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Shen Qingqiu had never considered himself to be particularly parental in nature.
Protective, certainly. As much as Qi-ge had looked after him when they were children, Shen Jiu had been the one picking fights and frightening off the leeches who would have dragged Qi-ge down. These days, anyone who threatened Cang Qiong Sect or its sect leader received much the same treatment.
Nurturing, however, was not a word Shen Qingqiu would use to describe himself. Neither did his childhood dreams of running away with Qi-ge ever include a small, grubby, needy third party.
Despite all of this, as Shen Qingqiu looked down at the infant seemingly content to slumber in his arms, he found that he had no intention of surrendering the child to the nearest local authority or of finding a suitable family to take the boy in. No, Shen Qingqiu was struck by a strange but powerful conviction to keep the child himself.
Yue Qingyuan wanted children, he knew. He also knew that Qi-ge would never bring up the possibility, much less act on it, because Qi-ge was well aware that Shen Qingqiu had never been interested in parenthood. This disinterest had, in fact, persisted until just a sichen ago.
My child Shen Qingqiu thought, testing the words. My son. Our son.
He had once given all of his loyalty to Yue Qi, but Shen Qingqiu imagined Qi-ge wouldn't mind sharing it with a child of their own.
---
If there was any constant in the Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, it was that any and all new developments in a Peak Lord's personal life would be subject to intense scrutiny and gossip from their martial siblings.
The news of Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qingqiu's infant son, unsurprisingly, produced a flurry of speculation unmatched by anything but Sect Leader Yue and Peak Lord Shen's marriage. When the two shixiongs in question were both atypically tardy to a scheduled Peak Lord meeting, their martial siblings wasted no time taking advantage of the opportunity to exchange theories and rumors about the child.
"The important thing," Mu Qingfang said during a break in the conversation, "is that the child seems to have suffered no ill effects due to his exposure to the elements."
"What I want to know," Qi Qingqi interjected, leaning forwards conspiratorially, "is who the mother is. And where she is."
"This shixiong," Shen Qingqiu said from the doorway, "is the mother."
Shang Qinghua started coughing violently. Liu Qingge turned beet red. Qi Qingqi settled back into her seat deliberately, pretending like she hadn't just been eagerly discussing his son's parentage.
"This shimei wasn't aware that Shen-shixiong possessed such… faculties," she said archly.
"Of course not," Shen Qingqiu agreed, striding over to his own place at the table and sitting down. "Nevertheless, this one has given his husband a child, has he not?"
"Ha!" Qi Qingqi laughed and changed the subject before they could send Liu Qingge into a qi deviation. "Mu-shidi said that you found the child on your mission?"
Shen Qingqiu acknowledged her question with a tilt of his head. As the Qing Jing Peak Lord, Shen Qingqiu was sent out on missions more often than most of his martial siblings, the major exception being Liu Qingge, who spent more time off of his Peak than on it.
"I had resolved the matter disturbing the village and was about to return to the Sect when I heard what appeared to be the sound of an infant crying beyond the outskirts of the village. Naturally, this shixiong investigated.”
“Naturally,” Wei Qingwei agreed, sounding as though he wished Shen Qingqiu hadn’t said something sensible. Besides the possibility of a child in peril, an infant cry could also prove to be a lure sent out by a dangerous creature that could not be allowed to prey upon the nearby village.
"Fortunately," Shen Qingqiu continued, "There was no further threat posed towards the villagers, and this master was not too late to counter the threat of the elements towards the child."
"And you decided to keep him," Shang Qinghua added incredulously.
"And what of it," Shen Qingqiu snapped back defensively.
As Shang Qinghua scrambled to think of a response that wouldn't get him eviscerated, a child's gurgle from the direction of the doorway stole the attention of everyone in the room. Yue Qingyuan had finally arrived, and he'd brought the much-gossiped-about child with him.
The infant stared at the gathered Peak Lords and slobbered on the end of Sect Leader Yue's hair ribbon. Yue Qingyuan looked absolutely besotted, glowing with happiness as he so often did since he and Shen Qingqiu had resolved their differences.
"Apologies for the delay," he began, walking over to his seat and sitting down next to his husband.
As soon as Shen Qingqiu came into range, the boy eagerly reached out towards him with the arm that wasn’t holding Yue Qingyuan’s hair ribbon, grabbing the end of Shen Qingqiu’s ribbon and bringing it to his mouth to subject it to the same treatment. He managed to grab some of Shen Qingqiu’s hair in the process, but the man’s only reaction was to gently pry his hair out of his son’s tiny fist, sacrificing the ribbon to the child.
When the infant was settled, Yue Qingyuan turned his smile onto the rest of his martial siblings and brought the meeting to order.
“Are there any matters that should be addressed before proceeding with the agenda?” he asked.
“I have one,” the Zui Xian Peak Lord slurred. “What’s the kid’s name?”
"Shen Yuan," Yue Qingyuan answered proudly. “With the character for ‘wall.’”
A few eyebrows were raised at that–they had assumed the child would have the Sect Leader’s surname–but it certainly wasn't out of character for Yue Qingyuan to want his child to bear Shen Qingqiu’s name.
For his part, something in Shen Qingqiu had visibly relaxed with his husband and child in the room, and his martial siblings awed over a side of their shixiong that they had never experienced before. His tongue was no less sharp, but it carried less malice with it, and they breathed a sigh of relief.
Completely independently, ten Peak Lords simultaneously vowed to spoil the shit out of that kid. Good luck, Shen-shizhi!
---
Liu Qingge had an underdeveloped danger sense.
That is, he could sense very well where dangerous situations were, but they registered as a challenge rather than as a problem to him at least 90% of the time. He knew that made his judgment on what other cultivators could handle questionable at times.
Liu Qingge was also, however, a big brother. Contrary to popular opinion, he was, in fact, generally capable of distinguishing whether a situation was safe or not for a small child; he'd had practice with Mingyan, and she'd turned out just fine.
Somehow, little Shen Yuan was also turning out “just fine,” but for the life of him, Liu Qingge had no idea how. Shen Yuan had been a pretty quiet baby and well behaved, but once he'd hit the toddler stage, he'd become a holy terror to watch.
It wasn't that the boy would scream and throw tantrums; that would be more easily taken care of. No, Shen Yuan was still a pretty well behaved child. What made him difficult was that young Shen Yuan was fascinated by dangerous animals and plants, had the entire sect wrapped around his finger, and was supernaturally good at disappearing the second you turned your back on him and then reappearing near one of said dangerous animals or plants.
His parents didn't want to stifle that academic curiosity, something that was highly valued on Qing Jing, and neither did they want to confine him inside, where he'd presumably manage to get into some other kind of mischief anyway. But Zhangmen-shiziong and Shen-shixiong, for all that they indulged Shen Yuan, knew when to be firm, and the three of them generally got on without major incidents.
People who didn't have the benefit of experience of watching Shen Yuan, however, just learned to watch him like a hawk. Liu Qingge wasn't ever Shen Qingqiu’s first choice of babysitter for his son, even if their relationship had improved over the past few years. Shen Yuan, on the other hand, thought Liu Qingge was amazing. That was how Liu Qingge had ended up temporarily responsible for his shixiongs' five year old son, as both Shen Qingqiu and Yue Qingyuan were required outside of the sect at the same time for once. So, Liu Qingge’s shixiongs had decided to distract–or maybe bribe–their son by letting him stay with the Bai Zhan Peak Lord. After Shen Qingqiu had thoroughly threatened him, of course.
There was only a three day overlap between when Shen-shixiong left and when Yue-shixiong returned to the Sect, but Liu Qingge was more than ready to hand Shen Yuan back over to his father.
Liu Qingge loved Shen Yuan, and he enjoyed spending time with him, taking him for flights and demonstrating different fighting techniques. What he didn’t enjoy was feeling like he was constantly on a high level mission for those three days. By the end of it, he wasn’t entirely certain he wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there. He’d left Shen Yuan to amuse himself in the corner of Liu Qingge’s rooms in the evening before bed, and everything had seemed normal at first. Sure, the boy was talking to himself, but most children did. Most children, however, didn’t blankly stare off into space as if they were listening to someone respond, and they definitely didn’t get answers to their questions in the form of some kind of flashing light that Liu Qingge could just barely see out of the corner of his eye.
When he asked Qi Qingqi if she'd had any similar experiences, she roped him into some kind of support group (or maybe gossip circle, he wasn’t quite clear) with their martial siblings. Apparently strange and inexplicable incidents were common around Shen Yuan; Liu Qingge just hadn’t experienced anything less explainable than a knack for finding and surviving dangerous fauna in the past.
Shang Qinghua swore that the kid had some kind of god-like powers.
“I was running an errand on Qing Jing, you see– normally that would be a job for one of my disciples but this had already been screwed up once and I didn not want to make Shen-shixiong wait any longer. Anyway, Shen-shixiong had to speak with his head disciple for a moment, and that left me and Shen Yuan in the Bamboo House, which was fine, but then I heard a crash in the next room. I peaked my head through the doorway to see that Shen-shizhi had knocked over one of Shen-shixiong’s nice vases. Like, it was in pieces on the floor. I guess he wanted to hide it from his dad, because the next moment the vase was put back together, I shit you not. He didn’t know I was watching him, but I saw it!” Shang Qinghua had to catch his breath after that rant.
“Like a goddamn glitch in the matrix,” he muttered, and Liu Qingge didn’t really know what to make of that.
“He was found at a shrine,” Qi Qingqi reminded them, ever happy to stir things up. “Who’s to say where he came from?”
---
The thing was, Shang Qinghua hadn’t fucked over his plotline on purpose.
On the contrary, anything he did to intentionally try to change the direction of the world away from Proud Immortal Demon Way canon was promptly and cruelly shut down by his System.
What he hadn’t accounted for–and, more importantly, what his System hadn’t accounted for–was the butterfly effect. For the most part, the world course corrected itself if things got out of line. Either that or the System made him fix things.
Sometimes though, you stepped on a butterfly and the whole world went to shit.
And by stepping on a butterfly, Shang Qinghua meant “opening his mouth without thinking, accidentally starting an argument between Shen Qingqiu and Yue Qingyuan where Zhangmen-shixiong shouted back for once, and inadvertently helping them sort their shit out.”
He hadn't even been punished for being the catalyst to the whole mess, since he hadn't tried to do it, and (more importantly) since the System had been too busy running numbers to ride his ass for once.
So now his shixiongs were married and had a kid (a kid!!) and the entire plotline had gone so canon divergent before they had even hit canon that the System had actually shorted out in the end and left him the fuck alone. Which worked just fine for Shang Qinghua!
The kid was weird as shit but that wasn’t his problem, and thank fuck for that!
---
SYSTEM did not know what it was doing! ˚‧º·(˚ ˃̣̣̥᷄⌓˂̣̣̥᷅ )‧º·˚ It wasn't even supposed to be assigned to this world!! UV002 had originally been assigned a different System, but the user's original purpose of fixing the plot of WORLD: PROUD IMMORTAL DEMON WAY had been derailed due to an unauthorized alteration of the parameters of VILLAIN: SHEN QINGQIU, now designated TEACHER: SHEN QINGQIU.
Rather than abort UV002's transmigration, however, his assigned role was switched from VILLAIN: SHEN QINGQIU to ORIGINAL CHARACTER: SHEN YUAN. Theoretically, the user's presence would reinforce the changes to TEACHER: SHEN QINGQIU's character, thus ensuring a happy ending for PROTAGONIST: LUO BINGHE as per UV002's desire.
Babysitting an OC in a world with a permanently derailed plot wasn't an attractive gig for a System though, so the more experienced System who had been assigned to UV002 was moved to a more complicated case, and this SYSTEM was called in as a replacement. SYSTEM didn't want to be here either!
The more that SYSTEM watched Shen Yuan grow up, though, the more it realized that this wasn't such a bad gig, actually. Sure, it had its hands full making sure UV002 stayed alive, but it had much more leeway and much less supervision than a system at its level would have on a higher stakes assignment. Also, PROUD IMMORTAL DEMON WAY was a much more interesting setting than anywhere else SYSTEM had been assigned…
There were much worse situations SYSTEM could have ended up in, and it silently determined to do everything in its power to prolong this assignment for the foreseeable future. Who cared if it had to bend the rules a bit to make sure Shen Yuan didn't perish from any of the many dangers in PIDW? Or even if it had to bend them more than a little? Who would know, after all!
You’ve got this, USER! (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧
---
Shen Yuan had thought long and hard about how he would behave if he ever happened to transmigrate, so that he wouldn't end up behaving like an idiot when he woke up. He also, of course, considered reincarnation, but he had largely dismissed that train of thought because if he got reincarnated he’d have drunk Meng Po’s soup, right? So there wasn’t a whole lot of point in thinking about it.
Except apparently he was wrong about reincarnation, or at least this weird reincarnation/transmigration thing that he’d found himself living. He hadn’t been fully conscious as a baby, thank fuck, but it only took a couple of years for his memories of his previous life to fully return to him.
The System had told Shen Yuan that this was the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way, but since it also told him that this was an AU without a blackened protagonist, Shen Yuan hadn't bothered to worry too much at the time. He was a literal child; what did he care about papapa plants and other similarly awful worldbuilding elements in PIDW?
That was part of why it'd taken him so long to realize that his Qing Jing parent was the Scum Villain himself. It wasn't Shen Yuan’s fault! No one called him Shen Qingqiu around Shen Yuan. They called him "your father" or "Shizun" or "Shen-Shixiong" or "Xiao Jiu."
Even his Qiong Ding parent was “your father” or “the Sect Leader” or “Zhangmen-shixiong” or “Zhangmen-shibo” or “Qi-ge.” Nobody used people’s goddamn names around here!
Should he possibly have made a connection about Qing Jing Peak Lord Shen? Maybe, but he didn't even know where in the timeliness he was for a while! There was no Ming Fan or Ning Yingying or Luo Binghe to tip him off.
He didn't even realize his father was a man at first! A baby's eyesight was fucking awful, for one, and how was he supposed to know that he had gay parents? People kept calling him Shen Yuan's mother when he was little!! In hindsight that was a joke, but Shen Yuan had definitely spent a few years calling Shen Qingqiu "A-Niang" before he grew out of it! At least his father didn't seem to mind.
And he was Shen Yuan's father: both him and Yue Qingyuan. Being a child again meant being dependent again, which was strange as he remembered how solitary he had been in his former life, despite having a loving, if somewhat distant, family. His fathers’ took good care of him, though, providing him with attention, instruction, and material things without being overbearing.
They obviously loved each other, too, even if it was harder to tell with Shen Qingqiu if you didn’t know him. Shen Yuan sometimes wondered whether they’d felt the same way in the novel Proud Immortal Demon Way, when Yue Qingyuan had sacrificed himself to try to save Shen Qingqiu and failed. It didn’t matter, though, and Shen Yuan didn’t like thinking about it, so he put it out of his mind. It wouldn’t happen to his fathers, and besides– his A-Die wasn’t a scum villain! He wasn’t some poorly written, one-dimensional character!
So, yes, Shen Yuan knew he wasn’t living in a novel. Mostly, at least. But that didn't mean he couldn't experience all the parts of PIDW that he had actually liked! Even if he would have to wait until he was older to travel and see the world, there were plenty of interesting things to see on Cang Qiong and the nearby town. Especially on the Beast Peak! A 9-tailed celestial rat-leopard had even let Shen Yuan pet it before his shishu had made him go back to Qiong Ding.
There weren’t a lot of kids his age around, except Liu Mingyan sometimes. She was pretty cool, but she was also a few years older than him and thought he was a baby. She wasn’t wearing her veil yet, so that was interesting, but Shen Yuan mostly just thought she looked like Liu Qingge, and Liu-shishu had a sword, which was way cooler.
Shen Yuan’s partner in crime was the System! The System was a real bro, and it could do super cool things and get him out of trouble, which was great. He couldn’t tell his parents about the System–they wouldn’t understand–but little kids had imaginary friends, right? So that was a normal explanation. And maybe in the future, he’d be lucky enough to have Luo Binghe as his friend too?
---
Yue Qingyuan smiled as he and Xiao Jiu drank tea together and watched their son play. He smiled often, but his truest smiles came out in moments like these, where he knew his loved ones were safe and happy.
A-Yuan was talking to his invisible friend again. He’d told them about his friend before, as if it was part of a game, but Yue Qingyuan suspected otherwise. Strange things happened around his son, but he was more comforted than alarmed by them at this point. Everything that Yue Qingyuan had seen himself, and everything that he had heard from Xiao Jiu, their martial siblings, or A-Yuan himself, hadn’t hurt A-Yuan. It had protected him, brought him comfort, or entertained him. Yue Qingyuan wasn’t entirely sure if it was an outside force at work, perhaps even a heavenly force, or if the power was A-Yuan’s and his son truly was imagining a friend to explain it to himself.
Whatever it was, Yue Qingyuan loved his son, and he was glad to worry less whenever his duties took him away from his family. Yue Qi would fight tooth and nail before abandoning a loved one again, even for a time, but it still gave him peace to know that Xiao Jiu could take care of himself, A-Yuan had his mysterious friend, and both of them had an entire sect to look after them.
This wasn’t the life that he and Xiao Jiu had imagined as children–they hadn’t known enough to imagine this–but it was better than anything they could have come up with, obliviously danger-attracting son and all.