation. They took their pleasure where they liked as they liked it. 

Binghe had been the happy recipient of that favor on many occasions. Among cultivators, if children came then they were welcomed by the Sect and raised as a generational treasure. Cultivators tended to not ask too many questions about where they came from. Some people used sex as a means to an end, but he’d gotten better at spotting those types and thus rarely got entangled with them anymore. 

A-Yuan was a courtesan so he probably had no expectation of fidelity from Binghe from the start. He asked about Binghe’s adventures and seemed to always know when there’d been a ‘new friend.’ He chuckled about it, patted Binghe’s hair, and asked if he’d had fun. That was the extent of it.

So it was only Binghe, apparently, who had developed an expectation of fidelity from Binghe.

Now he was faced with the truth that he couldn’t keep A-Yuan protected the way he seemed to want if he wasn’t around to do it. His reputation was fearful among cultivator circles, but random rural bureaucrats wouldn’t know better than to touch what was his and the teahouse could only do so much. They had done, in fact, more than any other establishment would or could have and it still hadn’t been enough.

This fascination wasn’t going away and so he was forced to acknowledge that he could no longer have A-Yuan while still keeping him at a distance.

So Binghe was at least tidier looking when he met with the proprietress to discuss redeeming A-Yuan. The cost was negligible. The outstanding balance on his debt ledger could have been cleared with the pocket money Binghe had left him on his last visit. He didn’t pretend to understand the nuances of finance when it came to these circumstances except to know that the teahouses and brothels benefited most by keeping their staff in deep debt that wouldn’t be forgiven until the entertainers could no longer work. 

There was certainly a good reason why A-Yuan hadn’t redeemed himself. It probably had nothing to do with Binghe. 

A-Yuan was a good, clever man. He wouldn’t stick around a place like this out of sentiment; because he liked Binghe and this was how they could see each other easily. That would be foolish. Shen Yuan was no fool.

(Binghe just wanted to be the reason. He wanted to believe that a smart man could be stupid about him.)

He dismissed that thought in favor of more practical concerns. Even redeemed, A-Yuan was in no condition to be moved in the traditional fashion. 

How fortunate, then, that Binghe had his own methods of transport.  

Shen Yuan woke up feeling marginally better, but also to the sounds of multiple people in his room. The first thing he saw was Luo Binghe’s hip where he was seated on the edge of the bed and, in typical his heatseeker fashion, Shen Yuan had snuggled up to him in his sleep with an arm thrown across the man’s lap.

He sat up to discover his belongings were being packed by demons. There was an open portal humming in the corner that led into a distant bedroom where another group of people in yellow were putting away the things the demons handed through the portal. The people in yellow didn’t seem to want to get too close to the roiling black energy that marked the boundary of Luo Binghe’s interspatial gate, but the demons didn’t seem to give a damn and just crossed it with impunity.

Luo Binghe greeted him with the big shiny smile of a man who’d just gotten caught. “Yuan-er is awake!” He edged his bulk between Shen Yuan’s face and the rest of the room like that was going to help. “How are you feeling?”

“I feel like I’m being moved out without being consulted," he leaned over to squint at the portal. One of the demons gave him a friendly little wave that he returned with caution. “My lord has an explanation, I trust?”

There was no harem yet, right? He wasn’t going to be a founding concubine, right?

Right?

His patron wet his lips and looked guilty as fuck. “I can explain," he said followed by: “Ow! Ow, ow, ow!”

Shen Yuan gave Luo Binghe’s cheeks a final tug before releasing him. “Would I have woken up in that other room if you had your way?”

“Yuan-er isn’t well! I have good doctors in my palace.” Luo Binghe sulked as he rubbed his face but there was a little gleam in his eyes that Shen Yuan didn’t like. In the novel Luo Binghe had to be a glutton for punishment just to survive his own life, but this was too extreme! With the way he looked right now, Shen Yuan might as well have patted him on the head! Was any kind of attention good enough?

What kind of incurable M was this??

“Why couldn’t you wait to talk to me?" he wanted to know. “Does the madam know about this?”

“She knows.” Luo Bringhe caught the finger Shen Yuan was shaking in his face and kissed it with care. “Yuan-er has been properly redeemed. You are welcome in my palace for as long as you like. If you want to leave then that can be arranged too once you are feeling better. I have no intention of keeping Yuan-er against his will.”

Then he did the worst thing he could have possibly done. He dipped his chin so he was looking up at Shen Yuan through his lashes despite being the taller person. His eyes grew round and luminous. The corners of his mouth tugged down in a tiny sorrowful frown. It was the most lethal puppy-dog face Shen Yuan had ever encountered in the wild and it struck his objections dead in a single hit.

He folded like a bad hand. “Alright. We’ll do it your way," he yelped as Luo Binghe grinned and swept him up in an honest-to-goodness princess carry, blankets and all. 

“I will take good care of you," he murmured into Shen Yuan’s blazing hot ear.

Stepping through the portal didn’t feel like anything, but the ambient temperature changed a few steps into the new room. It was a bit cooler there. Tranquil Bamboo Grove was located in the southern part of the continent -which Shen Yuan still didn’t know the name of, just that it wasn’t a geographical analog of real-world China. Going by the gratuitous amounts of gold leaf on everything, the new room was probably located in Huan Hua Palace.

So this was either before the Underground Palace was finished or during a period where Luo Binghe was living mostly on the human side of things.

His burst of energy was fading and the pain was mounting. It was a short trip, but he had his face pressed into Luo Binghe’s shoulder and was breathing shallowly by the time they reached the bed -a jia zi style bed enclosed on all sides with elaborate wooden screens that depicted scenes of birds in flight against a geometric grid with a circular entrance. The inside was packed full of pillows and looked like an exquisite bird’s nest. 

“Almost there.” Luo Binghe said as he lowered Shen Yuan down in a nest of stolen blankets. He lifted one of Shen Yuan’s wrists and took his pulse. Whatever he found there made him frown. “The pain is worse?”

Shen Yuan nodded miserably. He didn’t often miss his modern life aside from his family, but it was hard to remember that he was living the isekai fantasy when he was trying to get through a flare while unmedicated.   

“What kind of disease is it?” Luo Binghe’s grip tightened on Shen Yuan’s wrist; not enough to hurt, but enough to feel. “Yuan-er said you knew.”

“Mmm." He took a shallow breath through his nose. “It’s… hard to explain. I don’t suppose you know what ‘autoimmune disorder’ means?” He nodded when Luo Binghe shook his head. Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky wasn’t great at keeping modern medical terms out of his narrative. They cropped up in weird places. The last doctor he’d spoken to knew about pasteurization -he’d used that exact term no less, despite the fact that it was derived from the name of a French man- but didn’t know about the immune response. Shen Yuan still hadn’t expected that one to get through. “It has to do with the part of my body that fights disease. It gets…” He considered the most accessible explanation possible for a layman without even a modern person’s basic understanding of the immune system. “...confused, I guess? Sometimes eating the wrong kind of food makes it attack me instead of the things that make me sick.”

Luo Binghe considered it and made a thoughtful noise. “Can Yuan-er drink anything?”

“A little bit.” He really didn’t want to vomit again so soon, but he also hated getting dehydrated. He was rewarded with a chaste kiss pressed against his forehead.

“I will return momentarily," Luo Binghe promised and left the room briefly. 

The Huan Hua Sect members and Luo Binghe’s demons finished packing away his belongings right around the time he returned with a small tray bearing a round little celadon teapot. After verifying that everyone was on this side of the portal, he banished it with a casual wave of his hand. Everyone bowed once to Shen Yuan and then again more deeply to Luo Binghe before showing themselves out. 

The pot contained lukewarm herbal tea. “This is silver frostberry tea.” Luo Binghe introduced it as he poured Shen Yuan a cup. “It promotes internal healing and dulls pain a bit. No matter what, this won’t ever hurt Yuan-er.”

Shen Yuan wondered if he was about to casually drink some impossibly rare, never-seen herb that no one except the protagonist would have laying around in his room or think to use because his new (–what? Concubine? Live-in entertainer? What did you call someone like Shen Yuan when you weren’t having sex with them?) was feeling under the weather.

The tea had a natural sweetness that was followed immediately by a more bitter medicinal taste that left his mouth tasting metallic. At first his stomach wanted no part of it, but Shen Yuan was an old hand at temporarily staving off his gag reflex in order to get some fluid down. He took little sips, breathed through his nose, and absolutely did not push himself. After a while, though, it got easier. His diaphragm stopped trying to convulse and his pain really did ease off.

Luo Binghe had lit a brazier by the bed and settled the teapot on it to stay warm. Shen Yuan would have drunk it cold, but the people in this world had his nainai’s attitude about drinking cold liquids; tolerable in moderation if you had to, but never for sick or old people. 

A wave of drowsiness hit him as the cramps continued to fade. He’d been sleeping all day, sure, but it hadn’t been very restful sleep. He sank down into his glorious nest of pillows as his eyes grew heavy. “Oh," he sighed. “That helped a lot.”

He felt someone gently teasing the top knot out of his hair and smoothing the bangs away from his face. His limbs grew heavy and he was distantly aware of his fingers closing on Luo Binghe’s sleeve out of some worry that he’d vanish while Shen Yuan was passed out in a post-medication nap.

Chapter Text

Binghe took A-Yuan’s pulse again once he’d been pulled under. The blood parasites had gotten directly to work as they frequently did when introduced to a friendly but weak host. Normally they waited a few days to reproduce in their new environment before working to support their host if Binghe didn’t give them directions right away. Like this they were, from a technical standpoint, really symbiotes rather than parasites.

He let his breath out in a relieved sigh as he felt A-Yuan begin to rally.

This had been the correct decision. For his blood to make such an instantaneous change in A-Yuan’s comfort, that meant that the disease was more serious than his little companion had led him to believe. A-Yuan had been downplaying his suffering and Binghe wished he could be surprised by that.

Was this how Shijie felt when she caught him in the middle of healing a messy yet minor (for Binghe) wound and he refused to let her fuss over it? He’d always thought he was preventing her from worrying, but maybe he owed her an apology. This wasn’t a good feeling.

He’d intended to fix up A-Yuan’s poor insides and then render the parasites inert so that they’d flush naturally out of his system, but the damage was more extensive than he’d expected and it was ongoing. If he concentrated he could feel the parasites dividing their efforts every so often, suggesting they were finding new things to fix. In fact, if things kept up at their current rate then the drop or two of blood that Binghe had fed him would be exhausted past the parasites’ ability to reproduce themselves within a few days.

That was… concerning.

A-Yuan said the disease was intermittent, yes? Luo Binghe frowned at the delicate fingers clutching his sleeve and then at A-Yuan’s sleeping face. The stressed cleft between his brows had eased. He was finally resting. 

‘I’ll have to leave it until this attack is over,’ he realized. He might even need to give A-Yuan another dose, which left him feeling a little uncomfortable. He was already in trouble for cavalierly whisking his lover away from the teahouse. In retrospect, there’d been no good reason to be so hasty. He’d let himself get carried away on a tide of his own urgency. He was perhaps lucky that A-Yuan was feeling poorly and wanted to be taken care of or else Binghe might have been in for more than a light scolding and getting his cheek pinched.

There was a soft tap-tap at the door and he turned to find his shijie leaning just inside the entrance. 

A-Yuan didn’t know it yet, but this room was part of Binghe’s own quarters in Huan Hua Palace. It wasn’t the safest place to bring a new member of his household, but at the same time he absolutely could not take A-Yuan to his estates in the demon realm. While his people there were more trustworthy (a sad state of affairs) and A-Yuan wouldn’t have to tolerate roving menaces like the Little Palace Mistress, he did not think A-Yuan’s constitution was strong enough to tolerate the atmosphere. Even Binghe needed a break from the ever-present miasma after a while.

Very few people would enter Binghe’s private rooms uninvited and those who did were trustworthy, so A-Yuan would have a safe haven here. 

Ning Yingying glanced quizzically at the sleeping man in the bed. Her brows lifted as she took in his familiar features. “I thought you were exaggerating!” she whispered and slipped a bit closer. 

Binghe sat on his irrational need to snarl at her like she was a demon who needed to be herded back inside her own boundaries. Since when had his shijie needed permission to go anywhere in Binghe’s space? He even expected the two of them to become instant friends as soon as A-Yuan was up to receiving visitors, so why couldn’t she come visit a bit early?

Binghe’s feelings had no answer for him except further mounting tension.

Maybe he was upset because this particular room was A-Yuan’s space now and A-Yuan was vulnerable. That seemed reasonable even if it didn’t quite fit with how he was feeling. Some part of him didn’t want anyone in there, not even servants. He entertained the brief fantasy of being the only soul permitted in these rooms and it was surprisingly thorough. He could cook. He could clean. He could defend. There wasn’t any need A-Yuan could have that Binghe wouldn’t enjoy fulfilling.

“Even Mobei-jun noticed the similarity,” Binghe replied to distract himself from the detailed vision of himself laying out clothes for a sleepy-eyed beauty or maybe serving an exquisite (and safe) meal made by his own hands on the low table over there. Maybe A-Yuan would let Binghe fuss a little bit? He wasn’t used to servants. Clearly Binghe would be a more comfortable presence for him. 

“I wonder if they’re related?” she mused and came over to press two fingers against A-Yuan’s pulse. It was a common impulse among cultivators, especially when confronted with a fragile mortal person in crisis. He bit his tongue to keep the enraged noise he wanted to make behind his teeth. She turned her big brown eyes on him, worry bubbling up behind them like an unpleasant spring. “A-Luo, he’s in bad shape.”

He nodded once. “I’ve taken measures.” She would know what that meant and it seemed to reassure her.

“I don’t think Shizun is old enough to have a son his age. We were his first generation of disciples.” She sat back on her heels. “Even if he was, I don’t think he could have Shizun’s name without Shizun knowing about it and I don’t think there’s any way he’d let someone end up in a brothel with his name.”

The ‘with his name’ was the key element of that statement, Binghe reflected. He could see the wretch they’d grown up under ignoring his duties as a father. Being someone’s teacher and someone’s parent weren’t so different among cultivators, after all. Siblings, though, were easier to lose track of and while Shen Qingqiu might have a peerless reputation, his lineage was totally unknown. It wasn’t impossible that they might be related, but the state of A-Yuan’s spirit veins suggested that it was unlikely. Family members tended to have roughly similar cultivation potential. 

Shen Qingqiu had a robust spiritual constitution. A-Yuan? There was no sect in the known world who would have accepted him as a disciple no matter how clever he was. 

“He’s better off with no family if that’s the family he has left," Binghe decided outloud and his shijie made a grumpy, but affirmative noise. 

Ning Yingying shook her head and sighed. “I came to tell you that the Old Palace Master and the Little Palace Mistress are back from their trip a little early," she told him. “Mingyan and I were going to investigate a chronic haunting to the east. We thought it might be good to leave a little early so I came to tell you. I know I promised to help Shen Yuan get settled, but I think this is for the best.”

Binghe was forced to agree.

His shijie and the Little Palace Mistress got on like two wet cats in a sack, which was odd when you considered the fact that Ning Yingying could turn literally anyone else into a friend up to and including Sha Hualing. Liu Mingyan, meanwhile, was very difficult to goad into a fight unless Ning Yingying was being harrassed. Then it was very easy to believe that she had a blood connection to the late War God of Bai Zhan Peak. The Little Palace Mistress’s mere presence was enough to raise Liu Mingyan’s hackles at this point.

Shijie was right. It was better that they be elsewhere. 

“I’ll send word when the waters calm down," he promised.

“My shidi is the best," she said with a smile even though that was patently false. If her shidi was really the best then she wouldn’t be having to leave again. “I’m sorry if we have to go before your Shen Yuan is feeling better. We’ll make it up to him when we get back.”

“Be safe.” He accepted a kiss on the cheek and only really relaxed once the door closed behind her.

If it wasn’t one thing then it was another. 

At the rate this was going, he was going to need to establish new premises in the human world. His martial sisters were being driven out of the place that should have been their sanctuary after they broke ties with their original sect. He’d chosen Huan Hua Palace because they had a long, storied history of raising female cultivators and he’d thought that meant they’d be able to live unmolested in such a place. 

Not so much.

Like Sha Hualing, he could probably have brought the entire Huan Hua sect under his thumb by marrying the Little Palace Mistress. That was only a solution you could deploy so many times, though. He’d been considering establishing a formal household earlier in the year, but lately he was starting to realize that if he did it would instantly balloon beyond all manageable proportions. Marriage was an easy alliance tool and he was currently an uncomfortably hot commodity in that regard. Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan could hold their own anywhere, anytime, but A-Yuan was a different story. He needed care and attention. Binghe couldn't give him that if he was splitting his attention among multiple spouses and that wasn't even getting into the potential infighting. 

If it had only been the Little Palace Mistress he needed to worry about then he might have hesitated less. She wanted to be in a harem and had exactly the right personality to keep a household of concubines in check and not killing each other. She'd practically been raised for it, which was an odd choice for a sect heir but he hadn’t been consulted on the matter. She wasn’t the worst option for a chief consort except her grandfather was a separate issue that Binghe was beginning to struggle with. The Old Palace Master was very generous with his money and his assistance, but like his granddaughter he got possessive of Binghe’s attention in uncomfortable ways. 

This was not the best place to have brought A-Yuan, but it was marginally safer than the teahouse. At least here he knew what dangers to watch for and had subordinates in place to watch over A-Yuan when he couldn't. The teahouse was at the mercy of whatever rich blowhard walked in the door, himself included.

Binghe entertained himself briefly with the idea of taking over the twelve peaks of Cang Qiong. The hall at Qiong Ding peak would make an exquisite seat of power and he could turn the entire Qing Jing Peak into a private residence for his family members. Wouldn't that be nice?

Then he waved the thought away; too much work at present and anyway he might yet have need of Mu Qingfang if his blood parasites failed to curb A-Yuan’s illness. They’d never failed him before, but there was a first time for everything. There was no need to alienate the best healer in the cultivation world on what amounted to a whim.

A-Yuan napped through the rest of the day. Binghe eventually reclaimed his sleeve -thankfully A-Yuan was a heavy sleeper and they did not have to recreate the story of the emperor and his sleeping lover- then attended to his other business.

He had no plans to go far and also no intention of letting A-Yuan wake up alone in a strange place. Those good intentions ran afoul of the fact that his habits were too well known in the sect. The Old Palace Master intercepted Binghe while he was on the way to the kitchens to prepare an evening meal. 

Binghe and, more importantly, his martial sisters were guest disciples. Their welcome and Binghe’s subordinates’ ability to come and go in the sect was dependent on the Old Palace Master’s goodwill so sometimes he needed to be indulged.

‘We really do need to move,’ Binghe thought to himself as he arrived back at his quarters hours later and in a foul mood. The Old Palace Master had needed soothing and had asked far too many questions about A-Yuan. You’d think Binghe was the old fart’s cheating spouse with the way he’d just been questioned! 

This alliance was getting out of control. There was a point where the costs of maintaining a connection outweighed the benefits he received and the Old Palace Master was getting close to putting a foot over that invisible boundary.

Binghe sat the tray of covered dishes down on the small dining table in his room and dragged his hands through his bangs as he sighed. 

He had money aplenty and no shortage of treasures. Maybe he could just build something to his own specifications. It might be nice to have a private kitchen with no need of getting under the staff’s feet. Then he could attend to meals for himself and whoever the hell he wanted without anyone else having the right to get involved. 

Speaking of, maybe A-Yuan was awake? 

Binghe found him sitting up in bed. Shen Yuan’s color was vastly improved and -when Binghe felt them out- the blood parasites were vastly reduced in number, but they were also not working as hard as they’d been earlier. A-Yuan had turned a corner. The parasites were still exhausting themselves faster than they could reproduce, but it was fine for the moment. 

He realized something was wrong, though, when A-Yuan spotted him and his expression cooled. He drew himself upright, tapping a new fan (this one was square and decorated with plum blossoms) into his open palm. His eyes narrowed and the resemblance between him and Shen Qingqiu became nearly unbearable.

“Binghe.”  

The sound of his unadorned name shot tingles down Binghe’s spine and before he quite knew what was happening, he was kneeling in front of the bed while A-Yuan glared down at him from the mattress like an emperor atop his throne. It wasn’t actually a bad feeling except for the next words out of the man’s mouth. 

“What else was in that tea you gave me?”

There was no way around this. Binghe had made a mistake and, worse, he’d gotten caught. He was going to have to grovel. 

“I was wrong!” He lowered himself down until his forehead touched the ground. It didn’t feel as shameful as he would have thought. It actually felt kind of nice. There was no possibility that Shen Yuan would hit or kick him so this was entirely Binghe’s choice. He was going to have to think about that later. 

Two bare and pale feet landed on the ground in front of him. One of them stomped in agitation. “Binghe, what did you give me!?” 

Binghe sat back on his heels. A-Yuan had scooted up to the edge of the bed so they were eye to eye. There were bright flags of color in his cheeks and he was gripping the wand of his fan in both hands so hard that the fragile wood might well snap.

“I was concerned and… may have shared some of my blood with A-Yuan through the tea.” Binghe swallowed hard. “It has a special healing property. What you described, I don’t know of any doctors who could treat it. My blood can bolster failing physical functions and heal internal damage.”

It could do a lot more than that, but he didn’t dare tell A-Yuan that or he’d never consent to a second dose and he might need one at this rate. Badly.

The color leached out of A-Yuan’s complexion and Binghe shuffled forward, worried enough to drop whatever formality he still observed with his lover. “I’m sorry, I should have asked. You were in so much pain and your pulse was so erratic that I gave you a drop in the tea to stabilize you. It was just a drop!”

“That’s why I feel so much better?” A-Yuan breathed, still upset. One of his hands sought the flat plane of his stomach. 

“I have a unique heritage," Binghe confessed. Most people knew he was a half-demon at this point and were generally fine with it. “My blood contains beneficial parasites that accelerate my healing and make me immune to poisons. They can be spread to other hosts if I will it.”

“Does Binghe understand why I’m unhappy with this?” A-Yuan asked. He didn’t sound like he thought the answer would be yes and that blow landed hard. 

There were good times to pretend that he was the one in control, but this didn’t seem like one of them to Binghe.

“Will Yuan-er explain?” He put a hand on the mattress next to A-Yuan’s thigh. He did not have the impression that touching was allowed just now.

A-Yuan pursed his lips. “Things like this, it makes it hard to trust you.” 

He could have punched Binghe and it would have hurt less. The air left him in a gust. 

A-Yuan softened. “Were you scared?" he asked.

It was hard to meet his eyes. In truth, yes, he had been. After a while Binghe managed to nod even though it felt like he was putting a knife against his throat and trusting the other man not to press down.

“I know that you were trying to help...” A-Yuan sighed after an unbearable silence. “...but it feels like you didn’t care about what I would want so you didn’t bother to talk to me about it.”

Ice flooded his veins. “No!” He sounded, even to himself, like ten years fell off of him in an instant. What was it about this man that regressed him back into a needy child? The cold fury had faded out of A-Yuan’s face and he looked like himself again instead of a shorter, prettier Shen Qingqiu. Even so, he still didn’t look happy. He looked disappointed and that was somehow even worse than angry. “A-Yuan, no! I didn’t think at all. It was never that!”

A-Yuan reached out with both hands and let them settle on his shoulders like butterflies. “I believe you..," he said and swallowed. “...but if you do something like this again then I can’t stay here. You understand that, right?”

Binghe’s feelings abandoned him; all of them. He felt like a tub that had been abruptly drained. Leave? He would leave?

“Does A-Yuan mean the blood or my mistake?" he asked hollowly, unsure of why it mattered. 

The small man in front of him shrugged off the first option. “What was done with your blood is done.” His tone wasn’t repulsed or really even upset, maybe vaguely annoyed, and Binghe felt his heart sluggishly start to beat again. He wasn’t being rejected in that way. This was about something he’d done, not something he was and he found that was easier to bear. “I won’t stay if you try to make all my decisions for me, especially like that. If you freed me then I’m free and if I’m free then I make my own choices.”

“I’m sorry.” Binghe let the breath he’d been unconsciously holding loose in a sigh. “I will amend my behavior.”

“See that you do.” A-Yuan finally smiled for him again. It was tired and small yet genuine. Binghe was forgiven. Then he looked around and sniffed in appreciation. “What smells good?”

“I made something to eat. There are dishes for A-Yuan too," Binghe said as he got to his feet and hesitated before offering A-Yuan his hand. Binghe relaxed further when Shen Yuan accepted it and let Binghe help him up. The skirts of his thin and somewhat over-elaborate night clothes cascaded down to cover his bare legs again. Binghe watched those lovely calves vanish from sight with regret, but he’d never seen A-Yuan interested in a meal before and the fact that his cooking seemed to have made the difference made the development extra interesting so he led the way into his rooms without complaint or lingering.

...or he tried to. A-Yuan pulled ahead, following his nose and dragging Binghe behind him by the hand. 

Binghe smiled helplessly as his little companion sat obediently at one of the two seats all but quivering in anticipation. 

“These are very plain," he warned as he lifted the covers. He didn’t yet know what was safe for A-Yuan’s consumption yet, but congee was an old favorite and friendly even to the most cantankerous stomach. He’d arranged toppings in bowls on the side so that they could garnish their own servings.

A-Yuan’s eyes slipped shut as he inhaled the light, clean fragrance coming from the ceramic pot as Binghe served them both. 

He only managed a small bit of the congee with a marinated egg, some slivered vegetables, and a tiny bit of chicken before having to push it away, but that was more enthusiasm than Binghe had ever seen from the man over food across their entire association combined. Usually he’d nibble at something and then spend most of his time fussing over what was in Binghe’s bowl or cup. At Binghe’s private table, however, he ate with unvarnished pleasure and no hesitation.

That knowledge settled in Luo Binghe’s bones and the imaginary palace building itself in the back of his mind quietly acquired a private pleasure garden with soft walking paths and flowering trees that connected two luxurious suites; rooms that got closer to one another with every passing thought.

Chapter Text

For once Binghe was interested in music so Shen Yuan played the zheng a bit after they ate. He’d been riding a wave of pleasant feeling that started to wear off as the night wore on, so he ended up pushing it too far. Eventually he had to lay his hands on the strings to still the sound.

“Forgive me, my lord," he panted. “This servant…”  He stopped when Binghe put a hand on his arm.

“A-Yuan shouldn’t apologize..," he said and got to his knees. He’d been lounging on the ground watching Shen Yuan’s hands on the strings and paying such close attention that Shen Yuan suspected Binghe was teaching himself to play by watching. It was the sort of shit he did and Shen Yuan had the advantage of knowing that he had a sore spot in the shape of his missing classical education. He’d take advantage of any opportunity to make up for it except, perhaps, asking for help. “...or refer to yourself as a servant.”

So he was A-Yuan now? He wondered what the difference was in Binghe’s mind or why he'd decided to make that change now. Shen Yuan liked the upgrade. ‘Yuan-er’ was a little cutesy, but the unvarnished affection in ‘A-Yuan’ was intimidating and he liked it almost too much.

Shen Yuan allowed Binghe to check his pulse. Judging by the way his lips thinned the outlook wasn’t good. 

“Is the blood not helping?" Shen Yuan asked. He’d be very surprised if it wasn’t. Heavenly Demon Blood Parasites were the magic bullet cure-all of Proud Immortal Demon Way, second only to Dual Cultivation. 

“It is," Binghe replied, but he didn’t look happy about it. “I can sense it working, but the transfusion I gave you was too small. They’re dying off faster than they are reproducing. A-Yuan will experience diminishing returns until the entire colony dies off.”

Well, that sounded bad. 

“So… I’d need a bigger colony?" he guessed. Shen Yuan wasn’t really concerned with the idea of Binghe turning the blood parasites against him. They’d only been used as torture devices against a very specific class of antagonist: kidnappers, rapists, and child abusers. Otherwise they were more frequently used as RFID chips for when members of Binghe’s harem inevitably got kidnapped. If he was harem-adjacent -and it looked like he was- then he absolutely wanted a magical tracking device in case his turn came along. The fact that it was treating his chronic medical issue too was just gravy so far as he was concerned. “Enough to support the attrition?”

Binghe seemed surprised that he’d suggest it. “A-Yuan would accept more?”

“I would have agreed before if you’d just asked," Shen Yuan told him and leaned over to press their shoulders together when Binghe wilted. Really, he was like a little kid when he was in the doghouse. It made Shen Yuan want to spoil him.

“I will remember that.” Binghe slipped an arm around Shen Yuan’s back. “Let me make some tea for you to chase the taste away.”

The tea had been what clued Shen Yuan in originally. Binghe had left him with a full pot of the frostberry tea warming on a brazier, but only that first one had the lingering aftertaste of iron, and he didn't get the immediate palliative effect from further cups. From there it wasn’t hard to trace his miraculous symptom abatement back to a probable source.

Binghe returned with more tea. It smelled different than the frostberry. It was stronger for one. 

Shen Yuan snorted when his big dumb lummox tried to coax his blood into a second teacup, which didn’t go well when his healing factor wouldn’t let the wound stay open for more than a few seconds. Rather than watch Binghe struggle and mangle himself, Shen Yuan leaned over and swiped his tongue over the gash on Binghe’s palm. He sucked against it to drain the rent skin until he couldn’t taste blood anymore. 

In doing so he missed the way Binghe’s pupils dilated when Shen Yuan sat back, licking the remnants off his lips. He was distracted by the taste. He’d tasted blood before after a nosebleed or whatever. Binghe’s blood tasted different, a little bitter and powerfully metallic. Shen Yuan held an imperious hand out for the tea chaser. 

Binghe chuckled as he handed it over and then another when Shen Yuan knocked it back like a shot and held the cup out for a refill. “Forgive me for the taste," he said, only half-sincere as he pulled Shen Yuan into his lap, sadly not for kisses, but for a pretty decent cuddle. He stroked the length of Shen Yuan’s back as they sat with foreheads touching. “Will you call me by my name again?” 

Shen Yuan flushed as he realized he’d been doing that. He’d been so mad he lost his Xianxia manners, but apparently his boyfriend-type person was into it. “Binghe," he said softly and caught himself on a laugh as Binghe surged to his feet with Shen Yuan in his arms. “Binghe!”

Finally he got a kiss. It was a cheek kiss, but hey whatever.

“Stay with me tonight," Binghe murmured in his ear and Shen Yuan got excited for a moment until he added, “So I can keep watch.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. “It’s my first night in the new room, though.” He pointed out, just to be contrary.

“Good point," Binghe agreed and -much to Shen Yuan’s dismay- took him back to the annex room to set him down in the pillow nest. Fortunately Binghe only paused to strip off his shoes and outer layers before crawling right in after him. He extinguished the lamps with a lazy wave of his hand and arranged them on their sides.

Shen Yuan didn’t realize it then, but it’d be a long time before he ever slept by himself again.

Life in Huan Hua Palace was –it was… okay. 

Shen Yuan liked it tons when Binghe was around. They read together, played music, and Binghe was a bottomless source of entertaining stories about the things he’d seen and done around the continent. He’d even taken Shen Yuan out on a couple of field trips to safer, but still magical places that lessened the sting of everything he’d lost in the transmigration until he almost didn’t feel it anymore. 

Oftentimes, though, Binghe couldn’t bring him along on his latest adventures. It wasn’t personal. Shen Yuan knew he was squishy. If Binghe could bring him along and park him in a luxury inn while he killed bad guys with an increasingly gender-diverse supporting cast then he did –which brought up another thought.

Something was up with The Plot. Usually if a hot competent dude showed up in Proud Immortal Demon Way the top comment for that chapter was ‘NOBODY GET ATTACHED!’ because invariably he was going to die, especially if he was nice or (worse) was a romantic interest for one of Binghe’s future wives. 

Once in a great while they’d concede to Binghe in a graceful and oblique speech about how so-and-so only deserved the best man possible (i.e. Luo Binghe) before wandering off into the sunset never to be seen again. More often they died, or turned evil and died, or got used by the antagonist of that arc for evil purposes before dying.  

It was frustrating, but also a facet of the genre. The narrative couldn’t allow someone capable of challenging Luo Binghe for his prospective wives to exist. That was why Liu Qingge had to bite the dust so early and Yue Qingyuan’s character had to be undercut by his unexplained need to facilitate Shen Qingqiu’s shitty behavior, not to mention his refusal to ever actually do anything except smile enigmatically.  

Even so, there was not just one Hot Competent Dude at the last Wuxia-style afterparty/banquet thing Shen Yuan had accompanied Binghe to. There’d been three and at least one of them had a starry-eyed girl hanging off his arm that Shen Yuan was positive he remembered as one of Binghe’s future flames. She and Binghe acknowledged each other just fine, but there was no sexual charge in the air when they joked at one another about exactly who it was that solved the unsolvable puzzle that let their party escape from the Hell Moth Maze.

It was like they were just friends and nothing else. 

Canon Luo Binghe was a good guy and all, but he was also fundamentally incapable of maintaining a platonic female friendship. Even if he got close then the Plot would undermine it by sex pollen or some poison that could only be cured by (surprise) Dual Cultivation, and then his friend would become aware of her (gasp!) secret feelings that she could no longer deny!

Feng Yuheng and Xuan Tianming made a cute couple and all. Shen Yuan was really happy for them, but he was also confused about how they’d been allowed to stay together when she was a literal miracle doctor. She could do stuff that Mu Qingfang couldn’t even dream about and had a personal pocket world that lived in a tattoo on her arm. She’d turned it into a state of the art (by Xianxia standards) field hospital. In Proud Immortal Demon Way she’d been prime wife material and instrumental in saving the lives of several of her sister wives. Not to mention her presence in the harem had cured canon Luo Binghe’s lingering reservations about depriving the world of its greatest doctor by conquering the Cang Qiong Mountain sect.

On the other hand, his Binghe didn’t even seem to remember who Cang Qiong Mountain sect was most days so Shen Yuan wasn’t confused enough to not enjoy his seat of honor in Binghe’s lap while everyone ate and drank their way through an understandable post-adventure adrenaline crash, but still.

“I’m jealous," one of the other hot guys had slurred within Shen Yuan’s hearing. “My wives are always unhappy with how long I’m gone, but none of them will come keep me company when I’m out. Maybe I should get a husband like Luo-xiong?”

“Do you even like men that way?” Feng Yuheng asked in dubious tones. 

“I might!” He -his name was Gao Tong, Shen Yuan thought- said. “Maybe!” He thought about it. “I could try!”

“I think you’re lonely and about to make a dumb decision," she snorted into her drink. “Do they know that they could be hanging around an inn in the nearest town and having a little vacation while you’re busy?”

Gao Tong squinted like the idea had never occurred to him although in his defense he was very drunk at the time. “It’s dangerous," he said after a while. “And uncomfortable.”

“So dangerous," she agreed. “Yuanyuan, tell me more about that poetry competition you attended yesterday and that garden you toured and the nice restaurant where you got lunch.”

“There’s not always nice things to do.” Shen Yuan had covered his mouth with his fan mostly to hide his reaction to the way his very tipsy companion was nuzzling into his collarbone. They’d have to leave soon or this was going to exceed the acceptable boundaries of PDA, not that Binghe ever seemed to want to do more than heavy petting. “Sometimes I stay in the room and catch up on my reading.” ...or his zheng practice, or his other experiments. He was a homebody at heart. “I am good at keeping myself entertained.”

Anything was better than being alone in the Palace. There he really was cooped up in the room. At least Binghe’s travel house included a sheltered courtyard. He’d tried to tour the Huan Hua Palace grounds a few times, but there were two camps in the sect; Binghe’s people and the Old Palace Master’s people. Shen Yuan could tell who was who by the sound of whispers springing up in his wake.

Binghe’s people thought Shen Yuan was cute and that generally Luo Binghe should have or take whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it; particularly the leadership of Huan Hua Palace and the sooner the better, please. They weren’t fussed about how, either. The Little Palace Mistress didn’t have friends in that faction so she didn’t figure prominently in any plans they made. The Old Palace Master’s people thought Shen Yuan was an eyesore and weren’t shy of letting him know.

Given the way the second group acted, he couldn’t quite blame the first group for wanting to transfer their sect loyalties to Luo Binghe. Huan Hua Palace was a lot like highschool. No one was allowed to fight, but that just meant you had to compete against each other in invisible ways or just not get caught.

That was the reason he still hadn’t met Ning Yingying or Liu Mingyan yet, despite having received multiple souvenirs and a letter from both via Binghe. According to what he’d heard from Binghe, the Little Palace Mistress actively sought them out whenever they were all in residence at the same time and when they were it inevitably ended up in one of those weird Proud Immortal Demon Way dance-offs that were pretty right until someone was bleeding into the dirt.

If it had just been nasty whispers, he wouldn’t have been bothered by it. What did he care about a bunch of faceless mob characters anyway? 

At first it was just whispers and it had been more or less safe to walk in the gardens or find an out-of-the-way spot to watch the Huan Hua Sect disciples practice. Again you could tell who really wanted to work for Binghe because they were frequently the ones putting their backs into it, but the senior disciples and elders didn’t attend the group training sessions so they didn’t really grow much. Mentorship happened in private in Huan Hua Palace or, more often, not at all. Shen Yuan wanted to help because some of the kids were really struggling except he wasn’t exactly a credible trainer.

Then things started to change.

Binghe began avoiding the Little Palace Mistress. He used to indulge her mostly, as Shen Yuan was beginning to suspect, because Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan didn’t have anywhere else to go. The novel didn't get into it, but Shen Yuan was privy to a lot of things that didn't make it into the novel. 

The girls couldn’t go to the demon realm with Binghe any more than Shen Yuan could, thanks to the poisonous climate there, but they didn't have anywhere else to go either. Ning Yingying was an orphan and Liu Mingyan had been disowned by what was left of her family for leaving Cang Qiong Mountain sect in protest of the sect master's refusal to properly investigate her brother's death. 

Their shared history and fractured home lives had bound them together into a little found family of three. The girls didn’t want to split up from Binghe any more than Binghe wanted them to go, but he was also an emerging power in the cultivation world so he couldn’t just buy a house and be done with it.

Binghe’s current options were to either found a new sect or shelter with an existing one. Founding a new sect was no easy task either, as Shen Yuan understood it. Binghe would have to find a territory that could support his people, but also one that wasn’t so desirable that he’d have to defend it constantly from other up-and-comers who were less willing to put in the initial start-up labor and didn’t know that he was the main character of their universe. Canon Luo Binghe had side-stepped the issue by establishing the harem and putting the Little Palace Mistress in charge of the human side of it. That had kept her too busy to really bother him much and basically have him leadership of Huan Hua Palace after the Old Palace Master decided to step back from the day to day operations of the sect. Shen Yuan’s Binghe seemed more reluctant to take that step, but he also had a lot on his plate. 

The Plot might have expanded to allow Binghe to have adult friendships where no one died or got naked, but the idiot one-off antagonists who thought his reputation was exaggerated were still all present and accounted for. 

The point was that Binghe was tired of a lot of things, not least of which was the conflict between his current hosts and his two future first-string wives. He said sect sisters, but Shen Yuan knew what was coming.

In canon Luo Binghe used Human Hua Palace as a launching platform to take over Cang Qiong Mountain sect as his eventual primary palace in the human realm. Shen Yuan’s Binghe, though, had gotten really excited about building his own place. That didn’t preclude future conquests, but Shen Yuan didn’t hate the idea of moving out of Huan Hua Palace in the interim.

He’d never paid much attention to the Old Palace Master in the novel. It was from Binghe’s perspective so all you ever saw of the man was a kindly grandpa type who gave Binghe whatever he wanted or needed for no good reason except ‘this boy is special’ and Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky never really bothered to get into what that even meant so Shen Yuan only had his own observations to go off of.

What he’d observed so far was not good.

The Old Palace Master liked three things; control, his granddaughter sometimes, and Luo Binghe. Not necessarily in that order, either.

Shen Yuan had been prepared to like the Old Palace Master. He was Binghe’s mother’s shifu even if Binghe didn’t know that yet. A lot of the disciples of Huan Hua Palace were orphans so that meant he was essentially her dad and by extension Binghe’s grandfather. Binghe might not know, but Shen Yuan had been prepared to display enough filial piety for both of them until Binghe learned the truth on his own.

Only Shen Yuan did not get grandfatherly vibes from the handful of interactions he’d witnessed between the two men. The Old Palace Master was too casually possessive of Binghe’s time and attention for that. The Old Palace Master didn’t seem like he wanted to do anything with Binghe other than look at him; something Binghe largely did not notice except every once in a while. He didn’t care about Binghe’s affairs either, but he did not like it when Binghe liked anything too much –or anyone . Those things had a habit of disappearing.

It was the reason why Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan couldn’t rest easy in the palace. The Little Palace Mistress didn’t sneeze without her grandfather’s permission. She was a battering ram and totally ungovernable when facing off anyone else, but he could stop her in her tracks with nothing but mild eye-contact. She might be the one fight-baiting the girls, but he was the one who’d likely told her to keep them uneasy. 

Likewise, neither the Old Palace Master nor the Little Palace Mistress paid Shen Yuan much attention until it became clear that Binghe wasn’t getting bored of him.

He could pinpoint the moment when he pinged the Old Palace Master’s radar to a casual evening musical event that Shen Yuan attended as Binghe’s date despite the Old Palace Master’s plans to the contrary. 

It was the sort of lavish affair that only Huan Hua Sect could or would pull off on a last minute whim. It had been cloudy all day, but the moon was full and the sky cleared in late afternoon so the Old Palace Master declared that there would be a moon viewing banquet accompanied by music three hours before the event would start.

To clarify, Huan Hua Sect did not employ full time musicians, and while they might live closer to a mortal community than the other sects it wasn’t like the steward could just run out and hire some musicians. The closest playhouse was over a day away by sword one way. Aside from one elder who could sort of play the pipa, their local options were Shen Yuan or no one.

No one forced him to play, but the Palace’s chief steward informed him that he’d be paid two taels of gold for half an hour of the zheng and -since Shen Yuan had no obvious status in the Palace that either of them could figure out- he went along with it. After all, Shen Yuan was trained for this and didn’t have much dignity. He personally did not see a reason to make the steward’s life more difficult when he was already having to pull an upscale party out of his ass.

Shen Yuan dressed up a little bit more than he usually did in ten layers of semi-transparent silk that ran the entire spectrum between yellow and blue with a garden scene embroidered on the top layer and dangling gold step-shake hairpins encrusted with sapphires and pale jade flowers. The foundation layer was an icy white brocade shirt with a standing collar to keep things appropriate. He’d even painted a huadian on his forehead in the shape of a little red water droplet, which he hardly ever bothered with. 

Binghe was into it right up until Shen Yuan seated himself -not at the main platform where the Old Palace Master and Binghe had tables- but at a little central stage where the steward had already set up Shen Yuan's zheng and some colorful cushions for him to sit on. 

The Little Palace Mistress started to sit at Binghe’s table, but he surged to his feet and stalked over to the stage.

“Did you agree to this?" Binghe asked, low and dangerous.

“There was nobody else," Shen Yuan whispered back. He couldn’t exactly say ‘yes’ since he hadn’t. Unfortunately Binghe was figuring out how to read between Shen Yuan's words and his lips thinned to an unhappy line, but he nodded. 

“You will come join me at the end of the performance," he instructed and turned back to stomp his way back to the main platform. He didn’t cause a fuss. He wasn’t rude, near as Shen Yuan could tell, but the Little Palace Mistress evacuated the seat she’d taken at what would have been Binghe's side and glowered when someone had to bring another seat for her grandfather’s table, making it pretty clear that no one had ever intended for Shen Yuan to join Binghe later. 

Shen Yuan played. It wasn’t his best performance. He was nervous and hadn’t practiced for an extended performance so it was all slapdash and there was no cohesive theme. Not to mention the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife as everyone on the main platform sat in wooden silence pointedly not looking at one another.

Binghe pointed at his side opposite the Old Palace Master as soon as the last note faded. Shen Yuan took his time bowing to his audience and the staff cleared his stage while a quartet of female disciples who could dance took his place with the poor pipa player, who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else doing anything but.

Shen Yuan wound up seated on the same broad chair, secure underneath Binghe’s arm with the man’s bulk interposed between him and the other table. The extra seat at their table went ignored.

He realized way too late that this had been a chess move between Binghe and the Old Palace Master. 

What, exactly, the Old Palace Master had been hoping to accomplish or find out was less clear. If he’d wanted to know if Binghe would get pissed if one of his people was ordered around then clearly the old fart hadn’t been paying attention. If he’d wanted to see if he could get away with treating Shen Yuan like the help then that hadn’t worked out in his favor either.

“If someone tries that again you tell them to talk to me," Binghe said after they returned to the rooms that night. His attention was turned inward for all that he kept playing with Shen Yuan’s hair. “You’re not a servant.”

“Then what am I?” Shen Yuan asked. This world liked its roles well defined and the Palace steward had given him a lot of opportunities to say ‘I’m Luo Binghe’s whatever’ so he’d have an excuse to withdraw the request, but Shen Yuan hadn’t been able to say it because he didn’t know.

Well, maybe that was what the Old Palace Master had been wanting to learn. 

“Mine," Binghe pulled him fully into his lap and buried his face in Shen Yuan’s shoulder. “You’re mine.”

Thud went Shen Yuan’s heart.

‘Oh.’ He thought, hovering on the edge of hysteria and held back from it only by the very intense hug he was being subjected to. ‘I am, aren’t I?’

He wasn’t going to get his heart back after this. 

Shen Yuan tucked his face into Binghe’s shoulder and clung right back to him.

It was all going to end so badly.

The Old Palace Master watched him after that. Before the moon viewing concert he’d seen the old man maybe three times and each time it had been while they were both in Binghe’s company. Afterwards Shen Yuan started seeing him at random, usually at a distance. He couldn’t say for sure that the Old Palace Master had been looking right at him, but Shen Yuan didn’t really believe in coincidence either.   

That was the point where Binghe started making a real effort to bring Shen Yuan with him when he left the Palace, so he knew he wasn’t making it up. 

Binghe acquired a pocket house made entirely out of red jade with enough defensive arrays and concealment charms on it to repel a serious-business siege from somewhere and they lived there if Binghe’s business took them somewhere without a convenient resort where Shen Yuan could be parked in comfort for the duration.

The jade travel house wasn’t a perfect solution. Shen Yuan’s health was better and improving every day, but something in his system was still wearing the blood parasites out at an unprecedented pace. Binghe thought they might be reversing old damage, but Shen Yuan’s present body wasn’t that old. He couldn’t tell Binghe that without having to explain, so he had to let that be the official theory. 

What it meant was that Shen Yuan still needed periodic boosters of Binghe’s blood and that if Binghe had business in the demon realm then Shen Yuan had to stay behind because his body did not like anything about the air or water there. He’d been once and Binghe had been forced to share blood twice in the same week.

Then one of the nomadic tribes of western demons raised a new warlord who was just strong enough to give Binghe’s reserve forces trouble.

“I will be back soon," Binghe promised as he loaded clothes and his private stash of medicine into a storage ring. He strode across the room and pulled Shen Yuan into a hug that lingered. “A-Yuan must be careful anyway," Binghe said quietly, almost muffled by his hair. “I’ll know if you’re hurt or frightened, but I may not be able to come fast enough.”

‘Thanks for jinxing me, asshole.’ Shen Yuan thought without heat. Now he was guaranteed to get poisoned or kidnapped or whatever. “I’ll be careful," he promised anyway. 

Maybe he’d get lucky and that big doom flag Binghe had just raised wouldn’t get triggered. It wasn’t like Binghe could skip this trip. There were largely peaceful demon communities dependent on him who didn’t deserve to get steamrolled by the new western raiders.

Shen Yuan did not get lucky. 

The door to Binghe’s quarters got kicked open within twelve hours of Binghe’s departure and a pride of jack-booted thugs in Huan Hua Palace colors dragged him into the Old Palace Master’s private receiving room.

Chapter Text

The Old Palace Master had arranged himself on a luohan couch with a full tea service that was in use by his granddaughter as she poured him a very filial cup of sencha.

“There you are," he smiled a gentle grandpa smile as his enforcers dumped Shen Yuan -who was still in his bed clothes- onto the carpet at his feet. One of them shoved him back down to his knees when he attempted to stand up. “Forgive this old man the late disturbance. I won’t take long.”

‘Oh good, he’s going to monologue at me.’ Shen Yuan groaned to himself. This was the only way in which the current situation could have gotten worse.

“This old man has been very worried about you, young master Shen," the Old Palace Master continued. He lifted his cup and blew gently at the steam rising off the golden surface. “It’s not a good thing to be alone in the world with only an untried young man to rely on. They rarely understand the way things ought to be done and sometimes the vulnerable people in their lives suffer as a result.” His chilly eyes flicked over Shen Yuan’s disheveled state and continued talking to him in that casual, conversational tone like he was just making small talk. “I understand he hasn’t made you a formal offer to enter his household?”

Shen Yuan’s cheeks blazed, but he didn’t reply. He just continued to stare at his abductor, who didn’t seem to need a response from him anyway.

“Well, of course a good boy like you wouldn’t push," the Old Palace Master continued. “I have always been impressed by your refined manners despite your –unfortunate background. It made me curious. I thought to myself, such a well-bred child couldn’t possibly be alone in this world with no protector except what he's had to find for himself –and do you know? I was right.”

… what?

Shen Yuan frowned in confusion. He knew better than anyone else that he had no family in this world. He’d been dumped, naked and new, in the middle of a bamboo stand that butted up to a farming community. If the farm wife hadn’t been doing laundry and not paying attention to her clothes line then Shen Yuan might have been beaten to death as a pervert long before he could wind up in the teahouse.

“I have located your people," the Old Palace Master sat his tea cup down and beamed. “You don’t have to thank me. In fact, I think it may be imperative that you leave as soon as possible. I’m sure they’ve missed you and your young man…" he coughed, looking a bit off-kilter for the first time. “...well, let’s just say I don’t think he’ll agree to release you to your family. This is really for the best. You’ll see. Thank you for being such a gracious guest during your time here. Huan Hua Palace thanks young master Shen for the gift of his company. Please enjoy your journey home.”

“You-!” Shen Yuan got a syllable out before somebody gagged him. He hadn’t seen the thugs gearing up to bind him. They tied him up in fine silk cords and carried him physically out of the room.

“Goodbye, dear boy," the Old Palace Master called after him. “I wish your every happiness.”

‘I wish you the mercy of a quick death when Binghe finds out what you did,’ Shen Yuan thought spitefully.

He was tossed into a carriage that was at least nice enough that he didn’t believe he was being dragged out into the woods to be murdered. One of the thugs even wrapped his winter cloak around him before they left, but didn’t untie him.

It was a long trip. They stopped in the middle of nowhere and Shen Yuan was made to change into daytime clothes. The fresh garments came out of a second carriage that was loaded down with every single thing he owned. At least they were thorough.

‘I wonder if ‘I’ left a goodbye note?’ Shen Yuan thought mulishly as his guards shoved him back into his travel carriage with a bamboo tube of water and a round of travel bread. His hands were left free, but they chained his ankles so he was hobbled. ‘Something suitably insulting so Binghe never wants to look for me.’

He could not recall canon Binghe ever falling for something like that so he had some hopes of being found eventually by his furious demon lord boyfriend. Whether it was before whatever fake ‘family’ the Old Palace Master found for him made him get married or enter a monastery or whatever was a different story.

Running was no good. He wasn’t strong so his best bet was to wait for rescue. They were in the middle of the boring transit part of this bullshit arc so Binghe probably wouldn’t find him until he was being handed off. He just had to be patient.

So Shen Yuan sat in his carriage in stony silence, accepted his meager travel rations, and stared straight ahead when someone tried to hit on him. It happened more often than he would have guessed for a bunch of straight-looking guys.

They arrived at their destination about three day’s worth of grueling travel later when the carriages came to an abrupt halt. He’d known this was coming because they’d stopped about half an hour ago and unbound him. The man who untied him made it very clear what would happen if he attempted to run.

“We won’t chase you," he said. “There isn’t a town for days in any direction. If you think you can survive then you’re free to go. Me? I wouldn’t risk it.”

Shen Yuan discovered that the guard wasn’t lying after he looked out the carriage windows at the unrelieved wilderness. In the distance rose a range of unfamiliar and mist-shrouded. He did not think he could survive by himself so he stayed put and continued to wait.

They walked for a little while longer until the carriage came to an abrupt halt.

“My shidi received your letter," an unfamiliar voice greeted them. “I hope you don’t mind that I accompanied him to meet your party.”

“You said you had something of mine," a second, somewhat more familiar voice said with derision. “I’ll be fascinated to learn what it is you think you have.”

The guards had an entirely new demeanor when they came to escort Shen Yuan out of the carriage. They handed him down and shaded him with an umbrella like he was the Little Palace Mistress herself.

Ugh, this was typical Huan Hua Palace bullshit. They were putting up a pretty front now that people were watching in order to make it harder for him to reveal what the Old Palace Master had done to him. He’d suspected this was going to be the case when they went to such trouble to keep from leaving marks on him. If he tried to complain without evidence then it would be the word of a former hooker against the Old Palace Master’s.

Two cultivators waited for him in a small clearing. One was a tall, friendly-looking man who held himself with a kind of calm assurance that lesser mortals probably couldn’t even imagine. He was dressed in black and white trimmed with gold. A slightly shorter man stood next to him with an exquisite fan held open against his chest. He was dressed in shades of pale green and white.

He was also someone that Shen Yuan knew, but had never expected to meet again.

One of the guards barked out a ceremonial introduction, “Introducing the young master Shen Yuan.”

“I know who he is," Shen Jiu snapped and turned to Shen Yuan. “You.” His gaze flickered up and down, taking in Shen Yuan’s semi-androgynous wardrobe. When they’d first met, Shen Yuan had been wearing flannel pajama bottoms, no shoes, and a Hakune Miku tshirt so this was a big change to take in. “...I didn’t think you were still alive.”

“I’m as surprised as you.” Shen Yuan glanced left and right, but it didn’t seem like anyone was going to stop him if he moved. Sure enough, they didn’t react when he approached the two cultivators. Up close, Shen Jiu had a few inches of height on Shen Yuan, but the other cultivator was a full head taller than Shen Jiu, not even counting his very tall guan. He was probably someone important. 

“I’m being gotten rid of," he whispered as soon as he was close enough that only Shen Jiu could hear. They weren’t friends, but they’d helped each other once. If Binghe wasn’t coming yet then Shen Yuan was going to make use of any ally at hand.

“Yes, I can tell," Shen Jiu replied sourly. “It’s fine.” He pointed at the cart holding Shen Yuan’s luggage. “You may bring his things to the base of the mountain. Huan Hua disciples who have arrived unannounced will not be permitted to climb the Immortal Stairwell.”

Shen Jiu didn’t allow Shen Yuan or his companion to speak again until the Huan Hua thugs were long gone. 

“Qingqiu, what is this?” the taller cultivator asked as soon as he was no longer being shushed. “Who is this person?”

Shen Yuan froze.

He knew that name.

“Qingqiu?” Shen Yuan asked in poorly concealed panic, clutching his own fan. The frame was made of ebony and the gauze insert had been embroidered in a two-sided depiction of a songbird on one side and a hawk on the other. It had been a special gift from Binghe and Shen Yuan had been holding onto it like a teddy bear since the day before when his doubts started to creep in. Binghe would come soon –right? “Shen Qingqiu? Since when? You said your name was Shen Jiu!”

“Qingqiu is the courtesy name I received when I became a peak lord.” Shen Jiu ignored his companion. “What on earth have you been doing? You’re dressed like a little mistress!”

“Xiao Jiu," the taller man interjected, pitching his voice lower. “Perhaps this is not the place.” He glanced pointedly at a group of what appeared to be cultivator disciples dressed in brown who were approaching. 

Oh no. If Shen Jiu was really Shen Qingqiu then this was Cang Qiong Mountain sect! Those were probably porters from An Ding!

“I think I need to sit down," he said faintly.

Of all the places in the world to end up, he'd landed in the only one where Binghe couldn't just kick the door down and collect Shen Yuan at his leisure.

“I know I do," Shen Qingqiu muttered and snapped his fan shut. “Come.” 

Going by the sheer quantity of bamboo, the house Shen Qingqiu led them to was located on Qing Jing Peak, although it was not the simple scholar’s hut that Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had described. The furnishings were minimal, but every bit as nice as what the Old Palace Master had in his private space, just less ostentatious.

Shen Jiu hauled him inside by the arm and dumped him on a floor cushion. “Take the cases into the side room," he issued crisp directions to the porters. “My brother will reside here with me.”

It was slightly reassuring that Yue Qingyuan -the tall cultivator, also apparently the sect master, what- and Shen Yuan both made the same abortive noise of distress in response to that casual declaration. They exchanged frustrated looks, but Shen Qingqiu steamrollered them both into silence by not letting anyone get a word in as he directed the disciples in placing the chests and cases that arrived with him. Fortunately they didn’t try to unpack anything. The contents were badly jumbled from being thrown in at random by the Old Palace Master’s goons.

Shen Yuan managed to get a hold of himself long enough to remember his very valuable etiquette –also that Shen Qingqiu had no pressing reason to help him nor did Yue Qingyuan need to help cover up for them. So he found the tea service and put his server training to use.

“Well, I see you’ve picked up some decent manners," Shen Qingqiu observed waspishly as he came over to join them. He accepted a cup and only the faint rise of brows indicated that he approved. 

“Elegantly done.” Yue Qingyuan seemed to have reverted back to his bland mirror-like smile as a defensive mechanism in the face of his shidi’s everything. Due to unfortunate circumstances, Shen Yuan knew way too much about the backstory between those two men and it didn’t look like they’d managed to work anything out since the last time Shen Yuan had seen Shen Qingqiu. “I was unaware that shidi had such a cultured sibling.”

Nor any siblings at all, considering ‘Qi-ge’ had all but raised ‘Xiao Jiu’ from a toddler insofar as Shen Yuan was aware. That meant Yue Qingyuan knew that Shen Qingqiu was lying to his face, but was apparently prepared to allow it to happen. Shen Yuan just wished he was surprised by that.

“He doesn’t.” Shen Yuan was not in any kind of mood to indulge Shen Qingqiu’s pointless drama-mongering. “He’s full of shit and trying to brazen it out so you don’t question him. We aren’t related.”

Shen Qingqiu sneered at Shen Yuan. “Who will believe you when you say that wearing such a face? With such a name? Huan Hua Palace believed it enough to dump you at my feet, free of charge. Who did you manage to offend there?”

“I was in the Old Palace Master’s way.” Shen Yuan had had time to think about that. “He’s arranging a marriage for his granddaughter. My ...lover is a guest disciple there. He had to leave for an extended trip. It’ll be a while before he realizes I’m gone.”

Fortunately, Shen Qingqiu inferred his meaning without Shen Yuan having to go into more detail. “Won’t be much of a union if you’re what’s interfering with it.”

“It probably won’t happen.” Shen Yuan winced. The Plot had gone off the rails there, but he wasn’t sure by how much. Canon never actually discussed Binghe’s marriage to the Little Palace Mistress much despite the fact that she was arguably his principal wife. She didn’t even have a name in the novel. Her presence on the story was sort of incidental to Binghe’ acquisition of Huan Hua Sect and every mention of her afterwards was mostly harem drama that she wasn’t even on stage for. “He doesn’t seem to like her very much.”

“No, I don’t imagine even inheriting Huan Hua Palace would sweeten that pot any," Shen Qingqiu agreed and held out his cup for a refill while looking pointedly in a different direction. Shen Yuan obliged with a refill and thought, ‘Fucking tsundere.’

“Perhaps someone will enlighten me?” Yue Qingyuan asked with great forbearance. “Why do you look like one another if you are not related? Why is my shidi willing to pretend that you are?”

“We are siblings.” Shen Qingqiu flipped his fan open to shield his face. “As of right now. If zhangmen-shixiong can’t keep the story straight then please enlighten us now so that I might plan ahead.”

“We helped each other out of a bad situation twelve years ago.” Shen Yuan counted the years back in his head. “Eleven?” He didn’t actually have a good grasp on what month it was when then System spat him out again, just that it was vaguely autumn-ish when the days were warm enough, but the nights got very cold.

That just alarmed the sect master. “What bad situation?” He stared at Shen Qingqiu; concern written in every line for his body and obvious for anyone who wasn’t Shen Qingqiu.

“It is of no concern," Shen Qingqiu started to lie.

“A monster tried to force me to take over his body," Shen Yuan replied at the same time and received Shen Qingqiu’s furious look with bland equanimity. “I’m not indulging you and your incessant need to create melodrama rather than make yourself vulnerable by giving an honest explanation for once.”

Yue Qingyuan turned wide eyes on Shen Yuan. “You…” He swallowed. “...you do know each other," he said in something like wonder. “What happened?”

“We resisted it.” Shen Qingqiu deflated as he retreated behind his fan. Annoyingly, Shen Yuan had just done the same thing and they glared at each other. 

The experience of fighting the System had stripped them both metaphorically naked. The weird amorphous robot god thing couldn’t attack them directly so the only weapons it could turn against them -once they’d figured out how to navigate the strange non-space their consciousnesses had been forced into when Shen Jiu refused to vacate his body and Shen Yuan refused to force him out- were their own memories, fears, and personal traumas. Basically, it tried to break them down with their own nightmares.

Shen Yuan had learned far more about Shen Qingqiu than he’d ever wanted to and vice versa, but most of those memories had been of his early life. They never saw anything of Shen Jiu’s life as Shen Qingqiu, which made sense in retrospect. Shen Qingqiu’s greatest fear was a loss of autonomy and abandonment. He was the sole ruler of Qing Jing peak now. There was little for the System to work with from this period in his life.

“For whatever reason, it thought he…” Shen Yuan indicated Shen Qingqiu with his fan. “...was dead and it needed him to be alive.”

“It was that fever," Shen Qingqiu elaborated, somewhat more subdued. He echoed Shen Yuan’s gesture with his own fan. “He was a recently dead soul at the time -fresh out of his corpse near as I can tell- and uncommonly resistant to the idea of being resurrected. We were forced to cooperate to repel the spiritual entity attempting to transplant him into my body.” He cleared his throat. “I had thought that he would be dispersed when we were successful.”

“I think the System tried to.” Shen Yuan ran his thumb over the carved handle of his fan and missed Binghe with an intensity that made his eyes water. He didn’t want to be having this conversation. He wanted to be home in a weird abstract way; not his old apartment or his parents’ house, but wherever his big idiot sheepdog of a boyfriend was. He wanted Binghe to distract him by being ridiculous and needy or carelessly cool. He wanted Binghe to make his problems piss off with nothing but a dark look. 

It was stupid because adding Binghe to this scenario was the last thing anyone needed, but part of Shen Yuan was now permanently and irrationally convinced that Binghe’s presence was the only thing that could fix the current terrible state of his existence.

“I heard it talking to itself for a while,” Shen Yuan continued his explanation. The System had announced its actions sort of like a computer would. “It kept trying to send me back to where I came from, but it had to –ask something else? I think?” It had kept petitioning an ‘Administrator’ for permission to deport Shen Yuan from their ‘narrative setting.’ “Whatever needed to agree kept saying no. Then, after it gave up, the System announced that it was releasing me into the ‘first available environment’ and I woke up in a stand of bamboo next to a soybean field. Alive.”

Alive and completely naked without a penny on him nor any idea where he was even still in the world of ‘Proud Immortal Demon Way.’

“What happened then?” Shen Qingqiu looked him over. “You look like you just stepped out of a brothel; a high end one to be sure, but still.”

“I, ah, did?” Shen Yuan hid behind his fan from Shen Qingqiu’s reaction. “I got sick soon after I woke up! The place I came from was different than here. I had no idea how to survive and I wasn’t good at stealing. Someone took me to a doctor and when I got better I couldn’t pay. My indenture papers were sold on to a teahouse. My lover redeemed me last year.”

It took Yue Qingyuan fifteen minutes of concentrated effort to calm Shen Qingqiu down and all his progress kept getting set back when a new question would occur to the man and he never liked the answers Shen Yuan had to give.

“Why did you not write?” Shen Qingqiu demanded. “Did you think I was such an ingrate that I would not send an escort?”

“I only knew your formal name!” Shen Yuan defended himself. “Do you know how many cultivation sects there are or what my debt ledger was charged for postage fees?”

“Shidi, it’s done.” Yue Qingyuan caught Shen Qingqiu by the elbow and somehow did not lose a hand so truly Shen Qingqiu must still have a soft spot for his Qi-ge. Somewhere. Deep down. That was filled with acid and razorblades. “He’s safe now. You can be easy.”

Shen Qingqiu responded by hitting Yue Qingyuan physically with his fan; rapid strikes against his shoulder, which Yue Qingyuan seemed to guiltily enjoy in ways Shen Yuan resolved not to examine too closely. He was probably used to counting himself lucky for any kind of attention he could get out of his shidi.

Having had to hold Shen Jiu’s hand through a vivid re-enactment of his abandonment by Qi-ge, Shen Yuan had gotten the impression that the older boy hadn’t ever had platonic feelings for Shen Jiu. He couldn’t really understand why Yue Qingyuan had never come back for Shen Jiu except to think that maybe whatever sect he joined wouldn’t let him off the mountain. He didn’t really know how permissive these places were, but he did know that they kept to themselves and regarded contact with mortals as detrimental to cultivation so he hadn’t been too willing to hold it against the boy.

Yue Qingyuan clearly felt guilty about something and Shen Qingqiu was certainly angry with him, but looking at their interactions; he was not positive that Shen Qingqiu was mad about the thing Yue Qingyuan was sorry for. 

Shen Qingqiu seated himself again with a huff. “Give me your wrist," he snapped his fingers when Shen Yuan stared at him like the crazy person he was. “Do it!”

With a sigh, Shen Yuan submitted to having his pulse checked for the umpteeth time. Weirdly, this time he felt it. A cool sensation entered his body from Shen Qingqiu’s contact point on his wrist and swept through his entire body. It felt like cool wind and smelt a bit like grass, except he couldn’t really smell anything. It was like his brain couldn’t quite quantify the sensation and was throwing out random associations to try and get close.

Shen Qingqiu’s mantled shoulders relaxed slightly. “Not bad," he said after a while. “Not –good, but not bad either. Your spirit veins are badly damaged, but they’re deep and broad. This body of yours is new as well. The veins are like a toddler’s aside from the damage. They’ve had no chance to wither with age. What did you do to yourself?”

“Nothing, it was like this when I woke up.” Shen Yuan took his hand back.

“Oh, and you would have a way of knowing?” Shen Qingqiu asked derisively. “Was it a miracle doctor who diagnosed you, but decided not to do anything about it?”

They were all sitting on the floor, otherwise Shen Yuan would have kicked him under the table. “The System intended for me to be you," he reminded the man. “I have all your knowledge and skills as of twelve years ago. I could diagnose myself just fine. Reading pulses doesn’t require any special talent.”

The System seemed able to give, but it couldn’t take away quite as easily unless Shen Yuan agreed to it and of course he hadn't been willing to cooperate with anything it wanted by that point. It manipulated, cajoled, and threatened, but the worst thing it could do was inflict illusions or dreams on them. The dreamscapes were very, very realistic with every sensation from pain to pleasure represented. Even so, they didn’t last long nor did they leave anything but psychic damage. If you were bullheaded enough then it couldn’t stop you and Shen Jiu had been stubborn enough for four of them.

“It couldn’t take away what I knew so it gave me a body that couldn’t use it," Shen Yuan clarified. The System had nerfed him rather than release an unknown Peak Lord level cultivator on its already unstable story.

“We’ll see about that," Shen Qingqiu announced and Shen Yuan did not like the look on his face afterwards.

Chapter Text

One of Binghe’s people managed to tail the group that removed A-Yuan from Huan Hua Palace so a message butterfly reached him a few hours before he could return to find their rooms emptied of Shen Yuan and all indications of his existence save a goodbye note that wasn’t even in his handwriting, like Binghe was stupid enough to be fooled by that even without the benefit of advanced warning. 

However, he did receive a warning and therefore, Binghe did not raze Huan Hua Palace down to the bedrock, but only just barely.

A-Yuan was alive and well. He was in the care of Cang Qiong Mountain sect for the moment, but Binghe couldn’t detect any upset through the tenuous connection granted to them by his blood parasites and his messenger was clear that Binghe's former sect was treating his lover with every courtesy except freedom for some reason. 

A-Yuan wasn’t happy enough to have been complicit in his own abduction and was, at worst, vaguely annoyed with his circumstances though and therefore must trust that his Binghe would come for him. 

His Binghe fully intended to, but if A-Yuan was comfortable where he was for the moment then Binghe was going to take the opportunity to attend to a little housekeeping before he brought his consort home again. After all, it would not do to have this bullshit happen twice.

The sniveling wreckage that had once been the Old Palace Master had stopped making sense a while ago. He wasn’t even apologizing or begging anymore, just emitting a high, thin keen that probably meant he’d die soon –too soon for Binghe, but probably not soon enough for him.

Binghe had to do less in the purge of Huan Hua Palace than he would have predicted. There’d been a deep rift in the sect for a long time and when the Old Palace Master set off the schism by assaulting Luo Binghe’s consort many, many incidental grievances between the two factions had emerged from the shadows that could only be washed away by blood. 

About a third of the sect was dead, the Little Palace Mistress included. He’d planned to keep her alive, but detained as a political prisoner in order to give a sign to the other sects that he wasn’t a bloodthirsty monster – except she’d gone after Ning Yingying in the fighting. 

Binghe had been occupied in another part of the battle with the Old Palace Master, but Liu Mingyan was there and she’d already lost one sibling to circumstances beyond her control in this life. The Little Palace Mistress opened up Ning Yingying’s face and -primed by years of both covert and overt aggressions from the woman- Liu Mingyan opened up the woman’s throat as compensation.

Shijie was out of danger now. There’d been some worry that she could lose her eye, but Ning Yingying had been one of the first recipients of Binghe’s blood once he knew what it could do and her parasite colony was well established. So she was currently in meditation in an attempt to keep her new scar. He didn’t understand it, but Shijie thought it made her look heroic and their Shimei agreed that it did look dashing so he wasn’t willing to venture an option on the matter at this point.

Binghe left the Old Palace Master where he was and gave the guard at the entrance to the Water Prison a final order regarding him, “Have someone watch the Spirit Lantern Garden and fetch the body once his lantern goes out. No need for a funeral. Just toss him in the acid. His old victims are surely looking forward to his company.”

That particular guard had been there for the duration of his interrogation and thus overheard all the things Binghe had not anticipated learning that afternoon. He’d always thought there was something off about the Old Palace Master’s interest in him. Circumstances had never become so bad that Binghe wasn’t willing to enjoy the benefits of his alliance with the old man, but now he was glad that -if nothing else- his birth mother had been avenged.

What he’d learned about Su Xiyan would take time to digest.  

Contrary to everything he’d ever believed, it turned out that Binghe hadn’t been abandoned at birth. He’d been given up to fate in a desperate gambit by a very brave woman. Bemused and bleeding a little on the inside, Binghe realized he would need to make a memorial tablet for her so he could make offerings and let her know that it had paid off. His adopted mother wouldn’t mind sharing a shrine with her, he was sure. She’d always wanted to meet a lady cultivator. Now they would share a hundred years of incense from their shared child. 

“Keep quiet about what you heard for now," he added to the guardswoman. “I’ll alert the other sects when I announce my leadership of Huan Hua sect.”

“Very good, sir," the middle-aged woman said with a grim glint in her eye. Binghe realized that she’d probably been in Su Xiyan’s generation, now that he was thinking about it. There weren’t a lot of women her age in Huan Hua Palace. He’d thought that was weird considering how many shimeis there were running around, but now he just hoped they’d all left on their own. Either way he was going to have to find out eventually.

The guardswoman probably knew already so he left in case she wanted some privacy to extinguish the former Palace Master’s spirit lamp a little faster.

His own Shijie and Shimei were in his soon-to-be former quarters along with Sha Hualing, who was washing the blood off her bare limbs and looking pleased with herself. Ning Yingying had done a decent job of retaining her trophy scar. It wasn’t inflamed or raised any longer; just a shallow depression down the right side of her face that bisected one eyebrow and made her look like a very sweet-faced bandit.

“A-Luo, A-Luo! Did you find out where they took him?” His Shijie jumped up to tug at his sleeve like she was a Shimei instead. 

“I told you he already knows," Sha Hualing said in the tone of someone who’d already had this conversation at least once already. “The blood can always tell, even at the rate that tidbit goes through it. Lord Luo wouldn’t be taking his time here otherwise.”

Ning Yingying turned to stick her tongue out at the demoness who rolled her eyes, unimpressed. 

“It’s alright.” Binghe patted her hand. This worry was on his behalf. His Shijie liked Binghe’s consort in that he liked his consort very much, but thanks to the machinations of the Old Palace Master Shen Yuan and Ning Yingying hasn't had time to develop any kind of personal relationship with one another. Still, Luo Binghe’s loyalty was enough to secure Ning Yingying’s and Liu Mingyan’s by extension. “He’s safe where he is and we’ll go get him soon.”

“Why not now?” she asked. “He’s probably so scared!”

“He was sent to Cang Qiong Mountain sect," Binghe said flatly and watched her wilt. She knew as well as he did that there was just one place in the human world where Binghe was unable to casually stroll in and take back what belonged to him.” Shen Qingqiu took him in.”

“That sounds out of character," Liu Mingyan observed. 

It was hard to tell what she thought about Shen Qingqiu on any given day. He was widely reported to be the one who murdered her brother, but Liu Mingyan’s chief complaint with Cang Qiong Mountain sect was that her brother’s death had never been investigated at all nor was Shen Qingqiu allowed to be questioned in the matter. 

Most people blamed Shen Qingqiu, but even Binghe was forced to admit there was no actual evidence to support the belief that Liu Qingge had even been murdered at all. Yue Qingyuan had refused to allow the body to be examined before the cremation, but those that had seen it reported that he’d been in such bad shape that it was hard to believe one assailant could be responsible for all that damage, not to mention the fact that Shen Qingqiu was nowhere near the swordsman that Liu Qingge, the War God himself, was.

Then there was the fact that this incident had happened during Closed Door Cultivation, which was sometimes known to end in tragedy.

So either Liu Qingge’s murderer or murderers had been allowed to go free or Yue Qingyuan was allowing the circumstances of Liu Qingge’s death to falsely ruin the reputation of an unpleasant, but innocent (in this matter, at least) man and posthumously damage her brother’s integrity. Either eventuality was enough to ruin Liu Mingyan’s faith in the leadership of their sect and that was before she realized that none of the other Peak Lords had even tried to persuade their leader otherwise –including her own. 

“I told you they look exactly alike!” Ning Yingying insisted. “Exactly! I thought it really was Shizun at first just –smiley.”

“Whatever the Old Palace Master told him was either true or sufficiently believable. I’ll dream walk to A-Yuan tonight to make sure he’s safe.” Binghe wanted to tear into his old sect already, but A-Yuan made for a superior hostage and he couldn’t guarantee that his old Shizun wouldn’t have taken him based on that alone. He had to know by now that they had unfinished business between them and Binghe wasn’t the tender youth he’d thrown away any longer. 

Shijie tried to comfort him. “He’ll be glad to see you.”

Binghe wished that were true, but his A-Yuan had a strange dreamscape that even Meng Mo had trouble controlling despite his hundreds of years of experience. The results were usually weird and uncomfortable for A-Yuan so he tried not to do it very often. The most he could do was look at A-Yuan’s natural dreams and try to glean an idea about his physical state from the random flotsam Shen Yuan’s sleeping mind produced as it went through the day’s events.

He didn’t bother shooing the girls off his bed and instead took himself into A-Yuan’s vacant room. It looked abhorrent without his consort’s things or his consort in it, but the bedding still smelled like A-Yuan and the honeysuckle incense he perfumed his sleeves with. If Binghe closed his eyes he could pretend that his consort was at the vanity combing his hair instead of far away in need of rescue. 

It wasn’t as good as the presence of one warm familiar body tucked against him would have been. Binghe had had a long, upsetting day and he was feeling the absence of his A-Yuan very keenly right then, but the illusion helped him nod off quickly so he could get on with that rescue.

A-Yuan was sleeping as well, which was a good sign. His dreams were as always highly symbolic. Binghe caught glimpses of an angry goose holding a fan and speaking with Shen Qingqiu’s voice, although the words sounded more like ‘wah wah wah’ noises than anything intelligible. Most of the dream was a second-hand feeling. A-Yuan wasn’t scared, but he was unhappy and very lonely. An empty narrow bed seemed to haunt his dreamscape like an insult.

His consort did not appreciate being made to sleep by himself. Binghe empathized. He didn’t like this either and planned to never do it ever again if he could help it. A-Yuan liked traveling with him. After this he wouldn’t complain about having a permanent contingent of bodyguards.

Fuck, they were going to need to get married. That was the only solution. Otherwise people might think he’d hesitate to destroy everything in his path if something permanent happened to Shen Yuan and this could happen again.

‘I will be there soon.’ Binghe thought and the dream shivered around him like A-Yuan had heard him.

He retreated then before he could destabilize the environment further and felt as content as he could be given the circumstances that his consort wasn’t in danger and his basic needs were being met. 

Sleep was the last thing he wanted, but he needed to be fresh for the morning when he gathered his generals and siblings to figure out how they were going to infiltrate the least accessible mountain in the known world.

Annoyingly, Shen Yuan looked good in the Qing Jing uniform. 

The clothes provided by An Ding were ever so slightly nicer than what the average disciple seemed to have received. The colors were right, but he had finer fabrics and more embroidery. His inner clothes were spelled to control temperature and dispel sweat. He had a jade belt ornament that could probably feed a small village for a year. 

Even Shen Qingqiu’s head disciple didn’t wear anything half so nice and the strangled look on Ming Fan’s face when Shen Yuan was introduced to the Qing Jing peak disciples as a ‘guest disciple’ told Shen Yuan that he’d noticed, but also knew better than to dare give voice to that observation.

For his part Shen Qingqiu didn’t even try to hide his inexplicable partisanship. Shen Yuan’s first week was split evenly between regular visits to Qian Cao peak and having his meridians resuscitated on Qing Jing by Shen Qingqiu.

It shouldn’t have worked, but Shen Qingqiu had noticed something Shen Yuan had failed to. His spiritual circulatory system was a carbon copy of the original goods’. The System had made Shen Yuan’s body in a hurry after all. It had probably done the magical equivalent of copy/paste to make him fit into the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way and then burned out his meridians so that he couldn’t try to cultivate on his own.

Shen Qingqiu’s qi was a perfect replica of what Shen Yuan would have been able to produce on his own if he could have. He was able, under Mu Qingfang’s guidance, to force open Shen Yuan’s meridians and circulate qi through his garbage spiritual circulatory system like using a cleaning gun on a blocked drain. 

It sounded easy, but in practice left them both exhausted, nauseous, and flat on their respective backs in the beginning. Shen Yuan was ready to throw in the towel immediately, but perhaps the only person more stubborn in this world than Luo Binghe was Shen fucking Qingqiu. It was easily the worst experience of his present life, but by the end of that first week Shen Yuan could cultivate a tiny, infinitesimal trickle of qi all by himself.

It was the same amount of qi that Qing Jing’s most recent crop of shidi and shimei could produce at all of ten years of age.

Yue Qingyuan beamed as he released Shen Yuan’s wrist. “A-Yuan has made good progress.”

“Don’t call me that," Shen Yuan groused. Only Binghe’s voice made that nickname tolerable. “You’re too easily impressed," he added.

Unfortunately, his worst attitude was nothing to a man who’d cut his teeth on Shen Jiu’s prepubescent mood swings. No matter what he said or did Yue Qingyuan just chuckled like it was cute. Shen Yuan was this close to cutting him to see if he could laugh that off.

“Yuan-shidi isn’t impressed enough," the man replied warmly. “That is a very good start and will only improve as you apply yourself.”

Well, maybe Binghe would be impressed –assuming he didn’t think Shen Yuan had willingly thrown him over for acceptance at Cang Qiong sect. He didn’t plan on staying. For one thing, he wasn’t going to stay and get attached to people who were scheduled to die within the next three years for reasons that were mostly their own faults. For another, he was starting to get worried. Binghe’s absence had stretched on for too long.

There was a chance that his boyfriend had believed whatever the Old Palace Master told him about Shen Yuan’s absence and the reason why Binghe hadn’t arrived yet was because he wasn’t coming. 

However, there was an equal chance that the demonic raiders were a bigger problem than canon let on. Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky could get hand-wavey about long boring campaigns and was prone to using them to work in timeskips.  

Shen Yuan didn’t want to have to live through a timeskip as Shen Qingqiu’s roommate. 

The arrival of Yue Qingyuan’s head disciple, whose face Shen Yuan knew but not her name, saved him from having to reply. She whispered something in Yue Qingyuan’s ear and the sect leader’s good mood evaporated. 

Shen Qingqiu had been at his desk pretending to be doing paperwork and not eavesdropping. He turned around in instant suspicion. “What is it?” 

Yue Qingyuan shook his head. “Yuan-shidi, forgive us. May we speak alone?”

Shen Yuan bowed -his martial bow was still clumsy and unpractised- and said, “Of course.” 

He made his escape before his ‘brother’ could set a minder on him. He hadn’t been unsupervised for one minute since his arrival at Qing Jing peak. Shen Qingqiu didn’t quite trust him not to make a break for it. Why he was so invested in having Shen Yuan settle down as a righteous Cang Qiong cultivator was anyone’s guess, but he suspected that obnoxious over-controlling behavior was how the man expressed affection.

Anyone else would have let him hire a carriage to the nearest town. Shen Yuan was not without resources. The Huan Hua goons hadn’t done a very good job of searching him or his belongings. They’d found and disappeared one stash of money in his wardrobe, but thanks to Binghe several of his casual workaday pieces of jewelry contained storage gems and that was where he’d been keeping the bulk of his critical personal assets after the first time they’d had to exit an inn room in the dead of night because of assassins or political insurgents or some random who felt like trying to kill Luo Binghe that day. 

‘It’d be easier if he hated me.’ Shen Yuan thought as he picked his way through the semi-labyrinthian paths of Qing Jing looking for the route to the Rainbow Bridge. This would not be an escape attempt today. He didn’t know the layout of the sect or the surrounding region well enough for that.

To his surprise, he made it way farther than expected before pursuit found him. Whatever news Yue Qingyuan received had the entire sect in an uproar and one man in bland disciple robes could go wherever he wanted. 

Shen Yuan found Qiong Ding peak and then the Immortal Stairwell that led down the mountain. His heart hammered in his chest as he made his slow descent, expecting at any moment that Shen Qingqiu would find him and drag him back like a naughty puppy. 

The Immortal Stairwell gave him a very good view of the surrounding area. He noted signs of a fairly large town to the west as the night died and he saw distant lights blooming beyond the treeline. It was big enough to host a market, he thought. A market meant traveling merchants. Merchants meant there’d be a road. If there was a road he could hire a carriage. If he could hire a carriage then he’d be able to go to a city big enough to support a courier exchange that worked with Cultivators. Then he could get a message to Binghe. 

The sun was low in the sky when he made it down into the wilderness at the foot of Qiong Ding peak. Cang Qiong sect prided itself in its lack of worldly interests so there was no path beyond the flagstone courtyard at the base of the Immortal Stairs.

Staring towards the distant glow, Shen Yuan wondered if maybe he shouldn’t just… go.

Would he get another golden opportunity like this? If he went back now then Shen Qingqiu and Yue Qingyuan would watch him like hawks from then on. He was twenty-six, a whole ass adult, but to a pair of immortals that was like an infant claiming to be grown up because they’d left the womb –especially to Yue Qingyuan, who had listened to Shen Qingqiu’s second-hand stories of modern China and interpreted that to mean that Shen Yuan had basically never been outside in his entire life.

He wasn’t entirely wrong, but Shen Yuan was also not about to let himself be infantilized this way any further.

Shen Yuan had money and anything he owned that he couldn’t bear to lose had long ago been stashed in his storage gems. He didn’t have food because stasis gems needed to draw microscopic amounts of energy from someone with a golden core, which he didn’t have –yet. He did have a good supply of drinking water, however, which was pretty good all on its own.  

The forests surrounding Tian Gong mountain range were supposed to be bountiful with rivers of sweet water and hardly any natural papapa hazards. If there was any woodland in this world he was likely to survive alone in then this was it.

He had no good excuse to keep waiting.

‘I’m going to have to risk it,’ he realized. 

The sky grew dark quickly, but that was actually a good thing because the stars came out and the forest canopy wasn’t dense enough to hide it from view. Shen Yuan wasn’t an astronomer, but he had picked up some extremely basic navigation advice from his web novel habit that wasn’t complete bullshit. It helped that the night sky here was extremely graphic. He picked a distinctive constellation a bit to the left of his destination and used it to keep himself oriented.

Hopefully the distance wasn’t farther than it looked.

The moon was full and bright. It illuminated Shen Yuan’s path and hopefully cut down on the number of things out hunting for a snack in the darkness. Night travel was dangerous in Proud Immortal Demon Way; less so this close to a sect, though.

Shen Yuan was getting tired as the moon reached its zenith and starting to think he’d need to find shelter for the night when everything went wrong.

His first warning came when the night singing birds slowly went quiet; never a good sign. The hair on the back of his neck rose followed by the fine hair on his arms.

There was something in the woods with him. 

It was just as well that he didn’t get a chance to try and climb a tree or something before that something found him, rising out of the undergrowth and above the treeline on a serpentine body. It had a broad hooded head marked with white shapes that sort of resembled different phases of the moon. Shen Yuan even recognized what it was; a moon-faced tree viper. So-called due to its markings and the fact that it could rise up taller than a tree.

‘What the fuck is that doing here?’ he thought as he froze in place. What little he remembered about them was lifted straight out of Jurassic Park. It sensed motion, but otherwise had crap vision. Unfortunately its sense of smell and hearing were very, very good. If he wasn’t careful then it’d catch him no matter what he did or didn’t do.

The moon-faced tree viper tilted its face up towards the clear sky and basked in the moonlight for a while as Shen Yuan held still and willed his heart not to hammer in his chest so loudly. 

Tree vipers were native to the Demon Realm and while they were known to seek out the human world on their own they didn’t often get far away from the demonic gates and naturally occurring interdimensional fissures between the two realms.

This was some Grade-A Stallion Novel Damsel-in-Distress Bullshit.

The only good thing about this scenario was that if the viper didn’t leave on its own then Binghe was likely nearby and would rescue him, but not if Shen Yuan was stupid about it. If he deliberately ran to make his boyfriend show up faster or something equally deranged then he’d become one of those characters who were literally too stupid to live and the one good thing about Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky’s writing style was that obviously stupid people didn’t live long. So he clung to the ragged hem of his composure and Did. Not. Move.

He felt his heartbeat fail in his chest as the wind slowly shifted and the viper’s tongue flickered out to taste the air. Its head swiveled around as it zeroed in on its prey. 

Shen Yuan’s limbs locked into place as his blood froze and he knew there was no way he’d escape it in time.

A figure dropped down on it from above and beheaded the viper with the silvery flash of a blade.

For a second Shen Yuan dared hope, but hope died as he recognized the icily furious face and immaculate pale robes of his savior. “Of all the brainless stunts!” Shen Qingqiu hissed as he bore down on Shen Yuan. “Are you so eager to die a second time? Is that it?”

He should have been afraid of Shen Qingqiu, but behind the man’s back something rose out of the trees to put his level of threat into stark perspective. Another, larger moon-faced viper lifted its head out of the tree cover. Then another. Then another and another and…

It was like that video of the iguana being chased by snakes. Dozens of serpents appeared out of nowhere drawn by the commotion and judging by the look on Shen Qingqiu’s face there were more rising behind him.

“There’s a female nearby," Shen Yuan breathed.

Solitary moon-faced tree vipers were always male or neuter. Females were extremely rare. Only a queen viper could draw together a court like this and queens could use an awful natural spell casting ability called beast arrays, which were the historical precursor to the present day spiritual array. 

They were in so much trouble.

Shen Qingqiu glared at him but nodded once, sharply. He grabbed Shen Yuan by the shoulder, jumped on Xiu Ya, and darted into the sky. 

There was nothing left but to run. 

An unholy chorus of hissing from all around told Shen Yuan that they’d been targeted. He shoved a hand into Shen Qingqiu’s sleeve and came up with a flare. 

“No," Shen Qingqiu snapped, snatching it back. “This is a diversion or a trap. We’ll only attract more victims. Someone let a Queen Viper loose in the shadow of our mountain. Hold onto me. We’ll need to dodge.”

As if summoned, a lurid red array appeared in the sky ahead of them. The jagged strokes of the igeograms just screamed ‘poison’ and if they got close enough to trigger it then no one would like the results. Shen Qingqiu banked hard on his sword and narrowly missed it, then another, and then a third. Too late he seemed to realize that the arrays hadn’t been intended as an attack, but rather they’d been herding the fleeing Peak Lord.

A serpent bigger than all the others surged out of the trees coming up under them with its gargantuan mouth open wide. Shen Qingqiu shoved Shen Yuan off Xiu Ya and then leapt away himself only just avoiding the Queen Viper’s jaws as they snapped shut on the empty air that had contained them only moments ago.

Shen Qingqiu made a sword seal as they plummeted towards the ground. Xiu Ya righted itself and darted underneath him. He did a barrel roll and shot towards Shen Yuan, but something else got there first.

Thick familiar arms in black sleeves with silver embroidery slid underneath Shen Yuan’s knees and around his back. The pale moonlight illuminated a face he’d been waiting weeks to see. He threw his arms around Binghe’s neck, too happy even to cry.

“You fucker!" he wheezed, too strung out on emotion for manners. “What took you so long?!”

Chapped lips found the exposed column of Shen Yuan’s throat, probably the only part of him Binghe could get at without the use of his hands. “I am very sorry for my tardiness," Binghe rasped, sounding about as shitty as Shen Yuan felt. “A-Yuan may punish me however he likes as soon as we’re out of the forest.”

The Queen Viper came around for another snap, but two slender figures on quicksilver blades intercepted it. Liu Mingyan rained down explosive talismans on it and Ning Yingying landed on the back of its thrashing head to take out one of its eyes. She leapt off when it started to glow and sheathed its whole body in demonic qi.

“Luo Binghe!” Shen Qingqiu shouted as he figured out just who it was who’d swooped in to save the day. “I should have guessed you’d be behind this!”

“You shouldn’t have absconded with my consort, then," Binghe shot back with a cocky sneer and –huh. It was hot all of a sudden despite the wind whipping through his hair and cutting through his not-thick-enough-for-this outfit.

“C-consort?” Shen Qingqiu reared back and something ignited behind his eyes. “So it was you who bought him from that filthy place –and now I know why.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Shizun," Binghe snarled. One of his hands came up to cover Shen Yuan’s ear and press the other against his chest. It did nothing to interfere with his hearing. “A-Yuan is worth a hundred of you!”

“Snake!” Shen Yuan wheezed as he saw the Queen Viper focus in on the shouting. “SNAKE!”

Chapter Text

The Queen Viper’s depth perception was ruined by its lost eye so it didn’t manage to bite anyone, but it did knock both Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe (along with Shen Yuan) off their swords, sending them crashing to the ground before Liu Mingyan and Ning Yingying could pull its aggro back in their direction. Shen Yuan’s last glimpse of that fight was Ning Yingying kiting it away from them while Liu Mingyan resumed her talisman assault.

Binghe took the brunt of the fall for Shen Yuan, deliberately tucking him up against his chest and rolling them so he was on bottom. Shen Qingqiu caught himself in a tree, but Binghe plowed straight into the ground so hard Shen Yuan saw stars despite being protected; hard enough that Binghe lost consciousness.

They got lucky. The dark bodies in the trees were mostly following their departing and distressed queen and had no attention to spare for some minor fallen prey.

Shen Yuan held very still, shielding Binghe with his body while he waited for the protagonist’s healing factor to put him back together and wake him up. He was under no illusions about his value as a meat shield. If a viper bit him the fangs would probably punch through his body and still hit Binghe, but it was a great excuse to cling to his boyfriend and try not to lose his shit so he was going with it. 

A pale shape staggered out of the trees. It was Shen Qingqiu and his arm was hanging at a funny angle. Either he’d broken it or he’d dislocated his shoulder. Xiu Ya was nowhere in sight. He huffed a sigh at Binghe’s prone form. It sounded like something that might have aspired to be approval one day, but got lost along the back avenues of resentment.

“Typical," he muttered and held out his hand to Shen Yuan. “Come away from there before that beast wakes up.”

“Too late.” Binghe’s arm tightened around Shen Yuan’s middle as he pushed himself up on one elbow. “Retreat now and I’ll forget this happened," he said as he squashed Shen Yuan up against his chest, shoujo-heroine style.

“Guys…?” Shen Yuan couldn’t believe that they’d immediately focused in on each other again at the first opportunity. His attention was on the very large shadow that had paused in its pursuit of the Queen Viper. It was smaller than the other males in its slither and probably couldn’t afford to be picky about where it got its meals. “Guys?”

The alarm in his voice got through to them just barely in time. Binghe rolled them out of the way and Shen Qingqiu only just barely leapt clear of the small viper’s strike.

“I thought you were both supposed to be good at this!” Shen Yuan hissed as his boyfriend covered him with his body, presenting his broad back to the viper. Demonic qi flooded the little clearing they’d landed in to the point where even Shen Yuan could sense it and the viper dipped back from them a bit.  

Shen Qingqiu had been thrown into a mossy boulder. He probably had a head injury, going by the way his gaze kept dipping and he was having trouble forming what should have been a simple sword seal, except he couldn’t seem to focus long enough to make it work. That was bad.

Between the two of them, Shen Qingqiu must have looked like the less challenging meal because it swiveled back in that direction.

Binghe’s bulk froze over Shen Yuan as they both came to the same realization then a big hand came up and forced Shen Yuan’s face into his shoulder. “Don’t look.” It was impossible to say what Binghe’s tone was like. How would anyone feel under these circumstances with their history? Still, Binghe’s priority was clearly Shen Yuan. “Don’t look," he repeated, lower and more desperate. 

The thing was… fuck this. Shen Yuan wasn’t good at not looking or minding his own business no matter what his history or personal feelings were. He’d only ever successfully avoided his own problems. Someone was about to die in front of him, someone he knew. How could he do nothing?

Shen Yuan had just enough of a view of the snake over Binghe’s shoulder to do what he needed. He made a sword seal with his free hand and felt something just out of sight respond to him.

Xiu Ya sliced out of the darkness just as the snake reared up to strike its prey. Shen Yuan directed it to slash at the snake’s eyes, making it jerk away from Shen Qingqiu then directed it up. With a short, sharp motion of his hand Xiu Ya plunged down pinning the viper’s head to the dirt piercing right through its brain. Its body thrashed once, twice, three times and then lay slack.

The backlash was immediate and terrible, an instant migraine. It was better than the first time he’d tried to use a spiritual technique at least. That time he’d passed clean out and it didn’t even work.

Binghe sat them both up, staring at the dead snake. Fortunately it was the last one in the area. He looked back at Shen Yuan and for the first time seemed to register what he was wearing. “A-Yuan?" he asked, brow furrowed. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Why shouldn’t one of my disciples wear my Qing Jing uniform?” Shen Qingqiu was wedged up against the boulder he’d landed against and circulating qi to heal himself. He’d gaze was still a little off, but his waspish voice was back to normal. 

‘Who’s your disciple?’ Shen Yuan wanted to snap, but his mouth flooded with an awful coppery taste and he clamped his lips shut; unable either to swallow it down or submit to the humiliation of spitting it up like he was in a D-List action flick. He hated this the worst about living in a Xianxia fantasy world. Back where he came from someone would only spit up that much blood if they were in the process of aggressively dying. Here it meant he had a cold or some shit.

“A-Yuan?” Binghe repeated and something like doubt started creeping into his face.

Crap, he was going to have to spit and Shen Qingqiu would never let him hear the end of it. That bastard could die and he’d still find a way to lecture Shen Yuan about ignoring his limits.

Speaking of, Shen Qingqiu’s eyes narrowed as he took in Shen Yuan’s face then he staggered to his feet. 

“Get away!” Binghe snarled. He still put his body between Shen Yuan and his old master so his trust wasn’t totally broken, although it had clearly wobbled.

“You’re an even bigger fool than I thought, which should not have been possible.” Shen Qingqiu kicked at Binghe with one foot to get him out of the way while pulling a snowy white kerchief out of his sleeve. He shoved it under Shen Yuan’s mouth. “Spit!" he commanded and fended off Shen Yuan’s slapping hands. “Spit!" he insisted.

There was no getting out of it. Shen Yuan spat out a disgusting clot of black-red blood that had no business looking the way it did considering how recently it had exited his body. Shen Qingqiu sneered at it (what didn’t he sneer at?) and threw the wadded up cloth to one side. “What did I tell you? Just because you know how doesn’t mean you ought to! You have the cultivation of a precocious eleven year old! Sword seals are beyond you!”

“I don’t recall kneeling to you!” Shen Yuan snapped back. 

“If you had a lick of sense then you wou-!” That was about as far as he got before Binghe picked him up and literally threw him across the clearing.

“I do not speak solely for the pleasure of hearing myself talk,” Binghe growled.

Oh no. 

Shen Yuan looked back and forth between his boyfriend and his ...Shen Qingqiu. They were about to get into another slap fight unless he did something.

“Binghe. Please don’t start anything.” Shen Yuan got to his feet and grasped the edge of his boyfriend’s dangling sleeve. “Please, can we find the others and go? I want to go.” 

He watched Binghe’s resolve waver between ‘attack Shizun on sight’ and ‘telling A-Yuan no’ then fall in Shen Yuan’s favor. He gestured and Xin Mo came barrelling out of the darkness to smack into his open palm. “It will be as A-Yuan wishes,” he said softly and turned a cold, cruel gaze on Shen Qingqiu. “My consort is merciful. Peak Lord Shen would do well to remember that Shen Yuan spoke in your favor tonight on top of preserving your miserable existence.”

He might as well have not said anything for all that Shen Qingqiu paid him any attention.

“Do not go with that beast!” He pointed at Binghe. “Do you have any idea what he’s done at Huan Hua Palace? He staged a coup! The Old Palace Master and his heir are dead. He’s declared himself their new sect leader. Where was his concern for you then? You were in my care the entire time, but only now does he get around to showing his face?”

Shen Yuan glanced up at Binghe who had his guilty face on. That meant an elaborate vengeance arc had gone down in his absence. The descriptions of how Luo Binghe took his exquisite and calculated revenge on his now-helpless enemies often took up entire chapters all on their own. He sighed. 

He wasn’t actually upset about the gruesome torture part so long as he didn’t have to see it and frequently the truths Binghe discovered during those gruesome sessions were more disturbing than the torture itself. Binghe wasn’t actually that much of a maniac. It took effort to wind up on his radar and the antagonists of ‘Proud Immortal Demon Way’ were never the kind who learned from getting caught. On those occasions when Luo Binghe let them go, they always came back for more pain unless they’d been explicitly acting under duress in the first place. “How long did it take him to die?”

Binghe’s ears turned red. “He wasn’t talking!” he defended himself. “Then when he started talking, too much came out. A-Yuan would have been upset if I didn’t find out everything he’d done!”

Yup, that’s how it usually went. 

He stepped into his boyfriend’s side.

“Are you not listening?” Shen Qingqiu got it together enough to call Xiu Ya.

“I am.” Shen Yuan’s reserves were flagging. He’d been tired already before all the snakes showed up. “Consider that I lived in Huan Hua Palace for the better part of a year. I’m only surprised the Old Palace Master lasted as long as he did. You can only keep the people under you at each other’s throats for so long.”

Probably the sane members of the sect knew they didn’t have a good replacement lined up who could keep the other sects from carving them up into little pieces afterwards. Gongyi Xiao would have done, except he commited the crime of being Hot and Good at It in a Stallion novel so he got killed off as a teenager. That was assuming the Old Palace Master didn’t have anything to do with it. As Shen Yuan recalled, Gongyi Xiao had lived a charmed life up until the moment his sect leader laid eyes on Luo Binghe. That timing was probably not a coincidence.

A figure in lavender flew overhead on a silvery blade with a long pink tassel. Going by the veil, it was Liu Mingyan. She was taller than Shen Yuan would have guessed, given how she was supposed to be a supernatural beauty and Xianxia was super into short women. She was athletically built too, like an actual warrior. Her cool gaze lingered briefly on Shen Qingqiu, but she deliberately turned her attention to Binghe and Shen Yuan. 

“Shixiong, there is a force from Cang Qiong inbound. It’s time to leave," she called down. 

Ning Yingying was probably keeping her distance, considering who was down here with them. Binghe looped an arm around Shen Yuan’s waist. 

Shen Qingqiu stood staring with an expression on his face that Shen Yuan had last seen on a tiny grubby Shen Jiu doppelganger as Yue Qi vanished from the other side of a window.

“Try writing!” Shen Yuan squashed his complicated feelings. “Like a normal person!”

At the very least Shen Qingqiu was back to being pissed when Binghe took off. His furious shout of “You!” echoed through the trees behind them, but he was in no shape to pursue.

They escaped the Tian Gong foothills ahead of a small vee of pursuing Cang Qiong disciples in a variety of uniforms; mostly Qiong Ding and Bai Zhan. As soon as it was safe to land for a moment they did so and Binghe cut them a portal directly into the main hall of Han Hua Palace.

Shen Yuan would have never thought he’d be so happy to see all that gaudy excess again. It was marred slightly by the signs of recent battle and a neat stack of reed mats stained with patches of rusty brown sitting off to one side of the main hall. Binghe picked him up again and this time Shen Yuan didn’t fight him when Binghe made him hide his gaze from their ugly surroundings.

Liu Mingyan and Ning Yingying were peeled off of them right away by people in yellow uniforms asking about this or that or other things Shen Yuan had run out of the energy to care about.

Binghe kicked the door to their apartments open and stomped up to the ginormous pearwood bed that dominated the main bedroom there. He shoved aside the black and red drapes shrouding the interior from sight, laid Shen Yuan down on the smooth black mattress, and climbed in after him.

“Binghe…” Shen Yuan started to reach for him, but drew up short when his boyfriend grasped him by the front of the shirt in two big handfuls and ripped the outer layers right off his body. “...BINGHE!”

He wasn’t done, not by a longshot. Shen Yuan’s undershirt met the same fate when Binghe realized it had a bamboo motif woven into the fabric then his shoes, his pants; in short everything. Binghe dropped the ruined uniform on the floor like garbage then wrapped Shen Yuan up in his own coat. 

“You are ridiculous," Shen Yuan informed him. “All my clothes are back on Qing Jing peak.”

Of all the things he’d thought to put in his storage gems, a change of clothes somehow hadn’t been part of it.

“I’ll get you new things.” Binghe seemed distracted though. His gaze kept sweeping down to when Shen Yuan’s legs peeked out of the black and silver coat. A warm tingling flush rippled over his skin and all at once Shen Yuan was very aware of his own nudity.

It didn’t look like Binghe was going to do anything though. His eyes just kept roving all over and it occurred to Shen Yuan that he’d been waiting for Binghe to make the first move this entire time. Did it… did it have to be that way?

He wet his lips as arousal pooled low in his gut and the loneliness of the past weeks really hit him.

There was something to be said for a good post-rescue sex scene. He’d thought it was cliched back in his first life, but at the moment he was still hopped up on adrenaline with nowhere to go and had been missing his boyfriend for a while. Mutual orgasms were sounding really good and he couldn’t quite remember why they hadn’t had any yet.

“Do you have to?" he asked and let go of where he’d been holding the lapels of Binghe’s coat closed over his front. 

Binghe both did and did not regret stripping the offending uniform off his beloved’s body. The green and white was too much in too many ways. It was a reminder of his past and worse still, his initial motivation in approaching Shen Yuan. 

Back then he’d wanted to exorcise the ghost of some old, unwanted feelings and it had almost cost him. 

“I’ll get you new things," Binghe promised, trying not to think too hard about the miles of smooth skin he’d just hidden away under one thin layer of black linen. If he let himself think about it now then he might actually die.

Shen Yuan searched his face with something Binghe couldn’t name moving just behind his gaze then he wet his lips and asked, low and in a tone he’d never heard A-Yuan use before: “Do you have to?” 

Then he let the coat slide off his slender shoulders to pool on the mattress underneath him, leaving his body totally bare once more as he relaxed back and let Binghe see everything .

He had freckles.

Not many, just a few scattered across his body like far flung stars. Binghe swallowed past a mouth gone suddenly dry and one of his hands reached out to touch one located at the midpoint between A-Yuan’s shoulder and hip, just below where his rib cage ended. The skin there was warm and so smooth. He looked up to meet A-Yuan’s eyes, totally lost. 

“Are you sure?” is what came tumbling out of his mouth instead of ‘yes’ and ‘please’ and ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’

A-Yuan bit his lip, trying to hide a smile. Then he reached up, grabbed Binghe by the collar, and pulled him down.

It was simultaneously the best and worst sex he ever had. It became clear very quickly that neither of them had any first-hand experience in bedroom matters between men, but also equally obvious that neither of them were willing to let that get in their way. Good or bad, it was the kind of sex Binghe wanted to be having for the rest of his life. Just living in a whorehouse wasn’t enough to make a seasoned seductress out of a virgin, it seemed, but Binghe absolutely did not care.  

A-Yuan chuckled when they messed up and kissed any part of Binghe that got within reach. Once they were better acquainted with the ways their bodies fit together he flipped Binghe on his back, straddled him, lined their aching members up, and… well, Binghe had no complaints. That was all.

There was a bite mark on the outside edge of A-Yuan’s shoulder when they were done; a souvenir of the moment when it really sank in for Binghe that he was A-Yuan’s first and if he was careful then he’d also be his beloved consort's last and only. The idea settled in his chest and made a home there. 

“I think we need practice," A-Yuan observed after they’d lain together tangled in the sheets and each other long enough to have words again. 

Binghe hid his smile in A-Yuan’s hair. “New skills are always worth mastering,” he purred. 

As interesting as the idea of keeping his consort naked in the bedroom for the rest of their lives was to Binghe personally, he had the aftermath of a coup to clean up. A-Yuan showed no more inclination towards returning to his side room than Binghe had in letting him, but had also had a very long day and a case of qi overuse to sleep off. Binghe left him under the quilt with his coat laid on top.

He still had questions about what had happened that night. Sword seals should have been impossible for someone with Shen Yuan’s lack of cultivation, but Shen Qingqiu knew him well enough to be possessive of his potential. That meant something, but Binghe was reassured enough in A-Yuan’s affections and loyalty that it could wait. 

It was very nearly the next day when Binghe finally felt it’d be fine to return to his quarters for a brief rest. All the bodies had been attended to while he was rounding up Moon Vipers to unleash in an area around Cang Qiong Mountain sect that safely away from the local towns, but close enough to the Tian Gong Mountains to give Yue Qingyuan heart palpitations. Obviously that hadn’t gone the way he’d expected. 

On the one hand, he was pleased with A-Yuan for testing his boundaries and taking advantage of an opportunity to escape. On the other hand, that had been some lousy timing. 

A-Yuan was still deeply asleep when Binghe found his way into the bedroom. He’d rolled himself up like a zhongzi with just the top of his head sticking out. Binghe smiled to himself as he pried the blankets away from his consort enough to slip under there himself. He was rewarded with an instant double armful of chilly consort.

As tired as he was, sleep hung just beyond his reach. He felt himself start to nod off several times only to jerk fully awake and alarmed for no good reason a few seconds later.

The surviving Palace staff members had been permitted to begin cataloging the Old Palace Master’s apartments now that Binghe was back and the results had been… unsettling. The good news was that Binghe had a portrait of his mother now. The bad news was that it had been found in a shrine hidden behind a false wall in the Old Palace Master’s private study. There was a memorial tablet inside and an urn of ashes that could only belong to Su Xiyan.

He’d entrusted the tablet and the urn to the sect shrine where they should have been this whole time, but he wasn’t sure what to do with the painting. It had answered some questions for him; namely how the Old Palace Master had identified him. 

Binghe could almost be his own mother’s male twin.

It was the answer to a question most people knew the answer to long before they could ever articulate it. Which parent do I look like most?

He’d never expected to know and now that he did? He didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. Be happy? Be sad? He’d spent years cultivating indifference for the people who’d thrown him away because it seemed to be more respectful than resentment and his adopted mother had been very clear that if he couldn’t show the idea of his birth parents true filial piety then he would damn well fake it. Trying to reverse that was harder work than he’d have expected.

A sleep-clumsy hand patted his side and A-Yuan blinked up at him from inside the circle of Binghe’s arms. “You alright?" he mumbled.

“Did I wake you?” Binghe didn’t quite feel like addressing his feelings at the moment.

“Mmm, a bit," A-Yuan yawned. “It sounded like you wanted to cry.”

Did he?

Maybe. That too was a new sensation. He thought he’d given up tears with his childhood.

“Is A-Yuan awake enough to talk?” he asked instead.

His consort nodded against his chest, clearly fighting the need to curl up and fall back asleep. 

“How do you know Shen Qingqiu?” He didn’t really like the way A-Yuan froze against him.

“It’s a long story,” A-Yuan sighed at last, putting his face into the safe hollow of Binghe’s throat. “A long and stupid story," he muttered darkly, which made Binghe feel a bit better at least.

“What’s your relationship with him?” Binghe couldn’t quantify it. He didn’t exactly have experience with traditional family dynamics.

A-Yuan burrowed into Binghe’s side like he could escape having to answer the question and groaned in defeat when it didn’t work. “He’s telling people he’s my older brother.”

“You – do look very similar," Binghe admitted with great reluctance. “You have the same family name. Is it so impossible?”

“Very.” A-Yuan pulled away to sit up on his elbows. “Binghe, have you ever had to tell a lie because the truth was too ridiculous to be believed?”

In all sincerity, yes. All the time. Binghe’s life was a series of impossible scenarios that no one ever believed had all happened unless of course they’d been there. Even his closest companions -with the exception of Shen Yuan- didn’t believe all his stories.

He nodded slowly. 

Maybe there was a reason A-Yuan was so willing to believe him when he talked about having found the latest in a series of long-losttreasures and secret inheritances. 

“This body doesn’t have parents or siblings.” A-Yuan examined his face looking for signs of disbelief. “Shen Qingqiu decided to give me a backstory so no one in Cang Qiong Mountain sect looked into my history too closely and realized I didn’t have one. He was trying to be helpful in his own special and overbearing way, I guess.”

At this point, Binghe knew A-Yuan’s pulse and body almost better than his own. He still reached for A-Yuan’s wrist to feel for the tell-tale signs of long term possession. If this wasn’t A-Yuan’s body then he couldn’t stay there forever. It’d deteriorate.

What he felt was nothing except ordinary; a living person in a human body that had only ever had one owner. A-Yuan’s spirit veins were in far better shape than the last time he’d examined his consort so maybe he owed Shen Qingqiu a small debt for setting A-Yuan’s feet on the path to immortality. If his old Shizun had to pick a point to finally start acting like a teacher then this wasn’t the worst choice he could have made.

Binghe checked his consort’s pulse again, but the results were the same.

If A-Yuan’s physical form was a fake then it was the most flawless fake he’d ever encountered. It even had functional interior organs. Every golem or puppet servant he’d ever encountered had been hollow inside; shells filled with nothing except the qi animating them. A famous trick for identifying one was to try to get it to eat or drink something in front of you so that you could hear things falling into their empty interior. 

Was that the source of Shen Yuan's illness?

“Shen Jiu and I once went to a lot of trouble to save each other’s lives.” A-Yuan scrunched up his face as he kept going. “His life, anyway.” A-Yuan’s gaze dipped away from Binghe’s as he admitted, “I –I was already dead at the time.”

Ice flooded Binghe’s veins.

“How?” His voice scraped in his throat.

A-Yuan blinked at him. “How did we save each other?" he asked.

“How did you die?” Binghe’s imagination had too much to work with. Where had he been when it happened? Had he had any inkling about what had almost been taken from him?

A-Yuan flinched. “I… don’t really remember,” he admitted and itched at his jaw in a nervous gesture. “I remember eating something and then…” He shrugged helplessly. “...I was dead and something was forcibly trying to make me possess Shen Qingqiu’s body, only he was still in it. I wasn’t really aware at first, but I woke up when he was resisting. Then it tried to make us fight each other for the body, but I wasn’t about to murder someone and he didn’t seem to want to fight me either when I didn’t attack him first so we decided to fight it instead.”

Binghe tried to fit that with what he remembered of his Shizun. He had no problems picturing Shen Qingqiu dispersing a weak ghost and then going on to fight the demon trying to use it as a pawn, but he –hadn’t?

“No wonder A-Yuan doesn’t like to eat,” he said instead. 

(A-Yuan looked forward to his cooking even on days when he refused to even look at anything else. That also meant something.)

“I have some reasons,” A-Yuan agreed listlessly. He’d started to pick at the blanket, unwilling to look at Binghe. “We managed to drive it out and…” His mouth twisted. “...it was time for me to go. Except I didn’t. I woke up in a copy of my old body in a place I didn’t know with nobody I could ask for help. I got sick from eating whatever I could find and ended up in the teahouse where we met.” He held out his arms, examining them. “This is a regular human body so far as anyone can tell. Even my disease is something that followed me from my first life.”

Finally, he looked at Binghe.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked.

The noise Binghe made straddled the unholy divide between a snarl and a backfiring car. Shen Yuan’s back hit the mattress as Binghe pinned him down with his body and took his mouth with a kiss that had more in common with a bite, but it was hard to care when this was a clear and unequivocal no in response to his question.

Binghe could bite whatever he wanted so long as he still wanted Shen Yuan to stay.

He started to surface from his possessive black-out at around the point where the sunlight was just starting to creep in through their windows. By that point Shen Yuan’s skin might as well have been one continuous hickey and he could not be made to care. He’d been too thoroughly laid to have complicated things like thoughts.

Anyway, it had been a long two weeks of No Binghe and he’d just confessed to being technically undead, but his boyfriend hadn’t broken up with him. Everything was beautiful in his world and nothing hurt as they lazed around in a timeless afterglow.

Of course Binghe had more questions and eventually he scraped together enough of his scattered brain cells to remember one of them.

“Were you a cultivator in your last life?” he asked. It was hard to concentrate past the way Binghe was tracing the curvature of his spine up and down, up and down. Shen Yuan tried anyway.

“No, there’s no cultivators where I came from.” He did not care to try and explain the theory of infinite worlds in his current fucked-out state so he kept side-stepping the ‘I came from another world’ question for another day.

Binghe gave him a deeply skeptical look. “Shen Qingqiu taught you sword seals after a week of cultivation training?”

Shen Yuan shook his head. “No, the thing –spiritual entity?” Was that what Yue Qingyuan had been calling it? Whatever, it was good enough. “The entity wanted me to be Shen Qingqiu so I know everything he knows. I even know his sword style, although my stamina is crap.”

It wasn’t bad at all for a mortal person. He’d never been this fit in his first life, but there was a big big difference between ‘fit for a mortal human’ and ‘fit for a cultivator.’ Compared to Binghe or even one of the Huan Hua novices, Shen Yuan might as well have been made of glass.

“How long ago was this?” Binghe asked, sounding thoughtful.

“Twelve years," Shen Yuan finally had an answer. Shen Qingqiu had experienced an intense qi deviation that year that presented as a lethal fever; one bad enough to trick the System into thinking he was dead or at the very least in a persistent vegetative state. “You would have been…” He had to think about it. “...fourteen?”

Binghe’s fingertips pressed into his back. “That long?”

“It’s been a while,” Shen Yuan agreed. “What is Binghe thinking?”

He didn’t answer. He just pressed his cheek into the crown of Shen Yuan’s head and held on.

The mood dissolved when someone finally came looking for Binghe. Good news, it was the Palace steward and he’d endured the power change with both his job and neck intact. Shen Yuan was glad he’d put in the work to convince Binghe that the man had nothing to do with that weird passive aggressive banquet performance. Even better, he’d shown up with a set of bottom layer clothing that would fit Shen Yuan. 

“Everything is in disarray, but this servant thought that the Noble Consort Shen would appreciate fresh underthings," the Steward addressed the floor as he set the folded clothes on a table and bowed himself out.

Shen Yuan had been naked for –well, a while now so he all but pounced on the folded shirt and pants. He still couldn’t go out, but staying inside for a little while longer appealed to his reclusive heart. Especially if there were still random bloodstains in the hallways. Fuck that.

Getting Binghe out the door took some more doing. As sticky as his boyfriend had been before everything happened, it was ten times worse now. He didn’t stay gone for longer than an hour and returned with food. After breakfast he had to leave again because someone found something in the Little Palace Mistress’s former rooms and it was cursed as hell. Binghe stayed gone for an hour and a half that time before pretending he’d forgotten something that he didn’t even pretend to look for in favor of tackling Shen Yuan back into the bed for a spontaneous makeout session.

The Palace seamstress came by in the afternoon to measure him for something, but she also left some very basic middle and outer layers that almost fit and a pair of cloth shoes so he was no longer confined to the rooms on the basis of nudity.

It was better when he finally ventured out. Things were still in disarray, but the corridors had a freshly-scrubbed look that suggested that someone else had noticed the missed spots too.

There were fewer people around in general when compared to what he remembered and those he did encounter were super respectful with bows and murmurs of ‘Greetings to Consort Shen.’

So, the ‘consort’ thing had gotten around. That meant it was possibly official. Given the way they’d been carrying on, he wasn’t sure why he was so surprised by that. What with how stratified and ruthlessly organized family situations were in these settings, he should probably be glad he hadn’t been labeled as Binghe’s bed servant or whatever even if that was probably closer to the truth.  

From what he kind of sort of remembered from history class and a boatload of wuxia and xianxia reading, only the main wife in a family and possibly the second wife in a family got the whole marriage brouhaha. Although he vaguely recalled that ‘consorts’ weren’t really a thing normal non-emperor men got to have? 

‘Consort Shen’ was better than being a concubine, he supposed. Proud Immortal Demon Way described all Binghe’s ladies as ‘wives’, but there were clear rank divisions in practice if you read the text with a critical eye. One of Binghe’s concubines probably lived better than anyone else’s first wife, but within the inner courtyard it was probably hard to remember that –and there was Shen Yuan, the first titled conquest of the harem despite Ning Yingying, Liu Mingyan, and Sha Hualing being right there.

Was this a Danmei AU or something? Did it even count as danmei if his Binghe was demonstrably bi?

Shen Yuan’s wanderings took him out into the big courtyard of Huan Hua Palace, a place he hadn’t been in much on account of the fact that it was the Little Palace Mistress’s primary territory. The gardens there were relatively untouched and it was harder to remember that a pitched battle had taken place there.

He wasn’t the only one who was taking advantage of the fact that the gardens were open to everyone again. He spotted two young women -one wearing a veil and dressed in light lavender and the other in green and white- standing by a pond full of ornamental carp that were blubbing hopefully for treats.

His steps slowed without him meaning to.

They’d come with Binghe to save him and they’d spoken via letter, but he’d never actually talked face-to-face with either woman. Being around Binghe no longer gave him anxiety. He wasn’t the same low-key psycho protagonist of Proud Immortal Demon Way. He had his moments, but Shen Yuan no longer got fanboy flutters about him.

Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan were a different story. They were exactly as cool as the original characters. That queen viper had posed them no trouble whatsoever.

Fortunately the girl in green noticed him before he could dither too long. She glanced over, glanced again, and then started beating on Liu Mingyan’s shoulder with both fists. “Mingyan!” she gasped. “Mingyan, Mingyan…”

“Mmm?” The taller girl looked his way and nodded her acknowledgment. “Consort Shen. I am pleased to see you out and about.”

Ning Yingying was far less reserved. Having gotten Liu Mingyan’s attention she came over and captured both of Shen Yuan’s hands in her own. “You’re awake!” She looked around. “Where is A-Luo?”

“He got dragged away by some elders.” Shen Yuan kind of knew that she was exuberant, but experiencing it in person was a whole other feeling. “He’ll probably show up again soon. He’s been checking on me.”

“He was really worried about A-Yuan," Ning Yingying informed him and then winced. “Sorry, I got excited. Can I call you A-Yuan?”

“Shidi, perhaps?” Liu Mingyan asked, catching up at a more sedate stroll. “I saw you were wearing Qing Jing colors when we found you. Did one of the Peak Lords take you in?”

“It’s… complicated and not a story for right now.” Shen Yuan made a face. “I didn’t enter the sect, but Peak Lord Shen wanted me to.”

Liu Mingyan’s cool gaze traveled over him and she nodded. “I see," she murmured.

“He’s older than me," Ning Yingying pointed out and then squinted at Shen Yuan. “Are you older than me?”

“Sort of," Shen Yuan admitted. He’d told Binghe the truth. Maybe that meant he could get away with admitting his real age.

“Sort of?” Binghe asked from behind them. Both he and Ning Yingying nearly jumped out of their skins.

She shook her finger in Binghe’s unrepentant face. “A-Luo, I told you not to sneak!” 

“I wasn’t sneaking, Shijie.” Butter would not have melted in Binghe’s mouth as he told that baldfaced lie. “You were just distracted.”

He walked over to put an arm around Shen Yuan’s waist and gave him an expectant look. 

“I was twenty-two the year I met Shen Qingqiu," Shen Yuan explained, trusting that Binghe would understand what he meant. He’d just been ejected from the System’s non-linear reality in the shape of a probably-fourteen-year-old kid. “I’m thirty-four now.”

Ning Yingying grinned in a way that was eerily like Shen Yuan’s own younger sister when she smelled a weakness and was about to ruthlessly exploit it. “A-Luo is the younger man!” She cooed and must have hit whatever she was aiming at because Binghe turned bright, bright red. 

“Shijie!” He sounded scandalized and Shen Yuan loved it. “We’re cultivators! Eight years is basically nothing.”

“If you say so," she agreed, eyes dancing. “A-Luo should make us all dinner so we can catch up. I want to hear everything.”

“Especially those things Shen-Shixiong doesn’t want to discuss in the open courtyard," Liu Mingyan agreed, more quietly  and with a significant look in Shen Yuan’s direction.