Chapter 1: Yue Qingyuan
Chapter Text
Every sect lost disciples at the Immortal Alliance Congress. Cang Qiong Mountain Sect lost fewer than some, Huan Hua Palace lost more than most. Some commented on the relative preparedness of disciples, muttering about showing off money rather than skill. Most were too busy with the aftermath of an entire generation of cultivators being decimated in a disaster none had been able to foresee or prevent. The Peak Lords and heads of the assembled sects intervened. They got the survivors out, healed the injured. They gathered the dead. They gathered all of the dead, all of the pieces of the dead.
Then the meetings began.
The Old Palace Master, of all people, grumbled about incompetence, about poor planning, about betrayal, about the strength of the demonic creatures who had invaded, about unacceptable losses, about disparities in losses, about responsibility.
Yue Qingyuan let it roll over him like wind through a bamboo forest, loud and forceful but ultimately without lasting effect. He didn’t consider why he had chosen that metaphor. He would not consider it. He might have had his own suspicions about the cause behind it all, but his suspicions were too difficult to grapple with in face of the disaster at the heart of these events. The Old Palace Master appeared to take Yue Qingyuan's silence as weakness, as an admission of guilt, as permission to delve deeper, to attempt to assign blame.
"And your Qing Jing Peak lost none at all!" The Old Palace Master exclaimed, red-faced and puffing. "How can you possibly—"
"None?" Yue Qingyuan inquired, and perhaps there was something in his voice that gave away more than he had intended.
The room went silent, and even the Old Palace Master caught the change in mood. No one else spoke into the quiet. When Yue Qingyuan continued, his voice was terribly even, measured, and colder than he had heard it before, foreign even to his own ears.
"Qing Jing Peak Lord Shen Qingqiu died," Yue Qingyuan said. "Qingqiu-shidi entered the Jue Di Gorge at risk to himself. He crossed into the barrier against medical advice, where he saved a group of disciples from being murdered by a flock of ghost-head spiders. When Without a Cure acted up, as he knew it might, it destroyed his ability to manipulate qi. And he continued protecting disciples from several sects, including your Huan Hua Palace Sect."
He took a deep breath, and continued, voice level, calm, quiet, cold.
"He died protecting them."
The Old Palace Master had turned faintly green under his usual pallor. Yue Qingyuan paused to regain mastery of himself. After a moment he forced a smile onto his face.
"How interesting that he is not included in your tally of Qing Jing Peak's losses. Perhaps you would like to amend your statement?"
Shen Qingqiu had not been well-liked in their generation. Yue Qingyuan had known that from their time as head disciples. He had long been aware of the volume of poisonous rumors, from the ones he could dismiss to the ones he had been forced to pretend not to hear lest he be obligated to take action. The youth who had returned to Cang Qiong Mountain Sect with Yue Qingyuan had been sharp and brittle, abrasive and short-tempered. He had not been well-liked within their sect, and even less outside of it. But he had still been named a Peak Lord, despite his late start at cultivating. He deserved better than to be overlooked or erased from memory, even in passing comments, even if no one had appreciated him for far too long.
"Of course," the Old Palace Master said, hastily, and paused. It appeared the interruption had taken the wind out of his sails.
Qi Qingqi stepped in then, sharp and acerbic as ever, ruthlessly efficient, and dragged the meeting back into something resembling sense. Yue Qingyuan reminded himself that he was grateful for her help. She was a loyal, reliable and hard-working Peak Lord. She had not lost her head as a result of this disaster. She had delegated effectively, and taken on additional responsibilities without being asked.
And she had not minded when Shen Qingqiu’s qi deviation had caused him to lose his memory, whispered a traitorous voice in the back of Yue Qingyuan’s mind. She had not mourned Shen Qingqiu’s lost past, or suggested they find a way to bring him back to himself. None of the other Peak Lords had. They had simply accepted that he was not possessed, that he had not failed any of Mu Qingfang's array of medical tests. Having done the bare minimum of due diligence, they had called his softer demeanor an improvement. Even the Bai Zhan Peak Lord, who was currently sitting a stubborn, injured vigil over Shen Qingiu’s corpse, had not cared for him before then. None of them had, until that inexplicable shift had revealed his quality for all to see.
Yue Qingyuan dragged his attention back to the present, where Mu Qingfang’s head disciple was sitting at a table with Ming Fan, both of them looking decidedly overwhelmed by the amount of work before them. They would need help: Mu Qingfang was too busy supervising the medical care of the injured to deal with paperwork, and there was no one to supervise Ming Fan, not anymore. Qi Qingqi would handle it.
Eventually the meeting came to an end, complainants running out of steam after far too much time listing grievances that, time and again, seemed so, so small. Who could care this much about in what style or comparative comfort the remaining Sect Leaders were being housed: was it not enough that they yet lived?
Yue Qingyuan walked out without another word to anyone. He had a burial to plan.
* * *
Luo Binghe didn't know how long he had spent bent over Shizun's body in Jue Di Gorge before his martial uncles found them. An eternity, perhaps, or no time at all. It had been long enough for the terrifyingly strong ice demon to vanish into a portal. It had been long enough for him to wrench himself under control, a single shuddering breath at a time. It had been long enough for Meng Mo to help him temporarily re-seal the sigil on his forehead that would betray his demonic heritage. It had, worst of all, been long enough for Shizun's body to begin to chill, even as it was held in Binghe's arms.
The seal won't last, Meng Mo had warned him. He'd almost seemed concerned, almost worried. The expression had been strange on his half-formed smoky face. They'll find you out. Better to flee now, boy. Humans are cruel to our kind.
"It has to last," Binghe had countered. "Shizun said to be good, to hide it. He said. So I have to."
And Meng Mo had sighed, and tapped him on the forehead again, and Binghe had been able to rein in the last bits of demonic qi mere moments before Peak Lord Shang had woken up at the base of the tree. Then Peak Lord Yue and Peak Lord Liu had arrived, hurtling towards him on their blazing swords like shooting stars, too late, doomed to failure.
They had pried him away from Shizun's body at some point, Binghe thought. Or maybe they hadn't—he really wasn't sure. Peak Lord Liu had checked Shizun's pulse only once before turning away to slaughter every demonic beast he could find, and Peak Lord Shang had been sent to go ahead with the news. That had left Peak Lord Yue to escort their group out on foot. He hadn't drawn his sword again, even when he fought, hadn't let them fly. Peak Lord Yue had checked Shizun's pulse several times, but he'd let Binghe carry his body. Shizun had been very heavy, even as slender as he was. One of his arms had kept falling in Binghe's face over and over again, limp and terrible.
Binghe shook his head to clear it of the memories and gave up on meditating for the time being. The makeshift infirmary ward he was in now was too loud, too full of crying, of the sounds of pain and anger and despair. It smelled more strongly of medicine, blood, and bile than he remembered ever noticing before. It smelled like dead things, and dying things. It smelled like decay and somehow, terribly, of things that made his mouth water.
You need to focus, boy, Meng Mo said in the back of his mind. Calm your senses, and reinforce the seal.
"I know," Binghe told him.
Someone gasped, the sound sharp and pained, and he closed his eyes against the flash of memory: Shizun had made a sound like that, at the end.
"But I can't do it here. I need to find somewhere quieter."
Meng Mo's silence might have been judgmental; it might not. Binghe didn't have the energy to care.
Levering himself to his feet was a challenge in and of itself. Binghe hadn't had any broken bones left when his martial uncles had found them, though he'd felt several of them break in the fight with that ice demon. But even now his ribs still felt sore, his ankles and one wrist weaker than they ought to have been.
No one noticed as he slipped out of the ward: it seemed like anyone well enough to walk unaided was free to go.
The long pavilion that was now an infirmary had been intended as a celebration hall. Its hastily installed cloth walls provided an illusion of privacy, but no barrier to noise. Binghe thought for a moment, and then headed along the covered path toward the main building. The kitchens were there on the bottom floors, as were small stone-walled storerooms. He'd learned their location—before—so he could cook for Shizun, just in case.
Now, if he was lucky, he could shut himself in a storeroom, or a woodshed, somewhere else quiet. And then he could meditate until it didn't seem like he would crawl out of his own skin the first time someone spoke to him, like the coils of angry, unfamiliar qi would boil out of him and strike everyone around him down just for being there, for being alive, for not being Shizun.
The halls of the main building were too empty: the few disciples who passed him, carrying bandages or tisanes, hardly gave him a second glance. The first few rooms he looked into were full to brimming with hastily-stacked dry goods. The third door had a protective sigil on it. Behind it, Binghe felt familiar qi, rising and falling unevenly, clearly in distress. He had broken the sigil and stepped inside before thinking about it, before wondering whether it was safe.
Peak Lord Liu was half-collapsed over Shizun's body, one hand grasping Shizun's wrist the way he always did when he was clearing Shizun's meridians of the effects of Without A Cure. Except usually Peak Lord Liu wasn't bleeding through layers of bandages in more places than Binghe could count, and usually Peak Lord Liu wasn't unconscious.
And usually Shizun wasn't dead.
Binghe took a deep breath, battered down the rising tide of distressingly heated qi inside him, and closed the door behind himself.
The qi fluctuations were coming from Peak Lord Liu. Binghe pulled him away from Shizun—from Shizun's body—and stretched Peak Lord Liu out on the smooth wooden floor. There weren't any stains on Shizun's robes from Peak Lord Liu's wounds. That was good. That was fine. Shizun wasn't breathing, but his robes were clean and new, just as he preferred.
Peak Lord Liu made a small, choked noise, and his qi surged. Binghe dragged his eyes away from Shizun and looked down at his martial uncle, uncertain.
He's dying, Meng Mo said. He sounded disinterested. He was never much interested in the lives and deaths of humans.
Binghe shook his head again, feeling almost frantic.
"No," he said. Peak Lord Liu was the strongest of the sect leaders, Peak Lord Yue excepted. More importantly, he was Shizun's friend. He couldn't die. Binghe wouldn't let him die. "He's just deviating," Binghe said. "I just—"
Peak Lord Liu's qi was fluctuating wildly, but now it seemed almost as weak as the newest disciple's, like water trickling over dry falls, nothing like the usual torrent of force Binghe expected from the Bai Zhan War God. He had been unconscious next to Shizun's body. Rumor said he had suffered a qi deviation in the past, before the Demon Saintess had invaded the peaks, before Shizun had been poisoned to save Binghe's life. Rumor said Shizun had saved Peak Lord Liu back then, in the caves. But Shizun wasn't here anymore. Shizun couldn't be the one to save him now.
Binghe looked at Peak Lord Liu, who was breathing in short, sharp gasps, hands clenched into fists. Shizun had said to be good. A good disciple didn't let his martial uncle go into a qi deviation. A good disciple didn't have a demon mark, and he didn't hurt anyone, and he didn't resent anyone for not being fast enough to save his Shizun, especially not his martial uncles.
Binghe had to be good. Shizun had said so.
So Binghe grasped at Peak Lord Liu's right wrist, the one less heavily bandaged, and started pushing his own spiritual qi into his meridians, feeling his way, trying to calm things down, even things out. Binghe ended up kneeling half-over Peak Lord Liu, hair falling into his face, even when he shoved it out of the way. It had never stayed put, even when Shizun had tried to braid it for him.
Binghe felt something roil inside of himself and pushed that thought aside. He focused on regulating his spiritual qi, on sending a slow and steady stream into the meridians of the wrist he was holding. He concentrated on breathing slowly, keeping his eyes focused on the bandages next to his fingertips, running up the arm under the sleeve. If he cataloged Peak Lord Liu's injuries, he wouldn't be tempted to look over at Shizun's still form. If he thought about Peak Lord Liu's injuries, he wouldn't have to remember how bloodied Shizun's body had been at the end.
Binghe fell into a kind of trance.
After a time, the wrist beneath his fingers twitched.
"What are you doing?" Peak Lord Liu demanded, trying to pull away.
He was unable to exert enough force to break Luo Binghe's grip. His qi was still severely depleted, unsteady, even now on the verge of wild fluctuation. He shouldn't have been so exhausted from fighting the beasts in Jue Di Gorge, even the unexpectedly fearsome ones: not the Bai Zhan Peak Lord. He had never been so weak after clearing the poison from Shizun's veins before, either.
"What—" Peak Lord Liu started again, and his voice was sharp, cold. He glanced at Binghe's face, and his eyes went flat, expression hard. The muscles in his arm went tense, and his qi began to gather into his hands, as if for a strike. His qi hiccupped in his meridians, skipping out of true, throwing everything out of balance.
"I—" Luo Binghe said, and held on, trying to keep regulating Peak Lord Liu's qi. He continued, a little helplessly. "Shizun told me to be good. Liu-shishu is on the verge of a qi deviation. Shizun told me to be good. I have to help you. You have to let me help you."
Peak Lord Liu went a little limp at the mention of Shizun, and stopped resisting.
"His meridians need to be cleared," he said, which made no sense. "They're still blocked. He doesn't like that. His arm goes numb if he goes too long between."
He was talking as if Shizun were still alive. Luo Binghe blinked back tears, and Peak Lord Liu tried to sit up, weak as a new disciple, as a non-cultivator.
"Stay there," Luo Binghe said, and used his free hand to press the War God back against the floor, easy as gentling a kitten. "Shizun wouldn't want you to die. He would be mad at me if I let you die."
His voice didn't catch on the words, on the use of the past tense. It didn't.
"Fine," Peak Lord Liu said, grudgingly allowing himself to be held in place. That—that easy acceptance of help—scared Binghe more than anything else. The fear lept in his chest, and he could feel his qi pressing and hot, trying to get out.
Steady, Meng Mo said. Regulating his qi helped before. Do that again. Now, boy! His voice was stern, sharp, authoritative in a way he rarely was anymore.
Binghe nodded, and went back to focusing on pouring spiritual qi into the meridians under his fingers, keeping the flow steady, smooth, feeling it flow through the wrist, the arm, into the torso, the lower dantian, the core. It might have felt shockingly intimate, if he had been able to think about it, but his attention was focused so closely on himself, on keeping his demonic qi from going anywhere, on keeping himself in check.
He closed his eyes, still kneeling over Peak Lord Liu's body, and kept going, falling back into a kind of trance. Time slowed. Time passed. Binghe passed spiritual qi in a steady bright stream and felt himself begin to finally settle, bit by bit. It felt almost as though the roiling new part of him was calming down as his reserves depleted.
Finally he was shoved aside. The blow wasn't rough, but it sent Binghe reeling onto his backside. His hands flew out behind himself to stop himself from falling flat on his back. The demonic qi tried to flare up in response, and he shoved it down without a thought. Be good, he told himself. Hide the mark. Be good.
"That's enough," Peak Lord Liu said, sitting up. His wounds were no longer actively bleeding, it looked like. "I—" he paused. "We still need to clear your shizun's meridians."
Binghe looked over at Shizun's spotless body, at the one tiny smear of blood on his wrist. He opened his mouth to object, and Peak Lord Liu glared at him.
"I know he's dead," he said, blunt and direct. "But he deserved better. I should have—" he paused, some strong emotion flickering across his usually stern face. "One last time," he said.
With that, he staggered to his feet. Binghe jumped up to support him and got a glare for his trouble.
"I am not that weak," he said. "Save your efforts for your shizun, if you must."
It was, Binghe realized, a request for help, or as much of one as he was going to get. Binghe nodded, and stepped around to the far side of Shizun's body, wedging himself awkwardly between the edge of the pallet and the wall. He took one wrist, and Peak Lord Liu took the other.
Together, they cleared Shizun's meridians, until Peak Lord Liu's qi began to flicker dangerously, and Binghe pretended fatigue to make him stop. It wasn't hard to pretend, really, not after the last day and night, not with how hard he was still working to hold a seal on himself, with how his ankles and wrist and ribs still ached, with how depleted his qi was.
That helped, Meng Mo said, when Binghe sat back. And you've preserved his body in the process. You know, He paused. There are ways for demons to bring back the dead, child. If the demon becomes powerful enough, it can be done.
Binghe blinked, then leaned over to catch Peak Lord Liu as he passed out entirely, clearly drained beyond human endurance. He settled his martial uncle back on the floor, checked his wounds. He turned the Dream Demon's words over and over in his head, the implications of them.
All right, he said, finally, sitting down cross legged, seating himself between the door and his Shizun's body, his Shishu's unconscious form. Tell me more.
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Chapter 2: Shang Qinghua
Summary:
In which Shang Qinghua's day gets a whole lot scarier, Luo Binghe makes a plan, and Liu Qingge proves an unlikely ally.
Chapter Text
Shang Qinghua swore under his breath as he paced down the storage hallways on another errand for An Ding Peak, all part of trying to clean up the mess he'd created. He hadn't expected this many disciples to be injured, when he'd had Mobei-Jun gather stronger demonic beasts. He hadn't specified how strong, which had obviously been a bad idea.
He'd just needed a threat so that his son could be pushed into the Abyss before anyone noticed, that was all. Shang Qinghua had been so careful not to think too hard about the implications of that distraction, and now he was handling all of the logistics of sourcing medical supplies, chasing down absent Peak Lords and Sect Leaders who would be offended if they were fetched by low-ranking messengers. And the more he saw, the harder it was getting to ignore just how many people had been hurt. Or killed. Or died instead of cooperating with the plot.
What kind of fucking canon-divergence was this! What was happening! Shen Qingqiu had been behaving oddly for years, but to refuse to shove Luo Binghe into the Abyss? It made no sense! What kind of scum villain died for his hated disciple like that!
"Fucking idiot, Airplane," he muttered, pushing open a door. "You utter hack, even your scum villain can't do anything right. You really are sell-out trash, the internet was right."
Then he froze, blinking in the dim light. This wasn't Mu Qingfang's hastily-set-up office, or a dry goods storage room. It was a morgue. It was, even, an occupied morgue.
Luo Binghe opened his eyes. They glowed very faintly redder than they ought to have done. Maybe. For just a moment. Then he blinked, and he was the perfect model of the pre-Abyss-arc white lotus disciple again, seated on the floor between the door and the other occupants of the room, for all the world as if he were standing guard.
Shang Qinghua groaned internally. This made no sense! His son was supposed to be in the Abyss, getting blackened and finding Xin Mo, learning more about his demonic heritage! He shouldn't have managed to hide his demon mark, not so soon!
"Shang-shishu," Luo Binghe said, tone respectful, though he did not get to his feet. Liu Qingge was lying on the floor behind him, heavily bandaged. Shen Qingqiu's body was on a pallet near the wall, pristine in white and green. "Can this disciple help his martial uncle?"
"Um," Shang Qinghua said. Shit shit shit, he thought. "I was just looking for Mu Qingfang," he said. "But I needed to find Liu-shidi as well, since he refused to stay in the infirmary."
He stepped into the room and closed the door behind himself, refusing to be frightened. Or, well. Refusing to admit he was frightened. Luo Binghe wasn't blackened yet, right? He shouldn't be willing to kill people at random just yet. Shang Qinghua hoped that was true, at least.
"Liu-shishu is asleep," Luo Binghe said. "We cleared Shizun's meridians before he passed out."
He looked at Shang Qinghua, and something in his eyes flickered, dark and dangerous for a moment before it cleared up, and he smiled.
"If this disciple might beg Shang-shishu's indulgence," he said.
Shang Qinghua felt sweat break out at the small of his back. What was with this politeness? Luo Binghe only talked like that when he wanted something, when he thought he had an advantage, didn't he?
"Of course," Shang Qinghua managed, voice even. Mostly even. He wouldn't be scared of a mere disciple, even his protagonist. That would be ridiculous. He was frequently ridiculous, said a small voice in the back of his head. He ignored it.
"Shang-shishu said something as he opened the door," Luo Binghe continued. "You really are sell-out trash, the internet was right."
Shang Qinghua blinked at him.
"This disciple had heard Shizun say something similar," Luo Binghe continued. "Several times, usually when he was frustrated. This disciple has been unable to find any reference to an airplane or internet in the texts in Qing Jing Peak's library. Begging Shang-shishu's explanation."
He pronounced the words slightly wrong, as if they were foreign words in a language he didn't know. Shang Qinghua stared.
"Shen Qingqiu said what?" he demanded, words tumbling out of his mouth before he could stop himself.
"Airplane, you sell-out hack," Luo Binghe quoted. "Airplane, you shitty, lazy, half-baked wreck of an author, you stain on the internet." He paused. "Several things that were more rude," he admitted. "Does Shang-shishu understand Shizun's meaning?"
Shang Qinghua stared at him, then looked over at Shen Qingqiu's still body. If Shen Qingqiu had been cursing out the author—him—then, that meant. He was another transmigrator? He really was a different person than the original goods? That made so much sense.
"I—" he temporized. "I think—"
Luo Binghe looked up at him.
"I might know," he said, grasping at straws. "It's an … obscure divinity? A kind of creator god and his—communication array? I'm surprised he knew of it, it's very obscure."
Luo Binghe nodded, expression calculating.
"Shizun was very wise," he said. "He knew many things that other people did not expect him to know, especially after his qi deviation."
Shit, Shang Qinghua thought. Why had he written such an intelligent, insightful protagonist? The things that had allowed Luo Binghe to cut through intrigue plots with ease made it so hard to lie to him now!
"If Shang-shishu is similarly well-informed," Luo Binghe asked, and there was an edge to his voice now that Shang Qinghua did not like at all, "can this…" he paused, and Shang Qinghua resisted the urge to swallow in fright. "Can this obscure god tell us how to bring back the dead?"
Shang Qinghua froze.
Liu Qingge stirred, and Luo Binghe looked down at him, frowning. He put a hand on his shishu's forehead, clearly concentrating, and Shang Qinghua saw the faintest flicker on his son's brow, the hint of what might have been a demon mark.
"Shishu?" Luo Binghe asked, looking at Shang Qinghua, who regretted not taking the chance to flee. What was shame, when faced with the protagonist's possible anger! He had no shame!
"I …" Shang Qinghua swallowed. "I would have to look it up?"
He had built in some fail-safes and resurrection side-plots, sure, but they had mostly been demonic. He wasn't supposed to know that much about the Demon Realm! And besides, how long had it been since he had written the book? Between the lapsed years and how fast he'd written it, how was he expected to remember everything? And anyway, even when he'd been writing it, he hadn't been able to keep track of it all. His favorite anti-fan had been on his ass about plot inconsistencies all the time!
Liu Qingge's hand came up to push Luo Binghe's hand away from his forehead, and he shoved himself up to a sitting position.
"Look what up?" He demanded.
"Shang-shishu might know how to resurrect the dead," Luo Binghe said, as if he weren't talking about something that really ought to have been impossible. He glared at Shang Qinghua, daring him to contradict him.
Liu Qingge scowled at both of them, and batted away Luo Binghe's hand when he tried to reach for his wrist.
"He's dead," Liu Qingge said. His voice was flat, his tone completely without affect. Even for the repressed War God, Shang Qinghua thought, feeling slightly hysterical, this was ridiculously monotone!
"But he shouldn't be!" Luo Binghe exclaimed, distress clear in his voice. "It's my fault. Can't we try?"
His huadian flickered in and out of sight, just briefly, and Shang Qinghua hoped Liu Qingge hadn't seen.
Liu Qingge paused, and Shang Qinghua held his breath.
"It's not our place to contest the will of the heavens," he said, finally, but there was something that might have been doubt in his voice, or maybe a firmly buried hope.
"The heavens would not have given us the means, if they did not want us to use them," Luo Binghe argued.
He looked for all the world like he was ready to launch into a prepared debate, given the slightest chance. Shang Qinghua wouldn't be surprised if he had citations and references lined up, everything from the Book of Changes to some of the bullshit classic texts Shang Qinghua had introduced for flavor. He almost wanted to see it, to see if Luo Binghe would quote re-skinned Jedi lore about Force Ghosts in support of his argument.
Liu Qingge frowned.
"Sophistry," he said, but he sounded less certain.
"Any means Shang-shishu might discover would be found in holy texts," Luo Binghe argued. "Written down by a great prophet. It wouldn't be easy," he stressed. "But isn't Shizun worth some difficulty? Don't I—don't we both—owe him that much?"
Bold, thought Shang Qinghua, to remind Liu Qingge of Shen Qingqiu's having saved him from a lethal qi deviation. If anyone would honor a life debt, it was the Bai Zhan War God. Oh, just look how smart his son was, even now, in his little white lotus form, before any of his power-ups!
Liu Qingge's face almost crumpled.
"If we preserve shizun's body with regular qi infusions, just as long as Shang-shishu reads the texts…" Luo Binghe continued. "That wouldn't be too disrespectful, would it?"
That method sounded plausible, sure, but it was going to take a lot of qi.
"That would take an awful lot of qi…" Shang Qinghua offered, hesitantly.
Both his son and the War God glared at him immediately, and Shang Qinghua could swear he could feel the murderous intent in the room ratchet up to eleven.
"Okay, okay, okay, sure, it's worth a try!" Shang Qinghua said, waving his hands immediately in surrender. He knew when he was beat! He didn't know what Shen Qingqiu's weird apparently-also-a-transmigrator persona had done to get their loyalty, but he'd sure done something! Shang Qinghua wasn't going to argue with two of the strongest men in the world, even if one was still a teenager and the other was bandaged up like an old Hollywood mummy.
"Shang-shishu has already offered to do research into an obscure deity," Luo Binghe went on, tone calm and peaceable. "There may be a ritual he can find."
His eyes flashed very faintly red, when he glanced at Shang Qinghua, a clear threat. That had sounded so cool when Shang Qinghua had written it, and was creepy as fuck in real life, even creepier than in the official art or even the really good fanart. It was also a lot more obvious, when you were looking at it. Liu Qingge had better be really distracted by Shen-shixiong's death, okay?
"Yue Qingyuan is planning a funeral," Liu Qingge said, frowning slightly.
Luo Binghe grimaced. With good reason, Shang Qinghua thought: there was no way Yue Qingyuan was going to take any interference in that task at all well, not with the grief-stricken fugue state he was in at the moment!
Luo Binghe looked at Shang Qinghua, and his expression went suddenly hard, and completely terrifying.
"Shang-shishu can arrange a substitute," he said. "And he can arrange to have Shizun's body taken to Qing Jing Peak secretly. And," he paused, and made hard eye contact with Shang Qinghua. "This disciple trusts that he will tell no one."
Shang Qinghua wailed internally at his past self for making An Ding Peak be in charge of logistics. It had seemed so logical at the time: make one peak handle all the things other cultivation novels never admitted existed! Poke fun at genre norms! Give readers one less thing to complain about! Give himself a neverending list of impossible tasks, more like!
Externally he just nodded, agreeing before Luo Binghe could get up or get angrier.
"Of course," he said. "Of course. I'll—I'll just go do that. I'll just go—get started on that."
And he yanked open the door, stepped out of the room, and fled.
* * *
Luo Binghe watched Peak Lord Shang disappear, moving like a frightened rodent, and glanced at Peak Lord Liu, who looked almost amused.
"Is he always—" Binghe started, glancing after the An Ding Peak Lord, who had disappeared surprisingly quickly for someone with such short legs.
Peak Lord Liu quirked what might have been a dismissive, or even sarcastic, smile.
"He's always like that," he confirmed. Then he frowned.
"You're determined to do this," he said. He still looked conflicted, but less determinedly so than when Binghe had first mentioned the idea. "You'll try even if I disagree."
Binghe nodded.
"I owe Shizun my life," he said. "If there's a chance to repay the debt, I can't let it go. Not without trying."
Liu Qingge seemed to deflate a bit at that, and rubbed at his face with one hand. It left a small smear of blood just below the beauty mark on his cheek, and Binghe had to resist the irrational urge to wipe it away.
"Fine," he said. "Tell me your plan for keeping the body safe on Qing Jing peak."
Binghe noticed that this time, he had hardly hesitated over the word "body" at all.
Binghe nodded, and glanced at Shizun's body, which was still immaculately well put together, hands at his sides, hair crown not even a little bit askew.
Binghe outlined the plan he'd been working on ever since Meng Mo first mentioned that some demons could revive the dead. He'd been sitting in this storeroom after Peak Lord Liu passed out for what felt like a long time, and he'd distracted himself from the terrible stillness of Shizun's body by making plans. Not all means of revivification required the original body, Meng Mo had said, but many did. So Shizun's body had to be kept safe.
In the end, Peak Lord Liu nodded.
"Fine," he said, grudgingly.
Binghe got the sense, somehow, that this was high praise for him.
"I will stay here," Peak Lord Liu said, and placed Cheng Luan across his lap, easily drawn, in a clearly defensive position. It was a clear dismissal.
Binghe remembered the way Peak Lord Liu's qi had been spiking out of control when he'd found the room by chance, how close he had been to dying here, alone with Shizun's body. It was a risk to leave Peak Lord Liu here alone, but he needed to find Peak Lord Mu.
It was also a risk to leave Peak Lord Liu alone with Shizun's body, given the reservations he'd expressed, but Peak Lord Liu owed Shizun a life debt more clear than even Binghe's, and Binghe had to trust someone, or he'd never succeed.
Well, he had to trust someone with Shizun's body. He didn't think it would be at all wise to trust Bai Zhan Peak Lord Liu Qingge, the War God, renowned for killing demons of all kinds for the sect and just for fun, with the secret Shizun had told him to keep. He'd have to figure out how to hide the demon mark on his own.
"Go tell Mu Qingfang I'm fine, so he stops wasting his disciples' time trying to find me." Liu Qingge added.
"I'll go find Mu-shishu," Binghe agreed, ducking out the door. He made no promises about what he might say when he found Peak Lord Mu.
"Brat," he thought he heard Peak Lord Liu say as the door closed, but it didn't sound angry, not like how Shizun had said it when he was first a disciple. It almost sounded amused, like Shizun had when Binghe had hurried back from his last night hunt before the Conference.
Binghe took a deep breath, pushed down the coils of demonic qi that seemed to be looping their way around his spine and into his belly, around his ribcage, worming up his throat, and headed for the medical pavilion. He'd never saved someone from a qi deviation before. Peak Lord Mu needed to send someone to be sure he'd done it right.
Cang Qiong Mountain Sect couldn't afford to lose two peak lords, Binghe thought, and that was the part of him that had read every unrestricted book in Qing Jing's library, that had learned strategy with almost frightening ease, that calculated risk and reward, that followed inter-sect politics. One peak lord's loss could be managed, with care: two at once would be catastrophic.
Liu-shishu couldn't die, Binghe thought, and that was the part of him that was still holding his Shizun's broken body close, hearing the echoes of his gasping voice. Be good. Hide the mark, okay?
It was easy enough to find Peak Lord Mu: Binghe just walked toward the loudest section of the ward and waited. Soon enough his shishu appeared, sleeves rolled up, wiping blood off of his hands with a damp cloth. The blood smelled bitter, poisoned. Binghe almost gagged.
"Mu-shishu," he said, and bowed his head. "Could you come with me to Liu-shishu?"
Peak Lord Mu looked at him, and took a deep breath, almost a sigh. Then he finished wiping his hands clean, passed the cloth to a waiting disciple from Huan Hua Palace, and gestured for Binghe to follow him.
"What happened?" he demanded, when they were out in the sunlight, out of immediate earshot.
"Liu-shishu was having a qi deviation," Binghe said. He wasn't going to panic. "I—I fed him qi, slowly, like when he helped Shizun with Without a Cure. He woke up again, but," he paused. "I don't know if I did it right," he admitted, and balled his hands into fists at his sides.
It had been fine while he was in the room, while he could still see them. Now that he was separated, all of his fears came tumbling back. What if he opened the door and found there were two bodies in the room, instead of one? The new qi stirred.
Be good, Shizun's voice repeated. Binghe took a breath, and shoved it down.
"Good job," Peak Lord Mu said. "Luo Binghe, if he woke up, you did just fine. I'll go check on him myself. You should go find your fellow Qing Jing disciples."
Peak Lord Mu walked off without another word, leaving Binghe standing on a terrace in balmy sunlight. With the breeze blowing towards the pavilion, he could almost pretend nothing had happened.
Except there was a long-familiar weight against his chest from the jade pendant Shizun had given back to him. Binghe pressed a palm against it, thinking of how distraught he had been when Ming Fan had taken it, how shocked when the very leaves of the mountain had sprung to his defense. He remembered weeping for its loss, the only thing he had of his mother. He pressed his palm harder, grinding it against his sternum.
It wasn't a fair trade for his Shizun.
Eventually he went back into the main building and found Ning Yingying, and Ming Fan, and helped them organize the other Qing Jing disciples' return to the Peak. Ning Yingying had lost the list of disciples, but Binghe had packed an extra one, expecting that to happen, and gave it to her with a small smile.
"Thank you, shidi," she chirped, and dragged Ming Fan away with her to gather everyone else.
That left Binghe to pack Shizun's things.
They hadn't been here at Jue Di Gorge for long, but there were small hints of his Shizun's presence everywhere he looked, throughout the whole guest room. Binghe made the room into a search plot and went over it methodically, packed the papers and scrolls and books back into their cases, folded the robes, and placed the hair ornaments into a pouch. It all fit in two chests.
There was a full set of formal robes missing. And whoever had washed and dressed Shizun's body had taken the wrong under-robes for what he was wearing now. They must have been in a hurry. Maybe they hadn't thought it mattered anymore. Binghe thought it mattered. His Shizun might be—might have been—absentminded about dress, since his qi deviation, but he never liked being the focus of attention for doing something improper.
Binghe took a deep breath, and put the chests outside the door of the rooms. He sat down, and meditated, because he couldn't scream, and he couldn't cry, and he couldn't allow himself to lose control, to give into the heat swarming under his skin, the fear and despair.
When he finally got back to his feet, Binghe's own packing took almost no time at all. He slung his bag over his shoulder, feeling the loss of his sword keenly, and went to help his fellow disciples pack up the carts. Even if he had wanted to fly back to Qing Jing Peak, his sword was in pieces, scattered and lost. He didn't even have the hilt anymore, to return it to Wan Jian Peak.
Binghe didn't remember most of the journey home. He meditated, and allowed Ning Yingying to fuss over him far less than she wanted to, because her offerings of medicine had become yet another reminder of loss. Once, when it got really bad, he took a horse and rode out far in front of the caravan and let the qi boil up and out of him. The horse threw him, and ran away, and he had to wait for the wagons to catch up and explain. He didn't do that again.
At Qing Jing Peak, Binghe found the door to his little room locked, and a small, sealed scroll on his Shizun's desk.
"The door will only open for a drop of your blood," Peak Lord Shang had written. His handwriting was abysmal, loose and looping and almost entirely illegible in its haste. "No one else in the Sect meets the qualifications."
So, Binghe thought, looking down at the scroll, feeling only a dull kind of dread. He knows.
Meng Mo roused in the back of his mind. You can't trust him, he said. There's something wrong about him. He's too skittish. He knows much more than he's saying, and he's not powerful enough to have earned the knowledge well.
Binghe just nodded. His fingers itched to open the door, to check on his Shizun, but there were too many people around. He went to the library to start his research instead.
After nightfall, Binghe entered his room. He was carrying a bowl of rice that Ning Yingying had pushed into his hands.
His Shizun's body was lying on the bed, still and perfect, and unmistakably dead, body unmoving under a light sheet, perfectly coiffed, perfectly dressed, perfectly unmoving.
The scene was a nearly perfect echo of his past.
Binghe dropped the bowl, shoved a hand over his mouth to hold back a sudden, gasping sob. Only habit and fear of discovery made him close the door behind himself. Then he was running the very few steps, kneeling beside the bed, grabbing at Shizun's hand.
"Wake up," he pleaded, and he was a child again; the room was different, the hand he was holding was callused and thin, strong and older than its years. "Wake up, Shizun. Please."
But Shizun didn't respond, just as his mother hadn't woken up all those years ago, no matter how he'd begged.
"Don't leave me," he whispered, pressing his forehead to the back of Shizun's chilly, dead hand, tears falling onto his uncannily cold skin. "Don't leave me all alone."
Eventually Binghe stopped crying.
Are you done? Meng Mo asked. He sounded almost strained. That nearly broke the seal.
He didn't offer comfort, or try to tell Binghe things would be all right. He never lied in that way, as humans did, lying to be kind: he only lied for his own advantage. It was a relief, in its own way.
"I'm done," Binghe told him, and settled down to pass Shizun's body a steady stream of qi, as Meng Mo had instructed him must be done each day to preserve the body until a solution could be found. "I'm done."
He didn't sleep that night. He slept a little bit the next night, when Meng Mo berated him into it, enticing him with promises of power. Binghe cleared Shizun's meridians, and then sat up next to the bed and put himself into a waking dream.
Things were different, with Shizun gone.
Ming Fan seemed almost as lost as Binghe sometimes felt, unmoored like a boat adrift after a storm, like the fishing boat with a broken bowline Binghe had seen carried down the river in a storm until it capsized, years and years ago. He and Binghe circled each other, wary, but there was too much to do, and Binghe was too tired to resent Ming Fan for his past deeds, or to try to find an advantage in the situation.
Perhaps it was poor strategy, but Binghe didn't care about being Head Disciple: he only cared about bringing Shizun back. Ming Fan could have the title and joy of it. Binghe had other things to do.
In the end, Ming Fan and Ning Yingying found substitute instructors for the most advanced lessons in the Four Arts, and Binghe showed them how Shizun had organized his paperwork. Shizun had been letting Binghe do more and more of it, before. Binghe sometimes wished he didn't understand so much of it. It felt like a betrayal every time he knew immediately which family had sent a missive, or which properties or regions were managed by which merchant clan, each time he didn't have to ask Shizun for help, even if the help he sought would have been unavailable.
Binghe fell into a kind of pattern: up at dawn, to the library until the day's messengers arrived from down-mountain. Then he and Ming Fan sorted paperwork, and delegated to some of the other disciples. Lunch, because Ning Yingying would drag him there, and back to the library for research until sunset. Then he would meditate at Shizun's sword mound, clear Shizun's meridians, and sleep for long enough to train with Meng Mo.
Some days were different, of course.
Peak Lord Liu showed up sometimes, and helped infuse Shizun's body with qi before taking Binghe out to the training fields and teaching him how to fight with a training sword. He was a terror on the field, swift and beautifully able and frighteningly strong. Binghe loved fighting him, loved how it made him stop thinking, stop worrying, how he could just react and respond and how, gradually, as the months passed, he could push Peak Lord Liu just a little harder, a little longer.
"You need a proper sword," Peak Lord Liu said, the third time Cheng Luan cut through the practice blade Binghe was still using.
"Not yet," Binghe said. "I'm not strong enough yet."
He had been to Wan Jian Peak twice since they returned. There was a sword he wanted, but it had bitten his hand when he tried to draw it from the scabbard, and he had leaped back and away, almost afraid of its leashed power.
"Good," Peak Lord Wei had said, coming up behind him. "You have respect for a strong blade. That's good."
"It's mine," Binge had replied, looking at the long, straight shape of the blade, the simple crossguard with a black enameled pattern. "It's going to be mine. I'm just not strong enough yet."
Peak Lord Wei had looked at him, very seriously, and then nodded.
"All right," he had said. "But you won't be taking it any time soon. Are you sure you don't want something now?"
Binghe had only shaken his head. He hadn't been able to protect Shizun with Zheng Yang; any other sword he could master now would be equally weak. The sword he had chosen was the strongest on the peak: he could wait.
So now, facing Peak Lord Liu across the training fields, Binghe just pulled another practice sword from the rack and made a note to requisition more from An Ding Peak. Then he fell into sparring again, letting the fierce joy of fighting clear his mind and let him feel something almost like peace.
It was fall when he found the first hint tucked into a marginal note in an old paper scroll. Having exhausted the library, he had started, somewhat guiltily, to go through the scrolls reserved for the Qing Jing Peak Lords. Binghe took careful notes, cross-referenced every other bestiary and herbal he could think of, found maps, and had the whole set laid out on the table the next time Peak Lord Shang arrived to complain about his most recent weapons requisitions list being unreasonable for a scholarly peak.
"Shang-shishu," Binghe said, "please take a seat. Tea?"
He smiled the way Shizun had done when he was first accepted to the peak, perfectly polite and all but oozing thinly-veiled menace. He'd been practicing that with Meng Mo, in case he ran into a threat to Shizun, in case he needed to scare people away. Those early memories of Shizun were terrible to revisit, especially in dreams, but Binghe needed to be stronger, to save Shizun. He would do anything to be stronger.
Peak Lord Shang's eyes flicked to Binghe's forehead, to his eyes, and then down at the table, all in quick succession, as if he didn't want Binghe to see him looking, didn't want him to guess what he might be looking for. So, Binghe thought, Shang-shishu definitely knew, and it made him nervous.
Binghe just smiled a little wider, letting his eyes stay hard and cold. No matter how much he wanted to loom over Peak Lord Shang, or outright threaten him, the way Ming Fan had done when Binghe was younger, the very best model he had for terrifying other humans was Shizun as he had been before his qi deviation.
That version of Shizun had never done anything that could definitely be called improper, not that Binghe could see, but everyone on the peak had been at least a little bit terrified of him. And Binghe knew he wasn't strong enough to be a physical threat, the way Peak Lord Liu was, not yet, so he'd have to be polite. Shang Qinghua was cowardly enough that an implicit threat might even work better, Binghe thought. Let him imagine what might happen if Binghe were unhappy: he seemed to have enough imagination of his own.
Besides, overtly threatening his shishu directly would definitely be a bad thing to do, and Shizun had told him to be good.
"I-" Peak Lord Shang started, and then visibly deflated, and took a seat. "Yes, please."
The plant Binghe had found reference to, in a cracked and crumbling scroll nearly as old as the sect itself, was called the Sun and Moon Dew Flower, and its seed could be grown into a plant body into which a cultivator could reincarnate after his death. It was supposed to be planted and grown before the cultivator died, but Binghe had done additional research on that, too. He thought they could use Shizun's blood instead, and his stored qi from a medallion in one of the Peak's lockboxes. They would probably have to use Binghe's own demonic blood to force the link, but it should work.
Working with Peak Lord Shang, the two of them determined that the Sun and Moon Dew Flower grew in a cave near Lushui Lake, on Huan Hua Palace territory. Peak Lord Shang seemed most certain about the visual description of the cave mouth, and the likelihood of monsters to fight on the way in, and much less sure about where, exactly, there was on a map. Binghe filed that away with all his other oddities. These strangenesses about Shang-shishu could be a problem for later, for after Shizun was back. Maybe Shizun knew more about it, maybe he would explain more about the god Airplane, and his internet.
"We'll need Liu-shishu, too," Binghe said, because he wasn't taking any chances with fighting strong monsters, not after Jue Di Gorge. At that suggestion, Peak Lord Shang tried to excuse himself from the trip, and Binghe shook his head.
"How can we be sure it's the right cave without Shang-shishu's memory?" He asked, and he smiled, just a little bit. "Unless Shang-shishu would care to share the texts he found?"
As Binghe had expected, that made Peak Lord Shang capitulate instantly. Binghe was, by now, almost certain that the texts Peak Lord Shang was pretending to quote did not exist after all, but he was definitely not going to mention that anywhere Peak Lord Liu might hear of it. The fact that the ritual they were planning was referenced in a holy text seemed to be a mark in its favor, in Peak Lord Liu's mind, and Binghe knew he was not strong enough to oppose him, if he objected.
This kind of stark, strategic thinking seemed to be happening more and more often now, almost, but not quite like the kinds of calculations he'd made as a much smaller child: how best to look pathetic to earn coin begging, how to map the small town's traffic patterns to be sure he went far enough away that his mother wouldn't find out. The main difference was that now, with the bulk of Qing Jing's library in mind, Binghe could name the strategies, and compare different possible ones much more quickly, rifling through choices as if paging through a book. It felt manipulative; it felt necessary.
Now, sitting across from Peak Lord Shang, in his Shizun's bamboo house, Binghe took a long, slow sip of his tea, and turned the conversation to more mundane topics to calm his shishu down. He explained the need for more practice swords, new inkstones, and a brand new performance-quality guqin with the ease of someone who had taken over these negotiations from Ming Fan almost immediately after the return from the Conference. Ming Fan's family might all be merchants, but he was a terrible bargainer, and had no sense of the relative worth of anything his family did not trade.
No wonder his family sent him away to be a cultivator, Binghe had thought at the time. He'd be a liability as a merchant.
In the end, it took far less planning than Binghe had expected to get two Peak Lords away from the mountain at the same time: Peak Lord Liu had a habit of leaving to fight monsters at a moment's notice, and apparently no one noticed if the head of An Ding Peak went off to handle something personally. It was Binghe's disappearance that was hardest to arrange, because he couldn't fly off the mountain alone, with no sword of his own. Even if he were going on a night hunt with a loaner sword from Wan Jian Peak, he couldn't make the whole journey on foot, because it would take too long: they couldn't leave Shizun's body for more than a day.
In the end, Binghe falsified a nearby night hunt, and walked down the mountain, and Peak Lord Liu picked him up at the foot of the sect's hills, stiff and apparently displeased the whole trip, and glaring at Peak Lord Shang when he looked amused by the two of them sharing Cheng Luan. They flew faster than Binghe had ever flown before, and he was a little surprised that Peak Lord Shang could keep up.
Huan Hua Palace disciples had come to see what the disturbance was when the maze array was broken, but Gongyi Xiao helped them find the cave without questioning them further, despite his obvious curiosity. Binghe had only seen him in passing during the Conference, though he had heard a great deal about his bravery in the aftermath.
"Your shizun was very brave," was all Gongyi Xiao said. "Our Palace Master was grieved at his loss. He was very impressed by your rescue of our disciples, and said you would be welcome to visit Huan Hua Palace at any time." He sounded confused about this, but genuinely welcoming.
Binghe thought that was unlikely, but he knew better than to be rude, and he was distracted by a giant snake right about then, anyway. The creature was monstrous, man-sized, but easily three times as long. It looked unhealthy: its scales were patchy, mottled, and incredibly ugly. It was, somehow, almost pitiful.
"No, don't—" Binghe exclaimed, before he could stop himself.
Gongyi Xiao gave him an odd look, but he stopped drawing his sword, the blade only half-unsheathed.
"It's not bothering anyone," Binghe said, thinking fast, and grateful he'd done some research on this area before they set out. "There are no complaints from the local villages, are there? It might be a necessary part of the local ecosystem."
Gongyi Xiao looked at the two Peak Lords.
Shang Qinghua just shrugged.
"Mn," Peak Lord Liu said, and took his hand away from his sword.
Binghe halted in surprise: Peak Lord Liu loved killing monsters, and this was clearly a demon snake. Liu-shishu had killed more demonic monsters than anyone else Binghe knew. Binghe tried not to think about that, most of the time. It had been reassuring, before he knew he was a half-demon. Now it was confusing, and faintly terrifying.
Some of Binghe's confusion must have shown on his face, and Peak Lord Liu looked as if he were annoyed to be stating the obvious.
"It wouldn't be any challenge, or teach you anything, if you fought it now. It would only slow us down."
Gongyi Xiao watched the snake slither away with evident distaste, and Binghe watched his other companions closely. Peak Lord Shang looked curious, and a little afraid; Peak Lord Liu only looked impatient, as if this were a delay they could ill afford, and nothing more.
It turned out the seed was a kind of mushroom. Binghe gathered half of them, leaving some to re-seed the area in the future, in case they had to try again. Then he gave them to Peak Lord Shang, along with the qi-infused medallion, and two small vials of Shizun's blood, extracted with delicate care from a tiny incision in the tip of one finger. It had been slow, careful work to get the blood to flow enough to drip into a vial, but they needed to prime the seed to accept Shizun's soul, to pull it out of the cycle of reincarnation.
He didn't mention that his own blood was mixed in, two drops of concentrated demonic power in each vial. Peak Lord Liu wouldn't understand why Binghe's blood was needed, and Binghe wasn't about to explain that it was because he was a half-demon. He didn't think Peak Lord Liu would be all right with that, even if it was necessary to bring Shizun back.
Binghe stepped off Cheng Luan in the bamboo forest at midday, only a day and a half after he'd left. He immediately rushed back to his room, slipped in, and tried to center himself in the routine of infusing qi into his Shizun's spiritual veins.
It was harder work than he'd expected, and Binghe vowed never to let it go so long again.
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Chapter 3: Liu Qingge
Summary:
In which Liu Qingge has several difficult conversations, Shen Qingqiu haunts the narrative, and Luo Binghe continues to work hard.
Notes:
Remember AO3 is going to be down for scheduled maintenance on Friday, September 26, for about 20 hours starting at 7:30am UTC! (What time is that for me?) Download fic to keep yourself company while it's unavailable! Come back and comment when it's back up!
Chapter Text
Liu Qingge landed on Qing Jing Peak, already planning the moves he would be teaching the youngest Qing Jing disciples. He wondered if Luo Binghe would be able to spar again today. Yesterday he'd had a bout with a Bai Zhan disciple who wasn't skilled enough to pull his strikes, and sustained injuries that a more skilled attacker would have been able to prevent. Luo Binghe healed fast, even for a cultivator: Liu Qingge was, if he was entirely honest with himself, quite looking forward to teaching the boy how to avoid that particular attack.
Liu Qingge opened the door to the bamboo house. Only years of long practice keeping his body moving in a fight prevented him from stopping dead in his tracks at the utterly unexpected sight that met his eyes.
"Shidi," Yue Qingyuan greeted him, seated at the table with a cup of tea in his hands. His sword was propped directly next to him and his expression was set and darkly serious, which was a very bad sign.
"Zhangmen-shixiong," Liu Qingge said, and came the rest of the way into the room.
He propped Cheng Luan against the wall, visibly and obviously disarming himself, and took a seat across from Yue Qingyuan. Luo Binghe hovered after pouring him tea, all but wringing his hands, glancing between the peak lords with an expression of thinly-veiled despair.
"Shidi has been making frequent trips to Qing Jing Peak this last half year," Yue Qingyuan said, and Liu Qingge took a sip of his tea.
"Yes," he admitted, and waited to see where this would go, poised and patient. Yue Qingyuan was a formidable opponent: Liu Qingge would not strike at random, thereby opening himself to a counter-attack.
Yue Qingyuan made a small face at the stretching silence, revealing a bare flicker of annoyance.
"I see," he said. "Well then. Luo Binghe. Sit down."
Binghe sat, all but collapsing at the side of the table. He moved like a man mortally wounded, like his tendons had been cut and only qi and determination was keeping him going. The boy had moved like that in Jue Di Gorge, Liu Qingge remembered, when he had gotten to his feet still supporting Shen Qingqiu's limp body. He immediately shoved the thought aside. He preferred to remember Shen Qingqiu alive, when he could.
"Tell your shishu what I found in the side room," Yue Qingyuan said, and his tone was clear as ice and as implacable as an oncoming storm.
Oh, Liu Qingge thought. Oh no.
Luo Binghe's eyes flickered red for an instant, as they sometimes did in a fight, and Liu Qingge glared at him in disapproval of the slip-up, as he always did. The boy needed to be more careful: Liu Qingge had nearly killed him on sheer instinct, when he first found out, and only the fact that he had been in the midst of a nearly-lethal qi deviation had saved the boy's life. He had, in fact, been saving Liu Qingge's life from that qi deviation, unasked, and at great risk to himself. Between the life debt, and the fact of his having been Shen Qingqiu's favorite disciple, Liu Qingge had decided to wait and watch. And, to his surprise, the boy seemed exactly the same as he had before his Shizun's death: kind and respectful to his shixiongs, even when they were weaker than him, dutiful, and unwaveringly dedicated to the task of bringing Shen Qingqiu back from the dead by following what he claimed was a divine text.
"Yue-zhangmen heard rumors," Luo Binghe said. His tone wavered, his voice almost cracking with the strain, though he was well past the age at which his voice ought to have settled. "He made me open the door to the side room, which he was told no one else can open."
So, Liu Qingge thought, Qing Jing Peak had a spy, and one who had checked that particular door.
He and Shang Qinghua had agreed that the locking mechanism had been a necessary precaution. Liu Qingge had hoped no one would care enough to snoop on a disciple's room, to wonder at such a space being locked. And surely that alone had not roused suspicion. But Luo Binghe was still speaking.
"…he entered with me. He saw Shizun's body."
Luo Binghe put his head in his hands, and his next words were muffled.
"He wants to bury shizun," he gasped, and his voice was thick with repressed sobs. "He wants—he wants to bury shizun's body."
Liu Qingge's vision went clear, steady, as it did in the crucial moment of a fight. He knew, in that moment, that he would not allow harm to come to Shen Qingqiu's body, no matter how seemingly impossible the task of resurrection. He had not worked so hard to give up hope now.
There was, all of a sudden, the faintest flicker of reddish light between Luo Binghe's fingers, in the center of his forehead, right where a demon seal would be. It was a demon mark Liu Qingge had not seen elsewhere, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. The most human-looking demons were often the strongest, and the most likely to remain in the Demon Realm. The light flickered again, just a little stronger.
Liu Qingge felt his stomach drop at the lack of control that implied.
"I understand," he said, and heard his voice come out sharp and pointed, terse as it ever was when he was focused, when he had no energy to spare to soften his tone, to puzzle out other people's feelings and baffling social expectations.
Standing, he pulled Luo Binghe to his feet with a jerk, not allowing him to move his hands away from his face.
"You have done enough," he said, and shoved the boy from the house. "Go sit in the side room. I will handle this."
No matter what, he couldn't allow Yue Qingyuan to learn of the boy's heritage. Not ever, if he had his way, but especially not now, when Yue Qingyuan was already angry, already feeling betrayed.
Their sect leader had never been rational where Shen Qingqiu was concerned. He had always allowed Shen Qingqiu more leeway, more goodwill, more permission to behave terribly than anyone else; whether by implicit ignorance, selective hearing, or explicit acts of shelter. After Shen Qingiqu's qi deviation, Yue Qingyuan had seemed confused and upset by his changed demeanor in a way no one else had been, but his preferential treatment had continued all the same.
He had taken Shen Qingqiu's death exactly as hard as anyone might have expected, masking his obvious grief with the observance of exacting levels of propriety. Liu Qingge had considered what he would do if they were discovered. Somehow, he had never expected Yue Qingyuan to object to their scheme this forcefully, to demand the immediate destruction of the body. He had, shamefully enough, not considered the social or interpersonal implications of their being discovered, only the practical: an escape route, and the preservation of the body.
The door into the depths of the bamboo hut clicked shut behind Luo Binghe, who stumbled off with what might have been a muffled sob. Liu Qingge turned back to the room. He did not allow himself to so much as glance at Cheng Luan, propped by the door. Instead he went back to the table, sat, and took a sip of tea.
"Zhangmen-shixiong took the news of a single locked door very seriously," he ventured, attempting a testing strike.
Yue Qingyuan laughed, low and bitter.
"I took seriously the news that an unconscious body appeared to be locked in a disciple's private room on a peak without a living master," he said. "It explains why Luo Binghe has been so unwilling to leave or enter his own room in daylight, does it not?"
So. There was at least one spy on Qing Jing Peak, and they had been watching Luo Binghe in particular.
If Liu Qingge was correct, this meant that flying in on Cheng Luan to drop Luo Binghe off on Qing Jing Peak at midday after their recovery of the Sun and Moon Dew Flower Seed had been a mistake, no matter how much the boy had begged for haste.
"Luo Binghe has been working with his fellow disciples to keep the peak running. He has been keeping up with paperwork, studying, researching, sparring, and working himself to the bone for the good of the peak," Liu Qingge countered. "Keeping long hours is only to be expected."
"He has been illicitly preserving a corpse, and keeping it in his own bed," Yue Qingyuan replied, tone even. His knuckles were white with strain.
Put that way, it did sound strange. But there had been nowhere else to hide the body, and the boy had been insistent that he always slept sitting up on the floor.
Liu Qingge wanted to rage, to strike out, but his goal was not a martial victory, but a strategic one: he needed to keep Shen Qingqiu's body safe. What would his shixiong have done in this situation? He had always been a strategist, even after his qi deviation, when he had stopped weighing personal gain above all else. Liu Qingge ran through options, counter-strikes, and knew Shen Qingqiu would tell him to wait, to gather more information.
"And if I am not mistaken, you have been helping him," Yue Qingyuan continued. The look on his face was still, angry, stern.
"Yes," Liu Qingge agreed, and took another sip of tea. Patience, shidi, he heard Shen Qingqiu say, and shoved down a shudder at how easily he could summon his dead shixiong's voice.
But he paused to see how Yue Qingyuan would respond. Their Sect Leader was many things, but he had never been patient where Shen Qingqiu was concerned.
"You knew!" Yue Qingyuan exclaimed, his famous control slipping for a moment, showing an astonishingly raw grief before he clawed his composure back into place. He took a deep breath. "Why would you—would you defile Shen Qingqiu in this way, Liu-shidi? Was his untimely death not enough for you?"
Liu Qingge put down the teacup, carefully, because it was one of Shen Qingqiu's favorites, and he didn't want to break it with the strength of his grip.
"I have helped because I have hope," he said.
Yue Qingyuan stared at him, expression entirely blank.
"You have hope," he said. "That is—impossible. The dead do not live again. You will stop this madness, and Shen Qingqiu's body will be cremated and the ashes interred in his existing grave."
He spoke with the certainty of a man whose edicts were not denied, the man who had sealed the Demonic Emperor, the Sect Leader of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, the wielder of the Xuan Su Sword.
Liu Qingge's hands formed into fists on his knees.
Patience, shidi, he heard Shen Qingqiu say, in his soft, kind voice. And, at the same time, in the sneering, superior cadences beside which he had grown up, the same voice said in calculating tones: That's a weakness to exploit. Strike hard and fast and take advantage of his care.
"Zhangmen-shixiong may be content to mourn his shidi's loss forever," Liu Qingge said, and he didn't try to soften his tone at all. "The Sect Leader may not care enough to attempt the impossible."
Perhaps Yue Qingyuan took a small breath at that. Perhaps not. Liu Qingge kept talking.
"But we have found a way to bring Shen Qingqiu back to the world of the living. I cannot allow you to prevent that."
The silence held sway, and Liu Qingge knew it was not sufficient, not yet. Hit harder, he heard. Show no mercy, not if you want to achieve your aim. It sounded nothing like the Shen Qingqiu who had saved him, and everything like Shen Jiu, the angry head disciple with whom Liu Qingge had fought so often. He knew, suddenly, what words would win this fight, the same way he sometimes saw what single strike would end a battle.
"If you ever truly cared for Shen Qingqiu, Zhangmen-shixiong, you would not stand in the way of his resurrection. But perhaps he was right to doubt you."
Liu Qingge glared at Yue Qingyuan. Tension crackled in the air between them for a moment, and then Yue Qingyuan looked away, blinking suddenly bright eyes. He looked smaller, though his posture did not change, his shoulders did not slump.
"You really think it's possible," he said. His voice was soft. It almost wavered. "You think—" he swallowed, and did not continue.
Liu Qingge nodded.
"I do," he said, and he even tried to soften his tone, to convey some kind of reassurance.
It was mostly true, barring his midnight moments of doubt, and it was what Yue Qingyuan needed to hear.
Surely that would make him leave them alone, make him leave Qing Jing Peak before Luo Binghe came back in and revealed his demonic heritage to the man who had sealed Tianlang-Jun under a mountain all those years ago. Liu Qingge was confident in his ability to keep a secret; he was confident in his ability to defeat many, even most of the threats to Luo Binghe's life, if his secret were revealed. He knew he could not defeat Yue Qingyuan, should the sect leader draw his sword with intent.
"Very well," Yue Qingyuan said. "But shidi. Be careful. This cannot become widely known."
And he stood and left without another word.
* * *
Luo Binghe clasped Shizun's hand, passing it qi slowly and oh-so-gently. The door to the side room was closed, which meant the noise-blocking talismans built into all of the walls of the bamboo house had activated: he couldn't hear anything. Peak Lord Liu might be persuaded by, might be agreeing with Peak Lord Yue: they could be about to come in and seize Shizun's body, and then there would be nothing he could do, not against the two of them.
Not against either of them, he thought, and unbidden, remembered his shixiongs' stories about how Yue-zhangmen had defeated Tianlang-Jun, the last Heavenly Demon, had bound him under a mountain, even when everyone else together from all the gathered sects had been unable to face the Demon Emperor's might.
His spiritual qi wavered, and Binghe took a deep breath and focused on suppressing his demonic qi and feeding Shizun a steady, placid, soothing stream of energy. If he wore himself out like this, the light from his huadian would fade. His two qi systems did still seem to be linked, somehow, such that exhausting his spiritual qi tamped down on his reserves of demonic qi.
It's odd, Meng Mo had told him, but half-breeds are rare, and viable ones even more so. It might be because of your heritage, or a remnant of the cradle seal. What have I told you about being ungrateful for a gift?
Meng Mo had told him to visibly and obviously check for poison, magic, or other kinds of sabotage, as well as hidden obligations or expectations before accepting any kind of gift, no matter how small, but Binghe hadn't thought that reminding Meng Mo of that would help at the time.
Now, feeling his demonic qi settle, Binghe was grateful for the link, no matter what its origin. He fell into meditation, and for a while, all that existed was his meridians, and Shizun's body, meridians choppy and jagged in places, narrow and winding in others. By now, Binghe felt he knew them nearly as well as his own.
He roused to a knock on the door, sharp, abrupt, familiar.
"It's me," came Peak Lord Liu's voice.
Binghe got to his feet and went to open the door, unthinking in his apprehension, hasty in his need to find out what had happened.
Peak Lord Liu took one look at him, pushed him back into the room, and snapped the door shut all in one swift motion.
"Be more careful," he said, and flicked Binghe in the forehead. "What if Zhangmen-shixiong had been with me? What if someone else saw?"
Binghe blinked at him and felt his legs go out from under him, wobbly and weak as overcooked noodles. Only Peak Lord Liu's hands at his shoulders kept him from crumpling to the ground.
"—What?" Binghe gasped.
The hands on his shoulders almost, but didn't quite hurt, the grip firm but careful. Peak Lord Liu lowered him to the floor and then sat cross legged across from him, propping Cheng Luan against the door, behind him. The sword wasn't out of reach, exactly, but it might be a sign of trust. Or maybe it was a sign of how little Peak Lord Liu thought of Binghe's fighting abilities.
"This," Peak Lord Liu said, and poked him in the forehead again. "Don't tell me you can't tell when it's showing."
Binghe blinked at him.
"No, I—" his feelings were a maelstrom, as unidentifiable as the sands and snow of the Northern Desert during one of its famously lethal sandstorms. He could see a flickering against Peak Lord Liu's white and blue-grey robes. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and counted backwards from ten in the mystery language Shizun had sometimes muttered to himself when he was particularly upset and trying to calm down.
When he opened his eyes the light had faded, and Peak Lord Liu was still there, staring squarely at his forehead. It took all of Binghe's willpower not to break and run, or burst out crying.
"Better," Peak Lord Liu said. He sounded almost as if he approved, the way he did when Binghe had nearly gotten a tricky bit of footwork right when they were sparring.
"You're not surprised," Binghe said, feeling blank, baffled.
He looked around the room as if it might have answers. It remained small and bare, devoid of any real personal touches beyond Binghe's cultivation manual and a small stack of books in the corner.
Peak Lord Liu blinked. It was more surprise than Binghe had ever seen him display before.
"The huadian first showed during my qi deviation," he said. "You're lucky it happened after you'd brought me out of the worst of it."
He left unspoken the fact that a conscious War God—one who hadn't been as weak as a kitten, drained to the brink of death from trying to clear a corpse's meridians—would have flattened Binghe like a bug, and with as little thought.
"But—" Binghe tried to fit this into his understanding of his shishu, and failed. "But I'm a demon!" he exclaimed.
"And I owe you a life debt," Peak Lord Liu said, as if it were that simple. Perhaps it was, for him.
"Besides," he continued. "Your Shizun told you to be good, and in the time since then, the only objectionable thing you've done is pretend you believe your Shang-shishu's lies about holy texts, when we both know he's getting his information somewhere else." He paused, and Binghe waited for something terrible, some kind of revelation of his previously unknown faults.
"Well," he added. "And your footwork when you're on the defensive is horrifying, but you're working on that."
Binghe gaped.
"What?" Peak Lord Liu said. "You knew your footwork was bad."
Binghe laughed, a little choking sound, and felt himself relaxing just a bit. Trust Peak Lord Liu to think his footwork was more important than the fact that he was hiding being a half-demon while a disciple of a righteous sect.
He took a deep breath, and tried to focus.
"Yue-zhangmen," he said. "What—"
"He'll ignore Shen Qingqiu's body for now," Peak Lord Liu told him. "But be more discreet. Put up illusion talismans over the bed, then let someone who gossips see the empty room once or twice."
Binghe nodded, already planning how to make the talismans. He'd have to get into the hall master section of the library, but he had a pass, forged in Shizun's handwriting, as he'd done for so much paperwork over the year or two before the Conference, to lighten Shizun's load.
"All right," Binghe said.
Ning Yingying would do nicely, he thought, or perhaps one of Ming Fan's friends, the skinny one with thin hair, whose name Binghe refused to use out of sheer spite. He had been present when Binghe's mother's medallion had been lost, and he'd laughed and kicked Binghe in the ribs as he cried.
"You can tell when it's showing, can't you?" Peak Lord Liu asked.
Binghe blinked.
"Yes," he said. "Usually it's sealed better than that, I just—seeing Zhangmen-shibo here was a bad shock. I won't let it happen again."
Peak Lord Liu made a mn noise, but let it be.
They sat in silence for a moment. It didn't feel the same as silences with Shizun had, no paper rustling as one or both of them read or did paperwork, but it didn't feel bad either.
"Good," Peak Lord Liu said, finally. He glanced over at the bed, where Shen Qingqiu's one hand was clasped over his chest, and the other lay sprawled on the thin mattress. "I'll take over," he said. "Go practice your footwork before you start on the talismans."
It was a clear dismissal. Oddly, though, it felt almost friendly.
"Yue-zhangmen—" Binghe began, because even if Peak Lord Liu had managed to convince him, Binghe didn't want to run into the man who had sealed Tianlang-Jun, and especially not when he was in a bad mood.
"Is back on his own peak, if he knows what's good for him," Peak Lord Liu grumbled, as if he, too, were not currently on a peak other than his own.
Binghe nodded.
"He'll be furious when he finds out," he heard himself saying.
What are you doing? Meng Mo demanded. This one hasn't killed you yet: are you trying to force his hand?
Binghe wasn't entirely sure, himself.
"Yes," Peak Lord Liu replied. He was already holding Shizun's hand in his own, circulating qi. The fact that he could talk while doing this was another sign of how far ahead of Luo Binghe he was in his cultivation. "He will. So make sure he doesn't find out until Shen Qingqiu is awake again, to intercede for you."
Awake, he said, as if Shizun were sleeping. To intercede for you, he said, as though there was no doubt in his mind that Shizun would take Luo Binghe's side, even against his sect siblings.
Binghe nodded.
"Now scram," Peak Lord Liu said. "You have better things to do than stand there."
Binghe left to practice his footwork, as he'd been instructed.
I swear you have a death wish, Meng Mo muttered, in the back of his head, keeping up a running commentary for the rest of the morning, unusually active for the daytime. It was harder to focus on his forms with a voice in the back of his mind, but Binghe was becoming accustomed to Meng Mo's soliloquies by now, and tuned him out with something that might almost have been called ease.
The visual illusion talismans, when Binghe found the right ones in a book at the back of the library later that day, were tricky to draw, but not impossible. There was a particular flick to the fingers that was especially unusual, and that Binghe only knew how to do because he'd seen Shizun do it a handful of times, when he was surreptitiously watching his elegant calligraphy instead of doing his own paperwork.
He drew a few on normal paper, to be sure he had the strokes right, burned them, and drew the requisite seven on the best talisman paper available on Shizun's shelves, and one extra in case he needed to replace one, or made a mistake in activating them.
Once infused with qi and placed at the needed points in the room, they worked even on Binghe himself, unless he focused particularly hard. Then he saw a blurry double image, like he was seeing things through cloudy water, or reflected in a tarnished silver mirror. He stepped into the array and the scene firmed up: a slim, pale-faced body lying on a bed almost, but not quite, too short for it. Binghe took a deep breath, then closed the door behind himself, and sat down to infuse Shizun's body with qi, lest time begin to set its hooks into his immortal flesh.
It was simple enough to pretend to sleep in on a day Binghe knew Ning Yingying would be the first other person in the bamboo house. Easy enough, to wander out of the side room only after she was in line of sight, and to stand in the open door sleepily talking to her for long enough for her to get a full view of the room. She hid her curiosity better than she had before Shizun's death, Binghe thought, and wondered who had been teaching her to be so sly. He shook the thought off as uncharitable, stepped out, closed the door carefully, and went about his day.
The next day, Ming Fan's friend trailed him back to the bamboo house after dinner, allegedly asking questions about a book Binghe had borrowed from the library. The boy had never shown an interest in the flora of the Northern Deserts of the Demon Wastes before, but Binghe answered his questions. When the boy asked to borrow the book, Binghe agreed. In a carefully-planned set of choreographed moves, he opened the door to the side room, stepped just barely inside, knelt down to take the book from a stack by the entrance, and, having allowed the other boy plenty of time to peruse the seemingly empty room, and even lean in slightly, Binghe handed him the book and shut the door firmly in his face.
It was only a day or two later that a mail tube from An Ding Peak arrived, with a very small scroll inside for Binghe in the strange sigils Shang Qinghua had taught him as a kind of code.
"Rumors have changed to mocking the initial gossips: names listed below."
There was a list of the people who were now being mocked. These were the disciples and hall masters who had been spreading the first rumor about Binghe keeping a body in his room. Binghe memorized all the names, noted that Ming Fan's friend had been among them. Then he burned the list in the little ceramic jar he kept on Shizun's desk for just such a purpose and stirred the ashes thoroughly.
In the following weeks and months, Binghe settled into a monotonous routine. In the mornings, he continued his dawn habit of rising at dawn and doing research in the library until correspondence needed to be done. He and Ming Fan began to divide Shizun's letters with more and more ease. When Ning Yingying came to retrieve him for lunch, Binghe occasionally retrieved something from the side room, just to be sure she would see the illusion of an empty bed.
It was the afternoons that changed: Binghe began attending advanced swordsmanship lessons, which Peak Lord Liu taught twice a week. Sometimes Peak Lord Liu would come with a night hunt request, and toss it to him.
"Go take care of this," he said the first time. "Young people shouldn't be so cooped up."
After the rumors had died down, Binghe had worked with Peak Lord Shang to make two platinum bells whose clappers each contained a drop of his blood, so someone else could enter if they needed to, if Binghe were detained, if something went wrong. Peak Lord Shang had added it to his belt, next to a white jade medallion; Peak Lord Liu had simply shrugged and tied the bell to his sword hilt.
The first night hunt had gone smoothly enough. The giant spiny-tusked lizard-moose he has been sent after had been larger than expected, nearly the size of a cottage, but Binghe had been able to identify its reverse scale, on its belly, not its throat, and had killed it swiftly before setting up preserving talismans around the corpse for recovery by An Ding disciples.
Binghe's heart had been in his throat when he entered the bamboo house. With his skin freshly scrubbed in the disciples' baths, and hair still faintly wet, he had to blink several times before the illusion resolved itself, as if he had lost some kind of resistance to the talismans by being gone for two days.
But Shizun's body was fine. The qi in his meridians was ebbing, but it felt like Peak Lord Liu, and Binghe let out a breath in relief. They could do this, after all.
That night, Binghe held Shizun's hand pressed between two of his own, and when he slept, he dreamed of the past.
Binghe didn't often dream of Shizun: his control over his dreams was too good for his unconscious to surprise him, and Meng Mo had warned him against the dangers of dreams. Binghe wanted to talk to Shizun too much, wanted to hold his hand warm between his own too badly. If he allowed himself, he might fall into dreaming like the lotus-eaters Meng Mo had told him about, and then Shizun would never be more than a dream.
When he woke, Binghe realized he hadn't only dreamed of Shizun this time: instead he'd dreamed of making tea for Shizun and Peak Lord Liu, of serving them their favorite snacks, of sitting with them while Peak Lord Liu cleared Shizun's meridians.
Binghe shook his head, and went to the library. He may have already found the information about the Sun and Moon Dew Flower, but there was still too much he didn't know. If he was steady about it, he could finish reading every book in the hallmasters’ and instructors’ sections of the library in the next year. After that, if he forged Shizun's signature again and sweet-talked the head librarian a little bit more, he could read the unique books in the Qiong Ding library in the year or two that followed.
Ning Yingying pulled him from the bamboo house for dinner, now, in addition to lunch, and he began to eat with her friends. Many of them were near strangers to Binghe, who had never lived in the disciples' dormitories, even before he had moved into Shizun's side room.
"You need more friends, A-Luo," Ning Yingying said, and whoever had taught her to be more sly about her sneaking had also taught her determination, because she refused to give up.
Binghe only ate alone after that when he was on a night hunt, or on evenings when Ning Yingying was invited to Xian Shu Peak. It was odd, to be surrounded by his peers, after so long avoiding them, but it wasn't bad. And apparently his stalwart insistence on choosing replacement instructors who cared about teaching, instead of letting Ming Fan appoint those who were the best at their art, had earned him friends in the strangest places.
Binghe's afternoons started to include sparring with his shixiongs, and with Peak Lord Liu. Then he started teaching his shixiongs things Peak Lord Liu had taught him. By the time the fourth year had passed, Binghe knew all of his shixiongs by name and by favorite foods. He had learned which hall masters and instructors and peak members of Shizun's generation responded well to clear instructions and which needed to be convinced something was their own idea. He had established a new filing system and finally persuaded Ming Fan to use it.
So when he sat down at his desk—they still never used Shizun's desk—and found a message tube from An Ding, Binghe expected only a requisition for new practice swords, or a note about the vicious excoriation Ming Fan had subjected an An Ding disciple to on the topic of inkstone quality.
It did contain the latter, in Peak Lord Shang's own hand.
But it also contained another note.
"The plant body is nearly ready to be woken."
Binghe blinked at the tiny scroll, reading and re-reading the small letters. The letters shook. No, it was his hand that was shaking.
"Bring your Liu-shishu to my Leisure House tomorrow at dawn," the note continued, and Binghe marveled at how much more authoritative Shang-shishu sounded when he was writing than when he was speaking. "And bring a full set of robes for Shen-shixiong."
That last part went without saying, of course. Binghe had been keeping a full set of robes, a set of combs and hair oil, and a set of towels in his qiankun pouch for the last month, just in case anything went wrong, in case Shizun woke early. Shizun wouldn't want for anything when he woke up, Binghe was determined to be sure of it.
Binghe had been worried about it for some time, because Peak Lord Shang had raised the question of fertilizers and accelerative potions several times, and had needed to be talked out of it. Binghe wasn't sure Peak Lord Shang had always been honest about whether or not he had attempted them before telling Binghe and Peak Lord Liu about the possible experiments.
In any case, Binghe thought. Tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning, Shizun might wake up.
He burned the note, stirred the ashes, and burned another three notes on top of it, so the ashes were thoroughly mixed.
Binghe went through the motions of the day in such a haze that one of his shixiongs managed to land a blow while sparring. His shixiong actually apologized, and Binghe just waved it off, causing a round of whispers that he barely noticed, too busy wondering if he ought to add a batch of sugared dried plums to his planned list of snacks. Instead of sparring more, Binghe excused himself, claiming he felt unwell.
He spent the rest of the afternoon cooking Shizun's favorite sweets, making sure there would be plenty of morsels for him to snack on while he settled into his new body. Plants liked sugars, Binghe thought, and Shizun had always had a sweet tooth and enjoyed his cooking. He wasn't sure what else he could do to welcome Shizun back, to make it clear he was sorry, that he'd been good as instructed. Pork buns were a safe bet, and would transport reasonably easily without being obvious. Binghe packed a tea set as well, just in case Shizun was thirsty.
In the end, Binghe hardly slept that night. Each time his eyes closed, he saw visions of the plant body rotting, as he'd seen spiritual plants rot when exposed to too much demonic energy. In one dream, Shizun's body mildewed and rotted at his touch, and Shizun died all over again, this time with words of blame on his lips. Each time he woke, he felt compelled to check Shizun's meridians, to be sure that he hadn't spread demonic qi into Shizun's spiritual system, that he hadn't damaged Shizun's body beyond repair. Each time, all was well, but Binghe felt dread hanging over him like a sword on a fraying string, and his dreams remained unsettled and wearying.
Enough of this, Meng Mo finally said, and took control of Binghe's dreams, dragging him into a deep, restorative sleep with a strength Binghe had rarely seen before.
When Binghe arrived in the walled garden behind Peak Lord Shang's Leisure House, dawn was still some time off. There were mild traces of demonic qi lingering on some of the carved rock benches, but Binghe paid them no mind, more concerned with the small pit in the ground from which were coming the sounds of swearing in Peak Lord Shang's distinctive voice.
"Shang-shishu," Binghe called. "I'm here."
"Oh shit," he heard, and then Peak Lord Shang's head popped into view, hair more disheveled than usual. "Good," he said. "Where's your Liu-shishu. Get down here and help me move the body, it weighs a million tons."
Peak Lord Liu slipped silently into view from behind Binghe. Peak Lord Shang squeaked in surprise, sounding like nothing so much as a kind of furred lizard from the borderlands, the small ones that were kept as pets sometimes by human children, who had them run in mazes or wheels.
Binghe was fairly sure that Peak Lord Liu had done that on purpose, to scare Peak Lord Shang, and he felt his lips quirk up into the beginnings of a smile, even as he walked over to the edge of the hole in the ground. He immediately sprang back, and pulled a large towel from his sleeve.
"Cover him up!" he managed, voice coming out much higher than usual.
"That's indecent!" Peak Lord Liu said, at the same time. His voice actually cracked.
"Huh?" Peak Lord Shang looked down at the body, only now seeming to notice its nakedness. "Oh, yeah, right. Uh. Whoops? Forgot about the xianxia modesty thing."
Binghe didn't know what on earth he was talking about, but set it aside for later, just handing Peak Lord Shang the towel to wrap around Shizun's new body's hips.
Between the three of them, they managed to get Shizun's body out of the pit, cleaned up, dressed, and sitting up against a conveniently chair-like rock. He looked almost exactly like he had before, facial features cool and elegant, bones thin and birdlike. But this body was heavier than Shizun's had been, the muscles more fully developed. Binghe allowed himself to hope that Shizun would be healthier, now, to hope that he wouldn't still be afflicted with Without A Cure.
Binghe was combing the last bits of hair oil through Shizun's hair when the body stirred, beginning to breathe just as the first rays of light played across its face.
There was a moment of breathless anticipation, in which it felt like no one breathed except for Shizun. His breaths became deeper, slower, falling into a pattern almost like sleep.
Binghe let out his breath, and began combing again.
A hand lashed out, lightning-quick, and grabbed his wrist.
"What," a sharp voice demanded, "are you doing."
Binghe was abruptly yanked around to sprawl on the ground before Shizun. He saw Shizun's eyes look him up and down, glance at Peak Lords Shang and Liu, and focus back on his own face, on the snacks and tea set that had been knocked out of place when Binghe had been thrown to the ground with shocking strength and viciousness.
"Who gave you the right to touch this master," Shizun said.
Binghe felt his stomach drop in horror.
"Little monster," Shizun snapped. "Get out of my sight." His voice was as cold as a winter wind, and his eyes glinted like chips of jade. There was none of Binghe's Shizun's warmth and care in that gaze, only the old, frigid hatred.
Binghe stared, frozen, unable to make himself move as he stared up at the Shizun who had poured boiling hot tea on his head, the immortal master who had ordered him beaten bloody so many times Binghe had begun to lose count.
"Little beast," Shizun spat. "Are you disobeying me?"
Something deep in Binghe knew that tone, even after so many years.
"No, Shizun," he said, scrambling to his feet and bowing deeply. "This disciple apologizes," he managed, feeling his heart in his throat, the shards of lost hopes as sharp as shattered porcelain.
Binghe fled without a backwards glance.
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Chapter 4: Mobei-Jun
Summary:
In which Shang Qinghua arranges for Luo Binghe to go on an "educational field trip" and Mobei-Jun is reluctantly impressed.
Chapter Text
Mobei-Jun looked at the seemingly-human child standing before him without many expectations.
It had been interesting, several years ago, when the boy had unsealed a Heavenly Demon mark during their fight. Having chosen to hide among humans for the intervening time, rather than attempt to reclaim his hereditary throne, Mobei-Jun had his doubts about the child's strength.
But Qinghua had asked him to keep the boy alive. And while Mobei-Jun did not particularly want to be a glorified babysitter, Qinghua had been unusually insistent, willing to persist in begging long past the point at which he would ordinarily have been deterred by a growl or a raised hand. That determinedly stubborn persistence, more than anything else, had made Mobei-Jun agree.
"Come," he said, and waited for the boy to attack.
There was a long, awkward pause during which no one moved.
"Do you not wish to be stronger?" Mobei-Jun asked.
The child nodded, seeming reluctant to respond to him. He had an impressive glare, for a human.
"Then come," he repeated. "Attack me."
"My king!" Qinghua squawked.
The boy needed no further invitation. He grinned, and darted forwards.
Mobei-Jun waved a hand, and a sheet of ice appeared under the boy's feet. He grimaced, but did not lose his footing: probably channeling qi into his footsteps to firm up his stance. The first blow was easy enough to deflect, and Mobei-Jun was delighted when it turned out to be a feint. The boy tested him several times, reflexes fast enough to avoid the occasional ice dagger. Mobei-Jun glanced at Qinghua, who looked nervous, but not overly so—he was not yet pulling at his hair, or chewing on his fingers, as he did when he was truly distressed.
Mobei-Jun toyed with the child for a time, until he lost his footing on another ice slick, and froze, pinned by an ice sword hovering over his throat.
All in all, however, it had not been as disappointing a fight as Mobei-Jun had anticipated. Should he drop the boy in the borderlands, even without a proper weapon, he would probably last more than a few weeks.
"Fine," he said, and opened a portal to his kingdom with a wave of his hand. "Follow me."
The boy, whose name Mobei-Jun would probably have to learn at some point, locked eyes with Qinghua for a long moment.
"I'll take care of him," Qinghua said. "And your Liu-shishu too. Go on."
Bored of this exchange, Mobei-Jun stepped through the portal, which began to narrow swiftly after him. The boy managed to dive through before it closed. Good, Mobei-Jun thought. He had halfway decent reflexes after all.
The boy followed close behind him as they walked through the outer halls of the Northern Palace. He was clearly alert, but made no noises of surprise, as Qinghua had done on his first few trips here.
"These will be your rooms," Mobei-Jun told him, stopping before a suite that, in his father's day, had been his next-oldest brother's rooms. That brother had been soft, through and through, more like the Southern concubine who bore him than like a true scion of the Mobei line. He had died before coming of age, killed by their eldest brother in a pre-emptive strike that Mobei-Jun himself had escaped despite being several years younger and quite a bit smaller.
The rooms were in the same complex as those occupied by Qinghua. That meant they were close enough to Mobei-Jun's own to signal the king's interest, far enough away that anyone housed in them would have to make at least some noise to launch an attack on the king's own quarters.
"Thank you," said the child.
He bowed, deep and slow. Mobei-Jun could have taken off his head in a dozen ways in the time his gaze was downturned: humans really were strange.
"Stand up," he snapped. "Don't do that. It leaves you unguarded for too long."
The boy stood up, looking puzzled.
"Do you think expressing gratitude means you are safe?" Mobei-Jun demanded. "I could have taken your head off easily while you were bent like that."
"Oh," the boy said.
"What are you called," Mobei-Jun demanded. He would not have earned the title of his ancestors: Mobei-Jun would not call him Tianlang-Jun. Not yet, and more than likely not ever.
"I'm Luo Binghe," he said, looking more puzzled. "You didn't ask who I was before you agreed to take me in?" he asked.
Mobei-Jun just stared at him.
"What does that have to do with your name?" He asked.
Among the higher ranks of demons, a childhood name had little weight, and almost no connection to one's abilities or worthiness. It was shed as soon as possible, in order to earn an adult name or a hereditary family title.
"Oh," Luo Binghe said, and it looked almost as if he could guess what Mobei-Jun had been thinking. "You are the Mobei-Jun," he said. "That's your title and your name?"
Mobei-Jun nodded. There was no need to tell the boy that he had not yet fully ascended, that he had yet to devour his father's power in full.
"These are your rooms," he said, instead, gesturing around them. "You are unlikely to be grievously harmed if you stay here, or if you are in my presence." He remembered Qinghua's insistence that he explain things as if Luo Binghe were a much younger child, or a slightly slow human, and added: "You will go armed outside of these rooms."
He looked at Luo Binghe, who bore no sword, and who, according to Qinghua, would need to borrow a weapon for the duration of his stay for apparently lengthy reasons that Mobei-Jun had dismissed as irrelevant and stopped attending to.
"We will visit the armory after court."
He turned to leave, and Luo Binghe surprised him for the first time.
"Court?" He asked. "Can I—that is, would it be all right if I went with you?"
Mobei-Jun considered it. Today's court was almost entirely internal matters, and nothing terribly exciting. It should be fine, even if he was treating the child as something breakable.
"Fine," he said. "Do as I say, and stay out of the way."
The boy—Luo Binghe—nodded, and followed close on his heels. He was shivering slightly. Mobei-Jun did not offer him a cloak, or infuse him with qi: it would be instructive to see how the boy handled the temperature. Heavenly Demons in times past had been one of the races least bothered by the temperatures of the Northern Desert, and it was rumored that one of Mobei-Jun's several-great-grandmothers had carried a bastard child of a past Demonic Emperor, though that would have been hundreds of years ago by now, and was vanishingly unlikely. Demons did not often have accidental children.
Court was, as Mobei-Jun had anticipated, largely uneventful. Only one petitioner lied to him so offensively as to merit punishment. In a lenient mood, Mobei-Jun simply removed the woman's left arm at the shoulder, and even allowed her to see his court physician to have the wound cauterized before she departed.
Luo Binghe stood beside and behind his throne the entire time, and didn't make so much as a noise when the demoness' careening arm splattered blood across his pale green robes. It looked like most of his energy was going into not betraying how cold he was. Mobei-Jun could tell the signs of spiritual qi circulation for warmth, most notably the slight frizzing of hair that always left Qinghua's bun in a state that drove him to despair. The boy's hair was longer, more of it loose, and thicker. By the time court was over, he appeared to have something of a mane, rather than an ordinary human head of hair.
"Go," Mobei-Jun said, dismissing his court, and then strode to the doors to the right of the throne, pleased when Luo Binghe kept within arm's reach without being told.
They walked down hallway after hallway, and Luo Binghe kept up with Mobei-Jun's long stride in a way Qinghua never had.
"Is that usual?" Luo Binghe asked.
"Mn," Mobei-Jun replied. The boy waited patiently as they continued down a flight of stairs carved deep into the bedrock on which the castle was built.
"It was less violent than I expected," Luo Binghe finally said. He didn't sound shocked, or disgusted, just kind of abstractly curious. His teeth were beginning to chatter.
"A slow day," Mobei-Jun agreed.
They reached the end of the curling staircase and he cut his hand and traced a blood sigil onto the center of the door before them, freezing his blood before it could drip, feeling the blood crystals bite into the lightly etched lines of the protective spell that guarded this entrance.
The door opened.
The treasury into which Mobei-Jun took Luo Binghe was one of the least important ones in his domain, filled largely with tribute from weaker clans on the borders of his territory. It was one that Qinghua had organized for him when they were much younger, and then left in the care of several assistants. Mobei-Jun had not been inside it for some years, and he was displeased to see that someone had been slacking: there were snow-spider webs glistening in the corners of the floor, and small desiccated rodent corpses caught in their strands. The spiders were only a nuisance at smaller sizes, but if they fed enough to get larger than a palm's width, their venom could be irritatingly persistent.
Luo Binghe gasped in surprise and Mobei-Jun saw a spider the size of his head streaking across the wall towards him, alarmingly fast and sure-footed despite the ice patches he summoned beneath its feet, disgustingly nimble as it dodged the ice shards he aimed at it.
It had pounced on the boy before Mobei-Jun could remember the tricks his uncle had shown him to get rid of them the last time there had been an infestation, long before Qinghua's time.
Mobei-Jun watched the snow-spider land on the boy's shoulder, and had just long enough to think Qinghua is going to be so unhappy about this before the fangs struck flesh.
Luo Binghe, however, did not crumple to the floor. He did not frost over with rime and ice crystals, and he did not display any of the signs of poisoning. Instead he swore, and grabbed the first sharp thing to hand, using it to lever the spider off and pierce its weak point, under the join between its head and its abdomen.
"Ugh," Luo Binghe said, looking disgusted. "They're faster than I thought. Liu-shishu would be angry at me for reacting so slowly. He'd have caught it before it got its teeth in."
Linguang-Jun's suggestion had involved using servants as bait, Mobei-Jun recalled. He had killed the spiders in much this same way, though he himself had not been the one bitten. Mobei-Jun regarded this approach as a waste of perfectly good servants, and a cowardly way of killing a creature that had few defenses other than speed and poison. But his uncle had never been one to fight on an even playing-field when he could tip the scales in his favor. Looking back, Mobei-Jun sometimes wondered if his uncle had hoped Mobei-Jun himself would become bait for the spiders in place of the servants, but there was no way to know for sure.
"That stings," Luo Binghe said. His gaze went inward for a moment, and he shook his head. "Are there likely to be more of them?"
He looked down at the item in his hand: a star-tipped narwhal's horn, sharp and vicious, ethereal as moonlight and stronger than steel. He put it down quickly, as if he didn't want to touch it for too long. Wise, Mobei-Jun thought: the star-tipped narwhal's horn could drain a demon of qi within a day, if someone were fool enough to hold onto it for the full time.
"I should go first, if there are," Luo Binghe continued. "I need a sword."
Mobei-Jun looked at this half-human boy, who should by all rights be dead, crumpled into a dessicated heap on the floor of his outermost treasury. Even the Mobei line, native to the Northern Desert, were not immune to snow spider venom, though they could survive it with swift enough care.
Apparently Heavenly Demon immunity to poisons bred true after all. Mobei-Jun nodded towards a rack of swords on the closer wall. None were particularly valuable, but any would be an improvement on his bare hands, and all would stand up to having demonic qi channeled through them, which was one of the things Qinghua had asked that the boy be taught.
"Choose from those," he said, and continued walking into the treasury. It didn't take long to find the desiccated corpse of the previous steward of these halls, sprawled flat on her face, one hand thrown forwards as if in supplication.
Luo Binghe prodded the body with the sword, then turned it over.
"We need fire," he said, teeth chattering more robustly.
Mobei-Jun looked at him.
"Why," he asked.
"Not because I'm cold," Luo Binghe said, as if the idea were offensive. "Because it laid eggs in her belly, and if we don't kill them with fire—physical or spiritual—they'll hatch and overrun this level of the castle. A body this size could host a few thousand eggs and feed hundreds of them to adulthood." He paused. "Maybe more, maybe less," he admitted. "The books I read were more theoretical than I'd like."
"Not in here," Mobie-Jun said, because some of the items in this room needed to stay cold. Nothing in here would be a particular loss if it melted, but he wanted to see what this increasingly surprising boy would do.
"You'll need to clean the hall," Luo Binghe told him as they carried the body wrapped up in a banner made from the skins of colossal scorpion-tailed silver seals, which were conveniently waterproof and also burned well.
Depositing the body in the entryway, Luo Binghe looked around at the space, then shrugged.
"Good enough," he said.
Then he made a hand-sign, and the wrapped bundle burst into flames. There were horrible small popping sounds, and small keening noises. Luo Binghe only furrowed his brow, focusing hard.
That he could summon spiritual fire here, in the vaults of the castle of the Northern Desert, was impressive in and of itself. That he could burn an adult demon's corpse to feathery ash under such circumstances, with nothing but his spiritual qi, was more than a little alarming.
Mobei-Jun looked over at the young man standing beside him, seeing all at once the potential that simmered beneath the surface of his skin, and was, for the first time in a long time, almost afraid of another demon's strength. It was good that Qinghua had brought this half-human to learn demonic cultivation and behavior from him, after all. It would give Mobei-Jun the chance to assess his strength, and make him into an ally, rather than a tool for his uncle or his other opponents. And should he become a threat, rather than an ally, well. Shang Qinghua would get over the death of a single disciple, surely.
Luo Binghe, for his part, blinked back at him, smiled in triumph, and fainted dead away.
* * *
Luo Binghe woke up in the new rooms in the Northern Palace, all but buried under heaps of furs, with the sword he had picked laid close to his right hand. He was alone.
Shame washed through him as he recalled passing out in front of the Mobei-Jun. Peak Lord Shang had given him lecture after lecture about Mobei-Jun, about how they needed his help to get into the Holy Mausoleum, how Luo Binghe needed to make an ally of him and gain his respect through demonstrated strength.
Even knowing that this demon's willing help was necessary to bring back his Shizun, Binghe had struggled to contain his rage. His memories of the moments before Shizun's death had risen like a flood tide. He'd seen Shizun fighting Mobei-Jun again, Xiu Ya shattering, and Shizun crumpling into a boneless heap after trying to protect him. It had taken all his self-control, learned in long fights with Liu-shishu, to prevent him striking out in sheer fury, especially when Mobei-Jun had invited him to attack.
But blind rage wouldn't win any fights, and Binghe needed to win, to gain respect.
And, he thought, looking around the room, fainting like a child surely hadn't done him any favors in that regard, even if he had known how to destroy the snow-spider's eggs. What glory was there in killing something defenseless? What good would that do, in a demonic court, where strength of arms was weighed so heavily in the balance, and knowledge so little. And—Binghe recalled the world going swimmy around him with a grimace—what would Liu-shishu say to a disciple who misjudged his abilities so badly? What would Shizun say to a disciple who drained his qi to the point of passing out?
Binghe blinked hard at the thought, and then focused on dragging himself out from the pile of furs, forcing himself to catalog them as he struggled free. Some were from common enough monsters: white-pelted snowy dire wolves, the famously fierce dark-fanged Abyssal polar bears. Others were stranger: sharp-hooved moose-lions and what looked like they might be the rare Northern white-furred tiger-bats, which were, it seemed, larger than he had read. One fur he did not recognize at all.
Shizun would know what this is, he thought, petting the soft, deep black pelt, and was swamped by a wave of misery.
It had been bad enough on Qing Jing Peak, surrounded by the reminders of Shizun's presence, but at least there he had been able to shut himself in the side room of the bamboo hut and hold Shizun's hand between his, cold and delicate, and meditate while pushing qi through Shizun's gradually smoother meridians.
Now, though, Binghe was somewhere he'd never even dreamed of visiting, so far away it would take weeks of steady flying to get home.
And. He swallowed again, blinking fiercely. Home wasn't really there anymore. Shizun had woken up … wrong.
Binghe was hit by a wave of memory: the acid scorn in Shizun's voice, the sharp shove that had sent him sprawling to the ground. He remembered the way Liu-shishu had caught up with him before he got to Qing Jing Peak, how he had forced Binghe to fight until he had calmed down.
Binghe shook his head, as if he could free himself from those memories by force, and made himself stand up, lay the furs flat on the bed, and unpack some of his clothes from the qiankun pouch in his sleeve. There were several robes and cloaks in the wardrobe already, edged with black fur, embroidered in red.
There was a note pinned to the one at the top of the stack.
"These are for you, Binghe," it read.
It was in Peak Lord Shang's abysmally shaky handwriting, written in that strange code he had taught Binghe. Binghe had always wondered about that: surely when developing a coded language, Peak Lord Shang could have chosen symbols that were easier for him to write. But no, his handwriting in the coded alphabet was always worse than his usual calligraphy.
"They'll help with the cold," the note continued. "The patterns on the two fanciest ones in the back are from your lineage, so maybe don't wear them for a while."
The two robes in the back had lavishly embroidered cuffs on the sleeves around the lapels and hems that matched his demon mark almost exactly. Binghe frowned. He had never, to his knowledge, shown Peak Lord Shang his demon mark. How had the man known what lineage Binghe came from, when Binghe himself had not known until Meng Mo had told him?
Binghe put that question away for later, along with all the other questions that Peak Lord Shang's behavior had raised over the years since Shizun's death, and pulled out the simplest robe. Once dressed in fresh clothes, with the borrowed sword belted on over the robe, only his feet and hands felt like blocks of ice, which was a definite improvement over the day before. It felt strange to look into a mirror and see himself wearing colors other than those of Qing Jing Peak, but he supposed he would have to get used to it.
Binghe considered wandering the halls of the palace, but he remembered how fast the snow-spider had moved, and didn't want to risk getting into a fight with something too strong for him when he knew almost nothing about the demons who lived here. They would be violent, he thought, and dangerous, and they were almost entirely unknown to him, which made them even more dangerous. Besides, he didn't much want to go out into the palace, surrounded by demons like the ones who had poisoned his Shizun, in the court of the demon who had caused his Shizun's death, and pretend either to be human or, worse, to be one of them. He needed to do this to bring back Shizun, he reminded himself. He could bear it. He had to.
Binghe could feel his meridians starting to bubble, as they did when his qi became unbalanced. Instead of trying seated meditation, for which it seemed far too cold, Binghe took up his borrowed sword, and began practicing channeling his demonic qi through it, with Meng Mo giving advice of varying degrees of acerbic helpfulness depending on how pathetic or childish he thought Binghe's mistakes were.
It was nearly midday, by Binghe's best guess, when Mobei-Jun reappeared just inside his door. Binghe added "lack of respect for personal privacy" to his list of demonic traits that the books and Meng Mo had failed to warn him about, and forced himself not to scowl. Be good, he reminded himself. Even here. Be good.
"Court begins," Mobei-Jun told him, and turned to leave.
Binghe took that as his signal to follow. He found he was both deeply relieved that the Northern King hadn't seen fit to mention his passing out the day before, and resentful at the silence as they walked. Did demons just not talk?
Don't be stupid, boy, Meng Mo told him. This Mobei-Jun has never been talkative, even for his line.
Binghe entered the hall at Mobei-Jun's side to discover that court today involved a meal. Binghe was seated at Mobei-Jun's right side. It was a position of less respect and trust than if he had been placed at Mobei-Jun's left. The left, after all, was the side less guarded by a right-handed swordsman, and so Mobei-Jun allowed no one to sit there. Being placed on his immediate right was a mark of enough favor that Binghe could feel curious gazes on him during the entire meal. He straightened his spine and did his best to channel some combination of his Shizun's calm demeanor and his Liu-shishu's bored disinterest.
The food, to Binghe's chagrin, was nearly all strange. To begin with, this far north, there were noodles and mantou instead of rice. After the first bite of a seemingly plain meat dish ended up being salty and fermented, Binghe forced himself to take only small helpings of everything. Binghe refused to waste food, even so many years after his childhood.
"Try the grey one," Mobei-Jun told him.
Binghe had been avoiding that one, because it looked and smelled like it had been rotting for years.
"It's thirty-year bear paws," the demoness on his left told him. "It's a delicacy."
Binghe took a small serving of the fermented, rotten dish. He braced himself, and took a bite.
It was, to his horror, absolutely delicious. The flavors of vinegar, salt, and rot balanced each other perfectly, and the cartilage was only slightly chewy.
"It's good," he said. He must have sounded surprised, because Mobei-Jun looked, for an instant, like he was about to smile.
"It's very rare," he said. "This jar was laid down in my childhood, by my late grandfather's cook, and buried under the kitchen hearth, to prevent it ever freezing while it fermented." Then he actually smiled, an expression full of more menace than delight, and added: "You will, of course, come on the hunt, now that you have eaten of it."
Binghe swallowed, and balled one hand into a fist below the table, out of sight. Be good, he told himself. Be practical, said a voice that sounded like Liu-shishu. He should have known there was a catch to a delicacy being offered to him on his first meal here.
Inside his head, Meng Mo stirred, seeming to wake. Oh, he said, they brought out the Abyssal bear-paws. That's almost a ritual dish, these days, you hardly ever see it anymore.
Binghe ignored Meng Mo. Thinking fast, he took another bite and chewed it slowly, trying to look unconcerned, before he turned to face Mobei-Jun. It really was appallingly good, once you got over the smell: sharp and spicy and falling apart in his mouth.
"I would be honored," he said. "When do we leave?"
The answer, apparently, was right after eating.
It did not appear that Mobei-Jun employed gamekeepers to collect his game: instead he took a tiny hunting party through a portal into the heart of the Abyssal dark-fanged polar bear's territory, and set loose a yearling moose-lion as prey.
Finally they came in sight of the Abyssal bear, which was gorging itself on the moose-lion, dwarfing the large carcass with its white-furred silhouette. Binghe felt his heart begin to speed in the way it usually only did when he was on a particularly challenging night-hunt, or when he was sparring with Liu-shishu. The bear was taller than him at the shoulder, with dark claws as long as his forearm, and dark fangs nearly as long that dripped with a slow-acting digestive venom.
If Binghe recalled correctly, the Abyssal bear species all had a similar venom, which sped digestion and prevented them going into a hibernative state after eating. In the Abyss, where they were rumored to have originated, such a state would be lethally vulnerable.
In the Northern Desert, the venom would simply liquify the innards of anyone who ingested so much as a drop of it, anyone who received so much as a scratch from those long, wickedly-sharp teeth, or the similarly tainted front claws.
"Well?" Mobei-Jun asked him.
Binghe looked at him.
"As my honored guest, the first attack is yours," Mobei-Jun told him.
Binghe, who had heard similar things before, forced himself not to frown, but did not move immediately.
Meng Mo, who had been watching everything since the meal with what felt like a combination of interest and nostalgia, stirred again. Honored guest my left foot, he said. The one who goes first is bait, and they all know it. Don't fall for it, boy.
The bear had nearly finished eating the moose-lion, crunching on its bony antlers as if they were not knife-edged, one of the more dangerous natural weapons of the Northern tundra.
No, Binghe thought back at Meng Mo. It's a test. I have to be strong enough to pass.
I have to be good, he thought to himself, but made sure Meng Mo couldn't hear that part of it.
And, drawing the sword he had only received the night before, and which he had practiced with for a single morning, Binghe flung himself into the sky atop it, channeling spiritual qi into a demonic blade so that he could fly swift and agile around to the beast's blind spot.
Then, instead of diving in and being caught by the bear's spiny tail, Binghe harassed it with blasts of qi, alternating spiritual and demonic to loosen up his meridians.
Show-off, Meng Mo said, but he felt intrigued, and no little bit interested by what Binghe was doing.
When the bear was agitated enough to not be thinking clearly, Binghe reviewed what he knew of its weak points quickly in his head: its belly and its throat, and both protected by fang and claw. He jumped to the ground, tucking and rolling as he landed, and bounding to his feet just behind the bear's probable field of vision while he sent his sword skating around to the other side, controlling it with hand-signs made with the slightest flick of his fingers.
For an instant, he thought it had taken his bait, that it would snap at the sword, and he could duck in and slit its throat with the wickedly sharp dagger Liu-shishu had gifted him a year ago.
Then the wind changed, and the bear smelled him.
Binghe dodged its first lunge, leaving part of his outer robe behind on its left fore-claws. When it lunged at him again, he began to see the pattern of its movements, and, as time slowed down for him, he feinted right, dodged left, ducked and skidded under its fangs, and stabbed upwards with a ferocious, qi-assisted slicing gesture, cutting its throat.
It was, he thought, pausing for a bare instant to admire the injury up close, beautifully done.
Then the bear began to collapse on top of him. Binghe felt a drop of the venom drip down the back of his leg, bare where his robes had torn away, and felt the slightest scrape of claws against his skin. He jerked his leg away, but too late. The bright bloom of blood stood out on his skin, and the sickly grey of the bear's venom was mixed with it, clear as day.
It was, Binghe knew, enough to kill a human. It was enough to kill nearly any demon.
He ducked out from under the beast's corpse, hands dripping with blood to the wrists, clothes largely unstained because of the shield of qi he had put up to prevent blood-splatter from covering him head-to-toe.
Mobei-Jun's expression was stern and unbothered; two of the retainers he'd brought looked horrified. One looked delighted.
Binghe wove his way carefully out of the tangle of the bear's limbs, wiping the blood off his dagger onto the beast's fur as he passed by its feet. Its large forefeet were each almost as big around as his torso.
His sword was hovering in a holding pattern, a skill he'd only recently mastered in fights with Liu-shishu and night-hunts on his own. He was proud that he hadn't let it drop, and called it back to hand, sheathing it as he walked very slowly toward Mobei-Jun.
Binghe kept his expression as calm as he could manage, even though he could feel the venom trying to work its way through his veins, his blood parasites swarming to attack it. It was taking a lot of his attention, because the venom seemed to be trying to dissolve the parasites when they touched. Disarming the bear's venom was going to be tricky work, but Binghe knew he didn't dare show weakness.
"The venom sacs in the cheeks are intact," Binghe said, looking straight at Mobei-Jun. "Do your retainers know how to remove them safely?"
Mobei-Jun looked at him for a moment.
"You will instruct them," he said. "Can they remove the offal first?"
Binghe nodded.
The venom flared in his calf, and he felt muscle beginning to shred. He bent down, pulling out a handkerchief, and wiped the blood and venom from his skin. The handkerchief began to dissolve almost immediately, and he dropped it onto the ground.
Mobei-Jun gave instructions to the attendants, who approached the beast cautiously, as if they expected it to jump up and attack them. Binghe kept his scowl internal: he knew how to kill cleanly when he hunted, and this wasn't a nine-lived chartreuse ocelot-bear, which might have still had a few lives left, to rise and kill the unwary hunter.
To his surprise, Mobei-Jun walked over to a ridge in the earth and sat down, gesturing to his right.
"Sit," he said.
It was not a question. It was also, Binghe thought, perhaps a small kindness, to allow Binghe to sit and repair his calf without losing face. Or perhaps the king simply saw no profit in standing while his retainers did the bloody work of butchery. They didn't seem to mind, taking no precautions against the blood or offal, and eating some of the tripe steaming and warm from the animal's belly.
Binghe looked away, and focused on eliminating the last dregs of the venom.
"It seems your line bred true," Mobei-Jun said, when his companions were nearly done, and Binghe was flexing his legs cautiously.
"Hm?" Binghe was not paying full attention, worried about a small knot in his calf that might be a hiding pocket of venom.
"Are you immune to all poisons?" Mobei-Jun asked.
Careful, child, Meng Mo cautioned, as if Binghe were an infant, had never been hurt by someone he should have been able to trust. Binghe shunted aside the memory of a cup of hot tea dumped on his head.
"Why do you ask?" Binghe asked in reply, his tone guarded.
Mobei-Jun appeared almost to smile.
"My uncle favors poison," he said. "If you are immune to only many poisons, he will make it his work to find the one that works. If you are truly the heir of your bloodline, he will not feel a need to bother you for long." He shrugged. "After this display, it would be easy enough to claim full immunity to this one, or even to all poisons," he pointed out. "Decide which approach you prefer. And decide fast."
Binghe stared at him. That was more strategy than he had expected from this demon, whose bulk and fighting prowess—and habit of ruling via severed arms—had caused Binghe to expect him to be more of a brute. This advice spoke of a potentially strategic mind.
Of course he has a strategic mind, boy, Meng Mo hissed at him, exasperated. He's the sole surviving heir of the Northern line. How do you think he reached adulthood, dumb luck?
The texts on Qing Jing Peak had mentioned competition for demonic thrones, but nothing like the kind of detail that would help Binghe now.
Tell me more, Binghe demanded. But, later. I need to focus now.
And he got up, and showed the huntsmen how to remove the venom sacs from the bear's cheeks, how to remove the hollow fangs without damaging them, how to sever the paws so the most tendon remained intact, while removing the fur and the rough skin of the footpads, which would not be palatable, even for demons, even after fermenting for years.
"How does he know this?" one hissed to another, tongue faintly forked where it flicked out from her mouth. She clearly thought she was being discreet.
She was one who had looked horrified, earlier. The one who had looked delighted was busy removing the lower fangs, at Binghe's request. It was a hard and thankless task, as the lower fangs were more fragile than the uppers. They were also much less valuable. Binghe had thought it served them right for taking pleasure in his pain.
Mobei-Jun had not second-guessed any of his instructions, seemingly content to sit and observe.
"He's a heavenly demon," the other hissed back, even more quietly, though still not quietly enough. He was smaller than the first one, but they shared similar coloring, similarly forked tongues.
"He is right here," Binghe said, as he would have done to his shixiong when they gossipped about his bouts with Liu-shishu, as he would have done to his Bai Zhan shidi, when they talked shit about how much time he spent in the library. "And he knows how to read."
One of the lower fangs snapped. The demon assigned that task swore.
"Leave it," Binghe said. "It's worthless now."
"Don't you want to mount the skull?" They asked. They sounded horrified at the idea of not doing so.
"I want the pelt," Binghe said. "I want the meat, and the organs, and I want to make another batch of the fermented bear paws. I don't care about the rest. The bones aren't strong enough to make good tools, and they'll shatter easily enough for the marrow to feed other creatures, if we leave them here."
The attendant blinked.
"Oh," they said.
"He really is part human," one of the forked-tongue demons whisper-hissed behind him.
This time Binghe didn't reply. Better to let them assume he could not hear as well as they could, and be able to gather information.
That's my boy, Meng Mo said, sounding more satisfied than Binghe had heard him in ages. Smart and sneaky at the same time. How well you are growing up.
Binghe had a frisson of guilt at that—surely eavesdropping on strangers wasn't exactly what Shizun had meant, when he'd told Binghe to be good? But he hadn't meant for Binghe to end up in the Demon Realm at all. Now that he was here, letting his demon mark show, his goal was simply to survive, to get stronger, and to return to Cang Qiong Mountain Sect someday, so he could bring his real Shizun back.
Soon enough the bones had been assembled into a sledge to carry the desired bits of the carcass back through a portal, which Mobei-Jun opened with a wave of a hand.
Binghe wondered if that was a hereditary power, and if so, how far he could open them, and how many in a day, and how much qi it expended. He knew it was possible to travel between the Human and Demon Realms by portal, and now that he was less distracted, the strategic implications began to bother him.
We're lucky he doesn't want to conquer the Human Realm, aren't we? Binghe asked, because he needed to talk about this to someone, and Meng Mo was safest.
The Mobei haven't tried that for generations, Meng Mo replied. The last Heavenly Demon Emperor but one kept them on a tight leash. Besides, not all of them have the portals, and not all have it this strongly. He paused. Binghe wondered if he, too, was remembering that there was, now, no Heavenly Demon Emperor to keep him in line.
Let's hope he stays uninterested, Binghe said, finally, before Meng Mo could get any ideas about Binghe's so-called inheritance.
The next week was apparently an uneventful one by the standards of the Northern Palace: one assassination attempt against Mobei-Jun, which was laughably easy for him to quell; two assassination attempts against Binghe himself, both carried out with poison, both of which he reacted to by eating the entire rest of the poisoned dish and watching to see who looked increasingly uncomfortable as their plot failed.
Binghe attended court with Mobei-Jun, ate at his right-hand side, and in his own time, he read whatever books he could find, to learn more about demon social norms.
After the first week of doing sword forms alone in his rooms, Binghe began to spar with the guards when he could find them, since they seemed to have no set training times, and kept himself armed and on guard whenever he was alone within the palace.
The longer he stayed, the less unnatural it felt to have a pulsing spot of warmth on his forehead. The longer he stayed, the more normal it seemed to have been so fiercely possessive of Shizun's body, so jealous over Shizun's attention and time before his death. It was how everyone else around him behaved: it was ordinary, expected, even. It was hard to remember that this wasn't how humans behaved, to ground himself in a normal that seemed increasingly far away.
In some ways, his time training with Liu-shishu was what finally earned him a place in the palace hierarchy. The fact that Binghe could not only hold his own in a fight, but fight barehanded, with a sword, or with nearly any other weapon, clearly earned him respect that was at first grudging and then well-earned.
Time passed strangely in the north.
The bulk of the palace itself was underground, so there was no natural light. Even when outdoors, the sun shone for too many hours of the day to be of any use telling the time until Binghe had been there several months, at which point the days started getting shorter again.
The only reliable part of his new, strange, instinctive life were the monthly letters from Peak Lord Shang, which arrived on the small desk in his rooms without comment. Written in the same shaky code, they were always shorter than Binghe might wish. Shen-shixiong is well, one read. I'm delegating a lot more to my head disciple to sleep enough to build up qi to keep him that way. I think she thinks it's a sign I trust her more. She actually volunteered to coordinate caravan schedules for the upcoming trade season!
It was Midwinter, and Binghe was healing up a nasty gut wound the first time a letter from the Human Realm really surprised him.
The gut wound was from a bull-headed demon who had tried to gore Mobei-Jun despite an agreed-upon truce between his people and the Northern Kingdom. Binghe had gotten between the attacker and Mobei-Jun without a second thought. Afterwards, he remembered Shizun getting between him and the demon elder during Sha Hualing's attack. Perhaps, he thought, this might count as being good as well, even if he were doing it as a demon, even if he were doing it partially as someone might protect a needed tool, rather than as Shizun protected the disciples under his care.
Binghe finished wrapping his abdomen, though he scarcely needed it—no sense letting anyone know exactly how swiftly he healed, after all—and picked up the newest letter from his desktop.
The first section was the usual chatter from Peak Lord Shang, about his first disciple, about how much work it was to keep Shizun's body intact, about how much of a nuisance Peak Lord Shen (always Peak Lord Shen, when he was talking about the waking one, these days) was being, and how badly he'd fucked up the previous paperwork system for Qing Jing Peak.
It was the second section that nearly made Binghe drop the letter entirely.
It was in a different hand. Much shorter, it read only: Shen Qingqiu's body remains safely hidden. Return when you are strong enough to face the Mausoleum.
It was, Binghe realized, Liu-shishu's handwriting. Peak Lord Shang had taught him the code, too. He re-read the message, looking for hidden meaning, but not really expecting to find any: Liu-shishu said what he meant, and didn't waste words.
How do those humans even know about the Holy Mausoleum, Meng Mo groused, as he always did when Peak Lord Shang knew something he wasn't supposed to. Even the Mobei line doesn't have access to the whole thing, how would these cultivators know about the resurrection casket?
Binghe sometimes wondered how many people Meng Mo had possessed, how many dreams he had visited, to be as sure as he was of so many things that were, in theory, closely guarded information. Then again, being functionally immortal without a body gave an awful lot of time for ferreting out hidden secrets.
Resurrection casket? he asked, because by now he knew that demanding a list of Meng Mo's previous hosts would do no good, and he listened carefully as Meng Mo explained.
It took another five months before Binghe could reliably defeat Mobei-Jun in a sparring match, which felt appallingly slow to him, and was, by the muttering of the court, swift enough to cause some concern for Mobei-Jun's throne.
Linguang-Jun himself courted Binghe, for a time in the depth of winter. This lasted until Binghe got sick of his oily promises and told Linguang-Jun exactly what he would do if these attempts to kill his nephew via Binghe's borrowed strength did not cease immediately. Binghe was careful to remain polite and smiling the entire time, in just the way he had learned unnerved demons more than humans. It probably didn't exactly count as being good for Shizun, but it hadn't involved any direct violence, so Binghe was inclined to give himself a pass.
It was spring again when Mobei-Jun agreed to take Binghe back to the Sect, and that only after getting approval from Peak Lord Shang.
Come back to An Ding Peak, Peak Lord Shang had written. Liu-shidi will take you to Wan Jian Peak: he says you need a better sword first. Don't go to Qing Jing Peak no matter what you do: Peak Lord Shen has officially banished you from his peak.
Binghe had needed to stop reading and calm himself when he'd read that. Memories of Ning Yingying, of his various shixiongs, of the hall masters and older generations of disciples, swarmed into his mind's eye, and he felt, suddenly, the loss it would be if he could never see them again. Perhaps before Shizun's death, Binghe could have departed the Sect with Shizun at his side and been content, but those years of being dragged to the dining hall by Ning Yingying, of working beside Ming Fan, of drilling his shixiongs in swordsmanship? They'd all had their effect: his home wasn't just Shizun anymore. He knew what he would choose, if he had to, but losing Qing Jing Peak would hurt more, now, than it would have done before.
And this false Peak Lord, the one who had been lost in a qi deviation until Binghe's mistaken attempt to bring Shizun back, thought to take that away from him? Binghe seethed, feeling anger lacing its way through his veins like demonic qi, hot and barely leashed. He picked up his sword, stepped away from the desk, and did sword forms until he felt calmer.
Don't worry, Peak Lord Shang's letter continued, as if there were any world in which Binghe could not worry about being exiled from Qing Jing Peak. Peak Lord Shen tried to have you exiled from the whole sect, and everyone else disagreed. Did you know the head of Ku Xing Peak likes you more than he likes Peak Lord Shen? And he has a temper on him. Once he started yelling, nobody else could get a word in! The final blow was Qi Qingqi speaking up for you, though. You know Zhangmen-shixiong trusted her a lot when Shen-shixiong had just died, and when she took your side you could almost see Zhangmen-shixiong give up. Peak Lord Shen was furious not to get his way!
Anyway, the letter continued, come back with Mobei-Jun and get your sword, and then we'll get to the Holy Mausoleum. The barrier around it won't be a problem, and I think I know enough of the layout that we should be okay!
That last part wasn't terribly reassuring, but Binghe wasn't going to borrow trouble just yet.
The note from Liu-shishu was much shorter.
See you soon, it read. Wei-shixiong will help you get your sword. He doesn't like how much disharmony Peak Lord Shen has introduced either.
Binghe rolled the letter up, and put it carefully in his scroll case with all the other letters he'd received over the last year.
So, he thought: that was the plan. Two Peak Lords, a demon king, and a half-Heavenly Demon, setting themselves against the puzzles and monsters that guarded the Holy Mausoleum. It was a totally absurd idea, desperate in the extreme.
Binghe found, to his surprise, that he was looking forward to it.
This fic has been converted for free using AOYeet!
Chapter 5: Shen Qingqiu (Shen Yuan)
Summary:
In which Shizun wakes up, meets another transmigrator, and the Holy Mausoleum is a challenge for everyone.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Oh fuck, Shen Qingqiu thought, when he opened his eyes to see an ornately carved stone ceiling. Not again. He closed his eyes: his eyelids still seemed to glow with the overlapping translucent error messages that had filled his field of vision when he'd refused to push his little sticky sheep of a disciple into the Abyss. Why did I do that? had been his last thought, before the Abyss had closed, and everything had gone black.
He had not counted on being transmigrated again. He hadn't even been hate-reading anything this time! Where was he supposed to be now? This didn't make any sense!
CONGRATULATIONS! CONGRATULATIONS! CONGRATULATIONS!
IMPORTANT THINGS MUST BE SAID THREE TIMES!
Oh, fuck, Shen Qingqiu thought. That sounded like the same shitty System.
Then a noise broke his train of thought.
"Shizun?" A small voice asked.
It sounded like Binghe, but that was impossible, right? Surely that was impossible.
Shen Qingqiu opened his eyes a second time to see an older version of Luo Binghe leaning over him, Heavenly Demon mark glowing in the dim room, expression torn between hope and fear. He looked even cooler than Shen Qingqiu had expected, and his expectations had not been low!
"Binghe?" Shen Qingqiu asked, and coming back from the dead must have made him more than a little bit loopy, because he heard himself say: "You grew up so handsome!"
He reached out a hand, and a swift movement behind Binghe drew his eye to the other figures in the room: Liu Qingge and Shang Qinghua, and—holy shit—was that Mobei-Jun beside him? The northern demon king was built even more like a brick shithouse than most of the fanartists had guessed!
"Shen Qingqiu?" Liu Qingge asked.
His expression was carefully blank, but he seemed almost to be trying to get between Shen Qingqiu and Binghe, which was absurd. Also Shen Qingqiu was—apparently—in a coffin? How was he supposed to pat Binghe on the head from inside a—what was this? A white jade sarcophagus?
"Is it him?" Mobei-Jun demanded. He just looked angry. Or maybe constipated? Fucking Airplane and his penchant for strong-but-silent side characters.
"I've got this," Shang Qinghua said, and leaned over. "Proud Immortal Demon Way: what was your user ID on the forums?"
"Peerless Cucumber," Shen Qingqiu replied, and now he knew he was definitely woozy from whatever had brought him back, because he'd never have admitted that out loud in person otherwise.
"Hah! I fucking knew it," Shang Qinghua crowed. Then he looked at the other three. "Yeah," he said. "It's him. Wait," he started to say, turning back. "Did you say—"
Shen Qingqiu stared at him in shock, too many things vying for his attention all at one time. Binghe was crying, Liu Qingge was offering him a hand up from the coffin, Mobei-Jun was pulling Shang Qinghua to his side, and Shang Qinghua was making weird hand-waggling gestures at him? Wait. Did that mean—Shang Qinghua was a transmigrator too?
"Shizun," Binghe wailed, and pulled him into a tight embrace as soon as Shen Qingqiu was upright, hauling him halfway out of the stone coffin. "This disciple missed you so much."
Shen Qingqiu freed a hand to pat him on the head, which was a little bit awkward now that Binghe was his same height, and broader than he was in the shoulders. Binghe buried his face in Shen Qingqiu's neck and clung like a soggy limpet, shaking with quiet sobs.
"So," Shang Qinghua said, after a moment's quiet. "This would be a great time for you to tell me you remember the way out of the Mausoleum?"
Shen Qingqiu blinked at him.
"What," he said. "You don't? Those were the coolest bits of—"
WARNING
The System blared.
UNAUTHORIZED USERS PRESENT!
1,000 B-POINT DEDUCTION FOR DISCLOSURE OF CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION.
Shen Qingqiu glared at the "dismiss" button until it disappeared. He really hadn’t missed the interfering sack of shit that was the System. Okay, he hadn’t missed anything, because he’d been dead, but still. It was the thought that counted.
"I know you read the holy texts," Shang Qinghua said. "The prophecies? You know?"
Shen Qingqiu goggled at him.
"The prophecies?" he demanded. "You’re calling that overrated sorry excuse for a—"
Blaring error messages popped up again and he reined himself in with some difficulty.
Shang Qinghua looked meaningfully at Liu Qingge and Binghe.
"Yes, I read the prophecies," Shen Qingqiu admitted, feeling like he was swallowing glass, to call that sorry excuse for a fanservice-riddled webnovel a prophecy. "Where are we?"
"Shen Qingqiu should stand up first," Liu Qingge interjected. "And—"
He reached for Shen Qingqiu’s wrist, which Shen Qingqiu extended out of sheer habit, after so many sessions having his meridians cleansed.
The qi flowing through his system felt smoother than usual this time, as if it were catching on fewer snags than he’d expected. Liu Qingge’s face cleared, slightly, the effect not unlike wiping a bit of haze off your glasses lenses.
"Binghe," Liu Qingge said, and pulled at Binghe’s shoulder.
Shen Qingqiu realized, all of a sudden, that Binghe’s back had been to Liu Qingge this whole time, and his demon mark was visible.
"Shidi," Shen Qingqiu said, as if he could somehow prevent the War God from attacking the protagonist when his demon blood was revealed. "You might be—that is—don’t be upset," he concluded, failing to find the words he wanted.
How did you say: Hey, shidi, I know you hate demons and hunt them for fun, and are really, really good at killing them, but this is still my disciple, and your shizhi, and could you please not kill him, at least until we’re out of the Holy Mausoleum, because I’m sure he’d really appreciate a chance to run away, and I’d take it as a personal favor if you didn’t chase him?
"I know," Liu Qingge said, apparently interpreting Shen Qingqiu’s stammering correctly.
Shen Qingqiu gaped.
Liu Qingge ignored him entirely.
"Luo Binghe," he said, pulling harder. "Let go. Your Shizun needs to stand up and stretch."
Binghe gulped, his arms tightening painfully for a moment, and then let go.
Shen Qingqiu took Liu Qingge’s and Binghe’s hands and allowed himself to be hauled out of the coffin. His feet were all pins and needles, and he would have fallen, if Liu Qingge hadn’t caught him by the shoulders, leaving a smear of blood behind. The Bai Zhan War God was absolutely covered in gore.
Shen Qingqiu looked at the other three, startled, and saw that Mobei-Jun was slightly less blood-spattered, Shang Qinghua had a smear of something Shen Qingqiu didn’t want to think about all along his left side, and Binghe was virtually spotless.
As expected of the protagonist, Shen Qingqiu thought, absently.
Shang Qinghua was whispering something to Mobei-Jun, who was looking increasingly dissatisfied.
"Okay," Shen Qingqiu said, when his feet stopped burning and he could stand on his own again. "So. Where are we, exactly? I need to figure out the best way out of here, based on the—" he paused for a moment, wishing he had a fan with which to hide his face. His hand twitched upwards out of reflex, feeling strangely unbalanced. "—the prophecies—"
Something was pressed into his hand.
"Thank you, shidi," Shen Qingqiu said automatically, opening the fan. Liu Qingge looked away, cheeks slightly pink.
Mobei-Jun hauled the lid back on the sarcophagus, which appeared to be made of absolutely flawless white jade, and Shang Qinghua spread a map out along the top of it.
Shen Qingqiu took one look at it and scowled.
"Well, that’s garbage," he said. "How much of this was right?"
Shang Qinghua shrank back slightly from his glare.
"About—sixty percent?" he guessed.
"Forty percent," Binghe corrected. "Sixty only if you count the obstacles faced and not their locations."
Shen Qingqiu beamed at him. Binghe always had such a good memory!
"All right," he said. "If we go in order from the entrance—" he looked at the map and frowned. "I’m starting over," he said. "Then we’ll compare what you ran into with what—what I remember reading."
Binghe laid out a huge new sheet of paper, and handed him a stick of charcoal, looking as if he wanted to grind ink right now, as if this were somehow inadequate.
"Thank you, Binghe," Shen Qingqiu said, and began sketching.
In the end, the two maps looked only slightly alike.
Liu Qingge and Luo Binghe took up two different shades of charcoal—Shen Qingqiu was still impressed at the colorful kinds of charcoal that some trees in this world burned down to, so sue him—and began to annotate his map.
"Wait," Shen Qingqiu said, staring at the map. "Is that pinyin?"
Shang Qinghua shrugged.
"I mean," he said. "It works as a code, right?"
Shen Qingqiu just stared blankly at him. He knew he should be preserving more of an immortal master facade, but, so sue him, he'd just come back from the dead, and now he was seeing the protagonist writing in bizarre part-Chinglish mostly-pinyin word-salad!
The idea of writing in pinyin had never occurred to him once he got here! He'd been struggling to fit in, to remember all the traditional characters that the original goods would have used! And to teach pinyin to the protagonist? And with such absolutely terrible handwriting? Shen Qingqiu felt his fingers itch to take the charcoal away from Binghe just to correct his letter forms, and forced himself to stay focused.
"Shizun knows this code, too?" Binghe asked, sounding delighted.
Liu Qingge just kept writing. His observations, in a medium grey, were tidier than Binghe’s red scrawl, the notes written in a smaller hand. Leaning in to read over his shoulder, Shen Qingqiu could see that Binghe had noticed more about the architecture, the terrain, while Liu Qingge had paid more attention to the hazards, the monsters, the shambling dead.
Leaning forward a bit more to read a particularly fascinating description of a lesser Abyssal cobra-yak, Shen Qingqiu’s hair slipped over his shoulder, fell across Liu Qingge’s cheek, and onto the map.
"Oh, sorry, shidi," Shen Qingqiu said, pulling his hair back.
Liu Qingge didn’t respond, just kept writing. His cheek was slightly pink again.
Shen Qingqiu put a hand over his forehead.
"Are you sure you didn’t go by the greenhouses? You’re a bit flushed, and I’m not sure I remember what all of the plants in there do…"
Liu Qingge made a negative noise.
"Shizun," Binghe said, almost petulant. "We didn’t go that way. Look, see, this is the path we took."
Shen Qingqiu allowed himself to be pulled to the other side of the sarcophagus, where Binghe began pointing out their path and narrating the hazards they had faced, the portal Mobei-Jun had opened just where the barrier around the Holy Mausoleum began, the priceless pair of demonic and spiritual qi-storing amulets they'd detonated at the same time as Mobei-Jun's portal, all to break through the barrier.
Shen Qingqiu let him speak, let Binghe press close and wrap an arm around his waist. It must have been startling to see his shizun nearly fall over, before, after all. What a filial disciple he had raised! And so strong, too, to have gotten past the spiny tarantula-legged ice-drake at the northern end of the Mausoleum! And to have finished his notes so efficiently, and describe events to his shizun so calmly.
Finally Liu Qingge finished his notes, and they were able to cross compare the two maps, the remembered hazards, and determine the least-lethal way out.
"The puzzles should be fine," Shen Qingqiu argued, leaning over to point at a room with a particularly nasty puzzle. Binghe let go of his waist when he leaned. "I remember the answers, and if I don’t, I’m sure Binghe can solve them."
"Just because he’s read the whole Qing Jing Peak library and all the books my king had on hand—" Shang Qinghua started.
"That’s not why, and you know it," Shen Qingqiu told him. "This is the safest route out."
Shang Qinghua deflated.
"All right," Liu Qingge said. "Then what?"
"Then we go back to Cang Qiong Mountain Sect?" Shen Qingqiu asked. "Where else would we go?"
"Um," Shang Qinghua said. "About that."
And he explained, haltingly, and with some interjections from Binghe and Liu Qingge, about the research, the preservation of his body; about the plant body, the wait while it grew, and finally, about the first resurrection’s effects.
"There's a Shen Qingqiu on Qing Jing Peak now," Shang Qinghua said. "Er, Shen Jiu, really. But don't call him that."
Shen Qingqiu glared at him. "You’re telling me you managed to bring back—"
"It was an accident!" Shang Qinghua exclaimed, interrupting him as System warnings began to blare. "How was I supposed to know—"
Shen Qingqiu kept glaring, and Shang Qinghua deflated, perhaps remembering that they had both read the same so-called prophecies.
"Well," Liu Qingge said, and paused meaningfully. "That means he is Peak Lord Shen Qingqiu now."
"Oh," Shen Qingqiu said, turning and blinking at him. "Is that all? So I just won’t be Peak Lord anymore. That’s fine, isn’t it? And … I could change my name?"
Honestly, he thought, going back and not being Peak Lord sounded a bit like an extended vacation, getting to have all the benefits of this body's cultivation and none of the paperwork!
Shang Qinghua buried his face in his hands.
Liu Qingge and Binghe exchanged looks.
"Do all humans give up power so easily?" Mobei-Jun asked, looking between Shen Qingqiu and Binghe with something like horrified fascination.
"No!" chorused Liu Qingge and Shang Qinghua, who then looked appalled at being in agreement.
"Shizun," Binghe said, tugging at his sleeve. "You can’t. He’s terrible. He’s ruined all the lessons we set up, and dismissed the hall masters and instructors for being too soft, and he broke Wang-shixiong's fingers for playing a qin passage wrong!"
The poor boy—young man, now, Shen Qingqiu supposed—looked on the verge of tears. Ah, he thought, he's still my fluffy sheep after all, I did that much right.
Then he processed what Binghe had said. Wang Su, a spotty-faced boy who was one of Ming Fan's lackeys, had never had much skill for the qin, but he loved it fiercely. The idea of breaking his hand for playing badly made Shen Qingqiu's heart ache for the boy.
"He constantly starts fights at all the Peak Lord meetings," Liu Qingge added.
Shidi, Shen Qingqiu thought, imagining how his short-tempered shidi might respond to the book's scum villain, and wincing internally. You know you’re helping him start at least half of those fights, don’t you?
"Xian Shu and Ku Xing Peak have started acting in alliance to spite him." Liu Qingge added, which, well, Shen Qingqiu did have to admit that sounded very odd. "It's worse than it was before. He's tearing the sect apart. It's like he wants to see how far he can push everyone."
That, unfortunately, did sound like the original goods. And, Shen Qingqiu thought, if the original goods had found out that he'd been replaced and nobody had tried to bring him back, well, it made sense that he'd be acting spiteful about it.
"His paperwork is a disaster, and I swear he’s doing it on purpose to make my life harder," Shang Qinghua said.
That also sounded like something that the original goods would do, but given that Shen Qingqiu had definitely done the same thing more than once, out of anger at the man who was going to subvert the Immortal Alliance Conference, he wasn’t sure how much of a difference that kind of thing would make, really. He was more inclined to be worried about the students and about the unity of the Sect as a whole than about Shang Qinghua's workload.
"You can’t go back without reclaiming the role of Peak Lord," Liu Qingge said. "He won't allow you safe passage, and he won't allow Luo Binghe back on Qing Jing Peak, if he's still Peak Lord. Either you contest for the title, or you don't return."
Shen Qingqiu felt a pang at the idea of never seeing Qing Jing Peak’s bamboo forests again, never bickering with Qi-shimei or discussing the medical properties of strange monsters with Mu-shidi. Never hearing Ning Yingying's bell-like laughter as she teased her shixiong, never browsing through the library and helping a student learn about the obscure monster they had been set to research. Never waking up to Binghe’s snowy white congee in the little Bamboo House.
It hurt more than he had expected it would. Surely, after waking up from the dead a second time, wanting anything extra was foolish! Surely this was all bonus time, and he couldn't be picky about it!
Thankfully, his long-practiced placid expression held. Shen Qingqiu simply shrugged.
"So I won’t go back at all," he said. "I’m still a cultivator, I’d be fine."
He wasn't sure how convincing he sounded. And, in fact, no one looked the least bit convinced by this statement, other than Mobei-Jun, who just looked bored.
"Without a Cure," Liu Qingge said. "You’d be dead within a year."
Binghe looked, if anything, more stricken.
"I’ll come with you, Shizun," he said.
"Why don’t we decide once we’re not in the Mausoleum anymore!" Shang Qinghua suggested hastily.
"Good idea," Shen Qingqiu said, and looked back at the maps they had drawn. "Everyone remembers the way out?" he asked.
When they nodded, he flicked a flame at the map he had drawn, the one Liu Qingge and Binghe had annotated so carefully. It was a pity to lose such a good map, but Shen Qingqiu knew his tropes! If he left it written down, someone who wanted to hurt Binghe would get a hold of it, and it would end up being how some nobody powered up enough to fight the protagonist. Or someone would steal a holy relic that Binghe would need for pursuing or healing one of his wives! If they needed to know any of that information again, Binghe and Liu-shidi both had good memories.
And maybe when they got back to Cang Qiong Mountain Sect—or wherever they were going—he could spell a piece of paper large enough, and get them to write everything down again. In fact, Shen Qingqiu thought, remembering Binghe's very meticulously badly formed letters, he'd get them to dictate, and he'd do the writing himself.
The paper was ash in the space of seconds. Shen Qingqiu rolled the other one—the hilariously wrong one—up, and handed it to Shang Qinghua.
"Keep this one," he said. It would be a decent distraction, if something went wrong.
"Do you mean: keep it secret," Shang Qinghua agreed, deepening his voice to what he must think was an approximation of Gandalf’s. He sounded like Shen Qingqiu's sister-in-law's asthmatic pug. "Keep it safe?"
"Sure," Shen Qingqiu said, ignoring the Lord of the Rings quote through sheer force of will. "Let’s go."
* * *
Luo Binghe watched Shizun carefully from his position in the rear of the party, unsettled.
When he had tried to suppress his demon mark, before leaving the Hall of Joy, Shizun had stopped him.
"Don't," he'd said. "The Mausoleum needs to recognize you! It'll keep us safe."
That had been confusing in the extreme: Binghe wasn't accustomed to thinking of his demonic heritage as something that kept others safe. It may have kept him alive in the Northern Palace, but it certainly hadn't kept anyone else safe from him in those icy halls.
But here and now, Shizun had told him to let the mark show, to keep his demonic heritage on display, all to keep Shizun safe. And Binghe would do anything to keep his Shizun safe, even if it went against that same Shizun's dying words.
Binghe walked on, increasingly unsatisfied that they didn’t have a solid plan for keeping Shizun safe once they left the Mausoleum.
No matter how much Shizun insisted he would be all right out in the world on his own, Binghe knew he would be safer on Qing Jing Peak than anywhere else. But clearly, while Shizun would miss Qing Jing Peak, neither that nor an appeal to his safety would be winning arguments. And while Binghe could travel more or less incognito if he had to, the immortal cultivators who were Peak Lords of the world’s foremost cultivation sect were much more recognizable. The new Peak Lord Shen might be able to travel in disguise, if he wanted to, because his face was a tiny bit less sharp-featured, his frame a little broader than when he had first woken up, but Shizun would surely be recognized in an instant, anywhere he went, and known as someone who had come back from the dead.
Binghe knew he could keep Shizun safe in the Demon Realm, if he needed to, but he wasn’t sure Shizun would like that, not forever, not even with how much he liked monsters. Even Shang Qinghua complained about the lack of natural light from living underground sometimes, and Binghe had never seen him sunning himself like a lazy cat, the way he’d spotted Shizun doing time and time again in the little garden behind the Bamboo House.
You missed other people, too, while you were in Mobei-Jun’s palace, a traitorous voice told him. Binghe did not allow himself to think of how happy he had been to get that first letter from Liu-shishu. He had Shizun back; that had been the goal. Wanting more would be greedy beyond measure.
Demons are greedy creatures, boy, Meng Mo had reminded him, more than once, when Binghe had been surprised by instincts that he hadn’t known he possessed. We claim what’s ours and keep it close.
The first few rooms on their way out of the Mausoleum weren’t that bad. They got through the Hall of Sorrow, stepping where Shizun directed, and the blind corpses mostly left them alone after Binghe put up a complicated multi-layered barrier of demonic qi around them to prevent detection by the last breath candles. Maintaining it would be a drain, but they were moving quickly.
The puzzles in the Hall of Wrath were straightforward enough with Shizun’s help, even if his commentary was entirely incomprehensible at times. What was a Zelda or a Link or a Persia?
Still, even with the occasional rogue monster guarding an individual tomb, it was almost easy. It lulled Binghe into thinking that, perhaps, just perhaps, they might get out of this all right.
A few turns of the hallway later, they entered a large, high domed space ringed by individual tombs, each with their own decoration. Shizun hurried them past a tomb with elegant, sharply angled construction that looked almost geometric.
"Don’t stand still in front of that one," he ordered. Then, under his breath, he added. "Art-deco-ass western hackish borrowings."
"What?" Shang-shishu asked. "No, man, it’s like Balin’s tomb!"
"Which was Art Deco!" Shizun snapped back at him. He was clearly exasperated, showing much more emotion than he usually allowed past his placid, distant expression. "Didn’t you ever watch the extras?"
Binghe stared at the two of them, distracted for a moment by the incomprehensible words they had scattered through their speech, by the way Shizun’s face looked when it was so expressive. It was so different from the corpse he and Liu-shishu had been preserving all this time.
Seeing Shizun so animated made it real, all at once: they’d done it. They’d brought him back from the dead.
That moment’s distraction was all it took. Something plummeted at them, and only Liu-shishu’s quick reflexes saved Shizun from being snatched up by a giant black creature, like a serpentine dragon with huge leathery wings and only one set of legs.
It was astonishingly fast: Liu-shishu was caught in its jaws even as he shoved Shizun out of the way. The creature reared back, and Binghe could see Liu-shishu's arm and leg protruding from the serrated teeth, the arm curled around and looking like it was hanging on to prevent him being swallowed. Binghe froze for a bare instant, shocked to see Liu-shishu so vulnerable.
"Cut off its head," Shizun snapped, rolling to his knees and reaching instinctively for the sword that wasn't there. "Whatever you do, don’t let it scream, and don’t let it throw him!"
Mobei-Jun immediately harried it with ice spears from all directions, holding it in place and preventing it from extending its bat-like wings, which looked strong enough to break bones. Its neck was long and serpentine, the teeth clearly those of a monstrous carnivore. Binghe observed it for a quick moment, watching how it shied away from the jabbing ice spears, how it moved and where its neck seemed most supple. Then he ducked under its guard, between and below the battering wings, and chopped off its head with a single mighty blow. His new sword cut through the monster's flesh as if it were a spoon through congee, and Binghe sent thanks to Wei Qingwei again for allowing him to draw his sword from Wan Jian Peak, even after not-Shizun had exiled him from Qing Jing Peak.
The monster's head dropped to the ground with a meaty thunk, and Liu-shishu struggled his way out of its jaws. Or, well, he tried to. Most of his body was inside the mouth, his right arm bent and broken in an attempt to keep his head safe; his right leg perforated by teeth nearly as long as Binghe’s forearm. The head had landed squarely upright, the lower jaw pinned shut by the weight of the skull above it. It was alarming to see Liu-shishu unable to free himself from a monster's maw: more alarming, even, than seeing him get hit in the first place had been.
Binghe sprang over to help Shizun tip the head over onto its side and pry the beast’s jaws open. Between the two of them, they managed to drag Liu-shishu over to a corner where an empty tomb had a door that Peak Lord Shang insisted was without traps.
The fact that Liu-shishu was unable to walk was worrisome; the fact that he wasn't even trying was frankly terrifying. Binghe kept his breathing even, and focused on keeping the barrier intact. If it failed now, they would all be in even more danger. He couldn't let that happen, the way he'd let this happen.
"Sitting up," Liu-shishu insisted, when Shizun tried to leave him lying down. His voice was a bare whisper, with very little breath behind it. His right leg bent at an unnatural angle, and his right arm looked more like pulp than like a human limb. And that wasn't even taking into account the way one side of his ribs looked slightly caved-in.
Shizun fretted, but Binghe agreed, and gently hauled Liu-shishu to a seated position, propped against the deep door-frame of some ancient demonic family's tomb. If fluid collected in his lungs lying down, it would be harder for Liu-shishu's cultivation to deal with, and he might choke, or even drown.
Looking at his shishu struggling for breath, Binghe could see plainly how very extensive his injuries were. They would be a struggle for even Mu-shishu to treat, and Mu-shishu wasn’t here. They couldn’t wait here for Liu-shishu to heal himself: Binghe couldn't maintain the barrier for long enough, and when it fell, the candles and blind corpses would find them. Besides, Binghe wasn’t sure even Liu-shishu's level of cultivation was sufficient to recover before he drowned on dry land, with the way his breathing sounded.
"Go on," Liu-shishu said. His knuckles were white on Cheng Luan’s hilt. He was gripping it with his left hand.
"What?" Shizun asked.
"Go on without me," Liu-shishu said.
Binghe had been afraid that was what he had meant. Behind him, Mobei-Jun made a small sound of approval, as if that statement had finally tipped the scales in Liu-shishu's favor.
"Don’t be ridiculous!" Shizun insisted, immediately, color high in his cheeks. "We can’t just leave you here!"
Binghe watched the blood flowing more and more slowly from Liu-shishu's thigh, feeling as if he were somehow separated from his body, watching himself from a small distance. He had a solution, but to use it, he had to act fast. The more ruthless part of him that had been at the forefront for the last year didn't see any reason to hesitate. But the part of him trying so hard to be good for Shizun held him back, because it wasn't only his decision in the end.
"I could—" he said. His voice came out small. "I mean, if Liu-shishu agrees. I could heal him with my blood."
Shang-shishu gaped. Shizun looked almost visibly shocked. Only Mobei-Jun looked unsurprised.
"Do it," Liu-shishu said.
"But—" Binghe said. "You know what—"
"I know," Liu-shishu said. "Do it."
"It’s going to hurt," Binghe warned.
"Fine," Liu-shishu said, through gritted teeth. "It already hurts anyway. Do it."
Binghe cut his hand and held the bleeding palm to Liu-shishu’s mouth, encouraging the blood to flow. Liu-shishu swallowed it down readily. Binghe could feel the blood parasites adjusting to Liu-shishu’s veins, adapting to their new host. He knew this part would be agony for a normal person, but he couldn’t slow down: he needed to get them to the wounds, so he could stop the bleeding and speed up the healing process.
No matter what Meng Mo and Mobei-Jun told him was normal for demons, Binghe didn’t like hurting people with the blood parasites, and didn't enjoy causing meaningless pain. He'd hoped that maybe that was proof he was a little bit human after all. But even knowing that he was hurting Liu-shishu right now, he didn't slow down, didn't let the pain he was causing stop him from achieving his goal, so maybe he wasn't that human after all.
Behind him, Shizun and Shang-shishu and Mobei-Jun were keeping guard, which was good, because it meant Binghe could focus.
"Get on with it," Liu-shishu ground out.
Binghe nodded and felt the blood parasites begin to reach the affected area. Nearly all of Liu-shishu’s ribs were cracked or broken on the right side. His hand was pulped. His leg was the best of it, only broken in four places. Binghe set the parasites to work, face screwed up in focus. It was exhaustingly fine work, and nothing Binghe had ever done before—not on someone else. His world narrowed to where Liu-shishu lay propped up against the wall, right hand clenched on the hilt of Cheng Luan, silent except for his gurgling breathing.
"Stop," someone said. "Binghe, you can stop now."
There was a hand on his shoulder, the touch achingly familiar even though he hadn't felt it in years.
"Shizun?" he asked.
He wasn’t done. There were still injuries to fix, wounds that weren’t healed all the way.
"Stop," Liu-shishu said. He sat up, coughed, and bent over to spit out a mouthful of dark blood. "You’ll wear yourself out. I’m fine."
Binghe disagreed: Liu-shishu looked terrible. His fine white robes were more gore than fabric, and his right vambrace looked like it was on the verge of falling apart.
"Your shishu is right, Binghe," Shizun said, and pulled him back a little bit, as if a few inches distance would stop Binghe from being able to sense the blood parasites, stop him from being able to use them in any way he wanted.
The idea, now that Binghe thought about it, was terrifying. He held the Bai Zhan Peak War God’s life in his hands, and nobody seemed to think it was a problem at all.
"I’ll take them out," he said, all in a rush. "I’ll—"
"No need," Liu-shishu said, hauling himself to his feet by using Cheng Luan as a prop in a way that told Binghe more than anything else just how badly injured he still was. "Might be useful."
Binghe stared at him.
He trusts you, Meng Mo told him. I think he’s the only human here who really understands what the blood parasites could do to him, and he’s not bothered at all. You’d better hang on to that one, kid.
Binghe glared at him, from the safety of his own mind.
If you have anything useful to say, let me know, he told the dream demon. Otherwise we’re going to keep trying to get out of here, and you can stay quiet.
Rude, Meng Mo sulked, but he went silent for a time.
Shizun led them past the various tombs, towards the eastern end of the Mausoleum. Greenery began to spread through the hallways, despite the lack of light, and Shang-shishu lost his footing several times, tripping on tree roots or buckled flooring. Mobei-Jun caught him each time.
Binghe wondered absently if Shang-shishu would ever notice Mobei-Jun’s attention, but he wasn’t about to interfere.
The last tomb looked almost like a human greenhouse, full of plants from the Southern Demon Realm, where Binghe had yet to travel extensively.
"Don’t go in there," Shizun said. "Don’t make any qi-based attacks until we’re well past. Those spores are dangerous."
The spores looked like bits of cottonwood fluff, drifting in invisible breezes that even Binghe couldn’t feel against his skin.
They walked past the tomb quickly. Finally, they reached the back wall, where Shang-shishu pressed a series of bricks on the wall to reveal a passageway.
"What the—" Shizun started, almost as if he were about to swear. "That wasn’t in the—" he cut himself off again.
"Part of the original manuscript," Shang-shishu said. "Never made it into the, uh, final prophecies."
Shizun blinked at that, seeming to come to some conclusion that Binghe couldn’t even begin to guess at.
"You mean you had access to Great Master Airplane’s unpublished original manuscript," he said, and his tone was sweet and kind. Binghe knew that meant it was time to be very, very careful indeed. "We will be having a conversation once we are out of here."
Shang-shishu paled, but gestured at the passageway he’d opened.
"My King, you go first. Luo-shizhi, you’ll have to go last, and close the bricks by tapping the wall like so—" he demonstrated, and Binghe nodded. It was an easy enough sequence: four bricks, arranged in a cross shape. Top, top, bottom, bottom, left, right, left, right.
Once the passage sealed behind them, Shang-shishu let out a deep breath in what sounded like relief.
"No candles or corpses in here," he said, and produced a small ball of bright qi above his palm.
"Shidi!" Shizun exclaimed, suddenly, and rushed over to Liu-shishu. Binghe swallowed back a flutter of something that might equally be jealousy over Shizun's attention and worry for Liu-shishu, who had just been so desperately injured. "What happened? I told you not to use qi!"
"I didn’t attack anything," Liu-shishu said. His tone was almost petulant, like that of a child scolded for disobedience.
Binghe immediately lit a ball of demonic qi in his left hand and strode forward, pushing Shang-shishu aside to get to Liu-shishu and Shizun.
Where Shizun was pulling up the sleeve of Liu-shishu’s robe, there were small green plants taking root in Liu-shishu's hand, winding up his arm where the crushed and ruined vambrace had been removed. The pattern they were following mirrored the pattern of his broken bones perfectly. Binghe dropped to his knees and tugged at Liu-shishu’s boot, ignoring his protest, untucking his pants leg to see that—yes—there were sprouts here too.
"Shizun," he said. "What is this?"
"The Ties that Bind," Shizun said. "It will get worse the more qi he uses."
His face went pale.
"Binghe," he said. "You mustn’t keep healing your shishu’s wounds with the blood parasites while he’s like this. It will only speed up the growth." He turned to look at Liu-shishu. "Shidi," he added, and his tone was almost coaxing. "You can’t accelerate your healing, even subconsciously. Focus instead on keeping it the way it is."
Binghe felt like an idiot. Of course a physical cultivator like Liu-shishu would enhance the qi running through his body as a matter of course; of course he would heal himself with qi even while simply walking down a corridor. Why hadn’t Binghe asked for more details?
"Fine," Liu-shishu said. Then, after a moment, he asked. "How is it treated?"
"Mu-shidi will know more," Shizun said. "I only know that pulling it out hurts enormously and—" He grabbed Liu-shishu’s hand to prevent him from trying it, "—and can cause permanent damage," he finished.
"Fine," Liu-shishu said. "So let’s get out of here first."
He pulled his leg away from Binghe.
"Don’t make that face, brat," he said. "I’m fine."
He was demonstrably not fine. The Bai Zhan War God, unable to use qi at all? How could that be fine? But Binghe knew better than to argue with his shishu by now.
"Okay," Shang Qinghua said. He called several qi lights into existence, and rotated them around each person, checking for more spores in the bright light. "I think the rest of us are okay? Okay."
He sounded nervous. He always sounded nervous, but this was worse than usual.
"Liu-shidi is right," Shizun said, snapping his fan open in front of his face, the way he did when he was uncertain, but didn't want anyone to know it. "We should leave here first, before we try to make other plans."
The door out of the tunnel, when they reached it, had the same cross-shaped pattern of blocks on it, and used the same sequence of presses to open it. As it started to slide open, Binghe heard Shizun snort behind him, a shockingly undignified sound.
"The Konami code!" Shizun hissed.
"What!" Shang-shishu protested. "I remembered it, didn’t I?"
"Shizun," Binghe said, as the door continued to open.
He kept his voice level from practice, from a year of experience not showing his fear to anyone around him, lest the demons of Mobei-Jun’s court think him prey. He was keenly, guiltily aware of the zuiyin glowing on his brow. A moment's thought, and it had vanished, just in time, just before the door opened all the way, and he stepped out.
"Shizun, I think you should see this."
Shang-shishu peeked around him, yelped, and popped back into the tunnel.
Arrayed just outside the exit were the leaders of the four great sects, with Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qingqiu at their head.
This fic has been converted for free using AOYeet!
This fic has been converted for free using AOYeet!
Notes:
I want you all to know that the working title of this chapter was "PANIC! At the Mausoleum!"
That is all.
Chapter 6: Shen Qingqiu (Shen Jiu)
Summary:
In which Cang Qiong Mountain Sect investigates an anomaly in the Demon Realm, protects its own from outsiders, a reunion (of sorts) occurs, and a fight breaks out.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"If it was an explosion of purely demonic energy, it would not be our purview," Shen Qingqiu said to the assembled Peak Lords of his generation.
He spoke slowly, laying out the facts as plainly as if he were teaching the slowest of his disciples, and even knowing that he had to thread the needle of seeming respectful without being the least bit deferential, a hint of derision slipped into his tone. Did the head of Ku Xing Peak really think that Cang Qiong Mountain Sect ought to police every demonic spat? It was absurd enough to make Shen Qingqiu's lip curl just slightly, behind his upraised fan.
"However," he continued, laying out his carefully arranged arguments one at a time, just as he had done a year ago upon his return, when explaining to the hallmasters on Qing Jing Peak why the peak's rules had existed in the first place. "The fact that this event involved both demonic and spiritual qi—and both in such great quantity—raises the possibility of a captured cultivator having been forced to self-detonate. Thus, the four great sects have been alerted, and Cang Qiong Mountain Sect must take an interest."
The faces of the assembled Peak Lords were bored, at best. Several were actively doing something else, from obviously painting, to, in one case, sleeping with his head nestled on the long beard he had started wearing in the time Shen Qingqiu had been gone. He still hadn't gotten used to that, to the stark visual evidence of how long he had been dead. It had been years before anyone had bothered to do anything about it.
Shang Qinghua and Liu Qingge were both absent from the meeting. Someone coughed, and Shang Qinghua's head disciple nearly knocked over her brush stand. No one had objected to An Ding Peak’s head disciple sitting at her shizun’s table to take notes; the Bai Zhan Peak Lord's small table sat empty, as it so often did these days.
Shen Qingqiu was privately relieved not to see them. He had not been avoiding them in the time since he had woken on An Ding Peak. Avoidance would imply that they had power over him, and he refused to grant them that. No, he had simply arranged to spend his time in places they did not frequent. And he had exiled the little beast from Qing Jing Peak. If he sometimes woke up to the memory of gentle hands brushing his hair with reverent care, that was no one's business but his own. His cultivation was good enough, in this new plant body, that he didn't need to sleep. It galled him that the breakthrough in his cultivation that he had sought for so long—whose seeking had killed him in the first place—had come as a result of someone else's efforts, but Shen Qingqiu hadn't become Qing Jing Peak Lord by refusing advantages the universe put in his path, no matter how much he resented them.
Annoyance at himself, more than anything else, drove Shen Qingqiu to deviate from his planned script, and add: "It’s a pity the so-called War God can’t be bothered to attend a meeting at a time of trouble for the sect."
"Shidi would never be so irresponsible as to make an unannounced departure from his peak," Qi Qingqi replied, expression as placid as a winter lake, as if she hadn’t petitioned to have him censured for visits to the Warm Red Pavillion just two months prior.
Shen Qingqiu ignored her, because he was keenly aware that he had nearly lost that battle, and bringing it up again so soon would be unwise. Only the blackmail he held over several of his shidi had allowed him to swing the vote against Qi Qingqi, and it had looked as if Yue Qingyuan might even have been wavering.
Shen Qingqiu had been a street-begging slave child, a rich man's toy, and a demonic cultivator's temporary amusement. He had never in his life felt his position to be more precarious than in that moment, watching the Peak Lords of his generation about to turn against him.
"Certainly not," agreed the head of Ku Xing Peak, who appeared, in the past year, to have gotten over his lifelong hatred or fear of women in order to ally with Qi Qingqi against Shen Qingqiu specifically.
Shen Qingqiu glanced around the room, gauged it pointless to draw more attention to the subject, and continued, forcing himself to speak slowly and calmly, as if he were ignoring Qi Qingqi rather than trying to draw attention away from her words.
"Cang Qiong Mountain Sect is the closest of the four great sects to the site of the disturbance. We must send a small group of fighters and someone versed in diplomacy."
"Not you, then," someone coughed.
Shen Qingqiu ignored it. He knew that no one would admit to having been the one to have spoken; chasing after it would only harm his dignity. He suddenly fiercely missed the days before his death, when his sharp tongue and reputation for underhanded tricks had been enough to prevent any of his shidi from testing him in this way. Liu Qingge had been the exception, but even he had stopped outright attacking Shen Qingqiu once they had become Peak Lords, and his outright vitriol had been predictable, and easily redirected.
"I will go," Yue Qingyuan said, immediately. "And Mu-shidi, in case of any injured cultivators who might need your expertise. And some senior Qiong Ding, Bai Zhan, and Qian Cao disciples."
"And I will go as well," Shen Qingqiu stated, in part because he was curious, and in part because he had not yet been sent off-mountain for any official Sect business, in the year he had been back, and he was starting to feel the walls closing in around him, as they had at the Qiu Household in his first months there.
He stared Yue Qingyuan down, daring him to object.
Just try to hide me away again, he thought, just try to make me your dirty little secret, confined to the sect for another year. Just try to lock me up. You don't know how that ended last time. I'll burn the sect to the ground, if I have to. "The sect’s foremost scholar on the Demon Realm ought to be present for an event of this magnitude," he added, when he saw Yue Qingyuan’s shoulders begin to stiffen in a way that might have presaged denial.
"Very well," Yue Qingyuan said. He didn’t look or sound happy about it. "But, shidi—"
"No buts," Shen Qingqiu said. "I will attend with Zhangmen-shixiong and Mu-shidi. And several of my disciples."
Qi Qingqi sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose.
"I will remain here in your absence," she said, addressing Yue Qingyuan directly, and clearly ignoring Shen Qingqiu. "The explosion near the borderlands could be a diversion. If Bai Zhan can send some of their senior disciples to each peak whose peak lord will be absent, that might prevent a repeat of last time."
Wei Qingwei nodded, as did several others.
Shen Qingqiu suppressed a scoff at the idea of Bai Zhan having senior disciples, but suppressed it. The other peak lords had always been his opponents more than his close confidants, but ever since his return, they had felt unified in a way that had never happened before. They had all despised him before, of course. Shen Qingqiu had not gone out of his way to ingratiate himself to anyone: they were his shidi. They were either useful, like Mu Qingfang, or Shang Qinghua, when he could be made to stop groveling. Or they were irrelevant to Qing Jing Peak.
But now the disdain felt different. It was abundantly clear that they had preferred the imposter to the real Shen Qingqiu, all of them except for Yue Qingyuan. And even Yue Qingyuan—who had always been ready to fall over himself to support Shen Qingqiu in the past—occasionally looked pained for an instant when Shen Qingqiu did something divisive.
Shen Qingqiu did not allow this to change his behavior. He continued arguing with his fellow peak lords, when they insisted on speaking to him. He refused to back down when he was clearly correct, and the other party clearly wrong.
It was that glancing look of guilty disappointment from Yue Qingyuan, more than anything else, that made Shen Qingqiu’s blood boil. The other peak lords were nothing: they could prefer the replacement all they liked. But Yue Qingyuan was his, and no one was allowed to take that away from him, especially not someone who had worn his body like a meat-puppet and been simperingly polite to everyone around him.
Shen Qingqiu hadn’t expected to be welcomed back with open arms: he had known that he was disliked, and had not cared to change himself to suit the preferences of weaker minds. But it had hurt more than he had anticipated to have ten of the eleven other Peak Lords greet his return with displeasure, regret, obvious loathing, or even, in the case of Liu Qingge, what had—for an instant—looked like pure grief.
Yue Qingyuan had been glad to see him back, once he was sure it was Shen Jiu he was talking to. Embarrassed by the sect leader’s obvious relief, Shen Qingqiu had snapped at him in censure. He couldn’t remember the exact words now: something about the stupidity of not having noticed that he had died, and was he always going to leave Shen Qingqiu to do everything by himself.
Yue Qingyuan had simply apologized, clasping one hand tight between both of his own, a radiant smile on his face even as tears streaked down his cheeks.
Shen Qingqiu had put extra effort into avoiding them all, over the last year, going so far as to use some of the absurdly huge stash of spirit stones he found tucked away in the bamboo house to rent a permanent room at the Warm Red Pavillion, so that he could occasionally get a night’s peace away from Qing Jing Peak.
The bamboo house, once a place of status and pride, had become eerie, scattered with small trinkets he did not recognize, small objects that were perpetually out of place. It was no longer his house, but that of the stranger who had lived in his body for those missing years. No longer a refuge, it felt almost like a prison. Staying there for too long felt like trapping himself with the ghost of the other him, the one respected by all of his peers.
Shen Qingqiu forced himself back to the present moment, where Wei Qingwei had just offered to accompany them to the Demon Realm.
"If Wei-shidi would consent to remain," Yue Qingyuan was saying. "It would be a weight off this sect leader’s mind, to know that someone so capable with a sword is here, should this be a diversion."
Shen Qingqiu unfolded his fan and listlessly waved it before his face, preparing for a long debate that he would have to interrupt. Doing so would paint himself yet again the rude, disruptive member of the assembled group, rather than the only one who seemed to realize that time was of the essence.
Cang Qiong Mountain Sect needed to arrive in a timely fashion, rather than being shown up by the other three great sects. They could ill afford to lose face with a late arrival. As much as it galled him to admit it, the absence of Liu Qingge would work against them here, especially if it came to a fight. Shen Qingqiu's cultivation was stronger than it had been, and he was much more formidable in a fight than before, but he was under no illusions about his martial skills when compared to the War God. And besides, what mattered with the other three great sects wasn't ability, but appearances.
Finally the useless nattering concluded.
"Shall we go?" Shen Qingqiu asked Mu Qingfang and Yue Qingyuan.
"My head disciple will come after us with the on-duty medical team," Mu Qingfang said. "I have what I need for emergency triage here." He patted a pouch at his belt.
"Shidi?" Yue Qingyuan asked, as if he thought Shen Qingqiu would be less prepared than their medical peak’s head.
"I have what I need," he said, coolly, not looking Yue Qingyuan in the eye. "I can depart at the sect leader’s convenience."
Shen Qingqiu had taken to carrying a qiankun pouch on him at all times that contained everything he would need to survive a year or more outside of the sect, another one filled with spirit stones, and a money pouch containing a number of strings of cash that wouldn't get him murdered the second he opened it. It was practical, he told himself. He'd had to uproot his life before. He hadn't had anything to bring with him in the past. This time, he would be prepared.
Yue Qingyuan said nothing more, simply unhooked Xuan Su from his belt and stepped onto the sheathed sword. Showing off again, Shen Qingqiu thought resentfully.
Yue Qingyuan never unsheathed Xuan Su, as if he thought those around him couldn’t stand to see such a powerful blade, as if the mere fact that he never bothered to draw it wasn’t a bigger boast in and of itself.
Shen Qingqiu and Mu Qingfang followed, and they started off at much too slow a pace.
"Faster," Shen Qingqiu snapped, and sped ahead, rejoicing in the clearness of his meridians in this new body, in the powerful waves of qi it seemed to refine in the sunlight, just by being under the open sky. Flying was easier than it had ever been before, and Xiu Ya’s occasional disobedience meant nothing when Shen Qingqiu had the sheer power to wrench it back under control with a mere thought.
"Shidi!" Mu Qingfang shouted, and sped to catch up with him, Yue Qingyuan easily keeping pace.
"We want to get there today, do we not?" Shen Qingqiu demanded. "Hurry up."
He was right to have been worried about the delay, Shen Qingqiu thought as they drew closer: there were already swarms of cultivators past the borderlands. When they finally arrived at the site of the disturbance, there were three distinct groups visible. The afternoon sunlight glinted off the gaudy yellow-gold of Huan Hua palace and bounced off the shaved heads of the Buddhist monks from Zhao Hua Monastery. The daoists from Tian Yi Temple were clustered a little ways away.
Master Wu Wang of Zhao Hua Monastery and the Old Palace Master’s head disciple both approached as soon as they landed.
It was just like the Old Palace Master to send only his head disciple and leave the hard work to the other sects, Shen Qingqiu thought disdainfully.
He was just preparing a snide remark to that effect when the Old Palace Master himself hurried over, looking frankly astonished to see Shen Qingqiu.
"Immortal Master Shen," the head disciple said, bowing not nearly deeply enough. "Immortal Master Mu. Sect Leader Yue. This disciple greets the peak lords of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect."
Yue Qingyuan, the sap, actually reached out and pulled the young man up by the elbows, encouraging him to stand back up again. Shen Qingqiu didn’t bother hiding his disgust with a fan.
"Is it the habit of the Old Palace Master to let his disciples speak for him?" Shen Qingqiu demanded, when no one else spoke.
Everyone was too busy staring at him, as if he were some kind of strange specimen, as if he were a freakish experiment gone wrong. It seemed Cang Qiong Mountain Sect had managed to keep the news of his revival better hidden than he had expected.
The Old Palace Master shook himself and nodded at Yue Qingyuan, at Shen Qingqiu, at Mu Qingfang.
"Greetings to the Peak Lords of Cang Qiong Mountain Peak," he said, though his eyes kept roaming up and down Shen Qingqiu's body with frankly unseemly curiosity. "If this one might inquire—"
"You may not," Shen Qingqiu snapped, just as Mu Qingfang began to open his mouth.
No doubt the medically-minded idiot was about to blab recklessly about the means by which Shen Qingqiu had been brought back to life, which could not be allowed. Not only would it be exposing a weakness, to reveal that his current body was not entirely human in origin, it would be revealing that he had been replaced by an impostor for several years. Revealing that the foremost cultivation sect under the heavens had been fooled by some petty replacement would weaken Cang Qiong Mountain Sect's standing, and Shen Qingqiu would not allow that under any circumstances.
"Ah," the Old Palace Master said. "I see."
Disturbingly, it looked like he did understand something, though what conclusion the doddering fool had drawn was beyond Shen Qingqiu’s guess.
"If this one might ask what the current situation is?" Yue Qingyuan asked, tone as mild as ever, effortlessly diverting the conversation without offending anyone.
Shen Qingqiu told himself that he did not envy Yue Qingyuan that skill, that seemingly-easy talent for making people do what he wanted by sheer force of reputation and decades of earned respect. It would be foolish to envy something that was outside of his control, and so far removed from his grasp.
After all, Shen Qingqiu was not the Xuan Su sword, was not the one who had bound Tianlang-Jun under Bai Lu mountain, was not the one to whom the entire cultivation world looked with a reverence that bordered on worship. How could he be, when at the time of that battle, Shen Jiu had been the disciple of a wandering demonic cultivator, cheating and stealing his way along the edge of starvation.
Shen Qingqiu snapped his fan open and forced himself to focus on the long-winded account that masters Wu Wang and Wu Chen were giving.
Apparently there was no way to breach the barrier around the site without amounts of force that were unattainable by normal means. It would be impossible to even see the barrier, currently a low, translucent red dome, if not for the spiritual qi being fed into a net of talismans the Zhao Hua monks had laid over the surface of it. As for what lay behind the barrier, that was a complete unknown.
"Hm," Shen Qingqiu said, and thought about their location, here at the southern edge of the Demon Realm. "As an above-ground structure, it’s likely a mausoleum. This far south, in the Demon Realm, the snake tribes are dominant, and the Sha clan. Have any major demon rulers died recently?"
He knew they had not.
Keeping tabs on possible opponents was not formally a responsibility of the scholar’s peak, but Shen Qingqiu refused to be taken by surprise. If Sha Hualing decided to backstab her father, Jiuchong-Jun, he would know about it before the chaos spilled over onto the sect. He would not be a sitting duck for a demon attack, unlike that useless impostor.
"Well?" Shen Qingqiu demanded, when no one replied.
"No demonic rulers are known to have died recently," the Huan Hua Palace head disciple said, slowly. "There were rumors from the North—"
"That's too far away to be relevant," Shen Qingqiu snapped, cutting him off. "What have your scouts reported?"
"Our scouts?" The young man looked baffled.
Shen Qingqiu sighed. "Of course," he said. "We will send some out in each direction. Did you at least bring any disciples with you who have experience sensing demonic qi?"
It was an insulting question: it was intended to be so. No self-respecting master would bring a disciple into the Demon Realm who might be overpowered by demonic qi, or be unable to differentiate the qi of an intruder from the background demonic qi of the world around them.
Wu Wang took a deep breath, face reddening, but Wu Chen cut him off.
"Our disciples are occupied feeding spiritual qi into the barrier-net," he said. "But I believe Tian Yi Temple has several disciples who would be well suited."
He bowed slightly at the head of Tian Yi Temple, who smiled, having slipped into the conversation without anyone seeming to notice him, like the bottom-feeder he was.
"Yes, of course," he said. He beckoned forward a trio of quite beautiful and absolutely identical young women, a young man, and a pair of androgynous youths.
The Old Palace Master announced his intent to also send out six disciples. By the time they had been selected, the first of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect's disciples had begun to arrive, flying in a neater formation than Shen Qingqiu had expected.
He selected Ming Fan and one of his friends, a boy who had been constantly breaking out in unsightly spots when last Shen Qingqiu remembered him, six Bai Zhan disciples and four Qian Cao disciples, dividing the twenty-four disciples selected up into groups of six, one for each cardinal direction. Ning Yingying he kept by his side, as befitted his head disciple.
Then he settled back to wait, standing a sensible but not cowardly distance from the barrier and fanning himself gently as he watched the gossip about him fly through the assembled cultivators.
"Is shidi sure this was a good idea?" Yue Qingyuan asked, coming over to stand next to him. "Your reappearance here will cause a larger stir than a gradual re-integration."
It’s been a year, Shen Qingqiu wanted to scream. Do you expect to hide me away forever?
"Does zhangmen-shixiong doubt my intelligence?" Shen Qingqiu asked, tone mild. They both knew it for the trap it was.
"Of course not," Yue Qingyuan hastened to reply. "I—" he seemed to realize there was no way to finish that thought that would not make Shen Qingqiu angry, and his shoulders dipped slightly. "Of course not," he repeated.
"Good," Shen Qingqiu told him, and went back to looking out over the barrier just in time to see a small door open in the edge of the barrier, within a stone’s throw of where he was standing.
"Look," he hissed.
Beside him, Yue Qingyuan froze in place, and as he saw who stepped out, Shen Qingqiu could see why.
Emerging from the red-tinted barrier was a tall young man dressed in black and green robes, long wavy hair pulled back in a tight ponytail reminiscent of the disciples of Bai Zhan peak. Qi moved strangely around him but he wore a cultivator’s sword at his belt. When his face came into clearer view, Shen Qingqiu hissed in a breath through his teeth. That little beast, here of all places.
"…Xiyan?" the Old Palace Master whispered.
"Shizun," the young man called to someone behind him. "Shizun, I think you should see this."
And, from behind him, out stepped another figure, his layered white and teal robes torn and bloody, his hair flowing from a scholar’s half-topknot, a silver guan. When he stepped into the light, his face came into full view.
He was, unmistakably, Shen Qingqiu.
* * *
There was a long moment in which no one moved.
Binghe considered, for one frantic, panicked instant, shutting them back into the Mausoleum, but there was no food there, precious little water, and no other way out, since Mobei-Jun’s portals seemed not to be able to pierce the barrier in any direction except to the Eternal Abyss.
They could face the assembled cultivators diplomatically: try to talk down the heads of the four great sects, and their assembled disciples. Or they could attempt to flee.
Binghe stepped forward, and gestured the others out from behind him.
"Are you sure?" Shang-shishu demanded, being pushed forwards by Mobei-Jun. "This seems like a really bad idea. I’m just saying."
"What," Shizun asked. "Should we stay in the Tomb of Horrors?"
"Oh fuck off," Shang-shishu said easily. "You know it’s more complicated than that."
Shizun snorted. Binghe stared for an instant, shocked at such inelegant behavior from his lofty Shizun, terrified for a moment that they had brought the wrong person back, again.
"Focus," Liu-shishu said, and stepped forward.
He was putting weight evenly on both legs. Only someone who had fought him as often as Binghe had, or another truly excellent martial artist, would have been able to tell that his right leg was still healing, or that all of his injuries were studded with spores of The Ties that Bind, growing into his flesh like burrowing maggot-wasp larvae.
The heads of the Four Great Sects were assembled around the Mausoleum's barrier, along with a few dozen of what must be their senior disciples. If they were in the Human Realm, Binghe thought wildly, they'd be near Bai Lu Mountain, where the Four Great Sects had assembled to seal Tianlang-Jun, the last Demon Emperor. He wanted to laugh; he wanted to weep.
Even with Liu-shishu on their side, even if he were not injured, a fight with these odds would be impossible to win. Flight would be similarly impossible, unless Liu-shishu could be knocked out: he would never consent to flee through a portal.
Binghe held an arm out to prevent Shizun from walking forwards into greater danger—again—instead keeping him behind Binghe's body, where he would be a little bit safer.
Closest to hand, Yue Qingyuan and the Old Palace Master were both staring at them especially hard, seeming to focus on Binghe in particular. While Yue Qingyuan's expression was nearly aghast, the Old Palace Master looked yearning, almost mournful. Binghe filed that away for later: that could be a weakness, a way to manipulate the Huan Hua sect leader.
"Sect Leader Yue," Shizun called out. "Assembled venerable sect leaders. This Shen Qingqiu greets you."
He bowed.
Binghe felt his spine crawl from the danger that gesture posed, even here, surrounded by human cultivators. Perhaps, he thought, hearing the ripple of whispering that rippled out from where they were standing, especially here.
"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Wu Wang, expression stormy, voice sharp.
Binghe was not surprised it had been Wu Wang who had spoken up first. The Zhao Hua head had always been known to have a short temper and an unforgiving nature that Binghe had privately thought was unbefitting a Buddhist monk. The man's letters to Shizun in the past had been so curt as to be outright rude, though Shizun had never seemed to mind.
"Now, now," another monk said, stepping forward hastily, and waving his hands as if to diffuse the impact of his sect leader's words. "It is a surprise," he admitted. "To go from Shen Qingqiu being dead to alive was miraculous enough, but now, to have two Qing Jing Peak Lords? This humble one is frankly astonished!"
The Old Palace Master was less circumspect. He turned on Yue Qingyuan, standing a few paces away from him, with a glare.
"What is the meaning of this?" He demanded, as if he had any right.
"An internal matter," Yue Qingyuan said, smiling only very slightly.
That should be enough to make anyone with sense back off: Cang Qiong Mountain Sect was famous—notorious, even—for protecting its own. Declaring the issue of an extra Shen Qingqiu an internal matter was as good as declaring it off-limits for anyone outside the sect.
"Ah, Yue-zhangmen," the Tian Yi leader began, and Yue Qingyuan turned a calm, unsmiling face on him. "That is," the other man stammered. "Perhaps, if this group can explain the disruption, we might all … leave? The Demon Realm?"
“We broke into the barrier a day or so ago,” Liu-shishu said, staring directly at the Tian Yi sect leader, who quailed under his steely gaze.
Binghe had no idea how on earth this man had become a sect leader, and of one of the four great sects, at that. Behind him, a trio of identical girls in Tian Yi robes were staring at the group of them with unabashed curiosity and whispering to each other. Looking back at them, Binghe began to have an idea.
"As you see," not-Shizun said, voice sharp, features set in an unpleasant sneer. "It is explained. You may leave first."
While it was clear that many of the assembled cultivators would like to stay and investigate further, or at the very least gossip more, the steady pressure of Yue Qingyuan's polite disapproval, Liu-shishu’s outright glare, and the promise of a tongue-lashing from not-Shizun were too much for nearly all of them.
"We will expect an explanation at the next meeting of the Great Sects!" declared Master Wu Wang. The Old Temple Master nodded agreement.
Binghe watched them all with half his attention. The rest was focused on Peak Lord Mu, who had hurried over to Shizun's side, and was being pushed towards Liu-shishu.
Peak Lord Shang came over to Binghe's side and whispered, low enough that only a demon's hearing could pick it up: "Mobei-Jun is leaving. Are you going with him?"
Binghe shot him a look, shocked that Mobei-Jun had not decided to simply slaughter the Old Palace Master and anyone else in Huan Hua Palace robes. Binghe had no idea what the source of that grudge was, but it went deep. Peak Lord Shang quailed a bit at Binghe's expression, but stood his ground.
"Well, are you?" He demanded.
"I'm staying with Shizun," Binghe said, loud enough for Mobei-Jun to hear.
An instant later, there were shouts of surprise, and the slight fizzle of demonic qi that Binghe recognized by now as one of Mobei-Jun's quieter portals. That removed their only hope of a clean exit if things went wrong, but the departure of Mobei-Jun might make their group seem like less of a threat. That might slow down the departures of the other sects' cultivators; it might speed them up. Binghe didn't care enough to speculate right now.
Instead, he focused on Peak Lord Mu, who appeared to be conferring with Shizun and holding onto Liu-shishu's wrist with some difficulty.
Binghe went over to the three of them, Peak Lord Shang following at his heels.
"… be all right?" Shizun was saying.
"Yes, yes," Peak Lord Mu said. "You noticed in time, Shen-shixiong."
He seemed not to notice the term of address he'd used for Shizun, or, Binghe thought, he simply didn't care which Shen Qingqiu was which, so long as he got to deal with medical marvels and cure strange diseases. Peak Lord Mu had always been rather single-minded in that way.
"You absolutely must not use qi in any way, Liu-shixiong," Peak Lord Mu said. "Shen-shixiong was absolutely correct about that. With how far the Ties that Bind have infiltrated your system, especially your sword hand, removal will be tricky as it is. Any more growth and you might well lose the limb."
Binghe felt himself go pale. Liu-shishu couldn't lose a hand! How would he—
"Mn," Liu-shishu said, which was most decidedly not a sound of agreement.
"Shidi," Shizun said, and his tone was almost pleading. "Please."
Binghe stopped paying attention to them, then, because the final group of disciples were returning from the woods. More alarmingly, Yue Qingyuan and not-Shizun were coming their way.
Focus locked onto the sect leader, it took all of Binghe's self-control to keep from instinctively drawing his sword and decapitating the person who flung themselves at him from behind.
Ning Yingying clung to his neck, laughing, and Binghe felt a small amount of tension leech out of him. When she stopped clinging like a koala-monkey, and ran to his front to embrace him, he could see tears running down her face even as she grinned.
"A-Luo, you're all right!" She exclaimed.
Behind her, Ming Fan met his eyes and gave a little shrug.
"No one would say where you had vanished to," he explained, and stepped forward to try to pull Ning Yingying off. "Shimei," he said. "Please, let go."
Ning Yingying stepped back, and straightened her robes hastily, but then looked Binghe up and down, seeming to check him for injuries. To his surprise, she stepped forward, and took his hands in her own, bringing them up to her chin, as if she wanted to kiss his hands.
"I'm so glad you're all right," she said, and her voice almost broke from emotion.
"Shimei!" Ming Fan hissed, and his spotty friend tried to pull her back, hissing something about Shizun being angry.
Binghe decided then and there to keep right on forgetting his name, just for that.
"It's all right," Binghe said, though it wouldn't have mattered. Ning Yingying had always been unstoppable once she'd made up her mind, Binghe thought, and bit back a laugh.
There was no malice in Ning Yingying's touch, or her gaze, only astonished relief. That felt—Binghe wasn't going to think about how that felt, not right now, not with the sect leader and not-Shizun a mere handful of steps away.
It would make him seem more harmless if he let Ning Yingying grab at him, whispered the part of Binghe's mind that was always running calculations, always gaming out the odds of tipping other people to his point of view. Having his fellow disciples rejoice at his return would emphasize his role in the sect, cast him as a member of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect in front of outsiders. That would all make it harder to exclude him, to shunt him aside while they decided what to do with Shizun.
"Mu-shidi," Yue Qingyuan said, and Binghe braced himself. "If they are well enough to be moved?"
"Liu-shixiong will need to fly with someone else," Peak Lord Mu began.
"Each of the four of them will have to fly with someone else," not-Shizun said, icily. "You may take Liu Qingge, Mu-shidi. A Bai Zhan senior disciple will do well enough for each of the rest of them, except, I think, that one—"
He pointed at Binghe.
"That will go with Zhangmen-shixiong."
It was strategic. The four of them were split exactly as Binghe himself would have done, in a way that managed both to mitigate any possible threats, and to reduce any chance of escape. He tried not to resent that, and failed.
As usual, Yue Qingyuan did not unsheath his sword before stepping onto it. Binghe stood behind him, kept repressing his demon mark by suppressing both his spiritual and demonic qi, and spent the whole way back to the Sect trying to devise a plan that would ensure Shizun's safety, a plan that would allow him to exist in a world that contained Shizun and not-Shizun, an excuse that would be a salve to not-Shizun's thin face and easily-injured sense of dignity.
By the time they returned to Qiong Ding Peak, having sent several disciples ahead as messengers, they were met by an assembly of all the Peak Lords. There were also a handful of medical disciples, all of the head disciples of Binghe's generation, whether confirmed or prospective, and a distinct buzz of gossip coming from the crowd.
"First things first," not-Shizun said, and raised his voice. "The source of the disturbance in the Demon Realm has been identified. It is not a threat," he said. "Now scram."
"Is that Luo Binghe?" Someone whispered.
"It looks like it," the girl next to him replied. "But look, there's Peak Lord Shen—and—" she took a sharp breath as Shizun stepped onto the re-built terrace on which Binghe had fought Elder Sky Hammer, all those years ago. "Is that—a second Peak Lord Shen?"
The whispering went up in pitch, like golden sky locusts getting ready to swarm.
Yue Qingyuan let out a small, tired-sounding breath, then straightened his shoulders infinitesimally.
"If you would step down," he said, and Binghe hastened to obey, noting that Yue Qingyuan had not called him 'shizhi' and wondering whether that had been intentional or not.
Binghe hastened over to Shizun, who was standing with Peak Lord Shang, Peak Lord Mu, and Liu-shishu. As Binghe approached, Shizun swatted Peak Lord Shang with his fan.
Liu-shishu looked over Peak Lord Shang's head at Binghe and shrugged one shoulder, as if to say he was as confused by Shizun's behavior as Binghe was.
"Mu-shidi," Yue Qingyuan said, and his voice carried in the bare stone courtyard. "If you would be so kind as to lend me your expertise."
Peak Lord Mu nodded, and straightened up.
"Of course, Zhangmen-shixiong," he said. "How may I be of service."
It wasn't really a question, as he phrased it.
"In your professional opinion, which of these two men is Peak Lord Shen Qingqiu?" Yue Qingyuan asked.
"Well," Peak Lord Mu said, and there was a tone in his voice that Binghe recognized, of a true devotee being invited to discuss his favorite topic. "Technically, shixiong, I would say both of them have acted in that capacity. Neither is possessed, and …"
Binghe let the discussion of the finer details of possession-testing swords, plant bodies, qi infusion, soul-recall arrays, and the more abstruse details of medical theory of the self and the soul wash over him, not giving it his full attention.
Instead, Binghe watched the crowd.
The assembled disciples were starting to form up into something like clusters. Qiong Ding Peak's disciples were arrayed neatly behind Yue Qingyuan, while Qian Cao's disciples, who had been taking advantage of their status as medics returning from a mission to mingle and gossip, were clustering behind Peak Lord Mu. Bai Zhan disciples were arranged behind Liu-shishu, who was being prodded by several Qian Cao disciples. There could be no help from that quarter, Binghe knew, even if Liu-shishu chose his care for Shizun over his fealty to Yue-zhangmen. His infection with the Ties that Bind prevented him from accessing any of his qi at all.
What really surprised Binghe, however, was how many of the Qing Jing Peak disciples were standing with him, rather than closer to Yue Qingyuan and not-Shizun.
It was clear that not-Shizun had noticed this as well, from the curl of his lip, and that he was not happy about it. The sight of his expression woke something small and frightened in Binghe's chest, the memory of beatings and of winter nights shivering in a woodshed with only a scrap of a blanket between him and the chill winds.
"… so, really, Zhangmen-shixiong," Peak Lord Mu said. "It could be said that both of them are Peak Lord Shen Qingqiu, or equally, that neither of them is."
Shizun flipped up his fan, but Binghe could see he was smiling from the curve of his eyes.
"Useless," not-Shizun snapped. "Is this what we get from Qian Cao Peak now? Quack-doctor non-answers, wishy-washy equivocation and a flawed treatise on the nature of the soul? I suggest you leave such philosophical subjects to Qing Jing Peak in the future, shidi. My junior disciples could do better."
"Excuse you," Shizun shot back, and Binghe startled. "Mu-shidi has saved all of our lives, and we owe him more respect than whatever that poor excuse for an insult was."
Not-Shizun drew himself up, and suddenly the two of them were trading insults, cold barbs, and veiled threats as fast as Binghe could follow.
"Oh, shit," Peak Lord Shang said, watching the exchange between the two of them as if entranced, while Shizun tore holes in the attempted insults that had just been thrown his way. "He's getting the full Cucumber-bro takedown. Holy shit."
Binghe had little attention to spare for that bit of nonsense, because not-Shizun had put a hand on Xiu Ya's hilt.
"I suppose you think I'd have done better to pander to my disciples, bending over backwards like a simpering, spineless fool?" not-Shizun demanded, riled up in a way Binghe associated with rough rope around his wrists and heavy lashings.
"Better than being so scared of them surpassing you that you chase off anyone who dared show any talent!" Shizun shot back, clearly furious, hand clenched white-knuckled on the fan Liu-shishu had given him in the Mausoleum.
Someone in the crowd whistled. Not-Shizun's lips went tight at the reminder of their audience.
"Yue Qingyuan," he demanded. "Remove this impostor from my sight."
"Shidi," the Sect Leader began, voice strained. "I think we all ought to go inside."
"No," not-Shizun said. "I will not tolerate its presence. That is not the Peak Lord of Qing Jing Peak. It is a body-thieving yao of some kind, and I demand that you remove it from Qiong Ding Peak immediately."
Peak Lord Mu started to open his mouth, and not-Shizun glared at him.
"Can you be sure it's not possessed?" He demanded. "Really? Without Wei Qingwei's swords and Ku Xing's rituals? They didn't catch it last time, did they? It's a monster. It needs to be put down."
Liu-shishu lunged forward. Shizun caught him by the upper arms, pulling him back with appallingly little effort.
"Oh, it has an attack dog now," not-Shizun jeered. "Two, if I don't miss my guess, though calling that a dog—" he gestured at Binghe, "—is more than it deserves."
He waved his fan towards Shizun, making it a lazy, genteel gesture.
"That it came back with an exiled former disciple is enough sign of its treachery, don't you think?" Not-Shizun demanded, clearly enjoying having so much attention on him, clearly relishing the chance to tear Shizun down, to smear his good name.
Ning Yingying made a furious noise, but quieted when Shizun glanced at her and shook his head.
Luo Binghe made himself step forward, keenly aware that the zuiyin on his forehead was no longer showing, but that if he got upset and exuded any demonic qi, he would have made it clear that he could hide it.
"Shizun," he said, and grasped at the trailing teal sleeve. "Shizun, let's just go."
"Don't be absurd, Binghe," Shizun replied. "There's no reason to let that desiccated vinegar jar drive you from your home."
Binghe swallowed. It wouldn't do any good to tell Shizun that that was exactly what had happened a year ago. He knew that stubborn set to Shizun's jaw. From the look of it, Liu-shishu did too.
"I'll cover you," Liu-shishu said, soft enough that only Binghe could hear. "Get him out of here."
But before Binghe could protest, Shizun stepped forward.
"I have nothing to hide," he said. "I wonder if Peak Lord Shen can say the same?"
Not-Shizun made a noise of outrage and began to step forward as well before visibly halting himself.
"Take it away," he demanded, glaring at the Sect Leader. "And the little beast, too."
"You dare!" Liu-shishu growled, and his fingers flexed on Cheng Luan's hilt, despite the Ties that Bind.
Binghe stepped quickly between him and Shizun and the rest of the assembled Peak Lords, hiding them as much as he could, signaling Liu-shishu to stand down as he had in monster-hunting missions off-mountain.
"I won't let you take him away," Binghe said. "We'll leave. I won't let you imprison him."
His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword, and not-Shizun laughed, high and bitter, and drew Xiu Ya from its sheath.
This fic has been converted for free using AOYeet!
Notes:
NGL, I’ve been faintly worried about this chapter, so comments would be even more welcome than usual. 💜💜
Chapter 7: Yue Qingyuan
Summary:
In which Yue Qingyuan steps in to defend Shen Jiu, Luo Binghe fights for his Shizun, several truths come to light, and Meng Mo finally gets to see the results of his meddling.
Notes:
There is art by a sea with no shores embedded in this chapter! If you can't see it, check out the art here on tumblr!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Yue Qingyuan barely had time to grasp that Xiao-Jiu had been the aggressor before a sword glare was streaking from Xiu Ya towards the new Shen Qingqiu, sparkling and lethal, replete with spiritual energy.
Luo Binghe blocked it with a sword Yue Qingyuan knew: a blade he himself had considered and rejected as a disciple, a sword just a hair less powerful than Xuan Su. How, he wondered frantically, had Luo Binghe gotten a new sword from Wan Jian Peak? When?
But there was no time to find out, because Luo Binghe was moving toward Xiao-Jiu, sword upraised. Yue Qingyuan had an instant's flash of memory: Shen Qingqiu dead on the torn-up earth; Shen Qingqiu's body limp and bloodied in Luo Binghe's arms; Shen Qingqiu's still corpse lying silent and cold in a chill room. He knew, with a sudden, bone-deep certainty: he would not survive that sight a second time.
Yue Qingyuan blocked Luo Binghe's blow with Xuan Su's sheath.
"Stand down," he said, though without much hope. The young man was clearly furious, and most likely beyond reason.
Behind him, Xiao-Jiu laughed, bitterness bleeding into even his mirth. Yue Qingyuan could see the glint of light off of Xiu Ya's blade in his peripheral vision.
"Say Shizun can leave," Luo Binghe demanded.
"Sheathe your sword. We can go in and talk about this," Yue Qingyuan said, though he didn’t expect it to work.
Luo Binghe shook his head.
"No," he said. "He'll turn everyone against me—against us. He always has."
Yue Qingyuan blocked a flurry of blows from Luo Binghe's sword: stronger than he'd expected, and decidedly more feral. Luo Binghe's forms were strange, hard to predict: his footwork was pure Bai Zhan, and his strikes still reminded Yue Qingyuan of the Qing Jing forms he'd seen as a disciple, but they were sharper now, less artful. It was still, somehow, familiar.
Yue Qingyuan kept pace despite the boy's astonishing skill. He could not bear the idea of killing one of his sect's own disciples, so he chose to fight at a disadvantage, trying to disarm rather than wound, to slow rather than kill. It helped, now, that he habitually kept Xuan Su sheathed: he knew he could strike with nearly his whole strength, confident that the sheath would turn the sword into a bludgeon.
But Luo Binghe was fast. He moved like smoke out of the path of Xuan Su, and the longer they fought, the more Yue Qingyuan saw dark trails of qi starting to wreath the blade in Luo Binghe's hands.
"Say Shizun can leave." Luo Binghe demanded again, blade braced against Xuan Su, held in place with both hands. His left palm was bleeding, but he didn't seem to notice, to feel the pain, to care.
The blood, instead of dripping normally, was forming a lashing whip hanging from Luo Binghe's hand.
Yue Qingyuan's stomach dropped. All of a sudden, he knew where he had seen this fighting style before.
For a bare instant, Yue Qingyuan was a teenager again and he was fighting Tianlang-Jun, the Demon Emperor. He was newly emerged from the Ling Xi Caves, and he was fighting the most powerful opponent the cultivation world had ever seen while battle raged around the two of them, the Demon Emperor laughed, and ruby-red eagles dove at his face.
Yue Qingyuan wanted to close his eyes in a moment of overwhelming grief that it had come to this, yet again.
He didn't dare, not if this boy had inherited Tianlang-Jun's ability to manipulate the blood.
"Stop that," he said, under his breath. Then, more loudly: "Luo Binghe, stand down."
"Say Shizun can live," the boy insisted, seeming not to notice the change in his words.
And, oh, if that was why he was fighting, his desperate strength made so much sense.
Yue Qingyuan knew what that kind of desperation to protect someone else felt like. He was intimately familiar with the strength it could lend. It was why he had survived the caves; it was, perhaps, part of why Luo Binghe was strong enough to match blows with him, despite his age and inexperience.
"Don't be ridiculous," Xiao-Jiu said, from the sidelines, voice pitched so loud that Yue Qingyuan knew he was speaking to the crowd, now. "You all know Cang Qiong Mountain Sect cannot permit such monsters to live. Look at the blood. That's the sign of a Heavenly demon's heritage. Zhangmen-shixiong sealed the last one under a mountain, surely he can do so again."
Yue Qingyuan felt so sick at the idea that he barely blocked the next blow, frenzied as it was.
"Say Shizun can live," Luo Binghe repeated, but he didn't sound like he believed it would do any good.
The blood dripping from his left hand had become a whip, with which he lashed out at Xiao-Jiu.
Xiao-Jiu, who was standing behind Yue Qingyuan. Who was explaining with apparent relish the terrors that a Heavenly Demon could unleash on the world, the aberrations with which they could surround themselves.
"Stop talking!" Luo Binghe cried, and the whip seemed almost to accelerate.
Yue Qingyuan was barely able to block the tip of the lash in time, knowing that breaking it would do no good: the severed part would continue to move on its own, powered by the blood parasites within it. He was perhaps the only person left in the cultivation world who knew this in any way other than purely theoretically. It was all because Tianlang-Jun had used a similar weapon at one point in their fight, more than twenty years ago.
The tip of the lash curled around Xuan Su's upraised sheath and nearly pulled the sword from his hand. Yue Qingyuan gasped, braced himself, and dove back into the fight.
An uncounted number of blows later, Yue Qingyuan managed to disarm Luo Binghe, holding him at scabbard-point.
There, he thought, with something that felt like relief and like fatigue at the same time. It's over. We can talk this through now.
Then the boy drew a short sword—a demonic one—from his sleeve, and launched himself at Yue Qingyuan again, gathering spiritual and demonic qi around himself in a swirling aura that had the onlookers stepping back.
Looking at the mingled energies around the sword, Yue Qingyuan knew they would destroy Xuan Su's sheath.
He braced himself, and drew his sword.
The assembled cultivators gasped as they were knocked backwards by a wave of white light. Some lost their footing. Yue Qingyuan had no time for them. The drain was immediate, invisible fishhooks tugging at him, body and soul.
Luo Binghe did not hesitate. He launched himself at Yue Qingyuan, his sword gleaming silvery-green and purple-black with spiritual and demonic qi.
No—the green was a person.
Shen Qingqiu flung himself between them, teal-green robes billowing in the force of their qi.
"Stop!" he yelled.
He was unarmed. His hands were empty but for an elegant white fan.
Yue Qingyuan had already committed himself to a crippling blow; to pull back now would be to risk qi deviation as the spiritual energy gathered in Xuan Su found nowhere to go but back into his meridians.
Shen Qingqiu's anguished face, less than an arm's length away, was one he had twice been certain he would never see again.
Yue Qingyuan halted his blow.
He had only time to see that Luo Binghe had also come to a stop before the rebound hit and Yue Qingyuan fell to the ground, writhing in pain.
"Yue-zhangmen!" he heard someone call, and "Zhangmen-shixiong," and "Binghe?" and, faintly, as he was on the edge of unconsciousness, "Qi-ge!?"
Then everything went away.
When Yue Qingyuan struggled back to consciousness, he could tell from the smell of the incense that he was in a room on Qian Cao Peak.
Xiao-Jiu was there, whispering furiously at Mu Qingfang, who kept shaking his head.
"Ah, Zhangmen-shixiong," Mu Qingfang said, when Yue Qingyuan shifted. "You're awake."
Yue Qingyuan felt hollowed out in a way he hadn't felt since his battle with Tianlang-Jun, since drawing Xuan Su from the sword wall in the first place.
"Yes," he said. "Is—"
"The little beast is alive, and his darling shizun is with him," Xiao-Jiu said with a snarl. "Mu-shidi refuses to eject them from the peak until they are healed properly, and Liu-shidi has threatened to leave with them if they are sent away." He sniffed. "No loss, there."
Yue Qingyuan knew otherwise. Without the threat of Liu Qingge to fight their battles, he himself would be called upon to draw Xuan Su to fight the sect’s battles, and that was impossible.
It was an oddly strategic move for Liu Qingge—but he had spent the most time on Qing Jing Peak of the other Peak Lords, after Shen Qingqiu's death. It was not impossible that he might have learned something, or become attached to Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu. Yue Qingyuan found himself remembering how uncharacteristically sharp-tongued Liu Qingge had been in defense of Shen Qingqiu's body, all those years ago.
Mu Qingfang was speaking, but Yue Qingyuan knew what he would be saying and tuned him out to consider what must have happened while he was asleep.
Luo Binghe had fought today to protect his shizun when no one else had stepped up.
More surprisingly, the boy had, apparently years ago, identified a sword that would meet his needs, and then waited until he was strong enough to draw it safely. The amount of potential that displayed—and the sheer loyalty involved in bringing his shizun back not once, but twice—was staggering.
"He's not listening," Xiao-Jiu said, sharp voice cutting through Yue Qingyuan’s thoughts. "What, can't you tell when he's not listening? His eyes go just a little bit unfocused and to the left, just like that."
Mu Qingfang stopped talking.
"Hm," he said. And then he pinched Yue Qingyuan hard, right on the soft skin of his inner wrist.
Yue Qingyuan snapped to attention.
"There we go," Mu Qingfang said. "Thanking Shen-shixiong for the information. This shidi will be sure to use it well."
Xiao-Jiu rolled his eyes.
"Now," he said. "If Zhangmen-shixiong can stop woolgathering, I believe there are important issues to sort out."
Yue Qingyuan nodded, glad he had mulled these issues over on the flight back to Cang Qiong Mountain Sect.
"When everyone is well, we will have to go to Wan Jian Peak and Ku Xing Peak," he agreed. "And test for possession again. After that? Well, there is precedent for identical twins having the rule of a single peak……"
Xiao-Jiu hissed like an angry cat, and sprang to his feet.
"Unbelievable," he snapped, and stalked out.
"Zhangmen-shixiong!" Mu Qingfang scolded him. "Peak Lord Shen has been on the verge of a qi deviation since you collapsed! I had only just gotten him stable."
And he followed Xiao-Jiu out in a flurry of whirling robes, leaving Yue Qingyuan alone with his thoughts, and no small amount of guilt.
Some time later, there was a knock on the door.
Shen Qingqiu came in. Somehow, even with different robes, Yue Qingyuan could tell this was the one who had emerged from the Mausoleum, and must therefore also be the one who had woken up after that terrible qi deviation, and the one who had died at the Immortal Alliance Conference. There were smile lines around his eyes, and he looked openly worried.
"Zhangmen-shixiong," he said, voice warm. "Or, well, if I shouldn't call you that anymore—"
"You can," Yue Qingyuan interrupted him.
"I'm so glad you're all right," Shen Qingqiu said. "We were all very concerned."
He worried at the edges of his sleeves, looking less like a peerless immortal, and more like a worried parent asking after their child's results at the acceptance tests.
"Once we confirm that neither you—" Yue Qingyuan paused, and then let out a long breath. "Nor the other Shen Qingqiu are possessed, and we sort out what happened, you will both stay. There is precedent for identical twins ruling a single peak in tandem, if not much. As for Luo Binghe … Qing Jing Peak can hold a vote on Luo Binghe's status as a disciple. If he is accepted by Qing Jing Peak’s members as a fellow disciple, I will confirm his status as a member of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect."
Xiao-Jiu would be furious, but there were very few ways out of this that wouldn't leave Xiao-Jiu furious at him, and Yue Qingyuan couldn't justify exiling this man, who had, for however brief a time, been his shidi. No matter how strange the circumstances, he had defended the Sect time and again, been lethally poisoned for it, and been willing to risk his own life to stop the fight between himself and Luo Binghe.
Shen Qingqiu nodded, looking relieved.
"Thanking Zhangmen-shixiong," he said, sounding much less anxious. "And you? Are you—that is, it seemed like a bad qi deviation. Is there anything this shidi can do for you?"
Yue Qingyuan smiled slightly, and shook his head.
How had anyone ever mistaken this person for Xiao-Jiu, he wondered. The differences were so clear, with the two of them together. Perhaps they had all, for their own reasons, been unwilling to accept the loss of Xiao-Jiu; perhaps some of the others had genuinely preferred this version. The thought was a bitter one, but Yue Qingyuan was accustomed to swallowing bitter truths. This one sat no heavier than any of his other failures.
Still, seeing the man sitting here with him right after Xiao-Jiu had left in a fury sat badly with him. He smiled to cover his discomfort.
"Well, then—" this Shen Qingqiu said, and fidgeted with his sleeves again.
"And Luo-shizhi?" Yue Qingyuan asked, trying for politeness. "How is he?"
"Still asleep, when I left," he replied, looking a little relieved. "That is to say—"
"Of course, shidi will want to be there when he wakes," Yue Qingyuan said, seeing an excuse to get his visitor to leave without ruffling feathers. "I am quite all right. Mu-shidi will be here soon to check on me and repeat all his instructions."
Shen Qingqiu smiled, then, a small, genuinely amused smile, and Yue Qingyuan watched him leave with something like relief and something like regret.
This would be complicated, that much was sure, but if a compromise could be reached, Yue Qingyuan would no longer have to worry about affairs on Qing Jing Peak, and both Xiao-Jiu and his disciples would remain safe.
He leaned back against the pillows on which he was propped, and allowed his eyes to close. Everything hurt, but everything had hurt since he had first drawn Xuan Su: this was only a matter of degree.
Eyes closed, meditating and carefully keeping his mind blank, Yue Qingyuan waited for Mu Qingfang to return.
* * *
Luo Binghe's dreams after he fell on Qiong Ding Peak were unsettling, uncontrolled things, all sound and whirling colors, voices half-heard and sensations and smells that touched the edges of rough, inchoate memory. In his dreams, he fought Yue Qingyuan inside the Holy Mausoleum, and every time he landed a blow on the Sect Leader, his attention wavered just enough to let a last breath candle light, or allow a blind corpse to attack his friends. In his dreams, the resurrection ritual failed, and he went mad and tore himself apart, leaving Liu-shishu to find his way out alone. In his dreams, his self-control failed, his zuiyin revealed his heritage to the assembled Great Sects as they exited the Mausoleum, and they were torn apart by an angry mob. In his dreams, Yue Qingyuan spoke with not-Shizun's voice, and struck his limbs off one at a time, telling Binghe he was rotten beyond saving, that he was a monster, a demon, a blight on the human world. Binghe wept, and his blood did not obey him, and he knew, deep in his bones, that Shizun was dead, that he had failed, yet again, to bring him back, that there would be no third chance.
It was the feeling of a familiar, fresh qi flowing through his meridians that finally woke him. Binghe kept his eyes closed, unwilling to alert anyone else in the room to his wakefulness. Instead, he listened, and felt for the ripples of qi that indicated another person's presence.
There were two people: Shizun was the first one, pouring qi into his meridians through one wrist. Liu-shishu was the second. His qi was muffled, as if he were tamping it down, which Binghe was relieved to feel: he knew the Ties that Bind would take time to heal, Shizun had said so.
"That should do," Shizun said, and then felt Luo Binghe's brow, brushing his hair aside with a cool hand. His fingers still had calluses from playing the qin. "Still asleep, poor thing," he said.
Binghe fiercely was glad he had not admitted to being awake: Shizun's face had always been too thin to allow him such gentle actions when he thought Binghe was awake.
"The whole sect knows he's a Heavenly Demon after that fight," Shizun said, as if continuing a conversation.
Liu-shishu made an agreeing noise.
"But Qing Jing Peak—the whole peak—will vote on Luo Binghe's continued standing in the Peak. Zhangmen-shixiong says he'll back whatever the peak's members decide."
That was a surprise.
Binghe had been convinced Yue Qingyuan would kick him out of the Sect entirely, after he used his blood parasites in the battle. The Sect Leader was famous for having sealed Tianlang-Jun, after all, and Luo Binghe had proven in front of witnesses that he was of the same bloodline. Fighting the Sect Leader had been one of Binghe's greatest fears in the years since his heritage was revealed, and now that it had happened, everything seemed to be going in ways he hadn't dared even dream about.
Binghe knew he would not have won against Yue Qingyuan, but he had hoped to gain Shizun enough time to escape, enough time for Liu-shishu to convince him to leave, to go somewhere safe until they could find him.
Binghe wouldn't have found him, of course, because he would have been dead or sealed, but Liu-shishu would have kept Shizun safe.
Now they were all alive, and it sounded like they would all be allowed to stay? Binghe could barely believe it.
Shizun pushed his hair back from his forehead again, and Binghe managed not to turn his face into the touch, just barely.
"He's really out," Shizun said. He sounded worried.
"The backlash was hard on him," Liu-shishu said. "He'll sleep the night through. You should also get some sleep. I'll stay up."
Shizun hummed, stood up, and by the sound of it, sat on the floor.
"What!" Liu-shishu exclaimed, loud enough that he would have woken Binghe if he had actually been asleep. "You can't—I didn't mean—"
"It's fine, Liu-shidi," Shizun said soothingly. "This way I can rest my head. I've slept in worse places." He actually sounded amused at that, but his voice sharpened as the sheets on Liu-shishu's bed rustled. "Don't you dare get up. Mu-shidi will have my skin. You stay there, and I'll stay here and get some sleep. If you get up, I'll go get Mu-shidi and tell him you need treatment again."
Binghe wanted to smile at that, at the casually manipulative nature of Shizun's care, the way he used his kindness to get what he wanted from others. It really was him.
After some time, Shizun began making the small, almost-snoring noises that he made when he was very deeply asleep.
"I know you're awake," Liu-shishu said quietly. There was no doubt in his voice, so Binghe opened his eyes.
"The Ties that Bind?" He asked.
Liu-shishu scoffed.
"Mu-shixiong will burn them out soon enough," he said. "Don't worry about that. Go back to sleep, I'll keep watch."
Binghe nodded, and stretched out a hand to pull aside a piece of hair that had fallen over Shizun's face where it was pillowed on his hands, right on the edge of Binghe's bed.
"Good," he said, and allowed himself to fall back into a deep sleep right away.
This time, when he dreamed, it was very nearly familiar. He found himself at the foot of a gnarled tree on a small hillock. This time, instead of being a dying tree in the center of a barren field, the tree was flowering, and the hill was carpeted with green grass and small blossoms.
Meng Mo was standing beneath the tree, smiling. He looked, strangely, almost proud. Binghe blinked, and when he looked again, Meng Mo's expression was stern again, more the strict would-be-shifu face he habitually wore.
"Well done surviving the Mausoleum, kid," Meng Mo told him. "I suppose this means you'll be staying in the Human Realm?"
He didn't sound as unhappy about it as Binghe had expected.
"I think so," he said. There was still the question of Shizun's safety to sort out. Characteristically, Shizun had told Liu-shishu all about Binghe's situation, and mentioned nothing about his own.
The air wavered, and Shizun appeared, only a little distance away.
"Binghe!" he exclaimed, and hurried over to him, looking around with awed, impressed eyes. "Oh, look at this! It's so lush now. I'm so glad for you!"
Binghe stared at him.
"What?" Shizun asked. "Isn't this Binghe's dreamscape? Wasn't it so much more bleak when you were younger? This is better, isn't it?"
He sounded uncertain, for once, and Meng Mo laughed.
"He's not wrong," he said. Then he gave Shizun a small nod. "Peak Lord Shen," he said, which was far more respectful than Binghe had expected. "As ever, you know more about dreams and dreaming than I expect."
Shizun just shrugged.
"Qing Jing Peak has an extensive library," he said.
Binghe glanced at Meng Mo. Both of them knew that could not be where Shizun had learned this: Binghe had read the entirety of Qing Jing's library, as well as all the scrolls put aside for its Peak Lords’ eyes only, and none of them had information about demonic dream manipulation, other than sidelong mentions of its existence and its danger.
It had to be the prophecies Peak Lord Shang had mentioned. Binghe opened his mouth to ask, when all of a sudden Liu-shishu appeared in the same place Shizun had.
He, unlike Shizun, immediately drew his sword, on the defensive.
"Shidi," Shizun called. "It's all right, we're in Binghe's dream realm. That's Master Meng Mo, the Elder Dream Demon. He's the one who taught Binghe how to manipulate dreams."
Liu-shishu sheathed Cheng Luan and stalked over, looking extremely suspicious. Somehow, seeing that made Binghe feel more settled, like everything was going to be all right now that Liu-shishu had arrived.
Here, in the dream world, he didn't have any of the marks of Ties that Bind, nor any of the injuries he had sustained in the Holy Mausoleum. He slipped through the knee-deep flowers, moving like a stalking predator towards Binghe and Meng Mo, until he could put himself just barely in front of Shizun.
"Well, I know when I'm not wanted," Meng Mo said, which was an absolute lie, and disappeared in a puff of smoke.
"Is he really gone?" Liu-shishu asked, doubtful.
"As gone as he ever is," Binghe confirmed. He was about to elaborate on that when Shizun reached out a hand and poked him in the forehead, and he realized his demon mark was showing. "I'm sorry!" he exclaimed, and immediately concentrated. The mark faded.
"Oh, no," Shizun said, sounding disappointed. "Binghe, it's so beautiful. Why would you hide it?"
Binghe stared at him, and found himself unable to speak.
"You told him to," Liu-shishu finally said. "Don't you remember?"
Shizun looked thoughtful, then agonized.
"Oh, Binghe," he said. "I didn't mean—"
"You said," Binghe said, and the words were there at the tip of his tongue, the ever-present echo of the last five years. "Be good, hide the mark."
He swallowed back tears at the memory of how Shizun's body had keeled over after those words, going limp and boneless just as the Abyss sealed.
"Oh, Binghe," Shizun said again. "I didn't mean the mark is bad. I just meant—I just wanted you to be safe."
Shizun wrung his hands, looking actually distraught, as if he thought he had done something wrong. That couldn't be allowed to stand, not if there was anything Binghe could do to reassure him.
"Shizun really doesn't mind?" Binghe asked, tentative.
Liu-shishu snorted.
"He wants to see the mark again," he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "That doesn't seem like minding."
But Binghe needed to hear it from Shizun.
"Of course I don't mind," Shizun said. "It's part of Binghe, how could I ever mind?"
Liu-shishu nodded, and Binghe flung himself at the two of them, weeping.
Shizun caught him just like he had when Binghe tripped as a disciple, and would have fallen over if Liu-shishu hadn't wrapped an arm around his waist to catch him and keep them all upright.
"Shizun," Binghe sobbed. "You're really back. I missed you so much."
Liu-shishu pushed some of Binghe's hair out of his face, but didn't let go of Shizun, so Binghe grabbed him, too, and hugged them both, fiercely glad they were both alive, that he'd gotten them both out of the Mausoleum alive.
Shizun's hand settled in his hair.
"Silly boy," he said, petting Binghe's unruly curls gently. "I missed you too."
Liu-shishu didn't say anything, but he didn't pull away, either, which was as good as an agreement.
There were still things to figure out, Binghe knew: even if Shizun and not-Shizun were both Peak Lord Shen, even if they all were allowed to stay under the protection of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, there were going to be overwhelming amounts of politics to handle.
But, here and now, Binghe just buried his face in his Shizun's shoulder and let himself be held.
Notes:
Thank you for sticking with me through these seven weeks of posting! Your comments have brought me much joy, and I'd love to know how the end landed with you, if you have the time!
The art in this chapter is by a sea with no shores, and it's lovely. Give them all the love they deserve check out the art here on tumblr!
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