Chapter Text
The court whispers that the emperor has gone mad.
Luo Binghe thinks they might be right - it has been weeks, yet the stink of rot and death from what he found in Shizun’s torture chamber stays in his throat, his mouth. He cannot eat without nausea; he cannot sleep without nightmares; he touches his wives only as needed to sate Xin Mo.
He’s set every demon and cultivator in his palace looking for a way to bring back what he’s lost. All these years, all these years, and only now Luo Binghe remembers the longing he felt when he first looked upon his Shizun, that beautiful immortal standing high above him under the dappled sunlight.
Mobei-jun brings him a folktale from the north, of an ancient temple housing a stone capable of granting your deepest heart’s desire, hidden from any seekers unless their desire is as pure and unyielding as diamond. Luo Binghe haunts the high passes and glaciers for a year before he stumbles on the tiny temple tucked into a crack of a mountain.
The temple guardian’s blood stains the floor before she even opens her mouth. Dropping Xin Mo, Luo Binghe staggers to the glowing stone, seated on a plinth of ice, and places his bloodstained hands on its smooth blue facets.
Let Shizun be alive and love me, give me a place in his heart that no one can ever remove or replace!
For a moment, only the high cold winds cry in Luo Binghe’s ears.
Then, the ice melts into warmth and darkness and safety.
The instant Shen Jiu hears of the demon emperor’s proposal, he knows the executioner’s axe will fall on his head.
Tianlang-jun demands marriage to one of the great sects’ head disciples as the price for a peace treaty? Preposterous. Though nothing more than a demon’s ploy, to uphold their reputations the righteous sects must be seen as supporting peace. They will accept the offer, and next they will turn on each other, fighting to avoid sacrificing one of their own.
Ultimately, the other sects will unite and insist that Cang Qiong, as the strongest sect, send one of their twelve head disciples to feed the demon’s appetites. Then it will be the peak lords’ turn to squabble with each other to avoid losing their own favored successor.
Shen Jiu holds no illusions regarding his own popularity and influence. This unlucky lot will fall on him.
The Qing Jing peak lord will not fight to keep Shen Jiu. Shen Jiu’s master favors him because he is the only disciple who hasn’t broken under the man’s absurd demands and perfectionism. Qing Jing’s peak lord will miss Shen Jiu the way he would miss his favorite guqin: the inconvenience of no longer being able to use it will sour his temper for a few weeks before he finds a replacement.
Yue Qingyuan will beg the sect leader on Shen Jiu’s behalf, of course, but that fool will refuse to select anyone other than himself to take Shen Jiu’s place, rendering all his pleading nothing more than an empty, useless gesture. The sect leader will never let his bright, promising successor end his life as the demon ruler’s toy.
No, it will be Shen Jiu, with his weak cultivation and blackened reputation who will be sold off for a peace that will never hold.
Run away? Useless to attempt it. There’s nowhere Shen Jiu can run where the power and wealth of the four great sects won’t reach. Cang Qiong will be the one most eager to hunt him down, to spare their more favored head disciples.
Shen Jiu has no choice except to endure being handed over to his new master. All his backbreaking work to earn the head disciple’s position, enduring every indignity his teacher and martial siblings heaped on him–all useless. Once a slave, always a slave. Truly, Shen Jiu was a fool to believe otherwise. Is his entire life not enough proof? Qiu Jianluo, Wu Yanzi, his Shizun, and now Tianlang-Jun.
Shen Jiu swallows down the hot flow of rage and self-ridicule, leaving behind bitterness like bile in his throat. This world will always throw him back down into the ditch. So he’ll look for a way to survive crawling through the mud.
The instant the sun is down, Shen Jiu flees blindly down the mountain–the other disciples can go fuck themselves if they don’t like it. If he’s going back to a place no different than Qiu Manor, if Shen Jiu will be forced to do that again with a man, he’s going to take what sleep and comfort he can now.
The girls at the Warm Red Pavillion take one look at Shen Jiu – pale, shaking and nauseous – and usher him straight into the back rooms.
Shen Jiu comes back to himself with Hua-jie cradling him from behind and San-jie playing gentle pipa music.
Many of the brothel women have been married before. Hua-jie was born to a good family, but her husband divorced her when she couldn’t give him a child, and Hua-jie’s family wouldn’t take her back. Ren-jie’s husband beat her and drove her out, leaving Ren-jie no other way to support her daughter besides selling herself. Li-meimei married out of the brothel to a rich old man who favored her, but returned within the year when he died and his legal wife gleefully got rid of her.
Shen Jiu’s dry voice rasps, “How do you survive marrying a man who can destroy you?”
San-jie’s music stops. Hua-jie’s arms tighten around him. “Any man you marry will destroy you,” she tells Shen Jiu, “but if you give him a son, maybe you can survive him.”
Shen Jiu tries to breathe; it’s just Hua-jie’s arms pulling a little too tight. “A son?”
Her voice is soft and bitter in his ear. “A son to tie him to you. A son to support you when he leaves.”
A son. Sons can inherit; a son owes filial piety toward his mother and is obligated to protect her.
Shen Jiu is a man; he cannot give Tianlang-Jun a son.
Can’t he?
Shen Jiu knows far more demonic cultivation than any righteous cultivator should. Techniques that shape the living body are forbidden, not impossible. While flesh-shaping is a method of torture, theoretically, there ought to be other applications.
Shen Jiu has also read every book in Qing Jing’s libraries, save for those restricted to the peak lord himself. He has access to Qiong Ding’s archives and Qian Cao’s medical records. If anyone has the knowledge and resources to construct such a technique, it’s him.
The idea circles in Shen Jiu’s thoughts all night. It stalks him the next morning, as he rises before dawn to go up the mountain, as he attends morning practice under the disdainful eyes of the other disciples, as he kneels at the peak lord’s feet and the man tears apart his work with the same eyes as fishmongers cast over their spoiled wares.
Without strength, power, wealth, or backing, Shen Jiu needs to be useful to Tianlang-jun, to give him something no one else can.
Shen Jiu has done worse, to survive.
Shen Jiu barely sleeps for weeks, spending every moment locked in one library or another, first confirming the possibility of success and establishing a foundation for his research, then slowly filling in the necessary components.
Once the framework is in place, Shen Jiu demands as many missions as he can, slipping away to purchase materials and more books. He empties what little savings he has, pouring every resource and every part of himself into designing the ritual that will be his only way of securing his life in the Demon Realm.
One last weakness keeps Shen Jiu from putting his dangerous, tenuously constructed experiment into practice. Perhaps someone else will be chosen. Perhaps the heavens, for the first time in his life, will spare him from men’s disgusting appetites and greed.
The hesitation Shen Jiu refuses to name as hope shatters the day Cang Qiong’s peak lords call him into their grand meeting hall and tell him he’s been sold off for their farce of peace.
The other head disciples are waiting outside. Shen Jiu can tell from their pitying, self-righteous, and mocking looks that they already know. Shen Jiu’s entire life is being given away, and he’s the last one told.
Inside his sleeves, his hands tighten into fists.
That night, Shen Jiu sits on the floor of his head disciple’s room, naked at the center of an array so complex that despite spanning the entire room, some of the characters are drawn no larger than a grain of rice. Privacy talismans and diagrams of the human body are pinned to the walls. A knife, a hand mirror, bandages, and dozens of clay cups full of tinctures and concoctions clutter what little free space is available in the array.
Do not pass out or you will die, Shen Jiu reminds himself, biting a piece of wood between his teeth.
Shen Jiu does not pass out, but the excruciating pain almost made dying preferable.
The aftermath is worse. He cannot bear to move for a full day and night, lying naked on the floor of his room, delirious and intermittently passing out.
Neither his master nor his fellow disciples come to look for him. Not even Yue Qi, who he’d driven away with vicious words after the meeting.
When Shen Jiu drags himself, step by step, out of his room to find water, knife-hot, red agony is his only company in the darkness. It gives him vivid, sweating nightmares for weeks of the intimate pain he remembers men can inflict.
Not that Shen Jiu can sleep often. In his quest to remake himself, he’s shattered every innate rhythm his body knows. He vomits everything he touches for days on end. His migraines leave him blind and bedridden. He freezes and sweats by turns, soaking through his clothes or piling himself in every blanket he can steal. His body remains wide awake at night, and exhausted during the day. He is abjectly ill for months, plagued by aches and swellings and tendernesses as his alterations take hold, all overlaid by the lancing pain from his groin and pelvis.
He spends more time than he should at the Warm Red Pavillion, letting himself soak in the presence and safety of the women there, where his weaknesses don’t terrify him as much. The sisters make him broth and hold his hair as he vomits. It is perhaps the last nice thing he will ever know.
When Shen Jiu returns to Qing Jing, his martial siblings do not bother whispering their insults. Shen Jiu remains the head disciple in name, but everyone knows it’s an empty title. Shen Jiu will never become Peak Lord, so they raise their voices and laugh fearlessly as Shen Jiu goes by.
Indulging himself in whores so frantically, they say, it’s all because he’ll be the one on the receiving end soon. His martial siblings always giggle at that part. What karma for a lustful, slavering lecher to be given as a whore to a lustful demon lord!
Shen Jiu’s marriage celebration suits a funeral better than a wedding. The trappings are present, rich and ostentatious enough to befit a treaty marriage between two realms, but the demons and cultivators attending exchange nothing but empty smiles and hollow platitudes.
When Yue Qingyuan arrives to lead Shen Jiu to the sedan chair, he tries to take Shen Jiu aside.
Shen Jiu only pushes him away, voice a low hiss. “Don’t you dare – You had your chance to help me, Yue Qingyuan, and you failed.”
Shen Jiu watches Yue Qingyuan’s face fall. That’s right. Between a dragon ascending the skies and a rat scuttling in slime, there should be no relation. Yue Qingyuan (never again Yue Qi) can finally untangle himself from Shen Jiu. Shen Jiu laughs cruelly in satisfaction.
“Don’t try to contact me, Shixiong. I never want to see you again.”
Cang Qiong’s next leader flinches violently and backs away, leaving Shen Jiu’s path to his new prison open. No one else tries to stop him.
With a sneer, Shen Jiu sweeps past his martial siblings, and lifts his skirts to climb into the sedan himself.
Once the curtain falls, he reaches into his sleeves to touch the qiankun pouches he’d handsewn into his wedding robes. Tianlang-jun’s gifts to the ‘bride’ were meant for Cang Qiong, but Shen Jiu had demanded to keep the bride price himself. Naturally, his martial siblings had upbraided him for his greed. Even the peak lords had looked disapproving.
Shen Jiu didn’t care. He wasn’t about to let the people who sold him again keep their profits. Not to mention he is badly in need of funds; that money might buy him a thread of safety in the demon realm.
Tianlang-jun barely looks at Shen Jiu during the wedding. At the wedding banquet, the demon lord either talks to the gathered dignitaries, or sends longing glances toward Huan Hua Palace’s delegation.
Shen Jiu knows the face of a besotted fool, and he knows which cultivators came with Huan Hua’s delegation today. When he remembers the rumors that Huan Hua’s head disciple had volunteered to marry Tianlang-jun and been refused, bile floods his throat like acid.
Shen Jiu has been ruined for a failed lover’s plot. He’s a mistake, an unwanted whore replacing the real princess.
His hands claw the fabric of his wedding robes in such humiliated rage that he’s grateful for the way everyone ignores him as they come to talk to his husband. They all expect Shen Jiu to die, for his life to be meaningless.
Shen Jiu’s hand clenches atop his belly. He’ll scrabble his way to survival with blood-caked, broken fingernails, like always.
Unlike the banquet hall, draped in gaudy gold and red, the newlyweds’ bedchamber is unadorned. Shen Jiu barely stops himself from sneering at the blatant confirmation of his place. Married only in name, holding no regard from his so-called husband.
Once the door closes, Tianlang-jun simply takes a seat and gestures for Shen Jiu to make tea.
Shen Jiu asks no questions. He keeps his head bowed and eyes demurely downcast as he performs his best tea service, feeling Tianlang-jun’s gaze resting upon him the whole time. It is like being stared down by a tiger.
Shen Jiu’s flesh crawls, but his hands never shake. Tianlang-jun is a Heavenly Demon, a ruler of unmatched strength in both realms. He can do anything to Shen Jiu – kill him, rape him, torture him – and Shen Jiu has no hope to stop him. That’s nothing new. Shen Jiu has spent his life in the hands of powerful, unpredictable men.
Shen Jiu will do what he must to survive this new master.
He kneels on the ground when he is finished, waiting for further orders.
“Sit,” says Tianlang-jun, casually examining the snacks on the table.
Shen Jiu rises with a quiet murmur of “Junshang,” and takes his place with his hands folded in his lap.
Tianlang-jun continues to eat, one elbow propped on the table and his legs crossed at the knee. Quite relaxed for a man who’s consumed Shen Jiu’s whole future.
Some trace of his resentment must show in his eyes, because the demon emperor pauses, a delicate pastry halfway to his mouth. His eyes rove over Shen Jiu with the dull sort of interest suited to examining an unwanted gift from a would-be acquaintance one has no interest in befriending.
Shen Jiu holds perfectly still. Tianlang-jun’s regard is a dangerous pressure on his skin, curdling his stomach despite the sedatives he’d slipped himself while out of Tianlang-jun’s sight.
“Where should I put you…” Tianlang-jun says to himself, tipping back the last of his tea in a smooth movement that makes his throat bob.
Shen Jiu weighs the risks of a response to a clearly rhetorical question, and decides he can play it off as believing his new master expected a reply. He bows his head. “Answering Junshang, this concubine is trained in the Four Arts. This lowly one knows a man of Junshang’s means and taste can find entertainment anywhere, but this lowly one is willing to perform at any time if it pleases Junshang. He has been prepared for his other duties as well.”
“Oh,” Tianlang-jun replies, voice drawing out in a bored lilt, “what duties are those?”
Shen Jiu has not been punished yet; he shoves down the rancid bile in his throat and half-lies. “Answering Junshang. Among humans, treaty marriages are expected to produce offspring. This one’s body has been made suitable for that purpose.”
Tianlang-jun’s eyebrows rise with the childlike delight of a village boy finding an interesting new beetle. “I thought human men couldn’t do that!” Head sweeping up and down, he surveys Shen Jiu with enthusiasm. “You are a human male, right?”
“I am.” Shen Jiu struggles to keep his exasperation out of his tone. So much for being the demon emperor–his new master was stupid. Arrogant and careless and ill-educated.
Shen Jiu can work with that.
Time to see if cruelty can be added to his master’s faults. Hooding his eyes in the way the pavilion women had taught him, Shen Jiu brings his hands to the lapels of his robe.
Tianlang-jun’s raised hand forestalls him.
Heart in his throat, Shen Jiu fights to remain calm. “Junshang?” he questions. He needs this. As sick as the idea makes him feel, his whole plan hinges on getting this demon to fuck him!
“Humans like it when their lovers don’t bed others.” The demon emperor’s cheeks flush and his eyes go glassy, clearly dreaming of his lady-love, the Huan Hua head disciple.
Resentment skewers Shen Jiu more thoroughly than a sword. These two careless fools who’ve sacrificed his life for their star-crossed romance.
It takes everything in him not to curl his lip, to instead turn himself meek and coaxing. “Junshang, all great human lords take concubines along with their wives. This one is sure anyone receiving your affection will understand that you must perform your duty to the treaty. Peace between humans and demons is a profound and lofty cause, one that we must work to uphold.”
Shen Jiu’s shaking hands struggle to tear open his robes – only two simple layers, so hastily crafted that the outer layer alone suits a wedding – ”But if my lord is concerned, he need not touch this lowly one with more than his spend.”
Finally, the belt on Shen Jiu’s robes comes free. Tianlang-jun lights up like a toddler given a new toy.
Heartbeat whirring in his ears, Shen Jiu holds his lapels open and fights to stay unmoving while Tianlang-jun circles the table. Hot, blunt fingers reach out to touch the intricate array drawn in red ink on Shen Jiu’s belly.
Shen Jiu leans into the soft fuzziness of the sedatives in his bloodstream, and forgets how to breathe until Tianlang-jun withdraws around the table, throwing back another cup of tea and regarding Shen Jiu over the rim.
The back of Shen Jiu’s neck prickles. The interest of a tiger can be more deadly than its disregard. But Shen Jiu doesn’t have any choice. He needs Tianlang-jun to give him this one thing, and then the demon can go back to wooing his golden lover.
Tianlang-jun sets down the teacup with a sharp plink, hands coming up to loosen his belt.
Still holding his robes open, Shen Jiu closes his eyes. He hopes Tianlang-jun believes his shaking is out of excitement.
The slick noises are repulsive. When they finally stop, the wet flood spilling across his belly goes on and on and on, beyond Shen Jiu’s endurance; the drugs alone keep him from hyperventilating.
Then it stops.
The way it slides across his skin is disgusting.
Shen Jiu hadn’t forgotten this filthy feeling at all.
The array on his belly tingles–or maybe it’s sheer nausea.
Eyes still closed, Shen Jiu bows his head, careful not to move his torso and dislodge it. “This lowly one thanks Junshang for his benevolence.”
Shen Jiu really must be a natural scum. Otherwise, why would he always find himself back in this position?