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Shang Qinghua is no fool—well, some would disagree, but his survival instincts are highly-tuned! So he stays away from Qing Jing Peak. Between his ruthless (though hot) scum villain and the small, sweet version of his poisonous protagonist, it’s just better to be over on An Ding! Many look down on An Ding Peak, but one thing you can say about it is that it’s major-character-free. Minor characters don’t murder each other! Or if they do, the methods are not nearly as creative.
So this invitation to Qing Jing Peak is not welcome. But getting on Shen Qingqiu’s bad side isn’t an option either. If there’s one thing Shang Qinghua believes, it’s that everyone’s good side makes worthwhile lodgings!
Shen Qingqiu smiles at him like a snake from over his teacup. A sexy, passive-aggressive snake, all “Shixiong thanks you for your concern” while looking like he’s sizing up whether Shang Qinghua will fit down his gullet. Shang Qinghua remembers the multiple meetings on the topic of Shen Qingqiu’s supposedly improved temperament, but he personally doesn’t see it. Shen Qingqiu always looks at him like something smeared on his shoe—which is exactly the expression he wrote Shen Qingqiu to have.
He does not expect Shen Qingqiu to call him “Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky.”
He expects even less for Shen Qingqiu to launch into a criticism of his book.
“I thought you were just a reader!” Shen Qingqiu yells, gesturing with his teacup and spilling some drops on his sleeve. “You’re the hack author himself? Master of plotholes? King of red herrings? Is this a stallion novel or a cultivation novel? It’s impossible to say, either way you’ve taken a dump on every genre convention! And the ending, I didn’t even get a chance to comment on it—”
Shang Qinghua pushes himself back from the table, eyes wide. “Shen Yuan?”
It’s Shen Qingqiu’s turn to go speechless. He stares at Shang Qinghua for a moment, then covers his mouth with the back of his hand.
“How did you know?”
“It’s obviously you, no one else speaks to me that way! Did you think some random reader would yell at me like that?”
Shen Qingqiu goes pink. “Yes!!”
“Well, they don’t! I can’t believe this! My ex-boyfriend transmigrated into my crush?”
“Your crush??” Shen Qingqiu slams both hands on the table, face going white with anger. “How could you have a crush on Shen Qingqiu? After how he treated Luo Binghe! Is that any kind of person to like? What’s wrong with you! After you’re the one who made Binghe fall in the Abyss in the first place! That’s sick!”
“What the fuck, dude, I didn’t know Binghe was going to be real, you told me his blackening was the only part of the book you liked! And okay, it’s not like a crush crush, it’s just that Shen Qingqiu is hot and hates me which is even hotter—except he’s you, I guess—wait, why do you hate me?”
“I didn’t know it was you! I hated Shang Qinghua because I knew he was going to betray the sect!”
“So you don’t hate me?”
“I—” Shen Qingqiu stops, mouth still hanging open. “That’s not—I didn’t—anyway, I’m not your ex-boyfriend!”
Shang Qinghua buries his face in his long sleeves.
“No,” he says. “No, no, it’s been thirty-five years, I am not having this argument with you again.”
“Then you admit I’m right!”
“No!” Shang Qinghua wails. “We were dating!”
“We were friends!”
Shang Qinghua perks up, lifting his face from his sleeves. “So you admit we were friends?”
“Shut up! We’re not talking about that!”
“We’re literally only talking about that, you wanted to talk about our relationship!”
Shen Qingqiu looks terrified. “Don’t call it that!”
Shang Qinghua—before he was Shang Qinghua—was day drunk when he messaged Peerless Cucumber his weibo ID. Cucumber was funny! Posting a new chapter didn’t feel right until he’d swung into the comments section, usually within half an hour of posting, with a new list of complaints. It was like someone showing up at the same restaurant every day and buying a full meal before insulting the chef. Some wires were crossed in Shang Qinghua’s brain, maybe, because the vitriol made him smile.
So he started inviting it. Sending Peerless Cucumber fake chapter ideas to see him lose it. Responding to him with humble contrition, thanking him for the advice bestowed upon this lowly author, and then taking none of it. Okay, it wasn’t smart to mess with one of his loyal subscribers, but Peerless Cucumber still doggedly bought every chapter and every bonus story. They started messaging more often, and eventually talking about things besides PIDW—what other webnovels they both liked, why they were both up at strange hours, and so on. And—
“You started it,” Shang Qinghua insists, “you sent me a dick pic!”
“Only because you provoked me, all ‘let’s see if it’s really that peerless’—”
“That wasn’t provoking, that was flirting, I was flirting with you!”
“Well, how was I supposed to know?”
Peerless Cucumber, as a Zhongdian commenter, had a steel trap mind for details. Sometimes, instead of checking his own notes for continuity, Shang Qinghua would post the chapter and just wait to see if Peerless Cucumber would find a mistake so he could correct it.
It was perplexing to discover how much Shen Yuan didn’t notice.
“You sent me a dick pic,” Shang Qinghua says, “and I sent one back, and you said ‘Nice.’ You said ‘Nice’! And then I asked if I could call you and you agreed!”
“I didn’t know you meant to jerk off together, I thought you just wanted to talk! You seemed lonely, you were sending me pictures of your penis!”
“Bro, you came!”
“We were bonding!”
Several months of texting every day. Pictures of breakfast in the mornings, ribbing each other for eating so poorly. You writing? in the afternoon and If so I thought of another problem with the cultivation technique you introduced last chapter. Pictures of the view out their respective windows, comparing sunsets and moonrises. Are you awake? at 3am. Shang Qinghua responding, Yes, you thinking of me? ;) and timing the long pause before Shen Yuan’s noncommittal response, what he now knew was an indicator that Shen Yuan was flustered.
The worst part: as much as Shang Qinghua tried to keep flouting Shen Yuan’s suggestions to make him adorably mad, sometimes Shen Yuan did have good ideas. And Shang Qinghua liked the things he wrote after they talked things through together. Shen Yuan had a good grasp of Binghe’s character, and was maybe the only person in the world who cared when Shang Qinghua contradicted established lore for the sake of porn. So Shang Qinghua tried not to. It took longer to write, but it exercised a part of his brain that he hadn’t engaged since he stopped writing the kinds of books he liked.
And sometimes when he sent Shen Yuan a draft, Shen Yuan could barely think of two paragraphs of insults, which meant he begrudgingly liked it. One time he said, You can write like this but you’ve been publishing dogshit for the past one hundred chapters??
It was so cute! Shang Qinghua was a webnovel writer, he was weak to the tsundere trope!
And then the thirst traps. The selfies he sent Shen Yuan: shameless! The selfies he received in return: charmingly clumsy! The occasional mutual jerk-off session, via text or phone call: sexy! Shen Yuan was cute as hell. Shang Qinghua’s crush on him was colossal.
He saved up some money, and told Shen Yuan he wanted to come meet him in person. “Good,” Shen Yuan said on the phone, “I can give you the slap you deserve for lowering Ning Yingying’s intelligence again.”
Kind of hot! Shang Qinghua had easily segued that into phone sex.
Shen Yuan met him at the train station and took him out for lunch. Then they went back to Shen Yuan’s apartment, where Shang Qinghua crossed his wrists behind Shen Yuan’s neck and kissed him.
Shen Yuan pushed him off. They fought.
It was a depressing trip home. Shang Qinghua cried in a train bathroom.
But that was thirty-five years ago! He transmigrated not long after, and he had a whole other set of problems to worry about, with being an infant number one on the list. And then he met Mobei-Jun as a teenage disciple, and that pretty much wiped the fading memory of Shen Yuan right out of his spank bank.
The whole thing was such an awkward mess. Shang Qinghua would probably have never thought about it again if it hadn’t been his first and only kiss.
But he remembers it clearly, especially the way Shen Yuan kissed him back. Leaning into Shang Qinghua and parting his lips with a little breath before shoving him away.
“Like I told you,” Shen Qingqiu says now, “I’m straight! It was just a misunderstanding!”
Shang Qinghua stares at him.
“How long ago did you transmigrate?” he says. “Oh, it was the qi deviation thing, wasn’t it? No wonder Zhangmen-shixiong was so upset. When was it in your life, how old are you?”
“It was right after you posted the last chapter,” Shen Qingqiu says. “Which, by the way, I still want to talk to you about—”
“No! You can’t yell at me after breaking my heart! It’s not as cute!”
Shen Qingqiu pales, hand tightening around his teacup. “Breaking your heart? I thought...”
Shang Qinghua has a lot to say, but actually, he is very interested in knowing what Shen Yuan thought!
“What?”
“Nothing!”
Fucking hell. The qi deviation was just a few years ago, so what he’s gathering is that Shen Qingqiu is still in his early twenties. So it’s been three years since Shen Yuan rejected him, and apparently he’s used exactly none of that time to reflect. How can someone who demands so much intricate thought behind a shitty erotic novel be so good at avoiding his own thoughts?? Twenty-year-old Shang Qinghua would have been hurt, but this is really just sad.
Shen Qingqiu mutters something into his tea.
“What?” Shang Qinghua says.
He keeps his teacup by his face, cheeks flushing. “You didn’t... have to go home. After. I said you could stay.”
“Bro, I didn’t want to. You rejected me! I didn’t want to sit around watching anime with you!”
“I didn’t reject you! I didn’t know you had feelings for me, okay?”
Shang Qinghua puts his hand to his forehead, feeling like he’s staring down a mound of acquisition paperwork. “What are you talking about?? I literally told you that I considered you my boyfriend!”
“But I didn’t know you had feelings for me, I just thought you were confused! I’m sorry, okay?”
It’s tempting to grab the teacup from him and smash it on the floor. “You’re apologizing now? So many years later?”
“I said I’m sorry, do you want me to be sorry or not!”
“Cucumber-bro, I really don’t care anymore! I’ve moved on!”
“You have? Oh.” Shen Qingqiu puts his tea down, frowning. “Then we’re good?”
Shang Qinghua gestures nonsensically. “Maybe! I don’t know! Hang on, so you’ve been Shen Qingqiu these past few years? I could never figure out why people said Shen Qingqiu was so fond of Luo Binghe, I thought I was the only weird variable so I didn’t know what I’d... wait, everyone says you’ve been devastated since his death? But you know he’s not dead!”
“I’m not devastated!” Shen Qingqiu snaps, confirming it. “Why don’t people mind their own business! I don’t see why anyone needs to know which disciples I like or don’t like!”
“You’re not even his real teacher! Why—oh fuck, dude, is this about your weird Luo Binghe thing?”
Shen Qingqiu’s eyes go wide, his eyebrows flying up. His voice is icy. “What Luo Binghe thing?”
“Fuck, I can’t believe it.” Shang Qinghua cradles his forehead in his palms. “Of course it would go like this. You love Luo Binghe.”
“I don’t!” His entire face is flushed red now, down to the tip of his nose. “Shut up! Also what do you mean, how would you know anything about it?”
“You love him! You always got mad at me for being too harsh on him, like you’d never heard of conflict or stakes! I saw the inside of your bedroom—and the kind of fan art you commissioned—”
“Ahh!” Shen Qingqiu plugs his ears. “I’m not listening to you!”
He wrote Shen Qingqiu as beautiful but cruel, alluring but aloof, cool but with a viper’s sting. It’s a little bit annoying watching Shen Yuan make his character act so goofy.
“Anyway, Luo Binghe’s a teenager,” Shen Qingqiu continues, lowering his hands warily. “I would never have improper thoughts about him!”
Shang Qinghua jabs a finger toward his chest. “Aha! I never said you did, you’re the one bringing it up! And of course I don’t think you’re being improper towards a teenager, but it’s different when you already liked the adult version, isn’t it?”
“Not in that way! I already told you I’m straight! And anyway, I’ve been nice to him this whole time because I didn’t want him to turn me into a human stick, so thank you for that fate. You couldn’t just give Shen Qingqiu a quick painless death?”
“Bro, you told me Bing-ge’s revenge killings were the best part of the book, you wanted me to cut Shen Qingqiu’s balls off first!”
Shen Qingqiu swats his wrist with the back of his hand. “Why do you remember everything so clearly, why were you paying so much attention! There’s no need to talk about all of that, okay! Look, I actually wanted to talk to you about this. Doesn’t Shang Qinghua die too?”
“Yes, yes, you don’t have to rub it in,” Shang Qinghua groans. He, the author, reduced to cannon fodder he barely gave a backstory to.
“No, I’ve been thinking about this, and I have an idea that could help both of us. Do you remember—”