Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Well, I didn’t see that one coming.

Of course, everyone in the office knew that the tall metal shelving unit, still unfastened to the wall since Maintenance had to move it, heavy with the binders of invoices I needed for my work and two beds of retention files’ boxes stowed on top, was an accident just waiting to happen. “Aura ▇▇▇▇▇! Don’t you dare fall down!”, had even called one of my work friends when she saw me open the little foldable stepladder.

Yeah, it was a foregone conclusion.

Waking up again, laying down in the middle of a busy street, about a whole meter shorter and not understanding a single word spoken around me? And then the floating dialogue box appearing right in front of my face?

Unexpected! Really unexpected! And, dare I say it, overwhelming.

So I got up and ran away.

I couldn’t see very clearly, you know, due to the dialogue box and all, but I ended up in a conveniently empty side alley, just wide enough for my currently tiny self. Once reasonably hidden, I paid attention to the text displayed on the dialogue box. It read:

「العربية

Deutsch

English

> Español

Français

한국어

日本語

Русский

Tiếng Việt

中文

…」

And it had a little blinking arrow shaped cursor encouraging me to choose and a dauntingly small scrolling bar that hinted to a really long list. With a sigh, I selected Español and the text of the dialogue box blinked out, replaced by a little loading circle animation. It spun twice and then a loud mechanical voice, with a very strong Peninsular Spanish accent, announced:

「 Código de activación: “¡Más vale que valga la pena, me voy a morir aquí antes de que se descargue!” Sistema activado automáticamente. 」

「 Bienvenida al Sistema. Esperamos proveerte de la mejor experiencia posible. Nuestro más sincero anhelo es que, durante tu tiempo, puedas cumplir tus deseos y disfrutar de esta obra. 」

Well, shit. In my defense, one: nobody actually expects to be taken at their word when voicing that sort of thing, and two: that novel had been very, very difficult to acquire! And I wasn’t all that interested in the first place! One of my old roommates was very into it and kept bugging me to read it. I resisted for months, but then she convinced a mutual friend to read it, so both of them were bugging me and in the end I said yes in exchange of them watching Deca-dence, because everything was worth it in the name of the very precious bond between Natsume and Kaburagi-san!

But I couldn’t find the novel anywhere.   

Apparently, it had been more readily available before, thanks to a dedicated fan-translation, but the rights had been sold for an official translation and a netflix donghua—or so they said, because there had not been further news about either project and meanwhile the blog where my friends had read the novel was taken down. It went so far, that every link I found to download it was broken, or was obviously some kind virus. In the end, the only somewhat reputable file I could find was a version half machine-translated into Spanish from English (so I was even less excited about reading it) in a ridiculously large PDF file I still tried to torrent even though it had one single sad seed.

And I forgot about it because it was taking ages! Like, civilizations fell! Mass extinction events happened! Entire new continents were formed! Ages! It was like back then in the dark times of dial-up internet.

But before I could complain, the System continued:

「 Debido a que eres una Usuaria internacional poco familiarizada con Camino del Orgulloso Demonio Inmortal, el Sistema te ofrece los siguientes bonos: 」

「 Modo Sandbox habilitado; Modo Historia opcional.

Mientras el Modo Sandbox este activado:

• Usuaria002 no recibirá misiones relacionadas a la trama.
• Usuaria002 no tiene limitaciones OOC.
• La Tienda y mecánica de Puntos-B permanecerán bloqueadas.
• Objetos, locaciones y mecánicas de reanimación no tendrán efecto en Usuaria002 una vez que sus Puntos de Salud estén en cero.
• La cuenta se cerrará automáticamente una vez que los Puntos de Salud estén en cero.
• Una vez activado el Modo Historia, el Modo Sandbox quedará deshabilitado hasta que la trama sea completada al 100%.」

「 Herramientas de Accesibilidad de Idioma optimizadas.

• Para acceder a las Opciones de Idioma, favor de seleccionar el icono ⚙️」

I immediately changed the language to English because no-one from Latam will settle for Peninsular Spanish if given another choice. Additionally to the option to change the System’s language, the Settings offered me subtitles in English and closed captions (both in pinyin and traditional Chinese), which I enabled. The audio was only available in Chinese, but I would have selected it anyways; subs not dubs, you know?

In order to test the Language Settings, I cautiously stepped out my little hiding place and walked until I could overhear people talking again.

The closed captions appeared as a translucent dark ribbon with white text at the bottom of my field of vision, they read what I interpreted as a [people talking] sort of message because it didn’t change until I concentrated on the voices. It was then that the subtitles appeared as white text outlined in black, just above the dark ribbon, and the closed captions started transcribing the speech. It was really cool, unsettling and disorienting, but really cool.

I was just playing around, listening to random conversations and trying to get used to the subtitles, when someone said behind me: “There you are!” and I was suddenly graved by the upper arm. I was forcefully made turn around to face a woman, who yanked my arm up and dragged me away. She was rough and it hurt, so the eyes of my little body filled up with tears.

As we walked, she started berating me for having getting lost. Like, lady, I don’t know how I ended up in the middle of the street before I was isekaied, but this body was about four, if something, you lost me.

“Hóng Xīdàn! Are you listening to me?”, she said, punctuated by a yank to my arm, but a little chime sounded and I definitely stopped listening to her, because the System piped in (in a completely different mechanical voice):

「 Account successfully bound to role: Hóng Xīdàn ( 洪熙旦 ), Generic Minor Background Character. Current Health Points (HP): 23.996/25. Starting Spiritual Energy Points (SE): 5. 」

The woman yanked at my arm again.

「 HP: 23.991/25 」

「 HP: 23.986/25 」

Whelp.

“System, how can I raise my Health Points’s cap?”

「 The HP cap will automatically be raised as User grows up! A non-Cultivator Human Character can not reach a HP cap higher than 200! 」

「 User must reach the First Layer of Qi Condensation to acquire a HP cap of 300! 」

「 100 SE are required to reach the First Layer of Qi Condensation! 」

That meant I was going to need to learn to meditate, didn’t it?

*

The enormity of the situation I was in did not hit me until later.

After returning home I was sent to bed without dinner, and being confined alone and hungry enough to suspect poor original Xidan had not eaten in a while, in a dark room with the proof of my own mortality all nice and clearly displayed as numbers that tickled down, slowly and steadily, as time passed, really did inflict a very deep sense of hopelessness.

And well, I had already died once, and while I had thought I wasn’t scared of dying, all of this “waking up as someone else” nonsense did fill me with existential dread; was I condemned to keep living on life after life? Wasn’t I supposed to at least, like, forget my past lives? I definitely did not want to die a second (even more slowly!) time and have to remember it, no thank you, nuh-uh.

So I tried my best to avoid dying again, and it was surprisingly hard!

The woman who had dragged me home turned up to be my wet-nurse and she had been in charge of me since my mother died. As I understood from what I had overheard (which was a lot! People were really careless around little ears in this house!) I was the oldest child of a man I had yet to meet, whose occupation was still a mystery, but who was wealthy enough to have a fancy complex of courtyards for his wife and concubines― well, just the one, who had been my mother. In usual circumstances, this should have been a very good thing for my wet-nurse, specially so because my father was getting into years, and my mother had been brought into the household because the wife was unable to conceive! If I inherited, my wet-nurse ― being the one who raised me― was set for life!

Unfortunately for her plans, I had an unexpected half-sibling on the way. And not only that! A divinatory chart was consulted and everyone was already expecting a boy! From the wife! A much preferable option for a heir than a shu daughter. (And while I wasn’t complaining about being considered for inheritance at all, I was surprised it happened in a setting were the main guy had three hundred wives!)

Obviously, now with her dreams broken, my wet-nurse had to take out her frustration on me, when she wasn’t neglecting me. After all, it didn’t matter anymore if I was attached to her or not.

It was very fucked up, but it also meant I was left to my own devices a lot, and I used that time to further my plans to become a Cultivator.

*

I didn’t know much about the setting of Proud Immortal Demon Way, like, not only I knew just the bare minimum about the plot, I had not even been into Xianxia! It sounded interesting and there were some donghuas and cdramas I intended to watch, but I never got around to do it.

I regretted that! A lot!

I was now going blind, and to make matters worse, while the Language Settings allowed me to understand what was said around me, I didn’t know how to read and I couldn’t speak on my own; the System could help me by providing some NPC-like dialogue options when I needed to say something, but it felt very disorienting to have my body (which was already not really my own!) talk by itself since I couldn’t do it myself yet, so I tried not to use the System’s help very much. AND! On top of that, regular people didn’t know much about Cultivation in the first place.

That meant I could not find information on my own and I could not ask questions.

So instead, I threw myself wholly into the more familiar and comforting grounds of Language Acquisition. My new body still had its wonderful brain plasticity! I was picking up grammar so well! I made mistakes, but they didn’t look out of place in a child, even if they probably weren’t the sort a native speaker would make, and I had the muscle memory to pronounce and recognize most sounds! It was great! Even the hardest thing to do, which was learning to read and write, brought an unexpected boon! As I practiced and wrote interminable writing exercises, first on the dirt and then on innumerable bamboo strips, I found out it made my spiritual points raise, even if only by just a hundredth, and not every time I sat down to practice.

Eventually, through trial and error, I learned I could achieve similar results with weaving and needlework, and by playing the flute, so I figured it was related to effort and discipline, and some other criteria I probably needed actual instruction to achieve consistently.

*

I was eight the first time I meet a Cultivator.

Two persons had disappeared near the riverbank, both of them young women, who had been there one moment and then just gone, according to witnesses.

A request for aid had been sent to the closest Sect, but the case was apparently considered low priority. In the meanwhile, the town had no option than to try keep everyone away from the river, but that situation was unsustainable for long, and an inevitable third victim was taken.

Fortunately, a wandering rogue Cultivator had arrived in town in time to rescue the girl and— hear this— he killed the monster by collapsing the cave where it lived.

Yeah, that monster was absolutely dead and it was definitely not going to get out in about ten or so years to start killing again.

But I didn’t hold it against him, in part because he didn’t know we all lived in a novel, had not escaped unscathed from the whole ordeal, and also because he seemed like a genuine good person in how he indulged me and my little brother while he was housed with our family.

“Can Mo-daozhang tell us more about his travels?”, I asked for Hong Xitian, who was four, very shy and had developed an immense case of hero-worship.

“Of course, what would Hong-guniang like to know?”

I thought about it. On one hand, this was my best chance to learn about real Cultivation. On the other, a-Tian, who wanted to hear more about cool monsters, was giving me the puppy eyes, and I was weak against the puppy eyes-- I was weak against him in general, but specially so to the puppy eyes.

“Has Mo-daozhang fought many monsters?”

And he smiled and told us some adventures, probably heavily edited to be child-friendly, but still slightly bloody. This man was definitely a ‘cool uncle’ type.

In the end, I didn’t have to ask; he probably expected it from every child he encountered, so he offered to examine my meridians and, with some trepidation, I extended my arm.

Mo-daozhang placed two fingers over the pulse on my wrist. After a moment he hummed and released me.

“Well,” he said with a smile. “It does seem like Hong-guniang has potential as a Cultivator.”

“Really?”

“Yes, but this one believes Hong-guniang would benefit from formal instruction.”

*

One year later I found myself digging a hole, which was not at all how I imagined it going.

Mo-daozhang had been the one to arrange the whole thing, from convincing my parents to let me Cultivate (easy, once Mother realised that me leaving to join a sect would cement Hong Xitian’s position as heir) to arranging the journey to Tian Gong mountain range; even though Huan Hua Palace was nearer, he believed my chances to be accepted were higher at Cang Qiong.

It didn’t seem like that to me now that I was exhausted and covered in dirt, dreading what would happen if I didn’t catch the eye of any of the people in the fancy robes, and very surprised I didn’t had blisters in my hands yet. I wished Mo-daozhang was a little less of a “cool uncle” type as to be ok being responsible for children in a permanent manner.  

My nails scratched against something hard and I stopped digging. I dried sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve and looked up to the sky with a sigh. The patch of ground where I was attempting to dig was riddled with large rocks I would need to break in order to remove and I couldn’t just go around them, since they were so large and numerous. Breathing hard, I screwed my eyes shut and gritted my teeth, shallowing a complaint. I had already dug a nice sizeable hole before encountering this problem, and while the aspirants had not been told what sort of hole we were supposed to excavate, or how we would be judged, we had been instructed to dig until told to stop. That meant I had two options that would fulfil that requirement: keep at it or start anew.

I took a deep breath and let it go. I opened my eyes, climbed out and searched for a new unoccupied spot. There weren’t many, seeing as Cang Qiong had many aspirants, except for a space left by some shrubbery I would have to take out, but dealing with some roots was preferable (and much more viable) that attempting to break a boulder without any tools. 

I didn’t know how much time had passed, just that I had made some progress, even if not nearly as much as I had before I bumped into the rocks, when a disgruntled young man in white and yellow clothing called me over and guided me to a tent where awaited his master, the Lord of An Ding Peak.

That last little titbit of vital information I only knew because—while my guide just delivered me and then left without further word, to me or his master-- during our travel from my hometown to Tian Gong, Mo-daozhang had taken the time to explain to me that I was in luck because the previous generation of Peak Lords had just ascended last year, so if I passed the admittance test, I would be part of the very first crop of disciples chosen by the newly invested Qing generation, and thankfully he had also made sure I knew their names and their respective mountains, which--  due to the generational name-- was akin to memorising the dwarves’ names in The Hobbit, but conveniently color coded like Homestuck trolls.

I bowed low, with the backs of my hands facing him, but I was unsure if I should greet him as “shifu”; was I already in, or was this the personal interview part of the test?

“This master is called Shang Qinghua. May you tell me your name?”, he asked after telling me to rise and inviting me to sit at a low table. The tent was undecorated, but rather full with piles of lose documents and ledgers, like he had work to do throughout the test. The Peak Lord himself was very baby faced, as to appear even younger than the disciple who had brought me to him. He was wearing very fancy yellow and brown robes and an elaborate guan, but looking at his ink stained hands, deep eyebags and flyaway hairs, I got the impression of someone who regularly ate lunch on his desk, if he even got to eat lunch in the first place. I was immediately predisposed to like him.

“This one is called Hong Xidan, sir”. He hummed and pushed paper, brush and inkstone to my side of the table.

“Can you show this master how it is written?”

So personal interview it was.

I did my best to clean my hands discretely on my clothing, grinded some ink and wrote my name, taking care of making the characters neat and small, utilitarian clerical script, instead of fancy and showy calligraphy. He took the paper and nodded, smiling a bit.

“Does Hong Xidan know what does An Ding Peak do?”

“This Xidan know it is the logistic’s Peak, sir.”

“But do you know what does logistics mean?”

“It is—” I had to think about it for a moment “—the management of resources?” He lost the smile and blinked a couple times, did he expect me to don’t know? Well, I supposed a normal nine years old child would probably not.

“Yes, it is. This means that An Ding Peak is the one who acquires everything that the Sect needs,  does the deliveries both to and from the Sect, the maintenance, the storage. Also, for some reason, it is the one doing the accounting and auditing,” he said, listing the items with his fingers as he said them. “That means that An Ding does a lot of paperwork, so much paperwork--” he illustrated that part with a gesture that encompassed the whole tent “--and heavy lifting and thankless, straight up unpleasant work nobody else wants to do... May I see your hand?”

I offered it, a bit too aware of all the dirt I wasn't able to remove, figuring he wanted to check my meridians, but he only inspected the palm.

“See? No blisters and you still have all your nails. You are already subconsciously using qi to reinforce your body, or did you do it on purpose?” I shook my head. “Well, you did, which is great and it will serve you well. An Ding needs sturdy disciples. Ahh, but do you know what made you catch my attention?” I shook my head again. “It was when you stopped digging, you looked really frustrated and I thought ‘this kid is gonna quit’ but instead you very obviously swallowed a curse and started again. That’s what I’m looking for... On the other hand you also showed a willingness to cut your loses, and it is such a drag when disciples decide to quit, it is a whole administrative process. So, knowing this do you want to join?”

I bowed again.

“This disciple thanks Shifu for the opportunity.”

Because, ha! He might had been trying to scare me but the joke is on him! That sounded exactly like all the jobs I had before dying in my previous life!

Was I trilled to be doing it again? Absolutely no. Did I want to return home with the tail between the legs to be either killed off or married out? That would be even worse! The only thing I would miss was a-Tian, but he was also the very reason I would be miserable and I didn’t want to become bitter towards him! Here, I could keep loving him and instead hate my boss and co-workers, which was a perfectly normal and not at all unhealthy thing to do!  

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you!,” said my new master with a grin, and then dismissed me from the tent while another aspirant was ushered in.

Ping, chimed the System.

[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Important things must be said three times! User has received the Achievement: Joining a Sect.]

[Activate Story Mode:]

[YES]         [NO]

Absentmindedly, I selected “NO”, just like every other time it had asked before.

Chapter Text

After three months as an An Ding disciple, I was lowkey cursing Mo-daozhang for insisting on Cang Qiong. Oh, the classes and the workload were okay, but the politics—

Well, as told to us lowly new disciples, the problem started —depending on who was sharing the gossip— either five or seven years ago: when Shifu was made Head Disciple or when Shifu was the only survivor of a demon attack. The former was universally considered a consequence of the later, and even I, who liked Shifu, thought there was something fishy about it.

Before the demon attack no-one had expected much of Shifu. He had been an outer disciple for longer than most, for one thing, and he had not been popular among his peers, either, due to a tendency to complain, and to grumble, and to cower, and to run away at the first hint of trouble… but when he returned after being missing for several days, he was like a different person. First, he had redoubled his efforts in his Cultivation, and then he started taking assignments of more, and more responsibility, and more difficult and dangerous missions; he started climbing the ranks very quicky, and the people who worked along and under him found that, even with all the complaining and lack of spine, he was actually fixing problems (and it also helped that the survival rate of his mission partners has really high).

On the other hand, Bao-shishu, the Head Disciple before him, had had the post for a very long time and had been well liked; he was kind and reliable, always willing to lend a sympathetic ear and offer advice. He was also one of the disciples with the strongest cultivation in the Peak. Everybody thought he was going to succeed the previous Peak Lord— until he embarrassed his master in front of the Sect Leader. The incident had been so bad that the senior disciples warned us the newcomers to never mention flatcakes in Bao-shishu's presence, and that no-one, even from his generation, called him Da-shixiong. 

And that was the problem actually—no, not the flatcakes: that Bao-shishu was once again Head Disciple, under the man who had stolen that position from him. Maybe it could have been tolerable if the worst thing to deal with was the awkwardness of being present when both Shifu and Bao-shishu were in the same room (Bao-shishu would begrudgingly follow Shifu’s orders without acknowledging they came from him in the first place, or without speaking to him at all, and Shifu would “act” as if nothing was wrong, but it was actually very obvious he noticed! He was a nervous babbler! It was terrible, so uncomfortable!), but no! There were factions of people who supported them respectively, who made life very difficult for everyone caught in between: misfiled documents, delayed messages, incomplete instructions, deliveries marked as urgent rejected at arrival because they weren’t needed anymore! Shijie! Did you know how heavy that package was?! Did you know how far I had to run?!! We live in a mountain! I tripped down some stairs and I had to protect the package with my body because it was marked as fragile!!! Please, your beef is with the shixiong from inventories! I’m only an innocent bystander!

But then, without warning, Bao-shishu was gone.

There was no notice, no reasons, and the only thing Shifu did to acknowledge his absence was to name another Head Disciple.

“They are saying Shishu didn’t quit!,” said Shi Yaqiang, who was just technically my shimei, stopping on our way back to the dorms from the communal laundry shed— I had not been paying attention to the conversation around me while we did the washing and A-Shi knew me well enough to notice. She then turned very abruptly, almost hitting me with her basket of clean laundry in her haste, and motioned me to get closer. I shifted my own basket to one side and rested it on my hip so I could lean in. She looked left and right to see if someone was nearby, and whispered into my ear, “they say he quarrelled with Shifu and Shifu sent him on a dangerous mission and he was killed!”.

“And before, weren’t they saying they came to blows and Shifu expulsed him?,” I asked, unimpressed, because the rumours were starting to get wild, and this one was kinda leaning on the demon attack Shifu had mysteriously survived, and it was in bad taste.

I started walking again; the laundry had to be put away before going to classes and I didn’t want to have to run.

A-Shi laughed and hurried after me, amused because, in her opinion, I was taking the situation too seriously, since we both thought Bao-shishu had gotten fed up and left. Also, she was actually a bit older than me and liked riling me up.  “Maybe he got poached for Qiong Ding!” She said and raised her eyebrows, knocking her shoulder to mine, cajolingly.

I rolled my eyes but decided to play along.

“Maybe he left to start his own business”.

“Or he met someone and eloped!”

“It was someone from Xian Shu and Qi-shishu is forcing Shifu to keep it quiet”.

“Ohhhhhhh, that one is good. Xiao Dan! We have to tell that one to everyone!”

Shows how much we knew! Later we were told that, as it turns up out, Bao-shishu betrayed the Sect by stealing something for some demons who then double-crossed him and killed him. At first the information was kept under wraps to uncover possible accomplices, but now that the investigation was over, they could tell us... Yeah, it stopped being fun then.

*

Fu-shixiong wasn’t enjoying being Head Disciple. He didn’t even want to be Head Disciple in the first place. Before being pushed into the position, he had been managing some furniture and furnishing warehouses where he kept books detailed and organized enough to pass all his audits squeaky clean, but otherwise he and his personnel only had to really put in work when they received big shipments and when they had to run inventory, truly, the most relaxed place in all the Peak.

So, he wasn’t having a great time, and his stress manifested in a tendency to delegate things he should not have delegated.

“Oh, perfect! Hong-shimei! Hong-shimei! Come here!,” he called when I crossed his path on my way to sword lessons (grunt work or not, this was a martial sect, after all). We were alone and going opposite directions on a little trail used as a shortcut from the warehouses to the training grounds. I approached him somewhat warily. He was looking a bit frazzled and was searching urgently for something in his satchel.

“Here!,” he said, brandishing a scroll he handed me over with all the gravitas usually reserved to the Olympic Torch. “This shixiong needs to take care of an emergency, so he is ordering his shimei to deliver this to the Leisure House. It is very important that Hong-shimei hands it over to Shifu! Don’t read it!”

I stood there dumbly, cradling the scroll in my arms. I was already late for class and Shifu’s house was on the other side of the Peak, perpendicular both to the training grounds and the warehouses.

Fu-shixiong didn’t wait for me to acknowledge his order and started walking again, but then he suddenly stopped mid step and hurried back. “Almost forgot! Shifu is at a Peak Lord’s meeting—” for an instant, hope that he would take the scroll back blossomed in my chest, but he crushed it immediately “— so Hong-shimei must leave the scroll on his desk, in the little tray labelled ‘LIFE OR DEATH’. Here, use this to enter and to lock the door on your way out.” And to my horror, he took the master key hanging from a chain around his neck, handed it to me, and ran away without telling me to how to give it back.

With trembling hands, I put the key around my neck and under my robes, and for good measure I also stored the scroll inside my clothing. I started walking hurriedly to the Leisure House, checking every couple steps that the key was still hanging from the chain.

An Ding employed several master keys to the different buildings, safes, vaults and warehouses, and their use was strictly monitored and restricted to very specific hallmasters and high ranked disciples; Fu-shixiong’s could open any door in the Peak, while  Shifu’s could open pretty much every single door, drawer and locked diary in the entire mountain range, except, probably, one or two at Qiong Ding where Zhangmen-shibo stored the most secret treasures and stuff.

This key was worth more than my life.

The Leisure House was located in a secluded spot, far from all other buildings, surrounded by tall greenery. If it didn’t had such a bright and cosy cottage-core-ish aesthetic, with its fruit trees and herb garden, it would have been an incredibly creepy cabin in the woods. When I arrived at last, after a bit of a hike, I was almost in tears from pure frustration.

Even though Fu-shixiong had said Shifu was meant to be off the Peak, I still knocked at the door, in part because I held to the hope Shifu would miraculously be home to receive the scroll and the key, and, in a perfect world, to sent me back to class with a written excuse absolving me from my absence, but mostly because I felt terribly uncomfortable just entering his house uninvited when he was out.

I waited for longer than it was reasonable and knocked again. Irrationally disappointed that nobody answered, I finally reached for the chain around my neck. The master key was, well, key shaped, but it had no functional ridges, and it was, instead, heavily engraved with complicated arrays that would magically open all locks engraved with a matching array, while also leaving a record about which specific key was used— it was just like electronic hotel key-cards worked and I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of plot required this kind of worldbuilding.

When I finally found my resolve to enter, the Leisure House was dark, nicely decorated if messy, and colder than outside, as if airconditioned. It made goosebump erupt all over my skin, but it was otherwise quite pleasant. Shifu certainly enjoyed his privileges, we disciples had to suffer the muggy summer heat in our badly ventilated dorms.

The house was also rather small, comprised of only a minuscule foyer, receiving room, kitchen, bedroom (kept even darker and messier than the rest of the house, and I swore to pretend I never glimpsed the pile of dirty laundry on the floor and unmade bed when I passed it by, to save Shifu some face; I knew how it was to have a time consuming work) and, finally, the study. I supposed there would be a washroom somewhere, but I wasn’t about to go looking for it.

The study was probably the only room in the Leisure House to get some light. It had big windows covered by gauzy curtains and several lamps meant to hold night pearls. Shifu’s desk was neatly placed in the Command Position, but it looked almost straight ahead to the door, leaving a visitor to stand uncomfortably with their back to the entrance. Just like Fu-shixiong said, there was a tray labelled “LIFE OR DEATH” just next to another one that read “INMINENT CATHASTROPHE” and a rather big and full box that just said “URGENT”.

I was a bit unnerved by the whole thing, you know, by the invasion of privacy I was unwillingly committing, the darkness, the cold, and the sheer hostility in the feng shui of the study, but I wasn’t actually expecting the blow that sent me sprawling to the ground.

[HP: 141.327/208.99]

I laid there, dazzled, for what must had been just seconds, but it was enough to see the hulking figure looming over me, his pale blue eyes distinctly shining even in the bright room, his unmistakable zuiyin, the sneer revealing his sharp teeth, the sharp gleaming ice needles forming in the air.

But just as suddenly as I was struck, my sight was obstructed by yellow silk. I tried to get away for a moment, until I realised it was Shifu covering me with his own body. He cradled the back of my neck and curled around me, tucking my head under his chin. I screwed my eyes shut and held on the front of his clothing.

“Wait!,” he cried. “Please wait, my King. This servant begs you to spare his disciple. She is obedient and won’t say anything, this servant will personally ensure so.”

As he talked, Shifu pried himself lose, so he could turn around, and then made me kowtow alongside him with the hand he had on the back of my neck.

The demon took two steps closer to us. I blinked rapidly to keep tears from gathering in my eyes. The room was so cold now that I could see the moisture of my breath condensing on the floor. My heart was in my throat, and I was dizzy. I didn’t know if it was the blow to the head or the fear, but I prayed I didn’t invoke further wrath by puking on his boots.

“This King will not kill Qinghua’s little disciple.”

By the corner of my eye I saw Shifu start to raise to his knees, but the hand on my neck hand pushed down a bit more before it left me. I took the hint and kept my forehead pressed to the ground.

“Thank you! Oh thank you, my King! We will not disappoint—”

Abruptly, the demon moved again and dragged Shifu up, until I could see the tips of his boots hanging over the floor. I screwed my eyes shut again.

“Qinghua will make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

“O-of course, my King.” Shifu’s voice came out chocked.

“Good.”

The loud hollow crunch of a heavy blow startled a flinch out of me, and I whimpered when Shifu fell down, coughing, next to me, but I didn’t rise, even when the demon walked away and left the room.

We stayed on the floor for some time, until Shifu gathered himself up with a groan, pressing an arm around his ribs. I was, well, frozen on the spot, and he had to encourage me to rise to a sitting position.

“Come on, Xiao Xi. Let’s get up. There’s a good girl.” I sniffled and he cooed, gathering me up in a hug. I started sobbing because, other than A-Tian, nobody in this life had ever tried to console me before. “You did well. Are you hurt? Let Shifu see.”

Instead of, like, looking for my pupil’s reaction to light, asking me to do math and stuff like that, he simply put two fingers on my pulse point. This time I had enough training to actually feel what he was doing, but not yet enough to tell what he found.

“It seems than other than some bruising there’s no further damage.” He smiled and patted me very, very lightly on the head. “Shifu will prepare some tea to help with that and Xiao Xi will be good as new in no time!”

“Okay,” I said, still clinging a bit. It was very scary, alright? I had a little ten years old brain with little ten years old brain chemicals, I was very upset. I needed some reassurance.

Maybe it wasn’t very wise of me, seeing he had called the demon “my king” and he was familiar with him— hell, Shifu had even called himself a servant! But he had also protected me when it would had been easier to get rid of me, so I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Also, we lived in a novel, so things weren’t always what they appeared at first glance and if I had survived this encounter, it was for a reason.

He climbed to his feet with some difficulty, mindful of his ribs, and asked if I could stand on my own. I said yes even though I wasn’t actually sure I would actually be able to. In the end I managed it, just stumbling a bit before finding my feet.

We went to the kitchen and Shifu made me sit while he prepared the tea. It was testament of how much I had grown used to be Hong Xidan than the mere act of having a senior serve the tea was enough to make me uncomfortable.

I took a sip from the cup Shifu placed in front of me; it was terribly bitter, but my health points started raising instantly, so I downed it quickly. On the other side of the table, Shifu also threw his cup back like a shoot.

“So,” he started, “how did Xiao Xi find herself in this situation?”

I immediately handed him the master key and proceeded to throw Fu-shixiong under the bus with absolutely no hesitation at all.

“I see,” he said once I finished my tale of woe. He graved his chin in a pensive pose. “Fu Xiang has definitely lost his master key privileges and this master will have words with him about his responsibilities. On the other hand, while I understand Xiao Xi was following orders, she did enter the Leisure House without permission from this master, and well—” he raised both his eyebrows “—I need a reason to keep her close at hand: both our lives do depend on her ability to keep a secret.”

I shrunk my shoulders at the reminder… and at the suspicion of the real circumstances behind Bao-shishu’s death.

“Xiao Xi will take on the housekeeping of the Leisure House and tell her fellow disciples she is being punished. She will also move into the side room.”

“This disciple understands and thanks Shifu for his compassion.” I said, even as I thought it was a bit unjust, seeing how he was the one betraying the Sect and all. I cupped my fist and bowed as low as I could while sitting down. He gestured me to rise from the bow.

“Ah! Xiao Xi, don’t look so sad! Your Fu-shixiong’s punishment will be harsh for taking advantage of you and you’ll even get a nice private room all for yourself out of this, so not everything is bad!”

And then, the system chimed in.

[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! User has received the Achievements:

-Surviving.

-Becoming the An Ding Peak Lord’s personal disciple.]

[Activate Story Mode:]

[YES]         [NO]

Chapter Text

After a brief period of adjustment, it turned out that Shifu was right and not everything was bad. I was even doing pretty good, actually, and it surprised me.

I still went to the same classes as before, but now all my chores were related to the upkeep of the Leisure House and, well, Shifu was serious when he said he wanted to kept me under watch, so he didn’t send me on many errands and instead I spent my time doing housework or aiding in his job. Mostly it was organizing files, grinding ink, fetching stuff and brewing tea, but he also had me sit down with the ledgers to find every purchase made to a certain seller, or to match receipts and invoices with the entries in the inventory journals— busywork, I thought, because I only got those tasks if I hovered too much.

Then Shifu found out I was rather good at taking dictation (thanks in part to my handy-dandy closed captions since I always knew the correct character, even if I often missed doing the strokes in the correct order), filtering out his visitors (the house itself did most of the job) and keeping track of his schedule, and that sealed the deal! Now I was not only his housemaid, but also his secretary and personal assistant.

And the thing is, I had always liked to feel useful.

Shifu was very high maintenance, too. Like, not only he needed to be reminded to sleep, I had to physically make him go to bed, or he could just mutter “in a moment” and keep working overnight if I let him. He could subsist with no sleep for a while, if he were meditating regularly! And I knew he wasn’t! Other that checking on me, I never saw him dedicate time to cultivation. Did the abacus count as a cultivation path? I couldn’t think another explanation for his high level! He was busy working all the time!

One of the reasons I had to learn to keep track of his agenda was so I could make him go take a bath, brush his hair and change into his good robes before going to see the other Peak Lords. I had to make Fu-shixiong requisition those robes in the first place! All the other pieces of Shifu’s formal attire were hand-me downs from his old master, which could had been perfectly fine, except for the fact that the former An Ding Peak Lord had been fifteen centimetres taller, and nobody had bothered to tailor his robes to fit Shifu! It had been over a year already! I felt like a mother who just learned her kid had gone to school with a stained uniform! Shifu, please! Your image reflects on us all!  

And speaking of Fu-shixiong! His punishment didn’t seem so bad, at first, but his life was currently one of constant inconvenience and no sympathy.

Shifu had a little talk with him, like he promised me, and in that little talk Fu-shixiong got guilt-tripped for getting me almost killed, except Shifu told him that, instead of being caught by a powerful and terrifying demon lord, I got caught in a “secret security measure” he had to implement after the whole thing with Bao-shishu, so he had to add my qi signature to the array (or some other bullshit like that) to be released unharmed from the trap, and now he had to keep an eye on me because it was a security risk to leave me unattended and—wait. That was actually mostly the truth if we consider my new secret demon overlord a security measure. Ok, never mind. The thing is that Shifu had this conversation with Fu-shixiong in private, and the rest of the peak was told I had lost the master key, so as punishment, I was to do Fu-shixiong less sensitive, less glamorous chores (aka make sure Shifu was not living in squalor), which he had not been doing anyways, and Fu-shixiong was not getting a replacement master key.

So what happened to him was that every time he had to open a locked door he had to ask someone else to do it for him and to lock the door again once he was done; it got tiring very fast and he was already seen as somewhat incompetent (which he wasn’t, just overworked to the point of becoming irresponsible, and I felt very sympathetic, except every time I remembered he got me in this whole mess), so he was meet with a range that went from mild exasperation to outright hostility any time he needed help with something, even when it was justified.

On top of that, Shifu threatened Fu-shixiong with never choosing another Head Disciple, so he had three options: quit the sect, do his job well or inherit all the problems.

It was a horrifying fate to witness.

On the other hand this didn’t paint me in the best light, either, but I had supposedly lost the key after tripping down and hitting my head in the hike to the Leisure House, so while I had now the reputation of being terminally clumsy, people were more inclined to being sympathetic to a ten years old.

Anyways! I could had been responsible not only of the care, but also of the feeding of my Immortal Master Cultivator, except for the little detail that in this life I never learned to cook. I could probably make rice, because I knew how to make rice from my past life— but the firewood stove? A mysterious mystical artefact. So Shifu made time to cook! He liked cooking! He told me. He was very good at it! My elder martial siblings said, enviously.

Yeah. You can imagine how well that worked.

Fortunately, neither Shifu nor I would perish from starvation because his cultivation was advanced enough for inedia and all I had to do was keep in the study a little container of some snack he could eat with his fingers without leaving stains on the paper, in case he wanted to nibble on something while he worked, and while he forgot from time to time I had to eat, I could take all my meals with the other low ranked disciples in the mess hall, so it was no problem, and it worked very well for me because it was basically the only time I could talk to A-Shi.

But the thing that surprised me the most, was my secret demon overlord.

***

In my past life, when I was little, my neighbours had a rather mean cat who used to sneak into my house and bully our cats to eat their food. It even bit me once, when I ill-advisedly tried to grab him and take him out—  I still had the scar when I died.

This was kinda like that, but it was tiger, instead of a cat.

His Majesty just did whatever he pleased with the sort of feline arrogance that entitled him to come and go at his leisure into his enemies’ territory. One would like to believe that he at least had a good reason to take such risks, but most of the time he just appeared out of nowhere (since he could teleport) to demand Shifu’s attention or to sleep in his bed and then vanish just as suddenly.

Unfortunately for my stress levels and stomach lining, our current situation meant that I could randomly find myself alone with him in the house. Shifu had coached me about how to act when it happened and had assured me His Majesty had promised I would be safe.

The fact that Shifu had returned from securing that promise sporting a shiner had not been particularly reassuring, but since I had not died a second time yet, I just kinda resigned myself to a life full of jump-scares.

That meant that when the horror movie like sound of an unoiled door opening (I would need to fix that later) distracted me from my cultivation manual, I just sighed and stepped out my room, which had to be accessed from the kitchen and was very cosy. The hall beyond was dark, ominous and cold as usual. I greeted His Majesty with a deep bow in front of Shifu’s bedroom, never mind he was really drowsy and not paying too much attention to me. He had probably been there for a while, with me none the wiser.

“Qinghua?”, he asked between huge yawns he didn’t bother to cover, displaying all his terrifying carnivore teeth and the slightly too wide angle of his open jaws. Contrastingly to his fearsome appearance, he was rubbing at his eyes with a knuckle, not unlike a little child, and he had a strand of hair sticking to his cheek. The nap must had been phenomenal.

“Answering His Majesty! This unworthy disciple regretfully reports that Shifu has not yet returned, and she begs His Majesty he allows this disciple to asist— eep!,” I squeaked when he suddenly poked my belly with a super cold sharp claw, which was his way to order me to shut up and rise from the bow; Shifu was, usually, hit.

His Majesty had certainly never hurt me again, since that time he found me in Shifu’s study, but I could tell he found very amusing to startle me, usually by silently approaching me from behind to place a single freezing finger on the nape of my neck, and he had no compunction about pinching my cheeks and squishing my face for no apparent reason.  

“Xi’er will prepare tea for this King.” I had the feeling that making tea was His Majesty’s version of busywork—he would chill the tea to drink it, as he was an ice demon, but the process of making tea properly involved warming the pot and cups before brewing, and the cold affected the taste considerably; certainly, I couldn’t not make my best effort every time I served him tea, but it was a bit pointless, nevertheless.

I followed him to the study, where all the tea making paraphernalia was stored and where I could use a clever talismanic apparatus (a magic hot plate) to boil the water (no fires were allowed in the study).

I stepped carefully around Shifu’s desk; if it were to fall, the precarious tower of paperwork balanced on top was heavy enough to kill a cat or small dog, maybe not a child, but since I had been there and done that, I was still very wary of it.

Siting with His Majesty at the low table that Shifu had placed for me to do my own work, was less uncomfortable in comparison: he was terrifying and could harm me without effort and little consequence, but all the same he had decided to spare me, in this very room.

Along with the tea, I placed a plate of pork jerky on the table. It was particularly sweet; His Majesty had no tolerance for spice and was secretly fond of candy. He pinched my cheek and I thought about a conversation I had with Shifu some days before.

“Shifu,” I had called from the kitchen table, not looking up from where I was sorting red beans. Cooking for us was not a priority to him, but every once in a while he prepared treats and bribes for he other Peak Lords. Since being in the kitchen put him in a relaxed mood, it had been probably my best chance to ask. “Did Bao-shishu actually steal something?”

I knew he didn’t, but I wanted to know why he died when I was still alive.

“Ah,” had exclaimed Shifu, with a final hit of the cleaver knife he was using to mince pork. “Well, he didn’t. He found out, about— ” he made a careless encompassing gesture with the knife, accidentally flicking minced pork around and I cleaned it as it fell “—you know.”

“Like this disciple?”

“No, actually no, ha ha. He found out because he had been trying to find blackmail on me – which I guess he did? —and he... Ah Xiao Xi must understand that this master was defending himself, but in the end, allowing him to... leave, was a risk this master couldn’t afford.”     

“Oh,” I had said, and me and Shifu had let the matter rest.

Since Shifu had not answered my indirect questioning, I decided to risk being straightforward with His Majesty.

I waited until he had sipped his tea and had started on his snack; the plate of jerky was nudged gently in my direction, so I figured he was in a good mood (that nap must have truly been excellent).

“My king? May this unworthy one ask a question?” A subtle dip of his chin signalled I had permission to proceed. “This unworthy one doesn’t want to appear ungrateful, but she wants to know why did His Majesty chose to spare her?”

His Majesty raised both his eyebrows, so I thought my question surprised him, but I didn’t know why. He tilted his head slightly to the side.

“Xi’er misunderstands. Qinghua was the one who decided to spare her life.”

“Shifu?”

“En, this king’s Qinghua is ruthless and tolerates no treat to his position. Still, it upsets him to harm one of his sect, so after Qinghua had to deal with he last one and Xi’er was one of his littlest disciples, this king thought it best to take matters onto his own hands.” He smiled, and it was both handsome and terrifying. With one hand he reached to my face and squished it a bit. “But it pleased this king that Qinghua decided to keep Xi’er,”  he said, and with trepidation I realised he was fond, out of all people, inexplicably, of me and, most worryingly, of Shifu.

I learned a lot of worrying things from his answer, actually, but I would need to ponder on them later because the System chimed in.

[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! User has received the Achievement: Becoming a sidekick of the Heir of the Northern Desert.]

[Activate Story Mode:]

[YES]       [NO]

I automatically pressed NO and then what I had just read caught up with me.

What?

Chapter Text

By this point you may be asking yourself “how come two fujoshi recommended you to read straight porn?”, and the answer is “due the same thing that happened to Supernatural”. That is to say, women weren’t allowed to be recurrent characters and there were only so many characters developed enough to ship.

So my friends had been lured in with BL, specifically between the protagonist and his right hand man, who --I was told— was one of the very few recurring characters who seemed to have an actual relationship with Luo Binghe and also the only non-villainous male character: canon, basically! I still remembered Teen Wolf, so I took that information with a grain of salt, but oh boy! There sure was a lot of fic!

(Well, alright, yeah, the appeal had been yaoi and edgy ultraviolence; just girly things, you know how it is. )

So yeah, I didn’t know much about the actual plot, but I knew about Mobei-jun.

It is just that, well, fanart pictured him always as the unholy twink offspring of Sephiroth and Sesshomaru-sama, while His Majesty in the flesh 1) had permanently tousled black hair, 2) the features of his face were strong and striking, as opposed to the fine, delicate ones he was always drawn with, and 3) he was built like a fridge, one of those big silver ones with the French doors, if not an entire walk-in freezer.

I just never made the connection and Shifu never addressed him as such.

But now that I knew, I suddenly felt a lot better about my lot on life, you know? If I was to be the sidekick of the protagonist’s sidekick, I would probably survive the revenge arc... unless I died randomly for shock value or man-pain points.

Well! I just needed to learn to live with that hanging over me! I could do that! I reflexively checked my Health Points, but they were nearly full at the moment.

*

“This king will take over Xi’er’s martial training,” he said the moment Shifu arrived.

Forget what I said before,  I was going to die.

[ TIP!  Training montages can be purchased at the Store with B-points!]

[ Activate Story Mode?]

[YES]  [NO]

I have to say it was tempting.

“System? Can you remind me the Sandbox Mode perks?

[While Sandbox Mode is active:

• User002 will not be assigned plot related missions.
• User002 will not have OOC limitations.
• The Store and B-point mechanic will remain locked.
• Reanimation objects, locations and mechanics will not have effect on User002 once her Health Points reach zero.
• The account will close automatically once the Health Points reach zero.

Once Story Mode is active, Sandbox Mode will be unavailable until the Plot is 100% complete.]

Uhm, nope, still not worth it. The Store did make me curious and the possibility of being revived was alluring, but I preferred not having to do missions, thanks.

*

The less to be said about those lessons, the better, so I’ll just share a couple pieces of totally unrelated Demon trivia with you: they don’t believe in protective equipment or training weapons, they have a sink or swim attitude to teaching and, like cats, they like providing live prey to their young to practice with.

 And other than things better left forgotten, I did learn a lot about His Majesty! For example! He found it endearing if I snapped a bite at his fingers when he pinched my cheeks! And when I managed to catch one with my teeth he was super happy! So happy he threw me up in the air! And it was super fun once I realized he wasn’t going to drop me. When I was little in my life before there weren’t adults who were the type to do that sort of thing, so I was surprised how fun it was.

 I also, shamelessly, started being clingy and to ask to be carried. I was getting too big for it, but he was very strong and didn’t seem to mind, and now that I was completely sure he didn’t meant me harm, I actually felt very safe around him

Now, if only Shifu could be able to feel safe around him.

*

Shifu was a ruthless, unrepentant killer, but he had decided to keep me around and be responsible of me; he didn’t even need to have me killed if he wanted to keep his secret, I was very young, so he could just expel me and anything I’d say against him could be dismissed as me lashing out.

He didn’t have to actually take the time to care for me, but he did. He was good to me and I liked him, so I felt a bit offended when he said “why is Xiao Xi looking so coldly at this master?”

I wasn’t? He was allowing me to watch as he practiced the sword, which was not only a rare occurrence, but a huge privilege as he was truly a master, and all my classes so far had been guided by an older disciple (Demon Lords doesn’t count because they don’t cultivate the sword), it was just that I—oh. I couldn’t see him clearly.

“Oh no, oh no, nononono, don’t cry Xiao Xi, don’t cry. Shifu is not angry, see? See?”

But I couldn’t, not until he was very close and patting my head and shoulders lightly, but frantically, while the Song Bai sword hovered almost anxiously at his back. So I sniffled all my snot and between shuddering gasps I answered something that sounded like “nnNoooOoOOooo, XidaaAan caaAaaaannnt,” gasp, “see,” snort, “Shiiiiiiifuuuuuu.”

 It wasn’t, definitely, my most graceful moment, but I was worried because we lived in a pseudo-historical settling  were I didn’t remember having seem corrective eyeglasses before, so forgive me, and he also panicked a bit until he realized I was just a bit myopic and not spontaneously blind.

In the end he managed to settle us down and took me to Cian Cao Peak to see if my eyes could be fixed.

They couldn’t be fixed, told us the Shijie who examined my eyes. Or more exactly, that with my current cultivation, I wouldn’t be able to correct my vision, and that it would be even longer until I could be able to do it reflexively for long periods of time.

That’s how I ended up with huge bottle bottoms perched on my face. Now that I thought about it, I had been around this age when I started wearing eyeglasses in my life before. What a drag, now this body looked a bit more like the one before, but at what cost? The mole over the eyebrow was just cute. The thick, coarse hair was difficult to maintain, but at least it kept the braids from slipping out. Eyeglasses were just a complication.

A-Shi looked a bit appalled the first time she saw me wear them, and the other disciples who understood how expensive it was to get them made were jealous. It was no fun at all.

 It was no fun, and A-Shi was still nice and friendly to me, but we had slowly stopped being close. She had made good friends among the other girls in our cohort and when I was with them they talked of things I didn’t know, and there was too much I couldn’t talk about.

It was to be expected. Good thing I was not the original Xidan, or it could have messed her up.

I started sitting alone to eat, they didn’t call me to sit with them. The upside was that I didn’t need to make excuses to go home.

*

“Xiao Xi! Yes! Perfect!,” said Shifu one day herding me from my room to the studio, where Fu-shixiong looked like he had just narrowly avoided execution. “If Xiao Xi is the one to go, she will surely return!” That didn’t inspire confidence.

Fu-shixiong somehow managed to look relieved and uneasy at the same time.

“Is Shifu sure? This disciple wouldn’t dare to talk badly about such an accomplished master, but Shen-shibo is a bit—”

“Aiya, Fu Xiang should know better than to listen to rumors!,” admonished Shifu, the hypocrite, who was clearly afraid of his martial sibling. He hugged me and rubbed his cheek to the top of my head, I let him because it was nice, only two people in the world were affectionate to me, and the other one usually demonstrated it with playful violence. “Xiao Xi is cute and little and your Shibo is soft on little cute girl disciples, but, ah, not for any nefarious purpose, but because he believes not many people are appropriately soft and good to them. He is probably the safest person to be around your Hong-shimei.”

“If Shifu is sure…” said Fu-shixiong, not looking very sure himself.

“Of course!,” said Shifu. “Now, Xiao Xi, where are your good ribbons? You need to look the tidiest, most spoiled little disciple ever, or your Shibo will take it against me in the next meeting.”

My “good ribbons” were a deep blue pair His Majesty had given me as a very nice but possessive gesture; they were in the heraldic colors of his clan and the same shade as Shifu’s earrings, belt ornament and the stone in his hair pin. I had to admit the color contrasted beautifully with the yellow of our uniforms and like a stylistic choice on Shifu’s part.

Shifu did my hair in elaborate twin buns, tied the ribbons in bows and arranged them for maximum cuteness. He handed me a satchel and a box of osmanthus cake, and sent me on my way to Qing Jing Peak to beg for a copy of some super important papers one of my shixiongs lost (until further notice, the poor soul was in charge of receiving complaints from the other Peaks).

 It was the first time I was allowed to leave An Ding Peak, I knew A-Shi and the others had accompanied our older martial siblings on their errands before, but it was all new to me. I was following a very detailed set of directions, since Shen-shibo was likely to know if Fu-shixiong or Shifu accompanied me part of the way and then were too coward to face him.

Walking over the rainbow bridge was scary, but the views were so beautiful I soon forgot to be afraid of falling. Qing Jing Peak was beautiful too. Unlike An Ding, it was mostly comprised of bamboo forest dotted by small buildings and little gazebos, connected by meandering paths, instead of wide paved roads meant for carts and contained gardens that were mostly meant to catch water and avoid flooding. Qing Jing was empty, too, and if not for the faint music that could be heard in the distance, I would believe that I was alone in the mountain with the Shijie showing me to the Bamboo House.

Uh, it looked severe and ascetic, but the Fen Shui was geared to be optimal for cultivation and not to make the visitors want to leave, weird.

Shen Qingqiu himself also looked severe, but he cut a dashing (and very cool) figure. He was more beautiful, than handsome, and his features were imperfect enough to be interesting. It was a face made for portraits and magazine covers. He looked also very unimpressed (and a bit pissed off) to see me at his door.   

“This Hong Xidan from An Ding Peak greets Shen-shibo,” I said with my most perfect salute; Shifu said to avoid his courtesy name.

“And what brings Hong-shizhi to my Qing Jing Peak?” The wasting my time went unsaid, but he covered his face with a fan and looked at me over it with his judging, judging eyes of judgement, so I resorted to shove the cake box in front of me with both hands and an even lower bow, like offering tribute.

 “Answering Shen-shibo!, this disciple comes bearing a gift from her master and a request for a duplicate of Qing Jing Peak’s monthly requisitions.”

He let me squirm for a moment, but he agreed in the end and took the box. He –visibly put upon – invited me in and to sit at a low table in his receiving room. He disappeared into a room for a moment and returned with a scroll.

“Hong-shizhi may return to Shang-shidi with a copy of this scroll, but she will need to copy it herself.”

I carried my writing supplies in my satchel, so I was quick to agree and set to work. It was a fair condition, Qing Jing currently didn’t have a Head Disciple, so a lot of the administrative work was done by Shen-shibo himself and An Ding had lost the original in the first place.  

While I worked, Shen-shibo disappeared for a moment again and when he returned, he settled on the other side of the table to do his own work.

“Hong-shizi’s handwriting is not beautiful, but it is very clear,” he commented.

“This disciple thanks Shen-shibo for the compliment!” I bowed over the table and he harrumphed.

  “It was not a compliment. Hong-shizhi needs to work harder in her calligraphy.” I smiled at him and bowed again. He was being soft with me.

“This disciple thanks Shen-shibo for the advice!” He harrumphed again and returned to his work.

When I finished copying the requisitions, before he sent me back, he opened the box and told me to take one cake.

He was truly a softy.

*

After returning victorious from Qing Jing, Shifu rewarded me with my very own box of osmanthus cake and effusive praise.

And I was very easy to please.

Chapter Text

So I believe that we have established enough that I was reasonably happy with this life I found myself living and that there was little I could complain about, really— it’s just, I was scared every time Shifu and His Majesty were in the same room.

Something had to be done about it and I knew that separation was probably the healthiest thing, but the truth was that Shifu and I were trapped.

(And after several instances of His Majesty appearing to have his injuries treated and even once witnessing him just collapse out of a shadow portal in a bloody heap on the studio’s floor, I suspected he didn’t have anywhere else to go, either.)

It could have been hopeless, it sometimes felt that way, but His Majesty was not only fond, he did care for us; he looked at us with pride, when I fought back, each time Shifu got up and kept going after being beaten, and it was a twisted thing because he was aware it hurt, but I didn’t believe he meant actual harm, I thought he just didn’t understand how-- what it was like for us. What I didn’t know was if his care was genuine affection or just possessiveness, and that was a bet I had to make.

Straightforwardness had worked with him before, so that was what I would try.

Finding a good time to speak with him was easy; he regularly kidnapped me from the Leisure House when Shifu wasn’t there and His Majesty wasn’t in need of a place to sleep.

As usual, he picked me up so he could carry me on his hip, with the crock of his arm supporting my butt, and I took my glasses off to hide my face in the fur lining the neck of his cloak. He placed his free hand securely on the back of my neck and took us through a portal. Goosebumps erupted all over my skin and I pressed my face harder into His Majesty’s cloak, clinging to him. Traveling like that was very uncomfortable: cold and oppressive, and looking at the shadows within made me physically ill and gave me horrifying nightmares.

And then it was over.

I was set on my feet on the grass in some remote location and I immediately snuck closer to His Majesty’s side, hiding underneath his cloak and holding onto his belt. I had learnt from experience that he walked very fast and that some creatures were audacious enough to try to eat me if I separated from his side too much— and that he would let me defend myself and only interfere if he considered I was in over my head. On the other hand, while he, unfortunately, thought a bit (or a lot) too highly of my fighting prowess, well, he couldn’t fly and neither could I yet, and we didn’t want a repeat of he eagle incident, so he at least let me stay close. I usually put my glasses back on first thing, but this time I kept them off.

He wasn’t the considerate sort, so I was never told in advance what we were supposed to do, but I could usually get an idea from what he was wearing, what he told me to bring or if he notified Shifu that he was taking me somewhere (which meant we would be gone for longer than a day—Shifu had been so worried that first time…). Today, I believed his intention was to have me do sword drills. He was an— effective teacher, I will not say more on the matter.

Anyways! So since I had psyched me up to have this conversation, this conversation would happen! And I knew how to start it! Once I was sure he didn’t mean to leave the spot we were in, I just dropped in a kowtow, right there.

“When in doubt, grovel” was Shifu’s older lesson, and I had worked the unholy mix of sales/customer service that is an All Included 5-stars Resort’s front desk. I had no shame left in my person. I would grovel in front of someone I despised. Grovelling was a manipulation tactic. This was His Majesty, whom I liked, and I was doing it for Shifu, there was no duress in this, but I still meant it: genuflexion was a gesture His Majesty understood.   

“My king! This lowly insolent one begs His Majesty he listens to an unreasonable request!” The bad thing about being prostrated so, meant I could not see him to gauge his reaction and it was daunting.

“Xi’er has this King’s attention.” Ok, I was wrong, this was daunting. What if this didn’t change a thing? What if this made it worse? I shallowed hard, even though my mouth was dry. I had a speech planned, but it would be better to get it out at once before I lost the nerve.

“Please stop hitting Shifu!” Oh! I was crying now, not part of the plan, but just as well! “This lowly one wouldn’t never dare to tell His Majesty how to treat his servants, as it his right to do with us as he sees fit, but this lowly one is also a filial disciple and she must speak on behalf of her master!” I took a shuddering breath. “Shifu is too loyal to speak up!  This lowly one will overstep and make an assumption over His Majesty intentions! Humans consider being beaten a punishment!”

I practically yelled that last part. At least it came out half-coherent; crying made me less articulate.

Neither of us moved for a while and I considered it a good thing! No reaction was good! Better than storming out! It (probably) meant he was thinking about it (right? Right?!).

“…Xi’er may rise,” he said, finally. I straightened but remained on the ground. I looked up, he looked down. By then I wasn’t crying anymore. “Come, this King will return us to the Leisure House.”

 He picked me up again, just like before, as if nothing had changed, but once we stepped out the shadows to Shifu’s studio, he didn’t put me down like normal.

“My King!,” said Shifu, “you are back early. Did something happen?”

There was worry in his voice; I knew I probably looked rather pathetic, all grass and tear stained. His Majesty handed me over to him, wordlessly. It may not look it, but Shifu was very strong, so he also carried me with no effort. I put my arms around his neck, less for support and more because I found it comforting, and squished my cheek against his shoulder so I could see with one eye to His Majesty. It was so blurry I couldn’t figure out his expression.

“Oh, Xiao Xi,” said Shifu, rubbing circles on my back, rooking as if I were a lot, lot younger.

After looking at us for a moment, His Majesty started raising a hand; Shifu flinched minutely, I held my breath. His Majesty just patted my head lightly, and then Shifu’s.

“Xi’er is a good child,” he said and then stepped back and into a portal.

Shifu clutched me closer.

“Xiao Xi, what happened?”

I just shook my head in answer, I didn’t want to jinx it, and he let it go.

*

“His Majesty should consider talking to Shifu.”

He didn’t seem very pleased to hear that, but he asked! Obviously, Shifu wasn’t going to forget (or forgive!) years of abuse from one minute to the next (if ever!) and His Majesty wanted to know what he should do.

My King, please! I already did my part! It was your turn to have an uncomfortable conversation! And why were you asking me?! From your point of view I was a regular 10 years old child!

He laid down on the studio’s daybed to brood. The daybed was installed to encourage Shifu to sleep more, but His Majesty had pretty much claimed it as his from day one. I allowed myself to slump and laid my cheek on my folded arms over the table. He was actually doing a good job fixing his act, but I didn’t feel sorry for him. I liked him, but Shifu deserved better!

But alas! It was pitiful! I decided to help him a bit and appeal to his pride to make the idea more palatable.

“This lowly one thinks talking honestly is scary and difficult and that Shifu will be impressed and appreciate it!”

“Xi’er is a brave child.” Urgh! I was bad at taking compliments! “And she will not refer to herself as lowly again.” But it was the polite thing to do? “This King will take her words into consideration.”

I was so tiring to talk to him!

When Shifu arrived, he found us asleep.

*

If the conversation between Shifu and His Majesty happened, it probably went very well!

Too well, I'd say! I covered my eyes, felling unwarranted mortification, and closed the door again. 

I was glad for them!

But come on! Right in front of my bedroom?   

*  

So, for a completely and absolutely, totally, unrelated reason, Shifu decided I could be trusted again to do errands, and I ended up following Fu-shixiong around.

 Ah, Fu-shixiong. He was good at his job but he wasn’t as charismatic as Bo-qianbei had been, and, well, me and all related stuff had not made things easier for him.

To be honest, I still resented him a bit, but I also needed him to do his job uninterrupted and efficiently; a smooth operation meant a less stressed Shifu and less work for me, and less work meant more Cultivation! I mean, I didn’t want actual for reals immortality! I just wanted to be hard to kill.

Anyways, I played up the moe and made sure everybody saw there was no bad blood between Fu-shixiong and me, to try and improve his public image. Then I let the seniors boss me around a bit and my peers teach me stuff.

I was cute, I was useful and I was inoffensive. A-Shi and I were no longer close friends, but she and I still talked, and she was popular. Obviously, it wasn’t possible to be liked by everyone, but I did my best to keep away from the people who didn’t like me and to act oblivious to their dislike.

 I suppose it made me look like an easy target! But I was expecting bullying! Not this!

*

“Oh! Hello there!,” said my Shijie, standing at the door. I didn’t remember her name, I was bad at names, but I knew her.

“This disciple greets her senior,” I answered with a bow and she cooed.

“Aw, how polite! But you don’t need to be so formal with this Shijie!” She clapped her hands together. “Shijie just needs something from the urgent box!” She stepped around me! The audacity! “I’ll be super quick! I promise!”

When she faltered in the Long Hallway of Dread, I hurried past her to stand in her way and bowed again.

“Begging Shijie’s forgiveness! Shifu is not home! This shimei was ordered to don’t allow visitors in the house if Shifu is not here!”

“Please Shimei! It won’t take long! Shifu won’t ever know.”

“This shimei must ask her Shijie to come back later.”

“I have no time for this!,” she said as she threw me against the wall hard enough to bruise, but the loss of Health Points was minimal. She stalked down the hall directly to the studio, I got up and followed after her, and surprise! She didn’t go to the ‘URGENT’ box. What should I do?

“Shijie must leave! She really shouldn’t be here!” She stopped digging in a drawer and turned around, smiling sweetly.

“Shijie is sorry for being rough with Shimei, but this is very important!” Her face fell down, all concern and sadness. She crouched in front of me, grasped me from the shoulders. “Shimei doesn’t know, but Shang Ming—” gotcha! Only certain people refused to acknowledge his courtesy name. “—did something very, very bad and he is hiding it!” She held up a hand against her mouth. “He even killed Da-shixiong! Shimei must help me!”

I couldn’t cry on command, but it would have been a nice touch if I could, so I just hunched down and fidgeted with my sleeves.

“And Shijie will tell Zhangmen-shibo to stop Shifu from—from—”

“Yes! Of course! Just like Shimei said! Shijie will make things right! Shimei does know something! You can tell Shijie!” And she was back to smiling.

“Okay, Xi’er will tell Shijie. She can find it there.” I pointed to the shelves behind her and in her haste to get up she pushed me away.

She wasn’t paying me any attention when I stabbed her in the back.  

*

It was easy, to kill someone. I had worked at a newspaper and at a hospital and people died and was killed every day, on purpose or by accident, it didn’t take much for someone to die.

I had been killing big things with tough hides, sharp scales and acid blood. Cultivator or not, one blow well placed was enough for Shijie, but just as people are easy to kill, they also fight to stay alive, and she took long enough for it to hit me, what I had just done.

I had not thought I’ll have it in me to kill someone in cold blood. In my life before I was usually beside myself with guilt if I inconvenienced someone by accident. Maybe I could have handled things differently. The worst part was that I was going to get away with it and I didn’t feel as bad as I should have. What a terrible person I was. Maybe I was a bit in shock.

I called for His Majesty. He was a bit concerned when he appeared, I had never called for him before. He grasped the situation without need to explain anything. He took the body and I cleaned up the blood. The dagger went back into my sleeve. He patted my head.

Shijie had been right, Shifu wouldn’t ever know.  

Chapter Text

Reincarnation isekai’s MC very often bemoan the horrors of going through puberty twice, but you know what was truly horrific? Literal growing pains! They happen randomly, they don’t serve any apparent biological purpose, they don’t have a clear cause!

Some nights I  could just suddenly wake up feverish and in pain.

I was dreading my wisdom teeth already.

I would usually deal with it alone. Growing pains were terrible, but not the worst, and they weren’t dangerous, and they also went away on their own. And I wasn’t really ten.

This time, Shifu was there.

It had been a long day, one of these times when His Majesty’s visit meant Shifu would find a reason to keep me out of the house, and I had been tasked to do deliveries to other Peaks. I had been on my own, as it had been happening more frequently, and one Qiong Ding hallmaster— had been difficult.  

When I returned home, I had fallen asleep on the daybed (with the inherent risk of perishing suffocated by ten tones of demon; he was awfully like a cat), and with no one to sent him to bed, Shifu had kept working; it was dark outside now.

So Shifu was there this time. I noticed him when he took my wrist between his fingers and I felt his qi cycling inquisitively—he wouldn’t find anything; there was no illness, no injury, to find. There was nothing he could do, but he placed a cold compress on my forehead and ran his fingers through my hair and shushed me softly when I whined.

I wasn’t asleep, but I wasn’t entirely awake either. I was tired, too tired to sleep, and in pain, but he was there and gentle and comforting. His hands were cold, and he smelled like ink, spilled tea and the perfume pouches I put in the chest that stored his clothing. He talked to me, maybe at me. He talked when he was nervous, or idle, or irritated, often to himself, he talked. I answered, maybe. I was tired,  but not asleep.

The hand in my hair stopped for a moment, I complained, of that I’m sure, and he started petting my head again.

At some point I fell truly asleep.

Like someone who turns off their phone’s alarms without waking up, I selected ‘NO’ on the System’s screen when it popped up.

*

I started to suspect that Shifu knew about what had happened to Shijie.

As I thought, I had gotten away with it. And yeah, it had been mostly by dumb luck, but I had also ran some very quick calculations about the situation when she forced her entry into the house! and I had been right!

Point number one! She could only enter if someone opened the door for her (the Leisure House was warded to hell and back!)  and she had had to come when she was sure I’d be alone (I was easy pickings) —so she took advantage of a day when Shifu had been out in a business trip along Fu-shixiong and people from other peaks, giving them an ironclad alibi in the process.

Point number two! She had not told anyone what she was planning (probably, but if she had, I hoped they would keep quiet like she with what she knew about Bo-qianbei) or where was she going, either to keep her own alibi or to keep whatever she wanted to extort from Shifu to herself. That meant there was nothing to tie her disappearance to the Leisure House, or to me, not that people would consider me a likely suspect seeing I was not quite eleven yet and people didn’t think too much of me in the first place.

Point number three! She had been acting erratically since Bo-qianbei disappeared (I learned this after the fact) and they were close, so people just arrived to their own conclusions, and none involved foul play— Wow, you know what? If it had not worked so well in my favor, I would have been really outraged in her behalf!

I also tried to not think about what I did (ah, let’s just call it method acting as an innocent bystander) so everything pretty much just continued as if nothing had happened.

 But either way, Shifu started to pay more attention to me.

If he knew, it couldn’t be awful, I thought. He wouldn’t stop caring for me—but he would know, and not only it would be more difficult for me to forget about it, he would worry.

What use was it (what use would I be) if he worried?  

That was why I never told him either about things like the eagle or that one very enterprising suitor of His Majesty’s who thought she was only stealing his dinner from his camp (which was the reason why His Majesty microchipped me and made sure I could call for him in the first place, silver linings!).

So yeah, Shifu was paying more attention than usual, and I had an audience while I dusted the receiving room. I hated dusting, other people hated doing floors or cleaning windows, to me the worst chore was dusting, and the beautifully carved loquat motives on the furniture (to match and give continuity to the orchard outside the house) gathered dust like nothing else.

“Xiao Xi hums while she works,” he commented. I did, I had done so in my life before, and doubly so in this one with no recorded music.

“This disciple will stop, if it bothers Shifu,” I guessed; while it would be a very hypocritical thing for him to ask, since he did pretty much the same, it was a weird remark to make out of the blue with no purpose behind.

“No, no, It’s alright! It’s just, well, I just noticed that Xiao Xi favors some unusual melodies.” I shrugged sheepishly, made a non-committal sort of sound and continued dusting, now a bit self-conscious, because, well, I did try to stick to the songs I had learned on the dizi in this life, but the mind wanders, you know? And some things really stay with you, even beyond death, like Cha-la Head Cha-la, the Super Mario Bros theme or the Katamary Damacy OST. “And you even sing, sometimes. I had not paid attention to it before.”

Alright, I was not imagining things, that remark was very pointed.

“Shifu?”

“Hey Xiao Xi, does the phrase ‘Proud Immortal Demon Way’ mean something to you?”

Suddenly several things fell into place, including myself, since my legs stopped being able to support me.

“Xiao Xi!” He hurried to my side to help me up, but I just clung to his clothing, and he allowed me to bring him down too. In a very remote part of my brain, I thought that maybe I should stop being dramatically on the ground every time something happened, but this was just so serendipitous, such a neat and convenient coincidence, just like fiction, that maybe it called for dramatic reactions.

“You are User One!”

“I knew it!,” he said in response with a huge grin. He hugged me around the shoulders a bit too hard, but I understood the sentiment behind. “I’m not alone! Haha, I’m not alone! I should have figured it out before! Come on! We have so much to talk about.” 

 He released me from the hug to get up from the floor and helped me to my feet, then he tugged me along by the hand. I was grinning so much, I was crying. What a surprising turn of events!

He settled me at the kitchen table (he gravitated to the kitchen, like I gravitated to the studio) and started to prepare tea and to plate snacks, all while keeping his sight on me at all times, as if I were to leave the moment he stopped paying attention.

Once he was also sitting at the table and the tea was served… I found myself not knowing what to say.

I was aware —well, I suspected —that since the System called me ‘User002,’ there had to be at least another one, but I had not actually expected to meet them, not this easily. The only isekai I could recall where meeting another reincarnator went well was Hamefura, and Bakarina didn’t even know someone else remembered their past life too.

“You know? I kept imagining what I would say if I encountered another transmigrator, but it turns out I don’t know what to say,” he said after an awkward silence, and I couldn’t help but to snort out a laugh.

“Aiya! Xiao Xi, how unfilial! Laughing at your poor Shifu!”

“This disciple wouldn’t dare!”, I said, while laughing. “She laughs at both herself and her master. Neither this disciple knows what to say, and the System had hinted at the existence of another, uh, transmigrator from the beginning, so she has had the time to think.”

'Transmigrator' was a new word for me.  I had had no idea how to explain our situation in Mandarin, I would have probably just gone with ‘isekai victim’ and hoped for the best.

“Wait! Your System did? Mine never says anything useful. Ah, and Xiao Xi, you don’t need to be so formal with me anymore—oh, should I keep calling you Xiao Xi? What was you ID? Obviously, I don’t remember everyone, but I do recall certain readers, and it is not like doxxing is a concern anymore, isn’t it? Ah, right! And you don’t have to call me ‘Shifu’ in private anymore, either! In fact! Since we are in this together, you may call me ‘Airplane-gege’ if you want!”, he said without stopping to let me answer and when he finally did, he puffed himself up in a rather preening way.

Of course I wasn’t calling him that! Shifu would be Shifu until we both died (again)! If I could, I would call him ‘vous’ and ‘usted’ too! If he wanted, I could call him ‘Airplane-shifu’ because I wasn’t a complete asshole, but that was it! On the other hand—

“This disc-uhm, I am not completely sure I am able to be less formal, this is how I learned the language, so...”

“Learned? Was your family particularly strict or— Ohhh, it makes more sense that you were speaking Spanish when you had a fever if you are a native speaker, are you? I mean, I only understood ‘gracias’, and I was not completely sure that I didn’t just imagined it until I heard you singing just now. It was Spanish, right?”

 “Yes, and I’m a native speaker, too.”

“Well! Who could have imagined it? My humble little novel known internationally!” Something about that comment itched at me, but he didn’t let me think about it too much because he kept going... “So, did you read it in Mandarin? I wasn’t aware someone was translating it.”

“It was a fan translation; the official one was delayed for some reason —I had to learn Mandarin after I transmigrated— but I, uh, actually I died before I got to read it, because it couldn’t finish torrenting.”

“That must had been hard... wait! An official translation!? I was not aware there was an official translation in the works! Who even authorized that?”

“I am not sure? My friends said the project was announced during the pandemic, when they solved some legal issues over the IP ownership, but this discip—but I only knew the name of the editorial house who acquired the publishing rights, not who owned the original work after the author pass—Oh.” Yeah, yeah, I know: I was an idiot. “Shifu is 'Exteedee’ef'!”

“What the hell? No, I’m the Great Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky!”, he said, standing up to his full height. What he actually pronounced was Xiàng Tiān Dǎ Fēijī, so I was not completely wrong. Also, at that moment the innuendo flew right over my head (feel free to imagine a rimshot battery noise here). “But that’s not the important thing here! Xiao Xi— sorry, in the end you never said if—no, not important right now! Xiao Xi—” he braced himself with both hands and leaned forward over the table— “Do you remember what year it was when you died?”

“This disciple believes it was... 2023.”

He sat down.

“So around ten years, uh? And you are eleven, so time did pass even if it doesn’t pass at the same rate.” Shifu leaned all the way back, his face tilted to the ceiling. He sighed, heavily. “And you say you don’t know details. Well, maybe it is for the better.” He slumped, “ah, I don’t know what I was expecting -- that it was all just a dream, maybe? Even if it would had been a such a shitty trope—Alright!,” he startled me with a loud clap as he straightened up, suddenly cheerful and perky. “You never said, should I keep calling you Xiao Xi?”

“Yes, please. I like it,—” a ~dramatic pause~ “—Shifu.”

“Why not gege?”

“Shifu is teaching me to cultivate, martial arts and statistics; Shifu is Shifu.”

“Say Xiao Xi, would you like me to teach you swear words too?”

“Oh, yes please!”

Chapter Text

In the end Shifu only spoke sparingly of his life before, just that he and I had been born around the same year— which had been heartbreaking to know, because that meant he had died rather young, and that made me think about Shijie too (never good)— and that he had written for a living. For my part, I was a chronic oversharer when asked directly, so he knew both my entire lives stories.

He had also been outraged about my Sandbox Mode System and agreed I should not activate the Story Mode, the missions were just as bad as I feared. Also, he found out he could also have access to his System’s Language Settings in exchange of some B-points, and he went to town misusing his newfound powers for sneaky spy reasons and business reasons. I started teaching him Spanish out of homesickness.  

Contrastingly to how little he talked about himself, Shifu took up telling me about his novel wherever it was certain we’ll be alone, though sometimes, he let His Majesty listen in if the information was relevant to him or a well known fact.

Shifu told the story in in pieces, not always in order, so he skipped very far in the future or he told me stuff that was actually backstory and that had not been really written down. He had also forgotten a lot over the years, which, fair. I mean, I forgot a lot of details about my own fic between updates, and his novel had been really lengthy and he had written it over two decades ago, it was to be expected.

He also told me how he meet His Majesty— I already knew, because I had asked His Majesty before, and both remembered the incident quite differently.  

I also wanted to grab Shifu by the shoulders and shake, because to this day he still thought he was fated to die at His Majesty’s hands. Shifu, the poor man is pretty much incapable of killing you by now! If he ever did it would end up as a murder/suicide! We (and I included me because at some point I became the emotional support dog of the cheetah’s enclosure) were more likely to get attic-wife-ed if Shifu actually betrayed him— but the cognitive dissonance was hella strong, on Patrick Star levels strong, so I got tired of trying to convince him, and just judged him in silence for somehow also managing to pine after the man who: 1) he was currently fucking on the regular, 2) was in love with Shifu, 3) was planning to marry Shifu the moment the FIL kicked the bucket. Shifu! Don’t you see we are all three playing house here for a reason?!

And the other one was absolutely no better. I didn’t know what it was that His Majesty was telling Shifu, that he never managed to reassure him, or make clear they were in an actual romantic relationship and not just whatever it was Shifu’s insecurities concocted.

But you know what was the most frustrating part? Even with everything hanging over us, our little household was happy.

*

Time passed, as it is wont to do.

Other than the life-changing revelations, the only thing of note that happened that year was that the girls from my cohort got each other’s ears pierced at the dorms, so I made Shifu pierce mine too, but I also made the mistake of flinching on the first one, so he got nervous for the second and as a consequence, I ended up with one ear pierced slightly higher than the other.

I kept shadowing Fu-shixiong and being deployed if something involved Shen-shibo. To make the ploy less obvious, I was also sent as a messenger to Zhangmen-shibo (sad big dog vibes) and Wei-shibo (never remembered my name). The rest of the Peaks were distributed between some of my shidimei, and Qi-shishu (goals) kept trying to poach A-Shi because she came from a notorious silk making family and Xian Shu Peak was responsible of the textile production of the Sect. The fact that A-Shi was such a beautiful girl probably influenced that too, but I was sure Qi-shishu was mainly after her various talents. Fortunately for An Ding, A-Shi was also severely afraid of worms and caterpillars.

For his part, Shen-shibo started doing what I called the welfare checks, dropping by unannounced at the Leisure House to harass Shifu, criticize the progress of my studies and eat dessert.  

Those visits resulted in a lot of close calls where Shifu had to bodily pick His Majesty up to hide him in the master bedroom (I swear His Majesty was doing it on purpose! I was onto him!), but Shifu seemed ultimately more worried about Shen-shibo finding fault on his treatment of me, than about Shen-shibo finding about his demon lover slash overlord.

In a deeply uncomfortable overstep on Shibo’s privacy, Shifu told me the unwritten tragic past of his villain, so I could understand why he worried so about me and Shifu living alone. Learning that Shibo was meant to be the villain Luo Binghe infamously tortured but never allowed to die, had me in tears. I liked Shen-shibo, not as much as I liked Shifu and His Majesty, who ranked just below A-Tian, but quite a bit, and if he had done some questionable things, so did Shifu, so did I.

 That was probably the first time I thought about deliberately changing the plot.

“Can we do something?,” I asked Shifu.

“I have tried,” he answered, and I knew it had not worked.

*

By the time I was fifteen, I had graduated from just shadowing Fu-shixiong and I could pick up his work as needed. I also made the mistake of becoming, not only the person who knew how to do things, but the approachable one too, since Fu-shixiong always said he would help you, but only after he finished his own tasks (spoiler: his work never ended!), and I was a pushover.

Shifu also liked taking me along to act as his secretary on Peak Lord meetings because we had developed our own little spanish-english-chinese creole for note taking and secret messaging, which everyone else was told it was his personal shorthand. He also used me alternatingly as a prop, magician assistant, hype man and shill as needed, because I was always willing to play along to whatever bit or scheme he had going.

In truth, I really despised those meetings and I could generally only survive them by the surrealism of imagining The elephant never forgets paying along a laugh track in the background; Shifu’s martial siblings were such personalities. Qi-shishu could step out in a snit, dragging Li Qingliu along, yelling “vámonos Shimei, no te juntes con esa chusma” and it wouldn’t feel out of place. Their dysfunction was so tragic if was funny.

That year too, was the one when I started pinning my hair up and (I would kill whoever got the idea into him) His Majesty became convinced I would, one day, unavoidably, marry. As the fellow child of a concubine, he became a tiny bit obsessed on making sure I married up, for one, and also as first wife.

I was sure that if those existed here, he would have a pinterest board dedicated to my wedding, and the only thing stopping him was the fact that he had not yet found a fiancé he considered adequate. 

Please, my King! I joined a sect to escape from my murder and/or political marriage and to get superpowers! I had two lifetimes planning to never marry at all! Plan! Your own! Wedding!

 At sixteen Shifu decided that my Cultivation was advanced enough, and I got my spiritual sword, Yu Lu, rain and dew, which made Wei-shibo laugh, saying it contrasted with Shifu’s pine and cypress and refusing to elaborate. I could also correct my vision, even if not all the time.

Shifu, experimentally, decided to send me along on Night Hunts, which in his opinion, was very different than me going on adventures with a Final Boss leveled Demon Lord, not that he knew of all the times I was almost eaten while under His Majesty’s supervision.

Oh, the Night Hunts went well, though! It was my job to make sure they went well, and I was actually good at my job!

An Ding was not supposed to fight or exorcise anything on that sort of missions, just provide the means for everyone else to be able to do their own jobs! So it was fine and I never had to use my sword as a sword more that five or six times.

Like, okay! Maybe learning under His Majesty was useful! I could admit it to myself!

And maybe growing up knowing that a powerful Demon Lord would always come to bail you out of trouble if you called, did things to a girl’s confidence.

So did the fact that I had Shifu’s unquestionable support and backing.

I could now see the benefits of the rich nepobaby lifestyle.

So the thing was that I found myself well liked; all the better to get away with things!

To my martial siblings I came across as reliable, nice and unambitious. I took care to be endearing, fair and never too much, and if they thought I was a bit dumb sometimes, the better. They were happy when I got assigned to their missions, sometimes they even requested me by name, it was nice.

Shen-shibo saw right through me, I suspected, maybe a bit more than Shifu and His Majesty, who knew me at my most authentic. He was also playing a role, but he went, like, in an opposite direction, which was something completely baffling to me, but I supposed that people who don’t crave affection had other priorities.

But enough of that!

Being sixteen also meant that A-Tian was eleven, soon to be twelve!

I had tried to keep in touch with him, of course. Once I was removed from the situation, Mother didn’t have reasons to hate me, so she was very indifferent to me and allowed my correspondence to reach A-Tian because I made him happy and she loved A-Tian.

(I mean, hating a child as an adult is super silly, but I saw where she was coming from, like, Zumu at first and then my mom had been poisoning her with abortives for years. It was not my fault, but still…)

When he was younger, our correspondence had been pretty much one-sided, so I mostly sent notes accompanied by little presents. He could sometimes send pictures back, and as he grew older he started writing actual letters.

In recent years he grew up a bit bratty, if I had to be honest. Shifu had raised me a bit spoiled in this life, but he was on another whole level. Ah, and he had been such a sweet boy. I had hope it was only a phase, he still wrote detailed letters to his older sister, after all.

On his most recent letters he complained a lot about Mo-daozhang, who had ended up staying at our town, and who had ended up as one of A-Tian tutors. Apparently, Mo-daozhang was super strict and a killjoy (and also old and stinky) and never let him do anything fun or use a real sword. So props to Mo-daozhang!

There were a lot of other little brats on my life too, since An Ding took in several new disciples almost every year. I never had much time to interact with them unless I was supervising their work, and I had always been a poor teacher, so I was never on charge of their lessons, but I had my favorites.

There was Cao Qing and She Jinkui, for example, who came as a set, do not separate; A-Qing had the ideas, Jinkui made them possible. They and their precious industrious heads were adorable, but they were wary of me because I kept them from their harebraided money making schemes to make them, you know, Cultivate. If everything went my way, Jinkui would one day succeed Shifu, but first she and A-Qing needed to become Immortal, not that they knew that.

The other little shit I had became invested into was Shen-shibo’s A-Ming. Shifu said he was meant to bully Luo Binghe, but right now he wasn’t bad, just an entitled baby asshole. When he had joined the sect, two years ago, all of eleven, he had demanded I call him Shixiong. Like of course I did! To this day! Much to his embarrassment because all the other junior disciples of Qing Jing called me shijie.

He was right, actually, but Qing Jing Peak had not taken in any new disciples the year I joined, nor the next two, and Shen-shibo had not even selected those disciples himself at the exam, so I had been helping him with his paperwork since before any of them joined, and I would until he settled on a Head Disciple; they called me shijie as a courtesy.

There was also Ying’er. She too was eleven and she had joined earlier this year. Scandalously, Shibo had picked her up as soon as her hands had broken the ground. Shifu said it was because she was the child of one of Shibo’s courtesan friends, but other people were primed to find it sus. Encouraged by her Shizun, she became my little shadow when I was at Qing Jing.

She was about as spoiled as A-Tian, just, fortunately, a lot more kind.

Luo Binghe was twelve already— if Shifu got the timing right, he was some months older than A-Tian. He would be joining the Cang Qiong Sect next year.

Chapter Text

Shang Qinghua had a lot of guilt and a lot of secrets, sometimes they even overlapped.

Like the fact that he had, almost, let Mobei-jun kill his disciple. Hell! When he had arrived from that super tedious meeting and found the door to his house open, he had specifically called his king to help him deal with the intruder because the lock had not been opened by Fu Xiang, and even if he had, he had very, very strict orders to keep away from the Leisure House if Shang Qinghua wasn’t there! Shang Qinghua had a perfectly accessible separate office at the central administrative building! He even was there most of the time!

When he saw it was Xiao Xi, he had a moment when he had just thought “oh, what a shame”, since she was the first little disciple he had picked as Peak Lord and he even remembered her name; she had sentimental value, like a starter pokémon. Then the part of him that was a more or less decent human being had cached up to him with a metaphorical slap upside the head and the following thought of “oh shit, she is a child”, and then he had suddenly found himself on the ground between his king and his disciple.

Oh boy, Mobei-jun had not been happy at all at Shang Qinghua changing his mind on him like that, but he had also beaten him up a lot worse before, so Shang Qinghua didn’t even had to regret his recklessness.

It had not been until later that night, with Xiao Xi sleeping in the side room, that he realized that the System had not said anything at all, even though that he had never written a character with a role like hers.

*

Having Xiao Xi around turned out to be nice.

For one, she had taken on the work he had given her very seriously and the Leisure House had never been cleaner before, even when he had been the one in charge of cleaning it for his own shifu. The only place that was not clean, was her own bedroom, which he could kind of understand. He made a point of never entering, so she might have feel he wouldn't notice and call her on it; he wouldn’t call her on it even if she let the rest of the house be a bit messier, to be honest, but it was nice to live in a clean place.

She seemed to like Shang Qinghua, too, and sought his company when he was at home and drank up any attention he spared her. He found himself treating her more familiarly and more warmly, and she became even more warm and affectionate. That was nice too.

She was a fast learner with good memory, meticulous too. When he had, experimentally, given her a pile of inventory journals to sort out, she had taken to it like she had been born knowing how.  He patted himself on the back for having picked up such a good An Ding disciple.

Xiao Xi also adapted very well to Mobei-jun. For his part, his king was oddly tolerant of her, also curious—okay, maybe even playful. He liked to pinch her cheeks and he didn’t seem to mind when she explained her homework to him. Shang Qinghua felt a bit jealous of her, but he supposed that not even his king was immune to a cute kid.

She was a bit lazy for the martial aspect of cultivation— which he understood perfectly— but she practiced her sword forms when told and that was all he asked. He had found himself quite invested in in her cultivation, all those squeaky ‘shifu, shifu’ had gotten to his head and he felt the need to raise at least one good cultivator.

Ah, he tried not to think about what would happen to the Sect in the future, and while he liked to imagine that Mobei-Jun liked Xiao Xi enough to spare her when he killed Shang Qinghua, he really hoped that that didn’t put her in the path of his protagonist. His Xiao Xi deserved better than being absorbed into the harem.

  *

Shang Qinghua didn’t know what had happened, but he was sure Xiao Xi had something to do with it, since the change happened after his king had returned her to the Leisure House earlier than expected from their usual training trip.

He wasn’t complaining! He liked this change a lot! He was just very confused where it came from and worried that his king had stumbled on some mind-altering artefact or one of the papapa flowers.

*

 Uh, he has not been beaten up in a while.

*

Once the ice was broken, they really got talking.

Among other things, he learned that her name had been Aura. Ironically, she said, that was the name of an eponymous character in a novella with an infamous catholic mass themed sex scene. Her handle had been All That Glitters, but she had gotten used to de idea of being Hong Xidan in this life and she truly liked when he called her Xiao Xi.

He had been kind of relieved that she didn’t read the novel because, since he started to suspect she was also a transmigrator, he had been wondering how she could become attached to a character such as Shang Qinghua and whether if it had been authentic or she had, like a mission or something.

He had been very outraged about the unfairness of not having the Sandbox Mode available himself, but he recognized that she would have had a very hard time doing missions without meta-knowledge about the plot, and what would even the System make her do as a background character?

She had been very sympathetic to his circumstances, which soothed the hurt a bit. She agreed that transmigrating into his own novel into a minor villain who dies off camera was not only unfair, but nightmarish. Apparently, she had written Mary-Sue Naruto fic and got pale at the idea of her OC being a real person.

So a fujoshi fanfic writer with experience both as an administrative aide and customer service, uh. He really did a good job picking up this disciple.

Chapter Text

That last year before the start of the plot was very, very busy! Mostly because, as it turns out, the world doesn’t care that it is the setting of a novel and shit keeps happening all the time!

The situation at hand was one example of that.

“Oh Xiao Dan, what are we going to do now?”, whined A-Shi, wringing her hands as I rubbed the bridge of my nose under my glasses, their weight suddenly unbearable.

Strictly, we didn’t have to do anything. We, ourselves, had done nothing wrong. Unfortunately, I was fond of two of the little troublemakers kneeling at our feet, and I supposed that A-Shi was too, and that she, probably, also cared about the other two, even though they were dressed in Xian Shu lilac; she had a lot of friends there.

And it was tempting, very tempting, to let them face the consequences of their actions on their own because they seemed very unrepentant (the Xian Shu pair) and sullen (Jinkui), with the exception of poor A-Qing, who looked like she might faint. 

Who knows what my face was doing at that moment, but it prompted A-Shi to tug at my sleeve and say “Xiao Dan, please don’t be too hard on them”.

“Alright, this is what we are going to do,” I said after a moment, “you are going to write a proposal for this project and an essay about the reasons on why it should be approved. Then you are going to write all the appropriate requisitions for all the materials you stole. Then, with those materials you are going to rebuild the perfectly good loom you dismantled. And then, because this Shijie is nice, she is going to backdate all the paperwork and have Shifu to approve it—” I could see Jinkui filing that for future blackmail and I huffed. “I’m going to tell him you did everything by the book—as you should have done!— and that I forgot to bring the matter to him on time—usually I or Da-Shixiong screen those petitions ourselves, anyway. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but you little idiots decided to steal from the Sect! Why didn’t you thought to ask this Shijie or Shi-shimei?”    

I looked down at them, arms crossed. All but Jinkui, including A-Shi, started squirming.

“Because Hong-shijie would ask what sort of books we wanted to print!” Poor A-Qing was the one to crack.

“Cao Qing, shut up!”

“B-but She-xiaojie! Hong-shijie is scary when she is mad!”

“Not a word more Cao Qing!”

“What sort of books you wanted to print?” I had to ask, if those little shits decided to make cultivation manuals, I would—

“Yellow books!” said Cao Qing. A-Shi spluttered next to me.

“Cao Qing!”

“Ilushtrwtdns” or something like that, continued poor A-Qing while Jinkui tried to smother her with her hands.

As they scuffled on the ground, I looked to the Xian Shu pair, who had been silent so far. The one on the left, sitting closer to my little walking problems, looked unbothered if not clueless—I would go so far as to say she was also amused and enjoying A-Qing and Jinkui’s antics. The one on the right was sitting all poise and good posture, all but radiating calm. She wore a half-veil over her face, but her ears were very red, so she was not as unaffected as she wanted to appear.

“Well,” I said to them, “I know how my shimei are, but who are you and what’s your role in all of this?”

The one with the veil did a perfect and graceful seated bow and her martial sister followed after a beat with an identical one.

“Greeting Hong-shijie. This one is called Liu Mingyan and her shimei is called Yin Shuimu.”

“Thanking Shijie for her aid!,” added Yin-shimei, cheerfully, and then: “Answering Shijie’s question! This one just wanted to build a printing press, but she also enjoyed making the illustrations and carving the wooden blocks alongside Cao-shijie! Liu-shijie wrote the books!”.

Liu-shimei's only reaction was that her ears got even redder. For her part, by this point, A-Shi had moved from tugging at my sleeve to clutching at my arm.

“Liu-shimei is Liu-shishu’s little sister,” she hissed at me, a bit desperately. “Please Xiao Dan don’t say anything. Just imagine the scandal!”

I had a sudden thought.

“A-Shi has seen those books, doesn’t she?” I raised an eyebrow. She blushed and also pouted.

“They are good,” she admitted, looking away.   

“And how long has A-Shi known about the printing press?”

“I let them have some scraps! I told them they could have anything no-one was using! I just didn’t think they would steal an entire still working loom from Xian Shu.”

I bonked her lightly on the head with Yu Lu’s hilt.

“A-Shi is going to source the materials for the new loom herself.”

“But Xiao Dan~” She fluttered her eyelashes at me.

“No.”

“You are not fun!”

It was not, in fact, good erotica, probably because Liu-shimei was not yet 15, and I was pretty sure both Yin-shimei and A-Qing just copied illustrations from other books with very little understanding of what exactly was going on in them.

It was a very hypocritical thing on my part, since in my past life I had been reading smut when I was too young for it, straight up lying to get access to age restricted websites, but someone had to be the responsible adult, even if A-Shi was two years older than me, so I made them promise to avoid printing explicit sex (all, including A-Shi, blushed at the word, proving my point) for some years.

Shifu found the whole affair hilarious once I told him, and even gave them some money from his own pocket to buy paper and ink and get started.  

*

After that, I got used to seeing a little purple among the yellow and to reminding Yinyin to go home before curfew. Yanyan was also around a lot, but she was a more filial child, so in the end Qi-shishu only grouched about loosing a prodigy and not two.

I enjoyed the irony a lot.

One day, while we unloaded a cart (I was supervising but I didn’t like to watch as others worked) I asked Yinyin why she choose to transfer to An Ding. She was huffing and puffing and very sweaty, but she also looked like she was having fun. “I like looms, but I don’t like weaving,” she said. “And I can dance here too”. Which, fair.

 “We are building a windmill next!” chimed in A-Qing. She was tiny, so while she didn’t struggle with the weight, she struggled with the size if the sack of rice she carried. “It is going to be so fun!”

“And what is the windmill for?” I asked Jinkui, since she was usually the one to give a purpose to A-Qing’s ideas. She was about as tall as me, and I suspected she would still grow a bit more. She carried her sack easily over her shoulder.

But it was the three of them who answered in unison: “Bread!”

[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! User has received the Achievement: Easy Breezy]

I ignored the System's nonsense and reminded them to make their requisitions and to ask Fu-shixiong for permission this time, and then I started thinking about suppliers for the wheat. 

*

Getting lost in the idyllic slice off life was tempting, you know. I could try to resign myself to the unavoidability of the plot like Shifu had done to keep his sanity, it would have been easy— but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I kept asking Shifu about his novel. He knew why I did it, but he humored me. He liked talking about his writing just like any other author, enjoyed the questions I had.

I thought about it like writing, too, the chain of act and consequence, retracing the path of the storm to the butterfly. What was Shen-shibo’s downfall?

It was not Luo Binghe. It had started back, way back at the Qiu’s and even a bit before that, and the only bit that had followed him from his unpublished backstory to appear in the text of PIDW was Qiu Haitang, the punishment to his one good deed.

I only knew the little bit that Shifu told me about Qiu Haitang, of course. There was no way for me to get to know her personally. I was a bit torn about what I knew, she had been naïve and ignorant, and innocent for it. She had been young, but as young as Shen-shibo had been. She had also lost a lot in a horrible way that did make her a victim, just like Shen-shibo had been. In the time since then she could have done some self-reflection, but as I investigated her current whereabouts, I found her just as naïve and ignorant, just now embittered, self-righteous.

She was actually a very good foil to Shen-shibo. 

Everything about her was complicated, but I knew she didn’t deserve to be murdered on the side of the road for it.

Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now—ah, ok, there were some things I could try, but I didn’t actually like her that much, even if I felt bad for killing her, so the point stands.

I carried her body to a forested area, took her valuables to make it look like a mugging and buried her as properly as I could, which was a lot better than poor Shijie got! Then I called His Majesty for a ride. He left me in my room at an inn in a different town where I was on a mission with other disciples, and got a peck on his cheek as goodbye.

There was nothing to tie me or Shibo to the murder, I wasn’t dressed as a Cang Qiong disciple, I killed her with her own sword: it was as perfect as a crime could be.  

I gave her money to the children begging on the street, and made a mental note to get someone to offer escort them to the Disciple Selection Test.

And it was done.

*

But my work never ended.

Currently, Qing Jing only had nine disciples, where the oldest (but not the most senior) was A-Ming and the youngest, little Ying’er. There also used to be two Shijie who had left to get married (unfortunately, not actually to one another) three years ago. The rest of its inhabitants were a couple of elders in seclusion and some hallmasters who were Shen-shibo’s own martial uncles; all his contemporaries had decided it was in their best interest to leave the Sect.

The only other Peak with even less members was the one dedicated to the divination arts, probably because on top of a spiritual root, their disciples needed innate talent for divination.  

Anyways, that meant that there wasn’t actually too much paperwork being generated by Qing Jing, so Shen-shibo could get away without selecting a second in command and could do most of the administrative work himself. The rest of the work was done by me, because I was a pushover.

There wasn’t many perks to this part time job, since I was mostly paid in snacks prepared by my own Shifu, but I was allowed to wander Qing Jing at my leisure once the work was done.

I enjoyed those walks a lot. Qing Jing was very different to city-like An Ding, where even the gardens had a pragmatic purpose; it was, pardon the pun, a very calming place.  

 So that might be why the sound of crying in the distance alarmed me so much.

I ran towards the sound. I was preparing to find the scene of a training accident, but it was not that.

“Oh, A-Ming,” I said, in part because he looked rather pitiful, in part to announce my presence and don’t startle him.

I still startled him. He tried to dry his eyes quickly and winced when he touched the bruise on his cheek.

He was sitting on the ground, in the middle of a trail that went around the whole Peak. It was not actually the first time I encountered one of the Qing Jing boys running or, well, too exhausted to keep running on this trail. I crouched at his side and started bracing to help him to his feet, ignoring the spot where he had clearly thrown up before I arrived.

“Shi-shijie,” he hiccupped, “this one is f-fine.”

 If he was calling me Shijie, he most definitely was not fine.

“Shijie is sure A-Ming means that, but please just humor her.” With my support he managed to stand up and I helped him sit down again some meters away under a tree, where he could lean against.

I actually carried some emergency camping supplies in a qiankun earring, in case His Majesty took me hunting unexpectedly (the other earring contained my trousseau and jewelry, in case I needed to sell them for money), so I was able to wrap him in a blanket and offer him some water to first rinse his mouth—he was a bit embarrassed to spit in my presence, so I turned away while he did so— and then to drink slowly. The whole process gave me time to observe his bruise. It was badly inflamed, to the point he couldn’t open his eye completely, and I feared his cheekbone was fractured.

“Thanking Hong-shimei for her aid,” he said once he was a bit more composed. “She may leave now, if she wishes. This one still has some laps to complete.”

“Ming-shixiong may be a bit rested now, but this one entreats him to let her examine his wound, for her own peace of mind.”

It probably hurt a lot, because he allowed it. I placed two fingers on the pulse at his wrist, like I was taught by Shifu (like he had learned to avoid going to Qian Cao Peak) and used a bit of my own qi to examine the energy flow around the wound site. It was not fractured, thankfully, but I couldn’t leave him like that in good conscience. He would refuse to go to Qian Cao, and I wouldn't dare try to use qi to heal by myself such a delicate injury so close to his brain, so I decided to prepare him some medicinal tea instead. 

“Is Ming-shixiong amenable to tell this one what happened?,” I asked while we waited the water to boil. I used the magic hot plate and kettle from my camping kit, the tea came from the mundane pouch at my waist, since one doesn’t keep first aid supplies in mustard seed space. I was expecting him to refuse to answer, but he surprised me.  

“I—this one was reprimanded for backtalking,” he answered, his voice wavering a bit at the end.

“Ah,” I said. “Well, Ming-shixiong should listen to this one when she tells him there is no correct answer when told ‘shut up and explain yourself’, as this one imagines just happened.” He snorted in response, so I was probably right. “Shen-shibo is a bit heavy handed, when delivering punishment.”

“Shifu is just very strict and has high expectations for his disciples. He is not at fault if we fall short.”

No, my dude, he is just recreating behavior patterns from the adults from his own childhood and abusing you all as consequence.

And this is why you all are gonna jump in to bully Luo Binghe once he arrives to become the Peak’s scapegoat and why Shibo is gonna escalate.

“Let’s just drink the tea”, I said out loud.

The tea helped A-Ming, so he was able to continue running his laps. Before leaving, he thanked me again and bowed; I bowed back. I watched him run, until I lost sight of him in a bend of the trail, then I repacked my stuff and walked back to the Bamboo House.

*

“And who is Hong-shizhi to opine in how this Master disciplines his students?”

We were sitting at his receiving room. I had prepared the tea we were drinking. He had been bemused when I had returned from my walk, but now he was just irritated.

“This shizhi just believes that Shen-shibo was overly harsh on Ming-shixiong. He admitted he was in the wrong, but there was no lesson to learn in his punishment.”

“Ming Fang learned to respect his Master.” He was idly fanning himself, but I knew him well enough to know it was like the flickering tail of an angry cat.

“Ming-shixiong now knows to fear his Master.”

“And aren’t those the same thing?” He looked at me coldly over the fan and raised an eyebrow.

“Then, should this shizhi also fear Shen-shibo? Should she listen to those who warn her away? Is there truth in their gossip?” The fan snapped shut. He didn’t like that answer.

“Hong-shizhi should mind her words.”

“Oh, Is this shizhi being rude? Disrespectful? Is Shen-shibo going to hit this one—”

[HP: 2516.803/2652.129]

The clap of the backhand was deafeningly loud in the quiet of the Bamboo House. I had been goading him, but it still hurt.

“Should this shizhi also go run laps until collapsing?”

“Get out.” He stood up.

“No, no. This shizhi was just now a lot more disrespectful that Ming-shixiong probably was.”

“Get out.” He was looming over me, his arm still raised.

“This shizhi should be whipped for this level of disrespect”.

“Get. Out.” He said through clenched teeth. I noticed a drop of blood slide down the left side of his neck and red starting to pool in his right eye.

I may had miscalculated a bit.

“Shibo is qi deviating.” I climbed to my feet; he took a step back.

“Get out.”

“This Hong-shizhi is sorry. Please just let her help.” He collapsed and I took the chance to approach him again. I even managed to transfer him a bit of spiritual energy before he got the awareness to slap me again.

[HP: 2508.933/2652.129]

“Leave,” he hissed, and I finally obeyed.

It was fortuitous that I found A-Ming outside the Bamboo House. He stared at my matching bruise.

“A-Ming, call for Mu-shishu but be discrete. Shen-shibo suffered a qi deviation.”

Once he left to do that, I jumped on Yu Lu and cried all the way back home.

*

A-Ming was named head disciple.

Chapter Text

My hands were shaking like a drunk man’s in a Sherlock Holmes story when I tried to unlock the kitchen door (I was making stupid jokes because I used humor as a way to cope—No, it didn’t work. No, I couldn’t stop) it was the fastest way to my room, I needed to hide, it was all too much and I needed to hide, I wanted to bury myself in the orchard and rot — the key finally turned.

I hurried inside, one, two, three steps—

“Xiao Xi! What happened?”

Oh, no. Oh, no. Ohnoohnoohno—

“Where are your glasses? Are you okay? Let me see.”

And then I was standing there, hunched over and clutching the hems of my jacket while Shifu tipped my face carefully, one way and then the other. I was almost as tall as him now, but I didn’t feel like that in that moment. There was a grass stain at the knee of my skirt. If not for how my nose was bleeding, if you were to see me then, I would surely remind you of a child about to tell their mother that they wet the bed. I felt small and young and stupid, and so very ashamed.

I had to force myself to let go of my clothing, to let him take my pulse. The flow of his spiritual energy was directed to my head, first, and then it circled through my meridians in a more general check. He tiptoed carefully around my lower dantian, but he still paid special attention to it as I was in the middle of a delicate moment in my Cultivation. Some tension was released from his shoulders. I took a deep, if shuddering, breath, but wasn’t able to calm down.

“It is not as bad as it looks, so don’t worry Xiao Xi.”

I wanted Shifu to make it better. I didn’t want him to see me like this. I had stopped crying in his presence once we discovered each other as transmigrators. I had never seen him cry sincerely. He was raising me. I had already grown up once. Once upon a time we had been the same age at the same time. I needed to don’t need him. I needed to be useful, to be needed instead.

I was crying, every little thing made me cry.

“I fucked up.”

“Xiao Xi?”

“I—I didn’t—It was not my intention! Shibo—He—He—”

“Shibo? Shibo?! Shen Qingqiu? Did Shen Qingqiu hit you?”

“I almost killed him!”

*

 I spent some time crying my little heart out all over Shifu while he pried the half coherent story out of me. Those days I cried without making sound, and if you think about it, it is actually very sad, so please don’t.

I had left the door open like an idiot, but the warding of the Leisure House gave us enough of a heads up that Yue-shibo didn’t really surprise us when he walked in. He carried my glasses with him. They were bent at the bridge, one of the lenses had cracked and the other was missing. I didn’t remember what had happened with them, did they break when they fell?... Did I break them with my fucking face? They were pretty much unsalvageable, I was not looking forward to doing my work without glasses.

 But alas! Going on a tangent did not stop Yue-shibo from being there! Or me, for that matter! Heaven knows I did my best effort willing me into oblivion! All my lack of attention did, was make me miss how we ended up sitting down together, with me trying to breath normally and dry my tears discretely next to Shifu and Yue-shibo on the other side of the kitchen table. No refreshments were on sight. Shifu never allowed guests at the kitchen, mostly because he just hated having guest in general, but also because it was the place where he retreated for comfort, more than his own bedroom, even, so this was all highly unusual and weird.

Yue-shibo, who was still there, handed my glasses to Shifu. It was a smart move on his part, because it could have been very awkward for everyone when I left him hanging if he offered them to me. It was not only that I didn’t want to be perceived in that moment, a part of me, the part of me that hated making mistakes, blamed him for what had just happened.

Shifu accepted my glasses with so many niceties and scrapping, customer service smile sweet and guileless, as if to make up for both my lack of involvement and of composure. Yue-shibo had to be at least somewhat aware of how insincere Shifu was being, because it made him look a bit pained.

“Ah,” exclaimed Shifu, climbing to his feet, making his way to the door that connected the kitchen to the rest of the house. I followed him automatically by habit. Yue-shibo was compelled to also rise from his seat by the force of the social contract. “This one has already taken so much of Zhangmen-shixiong’s time already!” Shifu made an ‘after you’ gesture, showing him the door, and I followed my cue to perform my best ‘farewell to a very esteemed costumer’ bow, ruined a bit by how I was like two seconds away from bursting into sobs again. “This one is sure Zhangmen-shixiong has many, many other pressing affairs to see to.”

“Actually,” said Yue-shibo, coming to a stop in front of us, gesturing me to rise. “I came here for a very important reason.” Come on Yue-shibo, just leave! Shen-shibo won’t say a thing! I would go along whatever narrative painted Shibo in the best light! The matter is settled alrea—Holy shit! Was he bowing?! He was!! “Mu-shidi said to this Sect Leader that Hong-shizhi’s prompt actions spared Shen-shidi from extensive damage to his health. Hong-shizhi has this Shibo’s gratitude.”

‘I caused that qi deviation in the first place!’ I wanted to yell. Dumbly, I just bowed back, lower, in response.

“Oh, please do not”, he said and made an aborted motion, as if he wanted to straighten me up, but wouldn’t dare touch me, “that is not necessary at all, Hong-shizhi. This Shibo just wanted to express his most sincere thanks.”

I nodded, awkwardly.

All three of us just stood there uncomfortably, in silence, for a beat.

“This Shizhi just acted as her filial duty dictated”. Urgh. Please Yue-shibo, just go!

“It doesn’t negate the fact that Hong-shizhi acted admirably, and this master fears he will ruin the thanks he was just given her by asking her for a favor.”

Why, Yue-shibo? Why are you like this? Was all this interaction necessary?

“This shizhi will endeavor her best to help.”

“Then this master will be imposing.” And. He. Bowed. Again! And I had to bow back because he was my senior! “He would ask Shizhi to tell him anything she can about the events that surround Shen-shidi’s qi deviation. Shen-shidi remains— indisposed and unable to give details, so any information she may share will be a great help in Shen-shidi’s treatment.”

I didn’t want to tell him anything, but I didn’t trust Shen-shibo to manage his own PR, even less when confronted with Yue-shibo.

“I—this one—this imprudent one was arguing with Shibo. At first this one didn’t notice there was something wrong, not until she noticed he was bleeding from the Seven Apertures. He told this one to leave, but she disobeyed. It was then that he backhanded this one, but she managed to stabilize him enough to call for help.”

Shifu was standing next to me, but from the corner of my eye I could see him frowning, as if he were one to talk! I didn’t like worrying him, but it was not like I was actually hurt.

“This master appreciates Shizhi being so forthcoming.”

Yue-shibo seemed like he wanted to say something else, but before he could ask, Shifu took a step closer, putting me behind him.

“Xiao Xi is a good kid”, he said, shifting Yue-shibo’s attention to himself. I wasn’t, I really wasn’t; the weight of Shijie’s and Qiu-guniang’s lives pressed upon my shoulders all the time, they didn’t deserve to die just because it was more convenient to me. I did my best to refrain from crying again. “It has been an eventful day and I still need to take her to Qian Cao later. Why don’t we allow her to go and rest? This Shidi will escort you to the bridge, Shixiong.” And with that, he finally managed to make Yue-shibo leave.

Two days later, Yue-shibo arranged to have my glasses replaced. 

*

Fortunately, His Majesty was away dealing with Hot Demon Lord Stuff, and would remain away for a bit, so he did not see, and he was very much not told once he came back.

*

I suppose that you may be wondering if my stupid stunt at least accomplished something, and all I can tell you is ‘kind of’.

Mostly, it did make me (and then I made Shifu) reconsider how punishment was handled at An Ding. Since An Ding historically did not assign corporal punishment because any injury it caused could prevent the punished party from doing their job properly, there were a lot of very important, vital, but unpleasant tasks that would be assigned as punishment, and that created a situation where, even if you weren’t being actively punished, you feel like it for being assigned to them. And worse, accidents and errors were not being reported because people were punished for them the same way as the people who did shit on purpose! (Except for the Very Serious Crimes, which were dealt with by Qiong Ding –which was another can of worms —) That was not good! How to deal with that was an ongoing project! And I didn’t want to be the one dealing with it! I was just the maid!

 There was also some noise about shuffling messengers around so I would not be the one to go to Qing Jing Peak, but I was not going to let Shibo get rid of me that easily, so, even if Shifu wasn’t very happy about it either, nothing changed there. And while A-Ming stepped up as Head Disciple, which was, overall, a good thing, and Shibo did stop hitting his male disciples— he kept assigning them unrealistic amounts of laps around the mountain, to maintain a horse stance or to kneel on the gravel at the entrance of the Peak. So in the end, there was actually very little tangible improvement.

*

I stepped out the Bamboo House holding back tears. I was incapable of leaving it be and it manifested as shouting matches with Shibo almost every other time we meet face to face. It was terribly adolescent of me. It was also not a very adult thing for him to do, but I could never accuse either of us of being emotionally mature. Neither of us would ever apologize, but he would be nicer to me the next time we saw each other, and I could keep coming back, no matter what he said to me.

Shifu was not very happy, he was not the sort to forgive any slight, but he was very good at acting otherwise! And he very much didn’t want Shibo to be tortured for years and the Sect to be razed to the ground.

“Shijie!” I heard Ying’er call in the distance and I slapped on a smile before turning in her direction. She was running on one of the paths that lead from the classrooms. She almost tripped on the clobberstone before regaining her footing. “Shijie, wait!”

“Hello, Ning-shimei,” I said to her once she reached me. I super wanted to ruffle her hair, but I didn’t want to mess up her little twin buns, so I simply let myself be hugged by the middle, in what some very esteemed colleagues could call a ‘glomp’, and hugged her back. She was a good kid, and because she deserved the world, it was very hard to say no to her, ergo the spoiling. 

“Don’t be mad at Shizun.” She said to my stomach, and I grimaced over her head. “Shijie doesn’t come to see us anymore and Yingying feels lonely.”

 “Shijie isn’t mad at Shen-shibo—” a little white lie “—she is sad—” and very frustrated “— because he is harsher on your shixiongs than he is to us.” An understatement.

“But sometimes they are rude and mean,” came the muffled response, as she ground her face a bit more into my belly. I rubbed a gentle circle against her back.

“More than Shijie is when she and Shibo argue?”

“… No.” I was very rude, indeed. Ying’er let go of me and scuffled her shoes in the dirt.

“They do need to correct their behavior, if they are being rude and mean. But Shibo punishes them very harshly for any reason, sometimes they don’t even know why, so they never learn to do better.”

Ying’er didn’t have anything to say to that. She understood, but she didn’t like it. She was young and we all around her sheltered her a lot, she also loved Shen-shibo very much, so it was hard for her to reconcile the idea of a cruel Shen Qingqiu with the dotting Shizun she knew.  

I changed the theme.

“Say, Ning-shimei, has Shijie told you already the good news she got from home?” She shook her head, allowing the distraction; she liked to hear the gossip from my hometown, even if she didn’t know the people it involved. “Well, A-Tian just wrote to me the other day to tell that Mo-daozhang got married!”

“Really? Congratulations! Oh, how romantic!”

“I know! But it did take them a while!” Mo-daozhang and the girl he had saved from that monster all those years ago had been courting for a long time— that’s to say, he had been courted by the girl he had saved, with him none the wiser. Once he noticed, it had devolved into a soap-opery affair; yes, very romantic, but also frustrating and somewhat scandalous. “They eloped!”

“No way!”

“Yes! I understand it was because neither had any family, so they didn’t though it mattered—Mother was very offended! He is part of her household, after all!”

Ying’er giggled at that and started to share her own news from home— coincidently, a lover had offered to buy one of her aunties’ contract so everyone was understandably very excited.

It was the sort of thing she couldn’t share with anyone else; the other disciples could be very mean, indeed, but my mom had also been a courtesan before she became Father’s concubine, so Ying’er knew I was safe to know about her family.

I didn’t like how alone she was, but Shen-shibo wouldn’t allow her out of the Peak, so I couldn’t introduce her to Jinkui, A-Qing, Yinyin and Yanyan.

Ying’er really needed friends, but well, at least she would soon have Luo Binghe for company.

Chapter Text

Chapter 1

He had no way to know, that’s the thing. Maybe if he had, he could have prepared better, but as it is, Luo Binghe had arrived early to the town at the feet of the Tian Gong Mountain Range with all his provisions spent and already tired from the haste on the last leg of his journey. Still he had made an effort bathe in an icy mountain stream and donned his best over robe (the least threadbare of the two he owned) that he had kept stored along with his wooden bowl and broken comb in the parcel he carried on his back, after all, poverty is no excuse for untidiness, his mother had always said.

Of course, this meant that the robe he had used through the journey had been ruined and now that he had been knelling on the ground and clawing at the dirt for hours, his best (his only) robe was on its way to be ruined too. Tears threatened to fall from his eyes, but he dried them with the back of his hand: on top of the almost vertical cliff wall in front of him, Immortal Masters were watching to determine if he was worthy (or not) of their teachings.

Most of the other children around him had already left the canyon where the test was conducted, either being called to go along with disciples to meet their masters, or after having given up.

Luo Binghe dug with more desperation.

He had no way to know, if he had, maybe it could have provided him with some measure of comfort: on top of the cliff, his potential had caught the eye of several Masters.

He had no way to know, but one of them, wearing simple silver and blue robes, left after declaring that, great potential or not, he would only take disciples that came to him by themselves. If Luo Binghe had known, his fate would have been very different.

On one side, unseen not only to Luo Binghe but to the other people on the cliff, a disciple in white and yellow leant a bit and whispered a question to her Shifu’s ear. The Master, wearing grander yellow and brown robes, looked briefly to his side and shook his head with a slight grimace: he wouldn’t afford to fight for him. Luo Binghe would have done well with them, maybe it was better he never knew.

Next to the pair in yellow, another disciple had a more luck with her own Shizun, and at his order, she descended from the cliff in a cloud of white and green robes and trailing orange ribbons.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

His mother had not raised him to be ungrateful.

Life at Qing Jing Peak was not easy. He was behind the others but the instructors wouldn’t stop to wait for him. In fact, Shizun wouldn’t pay any attention to him, wouldn’t even look his way, be it to teach, or reprimand, Luo Binghe would be ignored, and everyone else followed his cue. Often he went hungry, or got locked out the dorms. There was never a guqing for him to practice, or a weiqi opponent. He didn’t have his own writing supplies.

Everyone ignored him, everyone but Ning-shijie and, sometimes, Ming-shixiong, so while life at qing jing peak was not easy, it wasn’t worse than before, so he was grateful.

Being grateful did not stop him from feeling jealous. Ning-shijie was Shizun’s undisputed favourite, and he relied on Ming-shixiong for many daily tasks, compared to that, Shizun’s indifference stung.

Notes:

Chapter Text

We did try, but it was one of these things that couldn’t be changed: Luo Binghe had to become a Qing Jing Peak disciple, the System said so.

Over the years we had tested the length of our leash. Shifu could change certain things deliberately (His Majesty dying at his hands if he wanted, for example), others could be achieved through butterfly effect (Yin Shuimu was meant to be a Xian Shu disciple and Liu Mingyan’s rival) and I could directly change others (like murdering Qiu Haitang).

On the other hand, there were certain plot points that Shifu had to achieve as a mission (becoming An Ding’s Peak Lord or our standing mission to allow demons to enter the Jue Di Gorge in four years) or maintain— the System would warn Shifu even if I just planned to do something that wasn’t allowed, even if I didn’t attempt to actually do it. So no, I could not go find Luo Binghe and his adoptive mother before she died, nor could I pick him up at the test myself, like I had done for some of my little shidimei.

I suppose the System got tired of me never enabling the Story Mode.

Well, sucks to be it. I would still do whatever I wanted unless Shifu stopped me!

Ah, but it had been hard! Luo Binghe was the same age as my A-Tian, and my heart got all wrinkled and squished when he clawed desperately in the dirt while we bumbling mooks on the cliff watched indecisively! This poor child! He must had been so hungry and so afraid! He had been so pale even under the sun!  

 I had hidden in my room to cry after that and, when I emerged back into the kitchen, I caught sight of Shifu smoking on the bench at the edge of the herb garden. He tried to avoid smoking when I was around because I didn’t like it, but it suited him; somehow it made his baby face appear ageless instead of… Millennial.

I stepped out to join him. Once I was near, I saw he also had a bottle of wine and no cups. I sat next to him on the bench, maybe too close for it to be appropriate in our pseudo-historical setting, but whatever. I nestled comfortably at his side so I could rest my cheek on his shoulder, and he threw an arm around me.

He offered the bottle to me, and I took a swig: saliva on the tip of the tongue and then sip; now inhale, swallow, exhale, and ta-da! No burning! No coughing! I handed the bottle back. I didn’t actually know the alcohol tolerance of my current body, and I had never particularly liked to be drunk.

“What are you thinking about?,” I asked Shifu. He grimaced and took a drag of his pipe.

“My original draft,” he said in a cloud of smoke, with the tone of someone admitting to accidentally killing a pet. “It could not have gone better for him, or us. Haha, it must had been even arguably worse in some cases. It was —you know— a tragedy.”

“It is not like Shifu knew; fiction is fiction.” He hummed, non-committaly, and drank from the bottle. “I mean, this disciple used to be an avid horror movie fan.” That got a snort out of him, but I did’nt manage to make him spit, drat.

I didn’t voice that I suspected we didn’t even live in the actual PIDW. We were probably in one of those webcomics, one with a title like 'I transmigrated into my own webnovel and the System won't let me edit!', if not, you know, a fic of one of those webcomics.

In the face of such existentialism, I stole the bottle from him and took another sip.

“This Master should not allow Xiao Xi to drink; she is still a kid.” First of all, I had taken two (2) sips; second, he had been the one to originally offer me a drink; and third and most important: physically, we were about the same age, if I managed to get pass my current (ba da bum tsk!) bottleneck, I could soon stop aging too, and he knew it. I glared at Shifu and he raised his hands defensively. “Geez. Alright, suit yourself. No respect for this old man, I see. Xiao Xi grew up a rebellious unfilial teenager. Raise crows, they warned.”

“Very well,” I said peevishly, standing up and caping the bottle. “If Shifu says so, this disciple obeys. No more drinking.”

As I made my way back into the house along the wine, I heard him gasp and cry: “unfilial! How unfilial!”

 And we weren’t sad anymore.

*

I arrived home furious, seething. Oh, how I hated that man! A Respected Master? Ha!, he was just an awful leecherous bastard! The man in question was a hallmaster at Qiong Ding Peak and the only point on his favour was that when I was younger he was simply rude and mean to me. Unfortunately, now that I was older, he would make innuendos and excuses so I would bend and he could look at my ass. ¡Viejo rabo verde! ¡Ojo alegre de mierda! ¡Ojalá se le seque!

I saw His Majesty sleeping peacefully on the daybed, too peacefully, in my opinion. I approached him calmly and then bit very hard (ok, not that hard) on his cheek. He woke up and looked at me reproachingly, so I blew a raspberry on his cheek too, for good meassure.

In retaliation, he dragged me over and squished me under all his three tonnes, wrapped in his cloak like a cat he wanted to pill.

“Should we kill them?,” he asked, airily, once I stoped trying to escape and bite him.

I didn’t want to kill everyone who made my life difficult! I was not like that! So:

“No.”

“Hm, if Xi’er says so.” He breathed out an enormous, soul-deep sigh, long-suffering and dramatic.

“Xi’er does say so,” I answered, mullishly. Then, bubbly, since I had a lot of pent up anger: “would His Majesty like to go with this one to cause problems for Huan Hua Palace?”

“This king is amenable,” he said.

And that’s how we found ourselves under Bai Lu Mountain.

Chapter Text

Traditionally, Bai Lu Mountain and its surrounding forest had not been under the purvey of any Sect, but now —in a completely unsuspicious coincidence— that the last pure blooded Heavenly Demon was sealed there, Huan Hua Palace just quietly annexed it to their territory, like a country that had maps be drawn with their frontier passing over contested land or arbitrarily changing the names of geographical features.

In the case of Bai Lu Forest, it had been gradually surrounded by maze arrays and then it had started being guarded by Huan Hua disciples… just to help people lost in the maze, obviously.

It really pissed me off because, on the other hand, my hometown had been part of Huan Hua’s territory for generations, but when we had been menaced by a (wo)man eating monster, we had to rely on the fortunate good timing of a wandering cultivator to save us; typical landlord behavior.

United by our mutual distaste for Huan Hua Palace, His Majesty and I had a long-standing project to disrupt their operations, and over the last year or so we had taken to test their barriers and illusions for exploitable weaknesses. We grabbed some snacks, I wore my sturdier informal uniforms (the kind meant to do long distance courier trips and battlefield supply runs), His Majesty dressed down and suppressed his demonic qi, and we made nice little field trips out of it. Sometimes, Shifu even joined us in a similar outfit as mine and the System counted it as advancing the planning of the invasion to the Immortal Alliance Conference; just a little minor villain family doing minor villain things.

Even wearing simple, unadorned, clothing His Majesty still looked too much like a rich Young Master to be a mere rouge cultivator and he didn’t move like a believable An Ding disciple so, at my cajoling, he agreed to wear light colors that looked vaguely Bai Zhan-ish and to carry Yu Lu at his belt for verisimilitude. Usually, a Spiritual Sword would not tolerate being handled by a demon, human disguise or not, but it was in Yu Lu’s nature to let itself be wielded by whoever I liked well enough.

For a long time, Bai Lu Forest had not really been of interest to us because it’s arrays weren’t triggered by demonic presence due to, you know, Tianlang-jun being meant to be there all the time forever, but then it turned up that spatial distortions did trigger His Majesty’s abyssal spider senses or something like that, and he had never said anything! Shifu and I discovered it the other day, when we lost a qiankun pouch and His Majesty found it like it had an airtag or whatever (I had never owned an apple product other than an ipod shuffle).

A giant magical maze (with its stupid looping paths) was an ideal place to experiment with powers like that and the perfect distraction for me to avoid thinking about my terrible martial uncles, so we were there, just mapping the way and definitely not scheming against anyone, when I had an idea.

“Would His Majesty’s powers be able to free the Demon Emperor?”

He tilted his head to the side and thought for a moment.

“It would depend on the seal used to contain him,” he said and then nodded once, resolutely. “This king will attempt to do so once we reach the center of the maze.”

“Is there a particular reason?” I mean, it was not beyond him to just do that in a whim.

“The Demon Emperor would make a useful and powerful ally.”

Uh, he was not wrong. Even if just freeing him was not enough to secure his aid, Huan Hua was also an enemy of his and we could use that as leverage, but—

“Can this one make a request?” He made an affirmative noise. “Can His Majesty ask him to spare Cang Qiong?”

He patted my head.

“Qinghua will not have it otherwise.”

*

For a moment, I thought that, maybe, Cang Qiong did not deserve to be spared.

It was hellish, a cruel and miserable place, that prision chamber.

One would believe that the dark hole of a cave under a mountain would be cold, but no, it was warm with the heat produced by the sheer amount of energy that circulated through the seals, and muggy due to all the blood and the rot.

And it was quiet. Sound from outside would not penetrate meters and meters of rock. Sound produced inside would not echo in the small chamber with such irregular walls.  

This oubliette was like a sensory deprivation tank.

A knot formed in my throat.

He was laying prone, with his arms stretched up over his head. They were chained. His head was turned to one side, so his face was only half submerged in the blood that pooled under his body, forming a perfectly round, macabre pond in the middle of the chamber: the edges of the main seal.

A protruding boulder that emerged from the ceiling was pinning him —crushing him — down with all the weight of the mountain.

He was alive, that was the worst part, suspended in a perpetual state of dying.

I stood at the entrance of the chamber, paraliced by fear: the repentine paranoia that if I took that last step into the prison, I would too become trapped. His Majesty had stopped too.

I took one step back.

A clear, melodic voice rang. Teasing, conversational and full of good humor, it was incongruous to the scene.

“Ah, are the esteemed guests leaving already?”

It baffled the fear out of me. I spared a glance to His Majesty, and he only nodded to me; yeah, right, if Shifu was not present, it was my job to do the talking.

I entered the chamber and folded into a kowtow, even though the Demon Emperor was facing the oposite direction and could not see it. His Majesty —who had dropped his human disguise the moment he entered the chamber— bowed elegantly, even if not very low, I had never seen him do that before.

“This servant greets His Holy Highness Tianlang-jun in the name of her liege, the Heir of the Northern Desert.”

“Ah, Xiao Mobei! I remember you! What brings you to this place?” I had lifted my eyes enough to see how he, painfully, turned his head in our direction. His hair, stiff and tangled with blood, covered his face. I had to grit my teeth, but then I remembered myself and relaxed my jaw, I had a job to do.

“My liege seeks His Holy Highness support to secure the throne.” His Majesty rose from the bow but I remained prostrated.

Tianlang-jun laughed, loud and spontaneous.

Then he coughed.

“Ouch,” he pronounced, still conversational, “I should not have done that— That will not be possible. As you can see, Xiao Mobei, I am a bit tied up at the moment.”

“My liege believes there exists the possibility he may be able to help His Holy Highness. My liege posseses abyssal powers capable of opening spatial rifts and transporting people”.

“This one,” (wow!) said His Majesty, “can not promise it wil work since he ignores the properties of the seal that imprisions the Emperor. In case that plan would fail, this one—” (it sounded so weird!) “— does promise to kept trying to find a way to free the Emperor in exchange of an alliance.”

“Well,” answered Tianlang-jun, “It will either work or it will not, but it is not like I have anything better to do, so you have a deal, Xiao Mobei. Try, but do not be discouraged if you fail.”

“This one thanks the Emperor for agreeing to his proposal. If the Emperor permits it, this one will proceed to examine the seals.”

“Xiao Mobei can do as he likes.” Tianlang-jun was sounding a bit condescending there, but I could not hold it against him, and if His Majesty noticed, he didn’t show it. Instead, His Majesty called me over and had me provide some Spiritual Energy to make the entire seal visible, and got to work.

His Majesty was very apt at learning by observing other people. That was why he was able to teach me the An Ding sword style, for example, and he had also picked up a lot of knowledge in sealing and talisman work from Shifu. Even if a lot was incompatible with his demonic qi and he couldn’t use it himself, he knew enough to tell how a seal or talisman worked and, sometimes, how to disrupt it.

 For my part, I knew shit all about sealing. It went right over my head. Heavens know Shifu tried, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I could recognize a talisman if I had seen it before, but that was it.

Since I was just standing around uselessly, I gathered my guts and approached the center of the chamber. I just bowed this time, for practicality’s sake.

“Would His Holy Highness allow this servant to—to brush back his hair?” I was the barest thing I could do for him right now, the only one too, probably. “Please.”

“This Lord will allow it,” he said in an amused voice.

I breathed deeply, and stepped into the blood circle.

It was disturbingly warm, at perfect body temperature.

“Uh,” he said. “I was not expecting that. I had come to believe the seal’s barrier was impenetrable.” So he was just planning to let me bounce off from it like someone walking into a glass door? Rude! “It seems the barrier is meant to stop either demons in general or Heavenly ones in specific. Xiao Mobei, if you could come here and test it?”

The seal not only stopped His Majesty from entering, if I stepped out, the blood that had soaked into my clothing would sluice right off and remain inside.

“How interesting!” said Tianlang-jun. “Xiao Mobei can now go back to his task. Ah, and if the young miss could now proceed with what she had offered, this Lord would be grateful: My nose has been itching for years!”

“Of course!” Because damn him, he was charming!

I entered the circle once again. Now that I was close it was easy to notice that, under the blood, he was actually laying over something like a raised stone table.

“Please forgive the intrusion,” I said before touching him, and waited until he gave the go head. I brushed his hair back carefully. He remained very still under my hand, with his eyes closed. I took the liberty of dampening my handkerchief with a bit of water from my canteen to clean his face a bit. He was very handsome and I could distinguish a faint resemblance to Luo Binghe—Xiao He definitely took after his mother.

“Ah, much better,” he sighed and smiled. Blinking a bit, he looked up. “Many thanks to the young m—”

He snarled. His eyes flashed red and, for a second, the blood spiked like ferrofluid exposed to a magnet. I startled and fell down on my ass outside the circle.

We stared at each other for a moment.

“Oh, my apologies for startling you. I mistook you for someone else,” he said, once again a genial young master.

Cold hands grabbed me under the armpits and dragged me to my feet. I patted one of His Majesty’s hands in thanks and he released me, but he remained next to me.

“His Holy Highness has nothing to apologize for; An Ding’s onion skin yellow has been mistaken for Huan Hua’s gold before, right?,” I said, smiling up at His Majesty, who snorted at my teasing and nodded.

“Yes, they certainly look similar under certain light,” agreed Tianlang-jun, peering up at me, “it took me by surprise, but now that I had time to observe, they are definitely not the same.” He smiled again. “Why doesn’t the young miss tell this Lord how a Cang Qiong cultivator ended up in the service of one of the Mobei princes while Xiao Mobei finishes looking at the seals? And perhaps she will also be willing to part with some of that water?”

*

His Majesty’s conclusion was that his powers would not be enough to free (“call me gege!”) Tianlang-jun.

We left with the promise that we could come back with a new plan. Tianlang-jun humored us and requested we came back with novels and plays (“but, ah, this Lord will need someone with a sweet, clear voice to read them to him”).

He deserved that and more.

Now that we were alone again on our way to exit the maze, I could hug His Majesty and cry.

“That could be My King,” I whispered into the unfamiliar light colour of his robe, wishing it was instead the comforting fur lining the neck of his cloak. He and Shifu were a fucking parallel.

He cupped my face and made me look up at him.

“Qinghua will not betray this King.” But Su Xiyan had not betrayed Tianlang-jun, either.

Tianlang-jun didn’t know that!

“My king! Xi’er needs to tell you something important!”

But before I had the chance to, we were attacked by a snake monster.

*

Ah, it was okay in the end!

Turns out Tianlang-jun had not been as alone as I had feared… And, apparently, I was too part of the plot parallel.

Chapter Text

“…Then, at the last second, just as he is about to crush Son Goku under his boot, Vegeta starts loosing the transformation! Someone has just cut his tail! It was Yajirobe, who had been hiding there all this time!”

“Yajirobe? The cowardly masterless swordsman?”

“Yes! Being so weak, he went unnoticed! But then he saw his opportunity to help Son Goku, so he attacks, and he is finally able to defeat Vegeta! So now there are the three of them: Son Goku, so hurt he can not move anymore; Vegeta, so prideful, but he still tries to crawl away! He has an ambition—a goal, and he won’t stop until he reaches it!; and Yajirobe stands over him with his unsheathed sword, poised to kill him—‘wait!’ yells Son Goku! ‘Please, I know it is selfish, but I want to fight him again! Don’t kill him!’”

“Oh”, said Tianlang-jun, intrigued. So far he had been a bit lukewarm towards Our Lord and Savior Goku, but his thing with Vegeta made him so interesting to well-seasoned BL connoisseurs.

“And Yajirobe stays his hand, so Vegeta crawls into his spaceship and escapes.”

He awaited for a bit and then sighed.

“I suppose Honghong is intending to leave it there.”

“His Holy Highness is absolutely right!” I ran the comb along his hair one a last time and braided it. It could not be cleaned until the seal was broken, but I did my best to keep it neat and untangled. Since I couldn’t read while I worked, with the blood coating my hands and all of that, I narrated Dragon Ball from memory to him.

His favorite was Bulma. He found Goku a bit boring (Heresy!) but liked how all his friends had tried to kill him at least once… he was completely indifferent to Gohan.

Tianlang-jun didn’t know about Xiao He: every time I had tried to tell him about Su Xiyan, he had shut me up, and if I persisted, he had his nephew, Zhuzhi-lang, throw me out, but I believed he suspected something.

Tianlang-jun announced that if I planned on being boring, he was going to sleep, and curled his arms around the low, custom made, porcelain pillow. While the seal that keep him imprisoned feed from a combination of his own demonic qi and the mountain’s natural energy flow, his chains had been regular (heavy duty) Demon Suppressing Iron, so I could just—pick the lock.  

I had to wake Zhuzhi-lang to step out the circle because he had wrapped his long serpent like body around it. He didn’t like to leave Tianlang-jun alone with me and always acted a bit distrustful. The fact that he could not voice his concerns probably made it worse.

I didn’t hold it against him! He had attacked His Majesty and me because he just had witnessed what appeared to be two cultivators walk out the prison, and that first bad impression had not faded. I understood because I would have panicked too.

Once I was out, Zhuzhi-lang wrapped himself back around his uncle. I understood that very well, too.

Before leaving I asked Zhuzhi-lang if he needed anything (no, as always) and checked that the nightpearls we had left behind were easily accessible to him in case they wanted to cover or uncover them. I bid them farewell and left the chamber.  

I had to go down into the tunnel for a bit to reach the agreed pick-up point. I idly smelled my sleeve as I walked, I just couldn’t get used to it. The barrier removed all the blood but it left behind a coopery sent, and the one mouthful running through my own veins.

Once in the right place, I called for His Majesty and returned home.

*

You may be asking, “but Xidan, how come you had time in your super busy schedule to go have sleepovers with the Demon Emperor?”

And the answer is very simple: I was not on speaking terms with Shen-shibo anymore.

So I had returned from Bai Lu Mountain now trying to distract myself from having been to Bai Lu Mountain, and decided to tell Shen-shibo that Hallmaster Zhu had been harassing me. Shifu would just have the guy disappeared, Yue-shibo would have him go on seclusion, Shen-shibo would make him regret it before those two things happened.

Instead of doing that I had found out that he had handed a fake manual to Xiao He.

I had stormed into the Bamboo House and wordlessly showed him the manual.

“i SuPpOsE hOnG-sHiZhI iS dIsApPoInTeD nOw?”, he had said in that sardonic tone of voice he used to antagonize Yue-shibo.

Of course I was! Not only it was cruel! It was fucking stupid! One thing was the sort of abuse that was begrudgingly socially acceptable in our pseudo-historical novel context: a murder attempt was a completely different animal.

And I told him that.

(Yes, I know I’m an hypocrite!)

Fortunately, there are privacy talismans on the walls of the Bamboo House, so while A-Ming, Ying’er and Xiao He could hear us yell at each other argue, because I had foolishly left the door open, they could not actually understand what was said.

I stormed out, crying, because I couldn’t do anything without crying about it, apparently, and returned to hide in An Ding.

Afterwards, Shen-shibo and I had just been really polite to each other, but I stopped going out of my way to spend time with him. Later, A-Ming told me Shen-shibo had just started pretending Xiao He was invisible and that Ying’er was very much pressing the issue.

A-Ming didn’t particularly like Xiao He, in part because Ying’er had taken to Xiao He a lot more easily than she had taken to A-Ming himself, in part because Xiao He really stressed Shen-shibo a lot, and an stressed Shen-shibo was a lot harsher on his disciples than a regular bitter one. But A-Ming listened to me enough that when I told him “you are his shixiong, act like it”, he did. Mostly.

One of the things that worked very well for us, was that A-Ming decided to send Xiao He on errands a lot, usually to An Ding were I could keep an eye on him, and much to Ying’er’s jealousy, since he got to meet my Three Main Problems before her.

He was being exploited (he was a pushover with an honest face, of course they were exploiting him), but he seemed to be happy about it, so I let it be.

I couldn’t help but to project A-Tian on him: he was loveable.

The problem was that I was suffering the whole time, because his dad who was being currently passively tortured under a mountain, refused to learn of his existence, and his mom had died to allow him to live, and then his other mom had died too, and I couldn’t do anything about it except feed him and teach him to write because the System prohibited it. He had to learn about his demonic heritage on his own.

To our great fortune, he had not known to read very well, so he could not get very far on the fake manual, and instead relied on Ying’er reading out loud form her own manual.

If I had been speaking to him, I could yell at Shen-shibo about it, because what if Ying’er had read from his manual instead, uh? What then? What if his beloved Yingying had started cultivating along the fake manual?

And the other thing that had been killing me: His adoptive mom was called Luo Yi.

According to Xiao He, Madam Luo had written her name as “to depend on" instead of using the character for "one", but upon hearing it, Shifu had gotten really pale and said “I swear I didn’t write that" so it was not just my imagination. This fact, the System would allow us to share with both Yue-shibo and Shen-shibo, but Shifu and I had the feeling that it could only make things worse for Xiao He.

And it would be just our luck, since the world worked on telenovela logic, if years into the future it was discovered that Madam Luo had been secretly my aunt all along.

You see, well, you already knew that my mom, Yu Baixing, had been a courtesan, but I had to dig a bit to find that. Growing up, I had never been told much about her, so I was very curious. I was a lot less interested in Father, since he wasn’t very interested in me, either, and from what I knew he didn’t had much say into my mom’s contract being bought so she could become his concubine, and I was very sure he didn’t even care much about Mother — Wen Qiming— or A-Tian all that much.

In fact, pretty much all Hong Muchen cared about was his telescope, and it was no inuendo: the only things he liked about his wives were their names. It had been Zufu who had chosen Mother because she was his friend’s daughter, and then Zumu had chosen my mom to spite them.

I felt pity for both of them. Mother, because Zumu had made her life hell, and my mom because, when she was very little her parents had send her older sister to a sect, while they had sold my mom to a brothel.

That I had learned from the Madam of said brothel, once I had tracked it. Mom had been very vocal about her hate for her sister and her parents.

I didn’t want to invalidate my mom’s feelings, but I really doubted that was what had happened: when my grandparents had sent her away, they had told her she was going to join her sister, and when I had searched, I had found no evidence of a Yu Baiyue in any sect. And well, my maternal grandparents had been poor, but trying to keep appearances they weren’t. And they had two older daughters and a younger son, but no money to pay two dowries and a bride-price.

So in the end it was a matter of math to figure out what had possibly happened to my aunt.

I absolutely did not think about my uncle. Uncles, martial and otherwise, were just troublesome.

*

I hoovered anxiously while Shifu worked, grinding up a fortune in rare ingredients.

“Now!”, he said and I lit it all on fire at the same time he upended a vial of oil.

The ashes were then packed into a wound on His Majesty’s shoulder. Within minutes, his fever started receding, and Shifu and I braced for when he woke up: the antidote to the poison we had just treated had the side effect of causing paranoia.

But we shouldn’t have worried. All he did upon awaking, was to drag us onto the bed, crowd us against the wall and spend the next 4 hours growling at the door.

We had fallen asleep at some point after that, and later still he had left, before I woke up.

“If someone see us like this, we will never get rid of the rumors that say I’m raising you as my Cauldron,” said Shifu next to me.

“I thought I was meant to be your bastard daughter.”

“You and I both know those two rumors are not incompatible with each other”.

That and, nowadays, we looked too close in age to be mistaken for father and daughter anymore. Just the other day Liu-shishu had asked to speak with my elder brother and I had just looked blankly at him in confusion until he said he meant Shifu. Was he projecting? Was Yanyan jumping to conclusions again? Shifu and I didn’t even resemble each other!

“We are never getting rid of those rumors, no matter what we do—are you raising me to be your Cauldron?”

He scrunched up his nose so much, one would believe he had just opened up a septic tank.

“Then there it is,” I concluded and made myself comfortable. Shifu was as gay as the old time in the dance hall, and I was so ace I was one joke away from a winning hand.

“We need to do something about Linguang-jun,” he said.

 Fucking finally! I didn’t say. This assassination attempt was planed so it could endanger whoever helped His Majesty; the man was starting to get too creative for my taste. But:

“His Majesty isn’t going to like it.”

“You are right,” he sighed. “We should do something about Lao Mobei, then. There is no lost love between them and the power up will be good for him… but how?”

“Uhm.”

“What is it?”

“You need to promise you won’t be mad.”

“Xiao Xi you are scaring Shifu.”

“Well… so maybe it is now a good time to tell you we’ve trying to free Tianlang-jun?”

Shifu called His Majesty and, when he returned, Shifu sent us both to sleep in the couch, and I didn’t dare remind him I had my own bed and His Majesty didn’t actually live with us.

Chapter Text

Turns out that having a specialist on board made the planning go smoother! Who would have believed it?

The hardest part, actually, was convincing Shifu to agree go meet Tianlang-jun in person; the best way to describe this process is to ask you to imagine the following three situations: 1) trying to capture a chicken, 2) dragging your disobedient mastiff dog who refuses to walk with a leash out of the park, and 3) getting a feral cat into a bathtub.

It is left to your imagination if those three situations correspond to literal physical actions or are just metaphors.

And then, once inside the prison chamber, that fierce creature, willing to use whatever means available to resist, had become a meek shivering little guy. Unrecognizable. A Christopher Reeve’s Superman sort of thing happened there but, like, if Chistopher Reeve had played two different sorts of pathetic cowards.

I loved Shifu so much. His Majesty kept making moon eyes at him the whole time. Tianlang-jun found him incredibly amusing.

But yeah, once under Bai Lu Mountain, Shifu only had to take a look to declare what was the reason why His Majesty could not find a way to disrupt the seals:  they would not stop working until Tianlang-jun died.

Tianlang-jun took those news better than the rest of us. To the others it could appear as resignation —and it was, in part—  but I knew better.

One very rare day that Tianlang-jun and I had been left alone, I had brought up the question of what would happen if we were unable to find a way to free him, and he talked at length, a very nihilist villainous sort of monologue from the scraped Final Boss. He used very pretty words, but the message was that he just wanted to watch the world burn, so it didn’t matter to him if he was out of the mountain or not if he got to accomplish that.

Well, yes? That was very reasonable, actually?, like, I would also want to do that if I were in his position, but unfortunately, my loved ones needed the world to live, so I could not support his goals, still a) this whole thing was unfair and he deserved better, b) he and Zhuzhi-lang were technically immortal, so they had all the time they needed to eventually find a way to destroy the world, and c) I obviously had my own ulterior motives!

It was very difficult, because I had to tiptoe around the landmine that was Su Xiyan, but I managed (kinda, but let’s not think too hard about this~) to talk him into instead taking a more personal sort of revenge against Huan Hua’s Palace Master, because fuck that guy.

 So, both as the first step of an experiment, and as insurance that we wouldn’t try to screw him over, he had me drink a bit of his blood (he even was gentlemanly enough to offer me a bit from a fresh wound, instead of the dubious pond blood) to see if I could be able to carry it outside the barrier, to see if he would be able to sense it while he remained inside.

I could. He could.

(I also discovered he could still control his blood quite effectively while his qi was being consumed by the seal, and more freely now that he didn’t have the Demon Binding Iron on, but by that point it was pointless to be afraid.)

The second step on the experiment was still a work in progress.  

So, yeah, uhm, returning to the point where I digressed: His death was necessary to destroy the seal.

“But there are ways to bring the dead back to life,” said Shifu.

“I assume Peak Lord Shang is referring to the Holy Mausoleum—while it is possible, it will not be of use in our current situation: Only this Lord can open the barrier that surrounds it and traverse its corridors without triggering the protections.”

Zhuzhi-lang fidgeted in place for a moment, as if battling with himself, and then seemly came to a decision for his inner conflict.

He lifted his torso to catch our attention, then he deliberately turned and started moving to the exit of the chamber. For a moment I thought he was leaving as a way to tell us he was unhappy with the discussion over his uncle’s death or with his uncle’s pessimism but, when he reached the threshold, he looked over his shoulder and made a “come along” gesture with his head.

After excusing ourselves to Tianlang-jun for leaving, His Majesty, Shifu and I followed Zhuzhi-lang as he guided us through a dizzying path of cracks within the mountain, each narrower and narrower, until we abruptly reached an open space: an underground lake illuminated by an opening in the ceiling from where we could see the sky.

Zhuzhi-lang paced along its shore, always just shy of touching the spiritual energy rich water. It was an anxious, yearning movement directed at a little island in the middle of the lake.

“Oh! I see! I remember this!,” exclaimed Shifu, “there are Sun-Moon Dew Mushrooms growing there, right?” Once Zhuzhi-lang nodded in agreement, he continued in a subdued, regretful tone of voice: “the body born from a Sun-Moon Dew Mushroom will not be able to withstand the demonic qi of Tianlang-jun, at least not for long.”

But Zhuzhi-lang just reassumed his pacing, now more aggressive, more frustrated. He still wanted to reach the island, but he couldn’t. He wanted us— humans who could touch the water, a demon with teletransportation powers—  to get the mushrooms for him, but we refused to. We didn’t understand, so we refused to.  Ah.

“Shifu, would it last enough to allow His Holy Highness to take his own body inside the Mausoleum?”

*

 After that, all we had to do was wait.

*

Life continued as usual, people needed to be fed, clothed, housed and cleaned after. Mail needed to be delivered. Buildings, roads and stairs had to be maintained. Ingredients, materials and all sorts of finished products were both sold and purchased: between the labor of all twelve peaks the sect was mostly self-sufficient, but some things could not be produced in-house and others were produced in surplus.

It was the incredibly mundane sort of activities that happened in the background even in —uh — real life(?). It was the sort of thing that most people wouldn’t think about unless they were involved in the process, so much that, when Shifu had been writing his novel, he had not even bothered to name the peak where our grain was grown nor the one where our livestock was raised, and now those two were often his biggest preoccupation.

And that was why even people who should have known better thought that medicinal grade ox gallstones appeared out of thin air, already perfectly labelled in the storage rooms of Qian Cao Peak.  

“For tomorrow! Oh! Why didn’t dear shimei make her requisition before if she knew they were running low?  There is no way Xi Jiao Peak will be able to provide them in such short notice, even if they agreed to start sacrificing the animals now!—” Shen-shimei (Different tone! No relation!) started to say something, but I interrupted her before she could “—Yes, this Shijie knows that they don’t need to kill the ox, but the other way takes longer! And the gallstones would still need to be dried! And Shen-shimei needs bezoars for tomorrow! Aiya! Now we are going to have to buy them, and the closest apothecary is going to charge us through the nose!” The apothecary wouldn’t dare, actually, because we would be buying them back from him!

“Money shouldn’t matter when lives are on the line!,” she said, vehemently, puffing up her chest valiantly against the unfeeling bureaucrat drone in front of her!  

“Or course! This is why An Ding has approved the emergency purchase!” It came out a bit strained, I couldn’t help it! I had agreed from the beginning; my gripe had just been with the timing! “But this happens every other month!”

“An Ding never provides Qian Cao with enough beozars!”

“We, at An Ding, are very careful when it comes to medical supplies! We always deliver the number of bezoars and other ingredients as specified by Qian Cao’s Monthly Average Consumption reports, to free our most esteemed Qian Cao martial siblings from the need to make monthly requisitions for their basic everyday supplies,” I said in my best ‘for sales press one, to go back to the previous menu press two’ voice. Internally, I had fallen into a sort of calm mental state usually only found in snipers and ambush predators. “And this Shijie knows Mu-shishu has instructed that Qian Cao’s stock never should fall below one and a half times those amounts.”

Shen-shimei, the disciple in charge of said stock of medicinal ingredients, didn’t say anything. She stepped in front of the window and the crosshair, she bent down at the edge of the water to drink.

“Well! It is just a bit strange! Because if Qian Cao is keeping track of their inventory—”

“An Ding must be making their calculations wrong!” A shot was made.

“Ah, but An Ding doesn’t make those calculations!” Jaws snaped close and dragged her under the water.

“Ah.”

“Yes, Head Disciple Lu makes those calculations! Four times a year, based on the outbound stock logbooks from the previous three months!”

“Uhm.”

“So it is very, very strange there are never enough bezoars at Qian Cao Peak! Because the only thing that this shijie thinks may cause this problem, is that her most dear, most precious, shimei has been sending the same numbers every month! And that maybe, for some reason, the bezoars were used less than usual that one specific month! Which then caused Qian Cao to receive that very same amount. Every. Single. Time. Since then. Instead of the amount they actually need!”

Ah, I really couldn’t help it! It was just too frustrating! I shouldn’t have shown that I noticed it was her fault or that I was angry! My usual modus operandi when dealing with people not doing their jobs, was to just smile, nod and solve the problem they caused to themselves. If they didn’t learn, I would then find myself a reason to be regretfully unavailable to help them and watch as they struggled. But, arhg! People thinking themselves above admin work were a sore point to me, and this one felt especially personal since I had literally died doing a job similar to hers.

“It won’t happen again,” she muttered.

“Lovely! This Shijie hopes Shen-shimei has a nice day!”

Once she left, Shifu peeked out his office into the antechamber. I had told Shen-shimei that Shifu was absent so he could keep working on other things.

“She is going directly to Mu-shidi, you know?”

“Pff, Mu-shishu is going to send her to Lu-shidi as he does everything paperwork related. Either she won’t tell, or well— Lu-shidi didn’t catch this, if Shen-shimei tells him, he is probably going to come here and try to convince me to not tell you, so you don’t tell Mu-shishu.”

“And is Xiao Xi going be convinced?”

“Nope! I’ll tell him I reported to you already!”

“Should I bring it up at the next meeting?”

“Yes, please!

“How evil. Good work. Those things are really expensive.”

He stepped out his office and locked his door, then he hid his key in the qiankun pouch sewn inside his lapel and left room.

I followed him two steps behind by habit as he made his daily rounds. We visited each department at the central administrative building. He asked questions, made corrections and adjustments, received progress reports. I took notes when necessary.

Finally, he cacked his neck and stretched his arms. “Let’s go home Xiao Xi, I’ll make us lunch.”

Every time it happened, lunch with Shifu was the highlight of my day, so my mood improved immediately. Nowadays I could cook some simple, staple dishes to get by, but I was not particularly good and it was always a lot more delicious to eat something made by another person, anyways.

On the other side of the spectrum, Shifu was a good cook, not because he was a talented chef with perfect technique or anything like that: he could enter the kitchen and improvise something good from whatever ingredients he found, it was never something fancy, it was just good and tasty and that was enough. I don’t think he ever followed a strict recipe to cook, he was just one of these people with buen sazón, so when he was teaching me and I asked how much of something i should add, or for how long should I let it cook, he would tell me to eyeball it and that I would eventually get a feeling for it.

Tl;dr version: he cooked like a grandma.

In fact, in one of these rare precious tidbits of information of his past life he had shared with me, he had confessed he had learned to cook from his grandmother. That while she still lived, he had spent most of his time with her in the kitchen.

I found that incredibly loveable about him.

Lunch that day contained stir-fried watercress. It was a treat I could only have rarely because His Majesty really hated spicy food, and Shifu didn’t like watercress, mustard greens and the such either, as he didn’t like bitter stuff and preferred nutty and salty flavors instead. I was partial towards spicy and tart, and didn’t mind bitterness: it was too much sweetness what I didn’t like.

So, as you can deduce, the watercress dish was made specifically for me.

“We’ll ask the apothecary to lend us the bezoars and then we’ll discount them from the price of the next shipment,” he said, followed by a sigh. “If Qiang Cao fixes the issue with their AMC report, we’ll have to ask Xi Jiao to try and increase their production.”

I winced, “Tang-shishu is not going to like that.”

“Well, it is that or lose income: it is not like we can reduce Qian Cao’s budget. Tang Qingling will have to deal with it.”

“We could always shame Qiang Cao into fixing their inventory shrinkage problem.”

“...Are you sure you want to do that?”

No, the least thing I wanted was another project.

“Yes.” Just thinking about the fact that they used the Last In First Out method on perishables made me erupt in hives. I did not spend the last years of my past life color-coding by hand the expiration date of every single ampule vial used at my job to now allow my shidimei to let expensive and rare medicinal ingredients expire on their shelves.

*

In a turn of events I should have predicted, Mu-shishu was all for it.

In the past he had had problems due to mislabeled or badly stored ingredients. Even once, as a disciple, Mu-shishu had lost a patient who developed xianxia Steven-Johnson. In retrospect, he said, it was probably triggered by too old and possibly moldy dried Vermillion Sage Seahorses (a plant, actually) that had been used to cure (successfully) the patient from a terrible poison gas during a mission. Shishu —he told me — had been prepared for a potential aphrodisiac side effect not, like, necrotized skin and multiple organ failure. (If it had been as horribly traumatizing as I imagine it must had been, I couldn’t tell! Mu-shishu was frighteningly unflappable.)

Since then he had done his best to train his disciples to be extra careful when administering any medicine and had all ingredients be examined periodically for any damage (which led to their shrinkage problem), but he admitted there was room for improvement.

That meant that by time I was done with Qiang Cao, they not only arranged their shelves taking into account how long the stock had been there so it could be used in a more efficient order (very difficult because some items were perishables and others became more potent over time!), but they also color coded their High Risk, aphrodisiacs and Look Alike- Sound Alike ingredients.

We implemented more strict control logs, too. The really dangerous stuff was already locked under key, but now it had to be counted and/or weighed twice a day or every time the key exchanged hands.

 Mu-shishu already had some disciples developing standardized single doses that would be stored in sealed packaging, and I suggested it also include shelve life, storage conditions and warnings.

I also talked him into sending his disciples with administrative responsibilities for cross-training at An Ding.

All of this didn’t make me very popular at Qiang Cao, but some people did become appropriately draconic over the stock under their charge, which was my goal, so it was okay.

*

To those who might be concerned about me continuing being sexually harassed, don’t worry, I ended up reporting that man to HR, aka, Yue-shibo.

The thing about Yue-shibo is that it was very difficult to notice when he was mad, but it was very scary once you did, even when you knew he wasn’t mad at you, so I found myself less forthcoming than I intended.

“Please Shizhi, this shibo needs to know—did he ever touch you?”

“No, he only… said things. But, well, some Shijies advised this one to never be alone with him behind closed doors.”

“This Master sees,” he closed his eyes and released a breath he had been holding. “This Master has to apologize to Hong-shizhi for not noticing this happening right under his nose.”

“It is not Yue-shibo’s fault, it was an open secret among us female disciples, but a secret nonetheless.”

“If none of you felt comfortable or safe enough to tell this Master, it is a failing on this Master part.” He rose to his feet and I followed suit. He then guided me to the door with a hand to my back; close but never touching. “Hong-shizhi should return home and leave everything to this Master.”

Before leaving I looked up at him and smiled.

“Thank you.”

For a second, his perennial gentle expression became genuine, actually warm. Ah, it was such a shame! Among all my horrible martial family, he was the one I thought I resembled the most, so I would always find my own flaws in him, so he would never be my favorite uncle.

“There is nothing to thank, it is the least Shibo can do.”

He patted my shoulder awkwardly, twice, and I left.

Like I suspected Yue-shibo would do, he ordered the hallmaster to enter seclusion.

The hallmaster very quickly stopped taking the trays of food that were left at his door, but since he could practice inedia, he surely was doing fine.

Chapter Text

In another life, one fact about Luo Binghe that would always be true, no matter how much he changed over the years, was that he wasn’t used to asking for things. As a child he would have learnt that asking would always be meet with refusal—  with mockery or a reprimand, if he was lucky, with punishment if he wasn’t, so asking was never worth the trouble, and as an adult, in the future that could have been, he would have been strong enough to just take what he wanted.

In this life, however, he had ended up in a mutualistic kind of relationship, that could be tentatively called friendship, with three girls from An Ding Peak who were bafflingly convinced that people had a hard time saying no to Luo Binghe and that no-one would suspect him of subterfuge. That meant that his usual role in their partnership was talking to people, and so far, the experience had been relatively painless.

Still, at that moment, fretting next to his too calm martial sisters, waiting at the door of the Leisure House, he was sure that this whole fair was a terrible idea, and specially so for daring to ask for something so—silly.

But She Jinkui was committed to this course of action, and Luo Binghe had learned that once She Jinkui’s mind was made, she could not be convinced otherwise. Sometimes, in the privacy of his own mind, Luo Binghe found her --so tall, pin straight hair, with her cold pale eyes and quick mind (and— he thought guiltily— her abrasive personality) quite reminiscent of his Shizun, not that anyone could ever compare to Shen Qingqiu’s elegant bearing and poise, or his peerless intellect.   

The door remained closed, so his shimei knocked again, louder, and Luo Binghe cringed, clutching the basket in his arms a little closer. Yin Shuimu patted his shoulder comfortingly.

“Don’t worry Luo-shixiong!,” said Cao Qing, “she gets mad if we don’t ask!”

The ‘she’ in question was An Ding’s First Disciple, Hong Xidan, and he would have liked to tell Cao Qing that the problem wasn’t Hong Xidan, who so far had been nice to him, but Shang Qinghua, who was said to be always busy, because Luo Binghe knew very well that adults didn’t like to be interrupted, even less with silly things—but it was then that the door finally opened, so Luo Binghe keep his thoughts to himself, and braced for the worse.

It was Hong Xidan, which was a relief, but she wasn’t dressed in her usual skirts and wide sleeved jacket (an attire that Luo Binghe had come to identify as the uniform of the An Ding disciples who worked in offices), and instead she wore a shirt and trousers in shades of grey—even her hair was different: her usual grown up hairdo with the blue hairpin had been replaced by a simple ponytail and an almost Xian Shu lilac ribbon. He started to fear they had not interrupted her in the middle of her work, but worse: in her day off. 

She looked at them, sighed deeply and slumped against the door frame.

“What did you do now?,” she asked. “Not you, Luo-shidi, this Shijie knows whatever it is not your fault.”

Luo Binghe tried not to curl in like a turtle, it was, in fact, his fault, a little.

“We haven’t done anything yet!,” said Yin Shuimu, not defensive or reproachful as one would expect, but worryingly cheerful.

“We wanted to ask Shifu to allow us to use the Leisure House’s oven!,” chimed in Cao Qing.

Hong Xidan perked up, suddenly intent like a dog who had heard a rabbit in the underbrush, and stared at the basket of ingredients in Luo Binghe’s arms.

“I’ll ask Shifu. Wait here.” She turned around and closed the door on their face.  

“See!,” said Cao Qing, smiling up at Luo Binghe. “It is fine!”

The door opened again.

“He said yes, but if it comes out alright, he wants half of whatever you are making.”

It sounded reasonable to Luo Binghe, who until then had expected Shang-shishu to order them to kneel on the gravel to repent for bothering him, and who was also convinced their experiment would fail anyways.

“One third!,” said She Jinkui.

“She-shimei has no leverage to bargain,” answered Hong Xidan. “This shijie must remind her that Shifu had the oven built to use it himself.”

She Jinkui clicked her tongue. “Alright.”

Hong Xidan moved aside to let them in and closed the door at their back.

Luo Binghe had been imagining the interior of the Leisure House based on the one time he had been inside the Bamboo House; he had been wrong.

The Bamboo House was a comfortable and luminous place, full of wonderful things. It was peaceful and quiet so its inhabitant could focus on his studies, and it had a clear harmonious flow of energy to better aid his cultivation.

The Leisure House was not like that. Upon entering the first thing one would notice was a sudden chill to the air and be greeted with a long, dark hallway. The furniture was beautiful and of excellent craftmanship, the decorations tasteful, but its shadows appeared to be a bit too long, a bit too stark. It was immaculately clean, but the air felt stagnant.

“Here’s the rules,” said Hong Xidan as she escorted them briskly down the hallway. “You are allowed in the receiving room, the kitchen and the garden—that’s where the oven is located. There will be no snooping nor shenanigans. You have until wei hour—Shifu has an appointment, and he will he taking this one with him— so you need to be done by then. I’ll be supervising.”

“Yes, Shijie,” chorused Luo Binghe along his martial sisters.

The kitchen, unlike the rest of the house, was actually welcoming and Luo Binghe would have liked to be allowed to properly cook in it. They never had much money, but before his mother fell ill, she had taught him to cook with the simple ingredients they were able to afford, and he missed it; along with his Guanyin pendant, knowing how to cook was one of the scant things he still had of hers.

He placed his basket on the sturdy kitchen table and started taking out its content, arranging each item as he went, so they would be accessible and easy to find once he started working. Since they had not known what would be available to use at the Leisure House, Luo Binghe and his martial sisters had brought utensils and containers along the ingredients for the bread they wanted to bake. He tried not to wonder too hard on where and how his martial sisters had sourced everything; the only thing without a dubious procedence was the flour they had milled themselves on An Ding’s brand new watermill.

The idea itself had been all Luo Binghe’s.

Hong Xidan had suggested he practiced his reading on subjects he personally enjoyed. Following this advice he had decided to read the meagre collection of cooking books from Qing Jing’s Library, where he found the method to prepare the leaven starter and the recipe for sourdough bread. In the beginning he had no real intention of making it (and, in fact, he was still a bit skeptical about the process), but he made the mistake of musing about it in front of Cao Qing and Yin Shuimu, who found it fascinating, and as all things they found fascinating, they wanted to learn how it worked.

Luo Binghe looked up from his ingredients and found all his four martial sisters watching him attentively and felt a little like a performer in a play. He blushed, a bit self-conscious, but also a bit pleased. For once, he was the one who knew how to do something, so a bit hesitantly at first, but gaining more and more confidence as he worked, he started narrating what he did and why he did it.

It wasn’t until they were waiting for the dough to rise and the oven to warm that Shang Qinghua made his appearance in the kitchen to see what they were doing.

If it weren’t for the fact that they had just been introduced, Luo Binghe would have mistaken Shang Qinghua for another disciple.

For one, he appeared to be very young, so much that just by looking at them, it was impossible to tell who was older, between him and Hong Xidan.

He was also dressed similar to his disciples: shirt and trousers, but mostly brown with onion skin yellow accents, instead of the other way around. It was definitely work clothing, but the fabric was good quality, hemp and cotton, richly dyed, without embroidery.

But beyond that, it was the closeness, the lack of ceremony. Shang-shishu talked casually, made jokes, let his disciples (mostly She Jinkui) bully him a little.

He and Hong Xidan had the same mannerisms, the same expressions, they existed comfortably in each other’s space with easy affection and casual touch—when they had been close enough, Luo Binghe had noticed they even carried the same smell; even though they didn’t resemble each other, they looked more like family than master and student.

A deep, dark, ugly hunger envy sparkled in his chest.

Why Hong Xidan? Why not him? Why was she allowed to be so close, so dear, to her master? Why was she allowed to be close to his master as well?

He was grateful to her, of course. He wouldn’t forget that, when she found out he couldn’t read (for all that Ning Yingying had tried her best to help) she had been so mad that no-one had made arrangements to teach him, that she had fought with Shen Qingqiu over it, that she had been teaching him personally.

It was not her fault that, since then, it was as if Luo Binghe was invisible to the eyes of Shen Qingqiu.

Ming Fan would make a complicated expression and tell Luo Binghe it was for the best. Ning Yingying would keep, unsuccessfully, bringing him up and calling attention to him while in Shizun’s presence.

It didn't bother him, really, he could live with it, but it was, just a little bit painful, a tangled up feeling that that cut and pulled, like matted hair, like a wire snare, if he wasn’t mindful about it.

Shen Qingqiu could allow Hong Xidan close enough to fight, and both Ming Fan and Ning YingYing said that Hong Xidan would eventually return and be welcomed back into Shen Qingqiu’s presence.

It was not her fault, but it was not fair.

*

The bread was delicious.

Chapter Text

My day started early in the morning, but (miraculously) my one single task was just getting His Majesty awake and ready to go. He had stayed the night before, but he had things to do, so he really shouldn’t linger for too long.

And oh, it really was a good thing that it was my only task!

His Majesty was formidable, hypercompetent, such a fierce accomplished warrior prince! Also, he was baby. The babiest.

To get him out of bed one had to sweet-talk him, cajole him, cuddle him, all the while taking care to avoid capture, as to not be dragged into the bed, squished like a stuffed animal and be slept upon.

It was usually a very inconvenient fate, and in that particular morning, it would have been a very gross one too; I gave myself a subtask to change their bed sheets while His Majesty dressed.

Shifu had woken up even before I did and had left already. He would, probably, be back in an hour or so, since he had only gone to his office in the central administrative building to leave last-minute instructions to his other minion-gophers, before the trip we had scheduled for the next five days.

Officially, we were supposed to go — undercover and with Yue-shibo’s blessing—  to the Borderlands, to meet an intermediary for goods ‘imported’ from the demon realm.

The intermediary was actually His Majesty in his human disguise and the trip was just an excuse so we could have a reason to leave the sect for a bit. Still, all three of us would be making an appearance at one of the border towns in order to be seen by witnesses, and then I would go on my own searching for information on Madame Luo, while Shifu and His Majesty went on a romantic getaway (one that involved bringing ruin upon a rival demon clan).

The deal we were supposed to negotiate was real, though, but that it had already been sealed over dinner, on our very own kitchen table, earlier this week. The thing between Shifu and His Majesty was incredibly profitable for both the Northen Desert and Cang Qiong! They should marry already and make the alliance official!

But before that, His Majesty needed to go and leave his own last-minute instructions to his own underlings. Then, in the afternoon, he would come back to pick us up and take us to a quick pit stop to check on Tianlang-jun, Zhuzhi-lang and the crops.

His Majesty and I ate our breakfast together, and he made faces all the while because I forgot to hold back on the ginger when I prepared our congee, and I felt horrible because he ate it anyways.

Then he decided to re-do my hair because I couldn’t use his colors and, possessive as he was, he wanted to still have some say on how I looked. I ended up in a ponytail, with my hair fluffing out impractically in all directions and the purple ribbon Qi-shishu had very publicly given me to harass Shifu after Yinyin transferred to An Ding, not that His Majesty knew that.

And then he wanted me to do his hair, which I really loved to do, so I stood behind him with the comb and took my time. It was in the middle of that that Shifu returned from his errand. He walked into the kitchen, distracted with the papers he carried in his hands: a perfect unsuspecting victim.

I combed His Majesty’s hair back from his face and gathered it up with a hand in a tall tail.

“Shifu, Shifu. Look!”

He looked at us and missed his step. Score! I let the ponytail fall and I solemly supresing a giggle re-arranged the fringe back across His Majesty’s forehead. His devastatingly handsome uncovered face was too powerful, too dangerous. Vain creature that he was, His Majesty preened all the while as I put little braids in his hair and affixed his jewelry, and Shifu pouted at me, as if he had not made this man like that on purpose.

The finishing touches, like fixing his lapels and a good luck kiss, those he demanded from Shifu.

I cleaned up the kitchen around them as they kissed as if they were to part for weeks instead of a couple of hours. I had long since become desensitised to their displays of public affection because they kept getting it on in the kitchen, where walking in on them was almost impossible to avoid.

Someone knocked on the door and I ignored it to give them time to finish with their goodbyes, but the lovebirds keep making out, even when the visitor knocked on the door again, so I had to actually physically separate them and choo His Majesty away.

“Enough! Now go, gogogo!” I pushed at His Majesty with my shoulders like a large piece of furniture, I didn’t even try to move Shifu because he had momentarily forgotten to be a weak little guy and was planted where he stood like one of those outstandingly enduring windswept pines that grew on rocky cliffsides(: the An Ding Peak Lord, everybody!). “Both of you have things to do other than each other and I have to tend to the door! Go!”

Come on! It was me who was the hormonal teenager! How did I end up chaperoning them? They were awful, the worst!

Finally! His Majesty opened a portal. Just as he was leaving, he smacked a kiss to my forehead, but it was merely a distraction, so he would get close enough to pinch me on one side, on the ticklish skin over the ribs.

I squeaked and Shifu had the gall to laugh at me.

“Xiao Xi deserved that.”

I glared at him, he stuck his tonge out to me and ran away to hide in the studio.

The very worst, I tell you!

I picked up my patience from where it had been threaded on, dusted it a bit and pocketed it again. Then I went to open the door.

*

It was kind of the expected progression of their project, but I had actually expected my Three (and a Half) Main Problems to ask for permission to build their own oven, instead of burrowing the one on the Leisure House. I supposed it was faster this way, but I could not consider beyond them the possibility it was just a plot to snoop into the house… but fresh bread made by Xiao He, who supposedly had  preternatural cooking abilities; neither Shifu nor I could resist that lure.

Shifu was being a bit weird about having Xiao He in his house, which was understandable. I would not hope to act any different if I had to be face to face with Shizuka, and he already had to wake, every day, and come to terms with the fact that he now lived inside his own novel.

So I set the girls on him to keep him distracted. Yinyin actually wanted to master the An Ding's sword style and wanted to be allowed to observe the more advanced classes. A-Qing wanted to ask some questions about our trade routes. Jinkui wanted to discuss the possibility of having an official budget for their printing business (she also wanted complete control over it, so she could invest the profit into the watermill). (Ah, yes, the windmill project ended up not being allowed by Zhi Ji, the divination peak, because the available locations to build it would mess up our peak’s Feng Shui and they already had beef with the Leisure House being as it was, so the girls had to settle for a watermill instead.)

I didn’t want Xiao He to feel left out, so I settled next to him, where he was absorbed by the riveting sight of the dough rising. He was very polite, but I could tell he never quite knew how to act around me.

“So, how are you doing, Luo-Shidi?,” I asked.

“This one is doing well, Shijie.”

“It is starting to look very fluffy, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Shijie.”

“Our martial sisters tell me Luo-shidi figured out the process himself.”

“This one just followed the instructions he found in the books.”

“That is also very impressive! Luo-shidi has improved a lot!”

“This one thanks Shijie for her praise.”

Silence.

I wanted to tell him so many things, but I was forbidden to do so. I wanted to give him a hug, but that could make him more uncomfortable.

There was also a part of me, the part of me that decided the best course of action was to murder Qiu Haitang for the things she had not done yet, that was afraid of him. He was fated to destroy my home and kill people I loved.

Right now, he was human.

I had thought about it, Shifu had not said anything, so I was allowed, maybe I would not succeed and that was why. Tianlang-jun suspected his existence, but didn’t really know about him for sure. I could simply kill Luo Binghe. (What an hypocrite.) It could be relatively easy. Maybe not right now with the girls around but I could have many chances later.

But he was not even fourteen years old.

He was still so thin, shorter than me. He was shy, and a bit awkward around people he considered adults. He was also so hardworking and I could already tell he had a strong sense of justice, of fairness (he never claimed more than what he believed was his due, and he was starting to recognize his own worth), which was both a virtue and would develop into one of his main character flaws later in the plot.   

Xiao He, my little martial brother, was not Luo Binghe, Conqueror and Emperor.

In the end, there was no way I would actually hurt Xiao He.

*

The bread was very, very good.

Chapter Text

In all the years His Majesty had been dragging me around on his quests all over the Human and Demon Realms, he had never before taken me (or Shifu, for that matter) to the Ice Fortress, which was the seat of the crown of the Northen Desert.

To his own personal holdings (a little castle on a dramatic cliff next to the sea, with the convenient tower to keep an Attic Wife™ or perhaps a British realtor, if this were another kind of novel), yeah, I had been to, once along Shifu, which had not been too bad because we had had each other to huddle for warmth—but the Ice Fortress, I was beginning to understand, was not a very… welcoming place for humans.

I clung tighter to His Majesty as we walked down a hall; it was a matter of survival.

Firstly, my dress was an almost diaphanous affair with a u-shaped neckline and trimmed in completely useless fur, and over it one of His Majesty's coats, one that was mostly for the look: the chainmail bikini armor version of winter gear (Did it make my tits look awesome? Yeah. Could people even look at them when His Majesty’s were right there? Dubious), so the only thing that kept me from succumbing to hypothermia, was His Majesty using his ice demon powers on me, which required physical contact.  

Secondly, I was looking like a very delicious snack, and most species of demon would eat humans (and occasionally other demons, actually, but in the case of the meat of other demons it was usually a ceremonial thing, while humans were more like a luxury food), so there was the very real possibility someone would try if they caught me on my own.

“Little Rabbit! It’s that you?” And who better to illustrate this, than the fox lady who had tried to cook me into a soup all those years ago. I was right next to His Majesty, but it didn’t stop her and she brazenly walked right into our space, close enough so she could tip my chin up with the tip of her sharp lacquered claw. “Heavens, look at you! All grown up!”

She was incredibly beautiful, all plump lips and laughing eyes. Her hair oil left an enticing sweet-smelling cloud around her, and her anachronistic eyeliner was flawless and sharp. On top of her head were a pair of fluffy triangular ears and, when she smiled up at His Majesty, her fangs were long and deadly. I kinda wanted to be her, but I couldn’t forget that she had kidnaped me and stuffed me into a wicker basket (the indignity!) to make His Majesty chase her around.

His Majesty dragged me away from her and closer to his side. He scowled down at her and her smile widened.

“Ah, now this one sees! My lord was wise to let his Little Rabbit grow from a small morsel to a full meal! Perhaps,” she said, taking a step closer, “this time My Lord would be willing to share with this one?”

“Leave,” he said, and she laughed.

“Who would have believed My Lord is so stingy! Maybe another time!” She bowed elegantly to him, winked at me, and left.

 This encounter, along the fact that His Majesty had proceeded to lock us inside his rooms until the next day, would be talk of the fortress, not because it was considered scandalous, but because it was very out of character of him.

The next person curious enough to risk talking to him, was his awful uncle Linguang-jun, who had been doing his very best to get His Majesty murdered since his Majesty was a little kid, and had given him abandonment issues and a fear for betrayal.   

His Majesty’s awful uncle slipped from behind one of the enormous pillars that held up the fortress ceiling, and circled around us like a villain in a cartoon movie. Even though His Majesty’s awful uncle was my and Shifu’s archenemy, until then I had never actually seen him in person before; he did look like Sesshomaru-sama and Sephiroth’s unholy twink offspring (except for a dramatic lock of black hair), and rather young, too.

He made some vague threats, specific criticisms to His Majesty and pointed comments about (but not said directly to) me (as if I were below his attention, except for the fact that I was the whole reason he decided to approach in the first place), but he wasn’t daring enough to step within punching distance like the fox lady. Very boring and tedious.

The third person to get curious about the human His Majesty was keeping around was not boring or tedious at all. He was also the main reason His Majesty had, until now, avoided taking Shifu or I to the Ice Fortress.

Yeah, it was his dad.

He just summoned us to his rooms (and by ‘us’ I meant that he ordered his son to go see him and told him to bring me along), so His Majesty and I had very little choice but to descend through a long, deep flight of stairs with annoying steps of inconsistent heights to the lowest levels of the fortress, until we stood before the ornate doors of the personal chambers of the King of the Northen Dessert, waiting to be allowed in.

Lao Mobei had not called us to him sorely as a power move; his health had been diminishing over the last decade, possibly longer, so he currently made very little public appearances, and a lot of actual governing was managed by His Majesty (I was aware that he was not crowned yet, but he was still My King♡ and my liege lord) and a council of elders, even if Lao Mobei had the final word on any decision that caught his fancy.

Once in his presence, it struck me how much he and His Majesty resembled each other in looks and how different they were in personality. In other words, Lao Mobei was this big – in both physical size and energy—handsome man, loud and boisterous, and I could have also found him charming, if not for the fact that he had barely answered his son’s greetings and he was already ordering me to come closer.

The arm His Majesty had around me tightened and the claws of the hand he had on my shoulder were starting to dig into my skin.

Lao Mobei laughed.

“Ah, Xuehua, Xuehua, don’t be like that. This King only wants to meet the Little Rabbit. You’ll get her back once This King is done.” He smiled indulgently, sprawled on his chair. It should be pointed out, that he didn’t offer His Majesty a seat. “Come on, Little Rabbit, don’t be shy.”

His Majesty reluctantly let me go, he didn’t had much choice here. I shallowed once, let go from where I had unconsciously latched to His Majesty’s belt and walked closer to Lao Mobei. I stopped halfway and he beckoned me closer. It just seemed to amuse him and to make His Majesty tense up more.

I was not being shy. You see, Lao Mobei had four vices: long fights, hard liquor, good food and women. His health condition didn’t allow him to indulge in the first one anymore, so he doubled down on the others—and I was very much the last two.

So the following events happened very fast and just as one would expect. It still managed to take me by surprise.

One moment I was in front of him. Then his hand was on my hip. Then I was on his lap. His hand... moved. With his other hand he tilted my face and he studied me intently. I didn’t divine his intention until it was over and His Majesty had snatched me away. On instinct, I covered my mouth with my hand, but otherwise I froze.

Lao Mobei licked my blood from his lips and grinned, showing up all his terrifying carnivore teeth.

“No need to be so dramatic Xuehua, it was just a little taste. You didn’t mind, right? Little Rabbit?” I managed to shake my head without uncovering my mouth. I did very much mind, my skin was crawling, but a fight with him, sick or not, was not in His Majesty’s best interests. “See? No harm done, your little pet is fine.”

He served himself a cup from a bottle on the table at his side. We stood in front of him, waiting in silence.

When he finished his drink, he sighed and addressed me again. “Ah Little Rabbit, isn’t your master cute when he is riled up? His mother was the same.” Neither of us reacted to that and Lao Mobei sighed again, as if deeply disappointed. He served himself another drink and waved a hand dismissively, “you may go now.”

We bowed and fled the room.  

When we were halfway up the stairs, I looked up to His Majesty. He was clenching his jaw, and he was half dragging me, half pushing me along, with an arm around the shoulders. My lip had stopped bleeding but the useless fur trim on my sleeve was stained red.

“Well, it went better that we thought!,” I joked. He let go of me and stopped some steps lower—he was so tall he still loomed over me— then he flicked my forehead with a finger and while I was distracted, he opened a portal directly underneath us, and we fell.    

*

And now it is time for a flashback!

I’m aware the transition is awkward but aren’t you gald I didn’t do a ‘You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation’ while I was in free fall?

Anyways, so on the fourth day of my vacation, I returned to Bai Lu Mountain carrying with me little new information about Madam Luo and a bunch of mice.

I also had with me a bit of stale sourdough bread (for the mice) and some wine (also for the mice, actually).

The prison chamber was still terrible as always, but it had been a while since it last made me panic. It now had night pearl lamps on strategic points, cushions and carpets for Zhuzhi-lang and me, and piles of books that Tianlang-jun could try to read with aid from Zhuzhi-lang and great difficulty;  Zhuzhi-lang would hold the book outside the barrier (a task made strenuous because he currently had no arms) and turn the pages, while Tianlang-jun squinted at the text from inside.

The other change was the patch of dark soft soil where Shifu had planted the mushroom that would grow Tianlang-jun’s temporary body.

That corner (ok, it wasn’t really a corner, it was actually a somewhat awkward spot far from the center of the chamber but not close to the wall) had been chosen because the outer seal directed both the natural energy of the mountain and Tianlang-jun’s own qi through it.

The body was—apparently, I was not good at gardening like Shifu— developing well, but it would need years still to be ready to accept the soul transfer, and I was in a bit of a hurry.

Luckily Tianlang-jun felt it fit to indulge me and my proposed time frame.

It had been a bit of a struggle to coordinate so Shifu and His Majesty would not be present, but Tianlang-jun and me had been planning for the second step of our experiment for a while, ergo, the mice.

I carefully took one out from the little cage where I had transported them. I let it sniff around, up and down my arm, and finally sit on my hand at its own leisure, even as it left behind a little gross trail of poop I flicked off my clothing. I stroked between the mouse’s ears gently with a finger and offered it a bit of bread that than been soaked with some of my blood.

Ah, I felt so bad! I really liked mice, so cute and smart, in my past life I had even kept a pet mouse when I was in middle school! 

From inside the seal, Tianlang-jun looked at me amusedly and I wondered if, to him, I was like the mouse in my palm. Next to the seal Zhuzhi-lang watched the proceedings indifferently, though a bunch of his snakes had started to congregate in the chamber. I dismissed the thought: it was a bit too late to be afraid now.

Once the mouse had eaten the bread, I whispered an apology to it and nodded to Tianlang-jun.

The mouse squeaked once, seized and died.

It worked.

Now we had to see if the mites could also be transferred to the mice if I dissolved my blood in tea, in wine, and after the blood had been cooked.

Poor things, but we needed to cover all our bases. At least most of them would survive their own tests.

I petted the little body of the mouse again and handed it to one of Zhuzhi-lang’s snakes.

Some days later I entered the studio of the Leisure House casually and closed the door behind me. Then I walked around the desk, so I was standing next to Shifu, instead of in front of him. He was making rapid calculations on an abacus, and I observed him for a moment, enjoying the clack of the beads. From my sleeve, I took a bag of deshelled salted toasted peanuts and placed it open on the desk, then I slid it across the surface until it was within reaching distance of his hand. He ate some absentmindedly but otherwise took no apparent notice of my presence: a perfect unassuming victim.

“Shifu~”, I finally said. I was ambushing him now while he was busy, so I didn’t ruin his free time later. I was considerate like that. “Xiao Xi needs to tell you something important~.”

 He looked up from his calculations, scowled at the peanuts, sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Xiao Xi, why? Why are you like this?”

“Xiao Xi doesn’t know what Shifu means,” I said, holding my hands behind my back.

“You and I both know that is a lie.”

“Xiao Xi has never told a lie in her entire life.”

He sighed again.

“You know what, I give up.” Very wise of him. “What it is?”

“His Holy Highness and I found a way to take his blood out of the barrier, and he is game to assassinate Lao Mobei using his terrible parasites. He even said he will remove them from the corpse once the deed is done.”

Shifu blinked twice.

“I was a bit worried because you tried to butter me up, but that is actually not bad, that is even good news!”

“Of course!”, I said, preening. If we got His Majesty the throne and his power up early, he would have better chances in his fight against Luo Binghe, and the possibility of becoming an ally instead of a subordinate. (And His Majesty and Shifu would be able to finally marry!)

“And how did you two manage to do that?”

“Oh, well, I drank some of his blood.”

He hunched over and covered his face with his hands, which I felt was an unmerited reaction. Then he let his hands fall to grip the edge of the desk, looked up at me with huge, round, wet eyes, and whinned: “Xiao Xi, whyyyyyy.”

“Because I love you,” I told him sincerely and to mess up with him. “And that face doesn’t work on me.”

His wretched looks disappeared instantly, and he started grumbling something about crows, eyes and rebellious teenagers that, I was sure, had nothing to do with me, because I only ever acted with his best interest in mind!

“Is Shifu done yet, or...?” He sighed again.

“I suppose it is now a bit too late to worry about you, so just tell me what do you plan to do to poison the old fart. He is paranoid as fuck, even if with good reason.”

“We are gonna pill him like a dog since the pill is already hidden in this rather excellent ham.” I patted the side of my thigh for emphasis.

Then I had to rub my forehead because Shifu threw a peanut at me.

Chapter Text

The exit shadow portal opened at a height and I fell on butt. From that I deduced that His Majesty was very mad at me.

After blinking out the lingering afterimages of the incomprehensible horrors inside the portal, I got up and dusted the seat of my skirts, then I looked around. He had dropped us in Shifu’s bedroom.

“That wasn’t really this one’s plan, honest!,” I defended myself, hugging myself and sitting on the bed. “Even if it ended up being faster this way, this one had only wanted access to his rooms so she could prick a finger with a pin and put some blood in his drink.”

“Xi’er is lucky he was only trying to rouse a reaction out of This King.” He towered over me, standing so close he was all I could see. He had only reluctantly agreed to the plan because Shifu and I had insisted, and now he was very pissed of.

“This one knows.” Lao Mobei was a hopeless horndog, but that whole affair had been a power thing directed, very much, not at me. We had been kinda counting on it: I might be very hot, but not a perless beauty like the fox lady or Qi-shishu, and baiting Lao Mobei into wanting to take something from His Majesty had seemed a lot easier because, no matter what I had said to Shifu, I was not inclined to seduce Lao Mobei.

I just didn’t think it would work so well, even if he had the precedent.

Shifu said Lao Mobei had done a similar thing to Linguang-jun and that that was why he was so awful to His Majesty: he was the son Lao Mobei had with the woman who had been Linguang-jun’s bride.

“This King hopes Xi’er is also aware that a kiss was the least he could have taken from her.”

“This one knows.”

“If he had not wanted This King to look, he could have summoned Xi’er on her own.”

“I know, I know, please don’t scold me anymore.”

He clicked his tongue, took a step back.

“Let’s go find Qinghua.”

But Shifu wasn’t home, even though it was late, so after looking for him around the house, His Majesty returned to Shifu’s bedroom. Even if I didn’t want to be alone, he was mad at me, so I just hid in my own bed to cry.

I had not bothered to tidy up before leaving for the Northen Demon Realm, so I had to move the pile of laundry from the bed to the chair before I could lay down. I would, probably (hopefully), deal with the rest of the clutter at some point.

Ah, how the turntables! Years ago I had been lowkey judging Shifu’s pile of dirty laudry, and here I was unable to put away my pile of clean clothing (please don’t ask for how long the pile had existed). But, I mean, there was only so much time in a day and if I had to prioritize (which of course I had to) I would always choose any of my other tasks —because if I failed to complete them, it could affect other people— over cleaning a room only I ever entered.

Until now.

How embarrassing.

Shifu knocked and, when I didn’t answer, he asked out loud and waited until I told him to enter. I was just not going to get up.

He walked across the room in the dark and once he reached my bed, he told me to scoot over, then he climbed in next to me.

We laid there in silence for a moment, on our sides, facing each other. Our shared blanket created a warm little cave in the space between us, and it made me feel safe and sheltered in a very childish way.

“He said Xiao Xi is mad.” That statement kind of took me by surprise, but I did some quick self-assessment and introspection, and it turned up he was right.

“A bit.”  I admitted.

I was mad at His Majesty because he was mad at me for something that had happened to me. Uh, I hope you understood that sentence. Shifu did.

“Uhm,” he hummed non-commitally. “You know he is not mad at you for that, right?”

Uh, yeah, no, he totally was. His Majesty was ““okay”” with his dad dying but, if it had to be at his hand, he would have preferred to, like, have an honest and honorable duel to the death with Lao Mobei. Instead, Shifu, myself and Tianlang-jun had pushed His Majesty to help us assassinate his dad, which he found distasteful and dishonourable, even if it was for the best for his kingdom.

For demons, fighting your parent for leadership was a respectable thing to do. Unfortunately, his awful uncle had been poisoning the opinions of the court for years, about how shameful it would be to get to the crown by defeating Lao Mobei in combat, now that he was sick.

It had been an inconveniently smart move. His Majesty’s awful uncle was not directly in line to the throne anymore, because he had to first go through His Majesty and his four elder half-brothers.  With this move he didn’t even had to fight them (nor an ascended Lord of the Northen Desert) himself, he could (and did!) pitch the brothers against each other to then just get rid of whoever was the last one standing (who had obviously been His Majesty, or I couldn’t be here telling you this), before Lao Mobei finally kicked it.

But— you may be asking —  wasn’t Lao Mobei super sick and dying? Wasn’t Linguang-jun worried Lao Mobei shuffled off this mortal coil before all those pesky kids were out off the picture?

That was the thing (and a super-duper state secret no-one outside the crown prince and the elder council was meant to know) (you may notice that Shifu, me and Linguang-jun knew anyways) (no, Shifu had not written this): he wasn’t sick-sick, he had been cursed (I didn’t know the details but the story involved the feud against Huan Hua Palace), so his own martial aspect would turn against him when he used it, like some sort of fantasy autoimmune disorder, and his health was currently suffering the effects of when he had been deliberately ignoring the reality of the curse, which he did for a very long time, until it caught up to him.

So now Lao Mobei was weaker, but still formidable, and still deteriorating, but not dying any time soon, holding the crown hostage, because he refused to abdicate and had killed everyone who suggested it. (In fact, there was a faction of the council that was all for Lao Mobei killing his detractors: it would make him die sooner— Linguang-jun was not very popular among this group.) (Also, was Lao Mobei like that because he wanted to instigate fights? Because he knew people wouldn’t fight him? Was he just naturally like that? Shifu and I had theories! And we would never know!)

So, yeah, His Majesty was not happy about assassinating his dad, but he went along with the plan anyways. (And it hurts me to admit it, but Linguang-jun’s scheming ended up working in our favor, because His Majesty, the fifth son from a concubine, was now the Crown Prince).

And then, as part of the plan, Shifu and I had asked him to tolerate further insult to his already hurting pride and dignity, by deliberately putting him in a situation (that he had been trying to avoid!) where his shitty dad would try to humiliate and/or hurt him through me, and all while confronting his complicated feelings about said shitty dad.

And that was why he was mad at me.

Still, I didn’t want to apologise for something that had happened to me (also, unfortunately for the harmony of our household, I cared for him a lot, so I could not offer him empty apologies just to make peace) and I doubted His Majesty was ready to accept he was also mad at me for plotting to kill his dad, which I could apologize for, because he was his dad, if nothing else.

After laying it down like that, I realized I was also mad at him because he was mad at me for something that I had done for him.

But it was something we had coerced him into…

Ok, no, this is just gonna keep going in circles:

We were mad at each other for reasons, and there would be no apologies either, for reasons.

Shifu understood my silence as the avoidance it was, and petted my hair, which was always nice, but right now it felt a bit condescending.

“Isn’t Xiao Xi the one always telling this master to be more honest and to communicate?”

“It is not like Shifu heeds to that advice,” I grouched, but I let myself be conforted a bit.

“If you talked with him you’ll see he is angry because he was worried.”

Who allowed Shifu to be insightful? After I reflected on that, I was still convinced that I was not wrong… but neither was Shifu. Urhg.

I changed the topic.

“Why isn’t Shifu with His Majesty?”

“He also told me to check up on you.” Wasn’t a girl allowed to be righteously mad anymore? “He didn’t tell me what happened, so, if you could? Just so I can stop imagining worse case scenarios?”

“The old man consumed the blood.”

“That’s good.”

“The court is now convinced that His Majesty is fucking me, but most of them may also be under the impression you and I are the same person?”

“We can work with that.”

“The old man groped me, and I don’t want to call it a kiss… but that’s how he drank the blood.”

“Ahhh,” he exclaimed, “are you okay?,” he asked and then winced immediately at his own question.

“His Majesty stopped him before it got too far, and it served to accomplish the mission—” and I stopped right there, because I was minimizing it. “So no, but I’ll live.”

“You should really talk to My King,” insisted Shifu after a minute. “Also, I don’t want to leave either of you alone and your bed is too narrow and I know that if I move I will fall, and if I fall I’m dragging you with me, and there is absolutely no way I’ll sleep on your floor--” (“Never, Shifu, it is dusty and there are spiders”) “— so let’s just go, you can sleep in our room tonight and not speak to him.”

I had not been planning on sleeping alone because I wanted to. I, in fact, had never liked to sleep alone. In my past life I had a history of sharing rooms and beds with family and friends, mostly by necessity, but even when I had my own bedroom, there was usually a dog (or at least a mouse doing mousy things in its enclosure) with me, so I had grown used to it. I slept terribly at the Hong State because of this. I had actually liked sleeping in a dorm, surrounded by my martial siblings, and at the Leisure House I coped by figuring out excuses so Shifu would let me sleep in his room every once in a while, or catching up on my sleep debt with naps in the studio while Shifu worked, sometimes with His Majesty.

I didn’t usually share a bed with Shifu AND His Majesty at the same time, because the reasons you probably are thinking— but it was the most perfect sleeping experience:

The room was kept very, very cold, so His Majesty could be comfortable, and Shifu and I would bundle together in a warm and soft cocoon of quilted blankets and furs, so I would sleep perfectly toasty. 10/10, would recommend.

Shifu, of course, knew this: his offer was a trap.

And I was going to step on it willingly for two reasons: 1) I was weak against the soft animal of my body and it’s creature comforts, and 2) His Majesty also didn’t like to sleep alone, and even if I was mad at him, I felt super bad imagining him all sad and alone-- and his sleep had been restless the past several nights at the Ice Fortress; he needed to sleep.

“Okay, I’ll go,” I agreed. Shifu rolled out the bed and offered me a hand; I took it and got up.

He led me by the hand, but I stopped by the door, pulling him back a little.

“Is Shifu sure His Majesty was worried?,” I asked to his back. It was easier now that he wasn’t looking at me.

Shifu sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Xiao Xi, we were both worried about you! I know why he is angry because I am too!”

“Oh.”

He turned and grabbed me by the shoulders.

“This world is not very kind to women! I know! It is my fault! Every time I discover you sent yourself on errands, I worry about you tripping into a wife-plot and some rando perving on you! Like that bastard whatshisface from Qiong Ding! Or Tianlang-jun!”

“His Holy Highness has never even made a pass at me, though.”

“But he convinced you to drink his blood!! He could do all sorts of things to you!”

“He won’t, we have a deal.”

 “But he could! That’s the sort of thing that happens in this world!”

“It has always been like that! This world! That world!” My eyes started watering. I breathed deep and then exhaled, I was getting worked up again. I took one of Shifu’s hands from my shoulder and held it between both of mine. “It is not your fault, and I never want to make you, either of you worry, but it, well, it chafes, being a kid again. I like to be spoiled, but I don’t like having to depend on your permission before making any choice, and I also want to be relied on, to take care of you and His Majesty… you have been here for longer, but was older than you, when we died. This body will be nineteen this year. I need you to let me manage myself.” 

“Then Xiao Xi needs to stop taking unnecessary risks, or, or at least to give me a heads-up, so I don’t discover second hand I had been sending you for years to deliver mail to a creep, or that you had been making secret blood pacts with the Demon Emperor. Don’t you trust me? Am I really so unreliable that my own disciple won’t come to me with her problems?”

“No, no. It’s not that! I’ll try to be more careful, I promise.”

“That’s all I ask; I don’t know how to do this alone, not anymore.”

“And I would have gone mad without Shifu,” well, more, or at least in a different direction.

“It is late,” said Shifu after a moment and let go of my hands. He had reached his limit for sentimental talk. “We need to sleep, let’s go.”

This time he offered me the crock of his arm, and we walked side to side.

Chapter Text

The bed in Shifu’s bedroom, with a canopy carved beautifully in precious hardwood and inset mother of pearl details, was huge and a piece of art disguised as furniture. It was probably the most luxurious thing in the house. His Majesty was sitting at the edge, waiting.

He was slumping forwards, bracing his elbows on his knees. He looked very, very tired and I felt bad for ditching him. He had undressed down to his inner robes and removed his jewelry, he had also brushed and braided his hair. The bed looked disturbed in a way that suggested he had attempted to sleep and given up.

“Xi’er has been crying,” was the first thing he said once he noticed Shifu and I enter the room.

 “His Majesty knows this one cries easily,” I answered, and as if on cue, my voice broke and my eyes started watering.

“Come here,” he said in response, and before I thought about it too much, I went, fell to my knees in front of him like a supplicant and clung to his shoulders, crying like the child I had just claimed I wasn’t.

His hand cradled the back of my neck. His hair smelled like Shifu’s —like my—hair oil. My glasses were probably digging uncomfortably into the side of his neck.

“I don’t want us to be angry,” I half-sobbed, half-said and, hey, I know what this looks like, but I wasn’t migajeando, our relationship was one of reciprocal spoiling and affection.(Maybe I was arrastrándome just a little bit, but that’s how I had been raised this time— feel free to picture me side-eyeing Shifu here.) His Majesty hummed in agreement.

As predicted neither of us apologized, but the matter was settled for the moment.

I looked back over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of Shifu looking rather smug; I had fallen directly into his trap.

*

“¿Shifu? ¿Ya esta dormido?,” I whispered, after shuffling closer and poking him a bit. He was sleeping the middle, as he usually did, and that night he was facing me—conveniently for midnight scheming— instead of spooning His Majesty.

“Sí, ya,” he answered, also in a whisper, and grabbed the hand I was using to poke him to stop me.

“Oh, perfecto. Estaba pensando en lo que hablamos hace rato.”

“¿Xiao Xi, y tiene que ser ahorita? Seguro te puedes esperar.”

“No, no. Es importante, quedamos en que le voy a avisar cuando vaya a hacer algo peligroso: En tres años, voy a participar en la Conferencia.”

“Xiao Xi—”

“Ya sé, ya sé, pero no quiero que mis hermanitos vayan solos, y va a ser sospechoso si no los dejamos ir y ninguno de nosotros va.”

While other Peak Lords selected the best among their disciples to compete at the Immortal Alliance Conference, An Ding, Long Sheng and Xi Jiao sent only those who volunteered to go, and Qian Cao, Zhi Ji and Zui Xian even discouraged theirs to participate.

There had been two Conferences since Shifu had ascended to his position, and An Ding had sent representatives to both. In the last one, last year, my martial siblings had not done too bad; Shifu had been encouraging us to advance our martial training in preparation for the plot.   

“Uhm, Xi’er is right.”

Shifu looked at me, I looked at Shifu. He scrambled to turn onto his other side, and I leaned over him to see.

His Majesty was sitting up, holding himself up with one elbow and rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his other hand.

“She should go,” he continued, then he noticed Shifu and I looking at him with twin expressions of shock and frowned. “What is it?”

“Su Majestad, ¿puede, uhmm, puede usted entender este idioma?,” I ventured tremulously. He tilted his head to one side, still frowning, but now in concentration.

“Sí, entender, más que hablar.” His accent was very strong, but the pronunciation good enough to suggest lots of practice.

Well, shit. He was really good at learning just by observing others, wasn’t he?

Over the years we had said a lot of things we shouldn’t have in his presence while he was ‘asleep’, like not quite System stuff, but almost.

... He knew we called him Amo Bonito in secret.

*

Shifu paced the room, occasionally yanking at his hair or burying his face in his hands, muttering to himself in Cantonese, which I could only understand with subtitles and His Majesty not at all.

He and I watched Shifu from the bed, waiting for him to sort himself. At least (I was quite sure) Shifu would find it counterproductive to exile us from his presence.

Finally, he stopped his pacing standing in front of us. I blinked up at Shifu sleepily. His Majesty was sitting behind me, criss-cross apple sauce, and I was folded under a quilt, not unlike L Deathnote, in the well his crossed legs formed. He was also using the top of my head to rest his chin, so I could feel his chest vibrate when he hummed inquiringly. Shifu pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed deeply before putting his costumer service face on, clapping his hands once and announcing in a cheerful voice: “Alright! Here is what we’re gonna do!”

He pointed at us with a finger, in a pose like a character from those attorney games. The room wasn’t that large, so his hand was very close to my face and it made me go cross-eyed. For a second, I thought about biting his finger, and that was when I realized Shifu had been right: we needed to sleep. I tried to suppress a yawn.

“My King!,” said Shifu. “To avoid misunderstandings due to mistranslations, please tell your servants what is it that you know.”

His Majesty hummed again, now meditatively, and turned his head to the side, so now it was his cheek resting on top of my head. He put his arms around me, so I had to straighten my legs to make room, and now they were out of my quilt cape and cold.

“No,” he said after a moment.

“My king! This is—”

“In the morning,” he declared and let himself fall to lay on his back.

Since he was holding me, he dragged me along with him, also making me fall, and it is very stupid, considering we were sitting on a bed, but falling backwards was a sure way to make me scream in honest, true terror, as if I were, you know, dying.

Because of this, His Majesty was usually very mindful about how he manhandled me, and I wouldn’t hold this accident against him because it wasn’t a reaction I had expected myself to have (we were sitting on a bed!), and he had been distracted.

For one second our intentions aligned perfectly: to get me upright again.

Unfortunately, it didn’t extend beyond that, and while His Majesty tried to help me sit up, my instinct was to get on my feet and away, and in my scramble, I kicked him in the groin.

For his part, Shifu reacted with a cultivator’s reflexes and tried to reach the bed, this coincided exactly with the moment I tried to jump from it, so I headbutted him in the nose.

After that I proceeded to get my legs tanged in the quilt and fell to the ground flat on my face.

[HP: 2907.501/3008.996]

[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Important things must be said three times! User has received the Achievement: Pratfall lv.3]

The Activate Story Mode window blinked for a second and closed on its own, as if the System had thought better of it.

*

In order to compose ourselves and nurse our wounded dignities (and our bruises), we moved to the studio (the cushions around the low table were way more comfortable than the kitchen chairs) to get some (medicinal) tea. Somehow, unconsciously, Shifu and I had ended up sitting on one side of the table, and His Majesty on the opposite one.

Since the three of us were very awake now, His Majesty did end up explaining what he had learned from overhearing the conversations between Shifu and me.

“Qinghua is an oracle.”

Shifu put a hand over my mouth one second before the System flashed a warning.

[WARNING! User002’s actions will interfere with User001’s main mission.]

I almost corrected him and over-explained by reflex, good thing Shifu knew me so well.

“You are not allowed to tell,” said His Majesty. Shifu and I shook our heads. “This King understands.”

Shifu and I looked at each other for a moment. He uncovered my mouth and moved his hand to rest on my shoulder, then he tapped it with his pointer finger three times, which was our signal for yes. I understood it to mean he wanted me to say something—the System would sometimes let us get away with things if I was the one to do them— and the overcautious method of delivery as instructions to be circumspect. I mentally composed a reply that would not trigger another System warning.

“We,” I started cautiously, “we were born with some knowledge about fate —me a lot less than Shifu—but in exchange, we are bound to it.”  

“Xi’er less so than Qinghua.” I nodded in agreement.

His Majesty frowned and turned his head, looking away from us, seemly thinking over my answer. Shifu and I shared a worried look.

Finally, His Majesty looked back again at us, at me, without turning, just by the corner of his eye—suddenly it struck me as a very defensive posture.

“This King would have never stopped hurting Qinghua.” Next to me, Shifu was very, very quiet.

“This one cannot answer,” I whispered.

His Majesty closed his eyes and swallowed once. “This King understands.”

In that moment, he looked defeated, but before I could figure out a way to reassure him, he beat me to the punch.

He straightened in his seat, facing us again. “And he trusts Qinghua and Xi’er.”

Shifu took one sharp breath and grabbed my hand under the table. I turned to look at him, but his and His Majesty’s gazes were locked on each other, as if the rest of the world had banished around them. Shifu’s eyes were shiny and for once I didn’t think it was on purpose.

“Th-thank you, My king, we will not disappoint you,” stammered Shifu.

“Qinghua, tell This King what do you want him to do.”

Woof. That was a critical hit! Shifu was no more! Annihilated! Vaporized! He gapped at His Majesty, blushing from the tips of his ears to deep down under his neckline. I fanned with my hands to get him some fresh air.  

“The most important thing right now,” said Shifu in a strangled voice, once he regained higher mental functions, “is to get My King crowned, preferably before the conference.”

*

Since we weren’t amateurs, Tianlang-jun waited a bit before making his parasites kill Lao Mobei from renal failure, so his death wasn’t so suspiciously close to our visit.

Even if Lao Mobei had been—like that, I would personally have preferred for him to die quickly and all at once, but I understood the necessity of making it look natural, and it had the additional benefit of giving His Majesty an excuse to come and go from Lao Mobei’s rooms and secure the space for the Ascension Ceremony; if anyone asked he was just fulfilling his filial duty to tend to his ill father.  

Said ceremony would last seven days, during which His Majesty would be rendered helpless as he ate his dad (just the heart!) (Yeah! I know that doesn’t make it sound better!) and absorbed his ancestor’s cumulative powers.

In PIDW he would had been guarded by Luo Binghe, so his awful uncle wouldn’t murder him, but since Xiao He was still 14 and human, and Tianlang-jun was still under the mountain, we would be relying on Shifu’s modified version of Huan Hua’s maze arrays to keep Linguang-jun bussy.  

We had total faith in Shifu’s work, but despite their reassurances that all would be fine, I wasn’t allowed to go with them.

Instead of wondering if they would end up breaking their promise to come back, I went to work like normal.

Fu-shixiong was in charge in Shifu’s absence, but he had his own office in the central administrative building, since I was Shifu’s personal assistant and secretary, my desk was in the antechamber of his office. It was a bit lonely without Shifu there, but A-Shi had said she would be free at noon, so she could join me for lunch.  

I was in the middle of summarizing sales reports for Fu-shixiong, when I was startled by a sweet, dear voice.

“Shije! Good morning!,” said Ying’er from the doorway. It was hard not to smile at her, even if she had entered without knocking. “I have mail for Shang-shishu!”

“Ning-shimei! You need to knock!,” I scolded her without real heat behind, and accepted the four little bundles of bamboo sticks she carried with her. I recognized the handwriting on them as A-Ming’s, none was marked as urgent. Belatedly, she also handed me a little booklet I signed with a stamp and the date as a receipt for the delivery—oh, how I wished for photocopies and their unambiguity. “I’m surprised Shibo allowed you to do deliveries! Do you need to go back quickly, or do you have time for tea?”

I had never thought I’ll see the day! But Shibo had an even harder time saying no to her than me, and she would be turning 14 in some months, so I supposed that he finally realized he needed to loosen her tether a bit.  

Ying’er nodded enthusiastically at the offer and sat down on the couch at the waiting area. I prepared some of the tea we kept for guests and plated some of my personal stash of snacks.  

“So,” I started once I joined her at the couch, “how are you doing? How are—things?”

“Good!,” she said taking a sip of her tea. “Shizun’s health gave us a scare— ah, Shijie, don’t worry! He is doing better now!,” she was quickly to assure, but she fell silent for a second and bit her lip. “Maybe you should go visit him sometime, anyways.”

“Maybe,” I answered neutrally, and took a bite of pork jerky so I didn’t have to elaborate. It was the spicy one Shifu made for me, if it had been the extra sweet one he made for His Majesty, I would have packed some for Shibo; they had the same sweet tooth.

Ying’er nodded with her mouth twisted in a petulant pout, understanding my answer as the refusal it was, and not very happy about it.

 A bell on the incense clock fell down, announcing wu hour.

“It is time for lunch, would Ning-shimei like to join me? I could introduce you to Shi-shimei.”

“Thanking Shijie for the offer,” she said, placing her teacup down, “but I must return now.”

Ying’er stood up from her seat and saluted, leaving before I even had time to say good-bye.

She lightly closed the door at her back.  

Chapter Text

The moment Shifu crossed the Leisure House’s front door, I was already frisking him for hidden injuries and asking questions.

He had returned from the Northen Demon Realm alone and days overdue, and to make matters worse, when he landed, he hadn’t even stepped off his sword, and he was already being summoned to Qiong Ding for an emergency meeting I wasn’t allowed to listen in.

As you may imagine, by that point I was beside myself with worry.

“Are you okay? Is he okay? Did it work?”

“It’s fine—wait! Hey! Calm down, I’m—Xiao Xi! I am fine! See! It’s fine!” He held me by the upper arms and shook me a bit. “It worked. I just sat there for a week and that part sucked, but I’m okay and My King is also okay, but he has things to do.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I am glad. Oh, I’m so glad.” Cue to the waterworks. Shifu just sighed and rubbed my back.

“Aiya, this disciple of mine! What am I meant to do with you? Let’s go sit down, alright?”, he said and guided me to the studio. He sat us down on the daybed and made me drink a cup of warm water.

“I’m sorry,” I said, scrubbing at my eyes. “I hate this, but I can’t help it, I truly can’t.” At least not ever since I caused Shen-shibo to qi-deviate. Before then, I had been more or less able to hide it from Shifu, if nothing else.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just a shame you can do it on command, uhm?”

I snorted, wetly. “If only.”

We let silence settle around us while I composed myself and drank my water, and he seemed to be arranging his thoughts about something. He had an arm wrapped around me, so I rested my head on his shoulder. I could smell he had been smoking.

The silence extended for too long, it was starting to make me nervous again.

“What is it?,” I ended up asking when I didn’t had more water to drink and distract myself. I was facing ahead, not looking at him, but I could feel when Shifu winced. “Oh, that bad?”

 “Not really? I’m just trying to figure out a way to tell you without alarming you.”

“Ah, well: that’s alarming, Shifu.”

“Yeah, I know. But it is not that bad, really. It’s just that it is about Shen-shixioing, and…”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“Is he okay?”

“He is not in any danger? I mean, no more than usual? Apparently, he had a qi deviation—”

“Oh, Ying’er told me he had been sick”, I interrupted.

“Uh-huh, a bit back, we were busy with— you know. And he had apparently recovered without issue. He was well enough to take his disciples on a night hunt, at least, but, well, the meeting was to inform everyone that he, apparently, has lost some memories.”

“How much?”

Shifu winced again. “He is polite to Yue-shixiong.”

I pulled off from Shifu’s side, absentmindedly placed my empty cup on the ground and turned a bit on my seat so I could see him. He also turned so we were face to face.

“And,” I said, shallowing. “And are you sure he is not…”

 He shook his head.

“I don’t think so? If he is, his System is allowing him to act out of character! And well, both you and I transmigrated as babies, before the plot. I was fourteen when you were born, but you died only nine years after me, so time is not a concern to it— why would the System have him transmigrate as an adult, in mid rex or whatever?”

From my point of view I had transmigrated all at once as a four years old because I didn’t remember anything before that and I had to learn the language from zero, but Shifu had the theory we had both done so at birth. He, after all, couldn’t remember anything before he was about three, and while he had always had some faint memories of our original world, his System had not activated until he was five, at which point he was “hit all at once with all [his] memories from [his] previous life”, which in turn made him loose consciousness for 3 days. To make matters more confusing, Shifu had older brothers who told him he had always been “weird” and “very creepy”, that “he had learned to speak too soon” and that once he had learned to speak, he would regularly say things about “stuff he shouldn’t know”, which could have been just his brothers being mean, but who knows.

 In my case, from what I could learn by having A-Tian ask around, OG Xidan—or baby me, perhaps— had always been very quiet and had never spoken much, and well, nobody ever paid much attention to her anyways, so there was no way to tell if I had been like Shifu, but four-ish was usually the age when people started to form memories and before that there was the so called ‘childhood amnesia’, so in the end, Shifu’s theory tracked? Maybe???

“What if he is like us, and transmigrated as a kid, but he just became able to act out of character?”

“Shen-shixioing and I are not too apart in age, but if what you say is true, he would be User One, me Two and you Three.” He shrugged. “I also wrote a bunch of amnesia plots, so it isn’t that strange, or at least Shen-shixiong losing some memories after a qi deviation sounds a lot more plausible than he being suddenly replaced by a transmigrator.”

“Alright,” I agreed, because I really didn’t want to think too much about it. “I— I should go see him myself. Ying’er asked me to, but I was—am, still mad at him, so I didn’t.” I should also apologise to her, for not listening.

“—I need to leave in the morning; will you be alright?”

“Again? You just arrived.”

“It can be helped, we have been neglecting some of our business.”

“You should let Jinkui manage some of them, she has a good head for business.”

“Aren’t she and the girls already a bit too busy with the printing press and the mill and all?”

“I still have hope that if they are busy enough, they’ll calm down,” I explained. Then, realising I was avoiding the issue, I answered Shifu’s original question. “But I’ll be fine, really. You don’t need to worry about me. I understand why you need to go personally; I would just have preferred if you had time to rest for a bit before.”

“Urgh! You and me both! I really, really, REALLY don’t wanna goooo”, he groaned and kicked his legs, in an abbreviated, little tantrum, before flopping dramatically to one side, to lay his head on my lap. He sighed, soul deep: “I’m so tired Xiao Xi”.

“You should try to take a nap, at least. I’ll take care of dinner.”

“There is stuff I should do before leaving,” he argued, gesturing vaguely to his overflowing desk.

“Fu-shixiong and me can handle it, and it’s not like one night of work would make much difference, anyway. Sleep,” I ordered, because he was very much unable to rest for his own sake and always needed some convincing.

 “Maybe just for a bit,” he mumbled, more than said, and closed his eyes. Within two breaths, he was fast asleep.

I unmade his topknot and made my best effort to untangle his hair with just my fingers. He had tied it up with a simple ribbon without brushing it first. I had long since made my peace with the fact that Shifu would sometimes look like his own scruffy disciple not old enough for his guan ceremony, but it must have made Qi-shishu splitting mad.

The ribbon was blue, of course, but it was in the shade I called ‘plausible deniability blue’: any color similar but ultimately too purple, or too light, or too teal, to be true Northen Desert blue. We used it mixed in with the accessories that did come from His Majesty.

It was just a little precaution to take in public now that we approached the Immortal Alliance Conference we would be sabotaging.

At first, Shifu didn’t see much use to it when I proposed this idea, saying that “any antagonist would be too low IQ to notice,” but then I pointed out that we were this arc’s antagonists, and he shut up and agreed to do it.

Once his hair was tangle free and loosely braided, I allowed myself the indulgence of massaging his scalp, his temples and the tense skin around his eyes. He rarely allowed me to touch him with such affection—oh, he hugged me and let me be close, yes, when I needed it, but otherwise he tried to avoid it.

For all that Shifu was such a high maintenance person, he didn’t let himself be cared for as much as he deserved, but at least then, there, in that moment, he sighed and snuggled down, comfortable.

He was difficult, infuriating at times, but he was trying so hard, even when he didn’t even notice how loved he was, how important he was, and I felt a deep, all-encompassing tenderness that had me curling up over him, cradling him, as if I could shelter him with my body from the unfairness of his circumstances—from the demands of his work, yeah, but also from his childhood (here and before), the limitations imposed by the System and from having to live through a novel he wrote (which was, in my opinion, a particularly unfair, cruel and hellish thing to do to someone).

With great effort and reluctance, and not without tripping with the cup I had left laying down, I managed to replace my lap with a cushion and left to get our dinner ready.

*

Shifu looked down at the gently steaming bowl I placed in front of him and raised his eyebrows. “Dessert for dinner?”

I smiled, sheepish, and shrugged.

“I thought Shifu would need something to warm up after being in the North for so long.” I took a spoonful of sweet black sesame soup and blew at it before eating it; not to brag, but it was very good. Then I continued, “and I believed you’ll come back together with His Majesty, so it had to be something the three of us would enjoy.” I pouted… the soup was so good because I had had practice. “It is a bit labour intensive to make in a short notice, and I wanted to have it ready when you arrived, so I have been making it for the last three days.”

He had the gall to laugh at me.  

“Xiao Xi, don’t tell me you have been eating tangyuan by yourself all this time! That’s so sad! Haha,” he said while fishing one of the little white balls from his soup. I would have liked to make him noodles, but that was a bit beyond my abilities, so dumplings it was.   

“Well, yeah, it would be wastedful otherwise.”

“It was a pun Xiao Xi, uh, tangyuan sounds a bit like ‘reunion’ so…”

“Ah, I see!,” then I thought about it and protested: “Shifu that was mean! I just wanted to do something nice for you! See if I bother again!”

Nowadays I was very fluent, but sometimes stuff like that still escaped me, the same as I didn’t get most literary references or famous quotes Shifu liked to use, or I built sentences with bizarre syntax. It had gained me some weird looks over the years, like when I was little and started calling His Majesty, well, His Majesty (or actually ‘bixia’) which wasn’t really the correct form of address for his rank. Eventually I figured it out, but the man in question not only found my mistake it cute, but also has a huge ego, so I kept calling him that.

“Aiya! How unfilial! It is my right as your master to laugh at you!” He pointed at me with the spoon, and I mopped up the drops of soup that spilled on the table with a napkin. “What’s the point to have disciples if you can't even make fun at them? Uh?”

“That’s it! I’ll give the rest to Shen-shibo tomorrow! He won’t praise me for all my hard work, but he won’t mock me, either!”

 *

I didn’t get to see Shibo. When I arrived to Qing Jing Peak, I was informed he had gone into seclusion at the Ling Xi Caves.