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Chapter Text

He should have known from the tea. 

All of the tea Shen Qingqiu had tasted his entire time as … well, Shen Qingqiu, had been bitter, sharp, tasteless, or spicy, or any number of combinations of strange flavors. He hadn’t favored a single one of them, especially not the ones put in proud display in his bamboo house or served at peak lord meetings. 

Though they were certainly what he had been expecting to find when it came down to the tastes of a distinguished immortal cultivator. The image he knew the original Shen Qingqiu was obsessed with portraying. 

It was more difficult in the beginning, to hide the grimace at the taste, and he’d used his fan often just to make sure no one would see. Acting out of character was a certain death sentence for multiple reasons, even ignoring the system that hung above his head like a chopping block. 

But as time went on he found it easier and easier to mimic Shen Qingqiu’s mannerisms. Keeping his fan held aloft, covering any expression that wasn’t aloof, making sure that any sign of weakness or confusion was impossible to perceive. 

If he was an actor back home surely he’d have won an Oscar for a performance like this. 

He’d treated it as a challenge almost. A survival situation was not the time to be worrying about comfort or catering to his tastes. Maybe once he figured out what to do with Luo Binghe and everything else he could try and start to make some subtle changes– lower his standards a bit.

“Would Qingqiu Shidi like some tea?” Yue Qingyuan leaned slightly closer, his warmth just out of reach. 

Shen Qingqiu felt himself stiffen, his back ramrod straight and sent a small glare towards the Sect Leader. He just smiled that same soft serene smile and leaned back, taking the tea pot and pouring them both a cup. 

It was warm, just barely steaming and while he grimaced at the thought of trying a new, horrid flavor of overly pretentious tea, holding it in his hands helped to keep the chill of the autumn air away. 

He sipped at it, appropriately, and couldn’t stop his eyes from widening at the taste. 

Sweet. Sweet and softly floral with just a hint of citrus to offset. It was the most delicious thing he’d tasted since arriving in this world and he snuck a glance up at Yue Qingyuan only to see his smile had turned doting. It made guilt crawl like a roach up the back of his throat. 

Quickly, embarrassed by his own reaction, he set the tea cup back down. 

Yue Qingyuan frowned. 

“Shidi,” he said, sighing. “It’s okay to indulge. We’re Peak Lords now, and between the two of us there’s no reason to keep up an image.”

Shen Qingqiu disagreed. If anything, it was most important for him to keep up an image in front of Yue Qingyuan. He, of anyone in this Sect, was the most likely to raze the world to the ground attempting to find the Original Good’s soul. 

He kept himself hidden behind his fan even as Yue Qingyuan sighed again. “At least allow me to send a blend to your Peak, Qingqiu Shidi. I know this is your favorite.”

Was it? That was… surprising. Based on what he found in the bamboo house, he’d assumed the original goods had kinda shit tastes or something. To think he actually had a sweet tooth to rival his own…

Nodding, Shen Qingqiu gave in and finished his cup. Yue Qingyuan beamed and he thought it might not be so bad to try and adjust a little early here. Luo Binghe was still years away from the Abyss and it wouldn’t hurt to at least have some tea he enjoyed between obligatory drinks used to keep up his image.

It wasn’t like someone would ransack through his home. 

“Zhangman Shixiong has been patient with this one,” he said after the cup was finished and Yue Qingyuan had started to pour him another. 

He startled, looking up at Shen Qingqiu with surprise before he collected himself. Sitting back and folding his arms in his lap. “It is Qingqiu Shidi that has been patient, it cannot be easy to relearn from the beginning what took decades to master.”

Shen Qingqiu almost shrugged, he hadn’t actually been having much difficulty at all. His cultivation was mostly stable, with the few foundational issues this body had built it on, and most of his martial prowess had been easily ingrained into his muscle memory. 

Since most of it was petty tricks and using spiritual cultivation to his advantage it was actually ideally suited towards Shen Qingqiu’s own proclivities. He’d never been a fan of brute force–as evident by his undying frustration towards Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky whenever that was the solution to Luo Binghe’s problems. 

It was easier to use his brain, calculate a solution that way. Thinking and analyzing was always what he was best at, locked away at home. It was refreshing to be able to use that freely and to his advantage. He didn’t even get marked off points for it being out of character! 

…Unless he was using it to help Luo Binghe. He remembered the point deductions for the leaves and took another sip of the tea to wash away the bitterness. How was he meant to survive if he couldn’t change the protagonist’s mind about him?

Luo Binghe was vindictive and vengeful once his demonic heritage was unsealed– there had to be a way to endear him to Shen Qingqiu so that when he took revenge on everyone that wronged him Shen Qingqiu might survive. 

And maybe, if he was lucky, Cang Qiong Sect too.

No, he shook his head. It wouldn’t survive the merging of the realms. His bamboo house that he was just settling into, the natural beauty and pleasant atmosphere, was doomed to be merged with the endless hell that was the Abyss. 

Yue Qingyuan chuckled and Shen Qingqiu looked up, schooling his expression once more. “What?” 

“Nothing Qingqiu Shidi, I was just wondering what had you scheming like that.”

Scheming? Bah! This Master wasn’t scheming! He’s only trying to find out how to survive this doomed narrative of his!

<Host> the system chirped, <The definition of Scheming is: given to or involved in making secret and underhand plans.>

Exactly, Shen Qingqiu nodded. Trying to survive is hardly scheming, he wasn’t like the Original Goods. 

<...>

“I’m planning on an excursion with my students,” he said, ignoring the way Yue Qingyuan’s eyes widened in concern. “We were meant to go down the mountain to the Gu Village, I know the poison caused us to postpone. I think it will be detrimental to continue to do so.”

The village would probably run out of children by the time Yue Qingyuan cleared him to go with the way he’d been hovering. He’d visited Qing Jing peak every day just about, and it was getting difficult for Shen Qingqiu to try and keep up his impersonation. 

Especially since he had to find the balance between acting like the aloof immortal he was and endearing himself to the people most able to protect him.

There was something tight in the Sect Leader’s gaze that Shen Qingqiu wasn’t entirely familiar with. As long as he’d been in this body Yue Qingyuan had shown him many expressions, affection, guilt, worry… okay it was mostly only those three expressions. 

“What are you thinking about?” Shen Qingqiu chanced a question of his own. 

“... Will you be taking Luo Binghe?” he asked and Shen Qinqiu’s brow lifted in surprise. 

It wasn’t like him to bother about Shen Qingqiu’s disciples. At least, not since he’d stopped using physical punishments entirely. Why did he care about Luo Binghe?

“Perhaps,” Shen Qingqiu studied Yue Qingyuan over his fan. The Sect Leader had been getting slightly bolder the more time they spent together without Shen Qingqiu snapping at him. 

At least, he assumed that was how the Original Goods acted. He couldn’t remember a single passage in the book where they were able to speak more than six sentences to each other. 

“I was wondering, Qingqiu Shidi… He…” Yue Qingyuan set down his cup and avoided Shen Qinqiu’s assessing gaze. “He’s a physical cultivator–”

“I am aware.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“...”

“Shidi, why did you bring him to your peak? Qing Jing is meant for spiritual cultivators–”

“I simply didn’t want Liu Qingge to have him,” Shen Qingqiu lied. Well, it was probably not a lie to the Original Goods. But it was hardly believable to say here and now, in this context. “And I wanted to know if I could tame a brute.”

Yue Qingyuan actually looked like he relaxed at those sharp words. A strange reaction that had Shen Qingqiu wonder what exactly it was he had been worried about.

“Was Shidi successful?”

“Apparently not,” Shen Qinqiu answered with a lazy flick of his fan. Other than cooking Binghe was not particularly adept at any of the skills required as a scholar of Qing Jing peak. He was barely passable at the Qin, had handwriting fit for the medical peak, and constantly blundered ahead at weiqi. 

It was a wonder the original goods had let him stay on the peak at all to do chores and attempt to cultivate instead of tossing him out entirely. Honestly if he had neither of them would be in this mess.

“Then why don’t you give him to Liu Shidi?” 

Shen Qingqiu froze. 

He expected blaring sirens and warning signs from his System, but it stayed silent despite the possibility of a major plot deviation. Was that even possible? No. It would definitely react if Shen Qingqiu agreed– it wasn’t like he had any control over Yue Qingyuan. 

“I refuse.”

“Qingqiu Shidi–”

“He’s my student–”

“You let him live in your house–”

“Would you rather I have Ning Yingying act as a personal servant?”

Yue Qingyuan’s eyes were dark and the smile on his face was sharp, brittle. 

“Shidi knows what is and is not within the bounds of proprietary.”

“Good. I think we’re finished with our tea then, Zhangman Shixiong. If you don’t mind, I have other work to finish.”

It took a moment of glaring but eventually Yue Qingyuan sighed, and stood to go. He didn’t bother to look back and left the tea behind. Well enough, it wasn’t the tea’s fault the room had gotten so cold. 

He let his head thunk onto the wood of the table. How was that? He asked the System.

<Very cool! Super in character!>

… of course. 

Chapter Text

Yue Qingyuan sent Liu Qingge with them. 

Which was actually pretty insulting considering this was a pretty mundane run of the mill training for his disciples and sending two peak lords was basically screaming to anyone who cared to look that either something was wrong with Shen Qingqiu (there was) or that there was a bigger issue here than met the eye (there wasn’t.)

Yue Qingyuan had been incapable of listening to reason though, making Shen Qingqiu empathize with the original goods for the first time. The man was impossible to deal with.

“What are we doing now?” Liu Qingge asked, arms crossed as they walked into the town. 

Shen Qingqiu forced himself not to roll his eyes—the good will he’d been trying to build with Liu Qingge was too hard won to ruin it now. “We aren’t doing anything, Liu-Shidi. This is a learning trip for the disciples.”

“Why are you here then? Couldn’t they have come themselves?”

He was pretty sure his fan wasn’t covering the way his face twisted at Liu Qingge’s suggestion. Excuse me Liu-Shidi?? Did you just tell me to let my little buns run around trying to fight a potential murderous psychopath on their own?? 

Quickly, Shen Qingqiu schooled his features back into forced placidity. 

“This Master is here for the sake of his students.”

Liu Qingge looked at him strangely for a moment before looking away. “What’s the big deal? They just have to be stronger than the monster right?” he muttered.

Perhaps his Shidi could also use a lesson in a few matters, Shen Qingqiu mused to himself as the children gathered around him. 

“There is no monster, Shidi.” Liu Qingge’s face scrunched and Shen Qingqiu had to bite his bottom lip behind his fan to hold back a chuckle. For a man with as objectively a pretty face as him, he certainly didn’t know what to do with it. “That’s part of the lesson.”

He didn’t look mollified and Shen Qingqiu returned his attention to the students he’d brought along. 

In the end, he hadn’t brought Luo Binghe. It wasn’t a mission he’d gone on originally as it was for more advanced students and Shen Qingqiu wanted to try and give the other children the chance to grow and improve before Luo Binghe became…

His fingers twitched against the carved wood of his fan. Even if Shen Qingqiu was the main target of the original Binghe’s ire, he wanted to at least try and give some of the students better tools for figuring out their situations before it even came to a fight. Not that Luo Binghe’s slaughter of them could really be described as a fight.

Maybe next he could teach them undercover tactics. How to hide and stay hidden. It wouldn’t help much if Binghe went out of his way to hunt them down, but he probably wouldn’t bother with hunting each of them down individually and it would at least buy them time even if he did.

Then again, Shen Qingqiu closed his fan and tapped it against the corner of his lip, that’s entirely dependent on the protagonist more than anything. That’s the curse of shitty novels like this, even if Binghe goes through literal hell he always succeeds in the end. 

At least without him here Shen Qingqiu didn’t have to worry about the plot. He could just relax and do exactly what he came here to do.

Watch his students learn that the worst monsters in the world were just under their noses.

He looked out among the young faces. “Your job is to investigate the missing children without tipping off the perpetrator. Work together. Once you’ve discovered who is behind this, come to me with your plan to confront them. Now disperse.”

They chorused. “Yes Shizun!” and disappeared into groups of two to three in different directions. 

Shen Qingqiu smiled just a bit behind his fan. These particular students had lots of practice at the Peak and were very good at written theory, but they were still children and needed all the real world experience they could get before they left to find their own way. 

<Very good! Shizun points!> the system chirped. 

His smile grew strained. Luo Binghe wasn’t even here and yet he was still playing the part as best he could. It was a bit frustrating, but he soothed himself with the fact that spoiling the students would end up worse for them in the long run. 

And he’d grown very sick of all the possession tests from his fellow peak lords every time they caught him so much as smiling. No wonder the Original Goods kept his expression hidden, his Martial Siblings were gossip hounds.

Well, except Liu Qingge. He gave the impression that outside of battle he had no idea what was going on. It was as endearing as it was irritating, how far from the pulse of information he was. And it was only endearing because it allowed him to keep his current opinion of Shen Qingqiu.

Since everyone else was convinced his current behavior was part of some scheme. 

“You said there’s no monster,” Liu Qingge said once the last disciple disappeared from view. “So why send them off searching for one?”

Shen Qingqiu smirked, fanning himself lazily. “I didn’t. I sent them after the perpetrator. If they assume it’s a monster, that's their failing.”

Liu Qingge shot a look at him before huffing and going back to staring out at the town. Probably looking for threats, or a fight. It was obvious the lack of monsters was a disappointment to him. No doubt Yue Qingyuan had talked up the importance of this detail. Liu Qingge must have thought that he’d be in grave danger, or the thick of some kind of mess only the strongest of their Martial Brothers could dig him out of.

Boo to them both.

Shen Qingqiu had been very clear about how boring of a trip this was meant to be. 

If Liu Qingge was bored he could leave. 

One Peak Lord was more than enough, even if he was in recovery.

When the sun began to set and it was clear none of the disciples had found anything worthwhile, he led Liu Qingge to the nearest pavilion to get a room. 

“If you have something to say,” Shen Qingqiu glanced back at Liu Qingge who looked uncomfortable, “Now is the time to say it.”

“I don’t—” Liu Qingge began before Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow. He deflated slightly and grossed his arms, scowling. “I just don’t understand why you never go to a normal hotel, or…”

“Camp? Out in the woods?” Shen Qingqiu finished for him. Even the thought made him feel gross, the idea of sleeping outside in the woods. Did Liu Qingge have no idea how much effort went into keeping his hair this nice? Did he think everyone just woke up looking like a perfect immortal cultivator? It took effort that Shen Qingqiu did not want to waste unless absolutely necessary.

He already missed much of the modern conveniences he’d lost when he woke up here, why would he willingly give up what few he had left?

Liu Qingge just grunted.

Shen Qingqiu turned away from him and walked deeper into the pavilion and towards the rooms he’d rented for them. “Because there’s no better place to learn.” 

He had to stop himself from a mocking smile at Liu Qingge’s expense when the man made an even more confused expression. But he’d see soon.

It wasn’t only his disciples that could learn from this trip.

When both he and Liu Qingge were settled and one of the women brought in tea and treats for them to enjoy Shen Qingqiu asked her to stay and grant them some company. Liu Qingge looked like he was about to explode in outrage at the suggestion, but Shen Qingqiu ignored him in favor of the woman’s much better reaction.

A sly smile she tried to hide by demuring.

“I graciously accept Immortal Master,” she said, her voice soft and flowery, “It is an honor for this one to even be asked.” 

Shen Qingqiu smiled and brought a cup of the tea she brewed to his lips. Not bad, but the tea Yue Qingyuan gifted him was better by far. Still, he continued to drink it with no change in his expression. 

Thankfully, despite the growing red of his face, Liu Qingge had yet to have one of his outbursts. With any luck, Shen Qingqiu would be able to get everything he needs in time for the poor man to realize why he had made his “scandalous request.” 

Once his tea was finished, he set it down and began his interrogation. 

Chapter Text

By the time he retired for the evening, Shen Qingqiu had not only made a new contact, he’d gotten a clear understanding of the political and economic reality of the town they were in, its relationships to the towns nearby, and around four genuine suspects for the missing children.

None of his students had approached him and he hadn’t seen them come to the pavilion either. It made sense on its surface, many of the kids were from wealthy families and would overlook something as obvious and useful as asking the courtesans. It was the same reason his Shidi was currently bright red.

“Do keep up Liu Shidi.” Shen Qingqiu hid a smile behind his fan. He didn’t want Liu Qingge to think he was being mocked.

Liu Qingge followed, grumbling under his breath. “You could have mentioned you went there for information instead of entertainment.”

“Why? When I so easily achieved both?” Shen Qingqiu fanned himself slowly, looking around the market square. There were at least two groups of his students using techniques he taught them to track demonic energy. They wouldn’t get far that way, they needed to start with questions not showy techniques. 

He frowned as Ming Fan and Ning Ying Ying ignored a shopkeeper trying to subtly get their attention to focus on why their spell wasn’t working. 

Another shopkeeper did notice though, and grabbed the first one’s arm harshly, shaking his head. There ended that lead, at least for any of the children.

Trying not to sigh, he gestured to Liu Qingge that he would be leaving the area. Someone probably went into the nearby woods, looking for monster tracks or an actual monster, and Shen Qingqiu wanted to know who so he could refocus their training and threaten to send them to Bai Zhan if they want to hunt monsters instead of using their head.

It would, at the bare minimum, make him feel less guilty if he wasn’t responsible for them when they got themselves killed. 

Liu Qingge followed him instead of staying in town—which is what he should have been doing—and Shen Qingqiu fought to keep a serene face instead of rolling his eyes. Did he not see how safe it was here? There’s no monsters! He already said there was no monster! Did Liu Qingge think he was lying just to get out of being babysat?

Shen Qingqiu loved being safe and protected. Why would he lie about that? 

He simply didn’t need Liu Qingge following him around right now!

This was all Yue Qingyuan’s fault. Obviously. 

Shen Qingqiu started brainstorming ways to try and subtly get back at the bastard even as he kept an eye out for any wayward students. 

“You said there wasn’t a monster,” Liu Qingge said. “So why are we in the woods?”

“You could have stayed in town and watched the students.” 

“I was sent to watch over you, not them.” 

He could feel his teeth grind. Liu Qingge was a reliable Shidi that had a very strong cultivation and could be trusted in a fight, Shen Qingqiu reminded himself. 

“Liu Shidi, I am still an Immortal Master. My students are still much, much, more likely to get hurt or in trouble.” 

Liu Qingge shrugged. “So?”

There was a shout and Shen Qingqiu followed it to find a young child running in the woods and making a mess. 

The child, upon seeing him, changed direction and threw himself towards Shen Qingqiu. 

Two other, older, familiar children were not far behind. Yelling. 

“Come back! We just want to ask you to—”

They froze upon seeing their teacher and Shen Qingqiu didn’t have to fake his look of disappointment before both of them fell into respectful bows. 

“Shizun–”

“We just—”

The two of them stumbled over each other as they tried to explain. 

Shen Qingqiu pet the frightened boy on the head as his tiny hands gripped onto his robes as tightly as they could. “One at a time.”

The taller of the two stood out of his bow and began trying to explain. “Shizun! We just thought that it would be easier to lure the monster if we had a potential victim that fit the criteria. We would have kept him safe!”

He waved his fan as the boy gripped tighter to his robes. “And you were in the woods, why?”

This time it was the other boy who answered. “Th– That’s the most likely place for a monster to hide without being found…”

Liu Qingge shrugged next to him, likely agreeing, and Shen Qingqiu felt a headache building just behind his temples. 

“Return to town, both of you. You are to split up and join separate groups and help in whatever way they ask without sharing any of your own ideas.”

“What? Why? Shizun?!” 

He slammed his fan shut. “Be lucky I don’t send you to Bai Zhan if you’re going to think like one of them. The only reason you both aren’t getting demerits is because you might have succeeded with your plan had you not been foolish enough to hide in the woods and choose an unwilling scapegoat.”

The two of them both shrunk away.

“Now go.”

They fled towards town and Shen Qingqiu was left with a clearly frightened child still burrowing into his clothes and a quiet Liu Qingge. 

“They wouldn’t last a day on Bai Zhan.”

“What?” Shen Qingqiu asked, as he knelt to try and gently pry the child off of him. He was ruining the silk and there was no longer any reason for him to be so scared. 

“Those two. They wouldn’t last a day on my peak.”

This time Shen Qingqiu did roll his eyes. “Of course not. That’s why it’s a threat . I need them to realize what they did wrong.”

“Going into the woods?”

“Getting caught .” 

By now the child had stopped crying, and Shen Qingqiu had managed to pry him away from his robes. He looked younger than Shen Qingqiu thought at first. Closer to five or six. Shen Qingqiu frowned and pet the child on the head as he collected himself. He didn’t have children this young on his peak.

“It’s okay,” he said gently, “We’ll get you home.”

The child nodded and pointed back to the town before grabbing Shen Qingqiu’s hand and dragging him away. 

Just as well, they were done in the woods anyways. 

Luckily the kid knew where his house was and Shen Qingqiu was able to drop him off rather quickly before heading back to the pavilion to change his clothes. Liu Qingge frowned, of course, but Shen Qingqiu knew the importance of looking unflappable and untouchable.

Naturally he was approached by the woman from the previous night again, who had the information on his students that he’d asked her to collect. 

“None of them approached any of the merchants so far,” she said with an exaggerated pout, “But two of them did try to break into the Lotus Mansion.”

“They were caught?” Shen Qingqiu asked, disappointed. 

She shook her head. “No, but one of the workers saw them sneaking out when he began his shift.”

Well, that was at least somewhat promising. The Lotus Mansion was where one of Shen Qingqiu’s own suspects resided. He tipped her graciously and began to brush his hair as she left the room. 

There were a few things he still needed to do before any of his students got caught doing something stupid, and while it was maddening that none of them were asking the right people the right questions, having a few of them suspect those in power was a balm on the worst of his frustrations. 

Liu Qingge, his ever present bodyguard, didn’t look mollified at all. 

But he didn’t ask any questions this time so Shen Qingqiu was content to quietly make his plans as he fixed his appearance. Just as he was about to declare himself fit to be seen in public there was a commotion outside and his door slammed open, revealing a very harried looking Ning Ying Ying. 

“Shizun!” she cried and flew into the room, straight towards him. 

Shen Qingqiu stood immediately so that the drape of his many silk layers hid her behind him as a strange man appeared in the doorway. 

“My apologies sir,” the stranger said, his voice thick and slimy. “She…got away from me.”

He could hear Liu Qingge unsheathe his sword an inch and cast him a glance, even as his favorite, no– Ning Ying Ying hid behind him. 

“She got away from you?” Shen Qingqiu said mildly.

The man nodded, daring to take a step closer. “Sure, she’s one of the girls—”

“Really?” 

Something about his tone must have set the man off, since he stopped and looked up at him properly. Then over at Liu Qingge. His slimy confidence from before waivered. 

“I…uh…”

“No, do go on,” Shen Qingqiu insisted. “Please tell me how my student got away from you.”

He raised his hands, properly frightened now. “I didn’t know! Sorry, I didn’t realize she was—”

“That’s not what I asked.”

The man tried to turn around and run out the door, but he’d made his mistake already when he dared to step into the room. The door slammed shut with a gust of wind before he could so much as take a step. 

“Liu Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu said, not taking his eyes off the stranger, “It appears he doesn’t want to answer my questions. Perhaps you might take over for me.”

The sound of Liu Qingge fully unsheathing his sword had the man falling backwards against the door. 

Shen Qingqiu wasn’t entirely sure what a mortal human might have done to have Ning Ying Ying, a powerful cultivator in her own right, running for her Master, but he was about to find out. 

Chapter Text

The interrogation itself was a good lesson for Ning Ying Ying. 

Shen Qingqiu took the time to explain what Liu Qingge was doing as he did it, and why it caused more pain than obvious alternatives. There’s more nerves in the tips of the fingers, so when you pry out the nails from their beds, it causes severe pain to shoot up the entire arm and without the protection of the nails themselves that pain was easily recreated.

It didn’t take long to get information flowing. 

Ning Ying Ying was no longer hiding behind him either, instead, she started taking studious notes as if it were any other class. 

Then again, they were cultivators. Perhaps these kinds of lessons were common?

Shen Qingqiu pet her gently on the head. 

“Now, what had you so scared? Hmm?”

Ning Ying Ying blushed and avoided looking up at him. “I’m sorry Shizun. I saw Ming Fan get grabbed and I panicked.”

He blinked. 

“You saw Ming Fan get grabbed?”

Ning Ying Ying nodded.

“By this man?”

She shook her head. “No Shizun. The other men that were with him.”

Shen Qingqiu held up his fan as his eye twitched. Why the Fuck did she not say that earlier???

“And how long ago was this?” he asked mildly. 

“Oh, uhm. About a shichen ago?”

Right. Two hours where one of his students had been nabbed by a cult. 

Shen Qingqiu knelt down. “Did you see where they took him?”

She shook her head again. “I was running. I didn’t want to get hit with the weird powder they used.”

“Smart to keep running,” Shen Qingqiu said, even as his martial brother scoffed behind him. “But remember, it’s important to have as much information as you can get from every situation.”

Ning Ying Ying nodded, her soft expression morphing into determination. 

“Now, I am going to look for Ming Fan. Your job is to get as much information about who this man works for as you can by the time I get back.”

“Yes Shizun!”

Shen Qingqiu smiled, handed her a knife hilt first, and then stood back up. 

“Liu Shidi,” he said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Liu Qingge frowned. “I’m supposed to protect you—”

“If you follow me I’ll tell Yue Qingyuan that you stabbed me in the Lingxi Caves.”

“What—” Liu Qingge’s face paled spectacularly. 

Shen Qingqiu smiled sweetly behind his fan. “Now be good you two, and I’ll be right back.”

Luckily, he had a general idea of who might have nabbed his student and where they might be, courtesy of the idiot who tried to grab Ying Ying. 

It turned out the two students that were seen leaving the Lotus Mansion were Ning Ying Ying and Ming Fan. If he knew his students, once they realized they wouldn’t get any demonic readings, Ming Fan figured the missing children were related to the Lotus Family and Ning Ying Ying suggested breaking in. 

She was far too reckless. Luckily, she was the one Shen Qingqiu was worried about the least post Abyss Arc. 

Shen Qingqiu fanned himself lazily as he stood on the street outside of the Lotus Manor. Now, the obvious option for someone whose student might have been kidnapped was to sneak in or break in and make a whole mess etc… etc…

<Warning! OOC!>

He grit his teeth behind his fan. I wasn’t going to!

The obvious option was also the dumbest option. That was what got Ning Ying Ying and Ming Fan in trouble in the first place. 

Shen Qingqiu, on the other hand, was a noble and respected cultivator. Quite an infamous one, in fact. 

He forced his expression to one of mild complacence and stepped forward towards the gates of the Manor. 

Two guards were standing outside. They were dressed well— emblems of the family’s wealth no doubt—and they lacked the distinct boredom that any security job was famous for. Security that wasn’t bored and half paying attention was security that had a reason to be particularly attentive.

Ming Fan, you dumbass, who did you get caught by?

“Halt,” one of the guards held up a hand the moment Shen Qingqiu stepped within half a Li. Very precise. “The Lotus Manor isn’t currently accepting guests.”

“This Master is investigating the missing children.” He waved his fan lazily, smile still firmly in place. “Are you telling me this family refuses to help answer questions regarding this investigation?”

The two men straightened even further, the one on the left flickered his gaze worriedly towards the one speaking to Shen Qingqiu before looking straight ahead once more. Shen Qingqiu took a mental note.

That one was more likely to break. 

“We—”

“Stop talking,” Shen Qingqiu snapped his fan shut and pointed it at the weaker man. “You. Go run to your Master and bring him out. Now.”

The man once again looked towards his companion, who ignored him in favor of glaring at Shen Qingqiu. Then he turned around and went inside, presumably to do as he was told. 

It wasn’t long before an ostensibly over dressed man was at the gate, doing his best to exude a sense of calm despite the cold sweat at the collar of his inner garment. 

“Master Cultivator,” he said with a minimal bow that had Shen Qingqiu raising an eyebrow, “We weren’t expecting you.”

“You weren’t?”

“No Master Cultivator—”

“You thought my students and I would wander through town aimlessly and not ask any of the local families about the disappearances? Or perhaps you thought I wouldn’t bother to get my hands dirty even when something happened to my student?”

The man’s face went completely white.

One of his hands inched towards his sleeves. 

“Don’t bother,” Shen Qingqiu drawled, opening his fan so he could once more go back to listlessly waving it. “Just bring him out.”

“I don’t know—”

“Now.”

That was thankfully enough, as the man gestured to the guard that had gone to get him. 

It was an annoying wait, standing in the sun outside the gates with a man that smelled like an anxious dog. The longer it took, the more Shen Qingqiu struggled to keep his face placid and not twisted into a scowl. 

They couldn’t even bother to offer some tea? 

Eventually, Ming Fan was brought out. He was dazed, and clearly only conscious enough to walk with someone else leading the way. 

Fortunately he was visibly unharmed. 

Shen Qingqiu grabbed him by his collar and began dragging him back to the pavilion where he and Liu Qingge were currently staying. Though not before leaving a small warning as a thank you. 

“Next time, be less obvious if you want to keep your secrets.”

He tossed Ming Fan onto one of the soft couches in his and Liu Qingge’s room and then grabbed his wrist to check his meridians. Slow and sluggish, but not impeded in a way that would cause actual damage. 

“Shizun! You’re back!” Ning Ying Ying ran to hug him, but he held out a hand to stop her—pressing his palm against the crown of her head. 

“Ying Ying,” he said softly, “You’ve ruined your uniform.”

There was a thick film of blood on her sleeves, up to the elbow, and plenty of dark splashes throughout the rest. 

“Oh!” she stopped trying to hug him. “This student apologizes Shizun. I’ve forgotten about our lessons on propriety. I’ll get changed right away!”

Then she ran off, grabbing her qiankun pouch and waving a cheery salute. 

Liu Qingge, in contrast, was still perfectly clean and put together. 

“Why would you care if she has blood on her?”

“We’re scholars. We aren’t supposed to look like we walked through a battlefield.” Shen Qingqiu went over to see their half dead captive. He was missing most of his nails and had at least a dozen shallow but nasty looking cuts. 

There was a snort from behind him and Shen Qingqiu ignored it in favor of kicking the man back to full wakefulness. 

“Wh—”

“You’ll need to run back to your master now,” Shen Qingqiu said. “You’ve stained the carpet enough.”

The man looked confused.

So did Liu Qingge.

“You’re letting him live?”

“Would you rather I kill him?” Shen Qingqiu was surprised. The man was only a normal human, and was already badly injured. It didn’t seem like the most honorable thing to kill him just because he threatened Ning Ying Ying a little. After all, she got her revenge already.

“I just…” he trailed off, watching as the man slowly stumbled and crawled his way out of the room, leaving a rather gross trail behind him. “I wasn’t expecting that, is all.”

Shen Qingqiu rolled his eyes. “How else are we supposed to threaten the Lotus Family?” he muttered. Surely Liu Qingge wasn’t completely empty headed? 

“I should have known.” He was scowling again, and now Shen Qingqiu was back to being confused. 

Yes? He should have? 

Ignoring Liu Qingge for now, Shen Qingqiu went over to Ming Fan to help him wake up. Shen Qingqiu’s spiritual energy wasn’t the most impressive, but it was leagues better than Ming Fan’s and he was able to clear out whatever strange drug they used pretty quickly.

“Sh—shizun?” Ming Fan glanced up at him, his eyes clear. 

Shen Qingqiu stood up and grabbed his fan, using it to gesture to the trail of blood that had been left behind by their guest. 

“Clean this mess. That is your punishment for getting captured and making this Master go after you.” 

Besides, Shen Qingqiu wasn’t going to be caught dead on his hands and knees cleaning and he sure as hell wasn’t going to pay the extra cleaning fee unless he absolutely had to. As of right now he was still avoiding Shang Qinghua’s traitorous ass and asking for more money felt like begging.

It would also give Yue Qingyuan yet another reason to visit his Peak and Shen Qingqiu would rather bash his head against a wall. It was equally productive. 

A hand wrapped gently around his wrist. 

Shen Qingqiu looked up to see Liu Qingge frowning down at him. 

“What?” Was he upset that they were letting a perceived enemy live? That was rather ruthless of him. Besides, it wasn’t like a normal human was much of a threat, and none of them had given him information about them . 

“You shouldn’t push yourself.”

“This Master can hardly push himself walking over and asking for his student to be returned.”

Liu Qingge frowned even deeper somehow. 

“I meant—”

Wait.

“You’re not talking about Ming Fan, are you? This Master wouldn’t be able to exhaust his cultivation even if he had to bring that child from the brink of death!”

The very thought was genuinely insulting. Okay, was Shen Qingqiu’s cultivation damaged? Yes. Did the poison make it less reliable? Also yes.

But literally all he did was clear out Ming Fan’s meridians after he got a dose of a mild anti-cultivation sedative! If Liu Qingge’s orders from Yue Qingyuan were this particular he was going to strangle the overbearing Sect Leader with his own stupid silks. 

A sudden stream of warm cultivation at his wrist caused enough of a shock that Shen Qingqiu literally ripped his hand away. 

Shit.

He was supposed to be endearing to Liu Qingge. That was his first line of defense against Luo Binghe. 

<+B points! In character!>

Shut up!

He could salvage this. 

“This Master said he was fine, Liu Shidi.” He forced his expression into a placid smile, despite his frustration. 

Liu Qingge did not look convinced. 

Luckily, their stalemate was broken when Ning Ying Ying re-entered the room re-dressed in clean and appropriate clothes and bowed to them both. 

“This student is ready to give Shizun her report!”

His smile turned genuine.

Thank fuck.

Chapter Text

“Go on,” Shen Qingqiu encouraged. 

Ming Fan was still on his knees, scrubbing the floor, and Ning Ying Ying took a moment to look over at him before Shen Qingqiu’s impatient wave returned her attention to the task at hand. 

“His name was He Gang, he worked as security for the Lotus Family, and was sent to capture and question Ming Fan and Ning Ying Ying because they wanted to know if we found out anything when we broke into the Lotus Manor yesterday. He was sent on the direct orders of the family’s patriarch.”

Well, none of that was new information. Shen Qingqiu folded his fan and tapped it against his chin. “And did Ning Ying Ying discover anything when she broke into their manor?”

She wilted slightly. “No Shizun, the Lotus family is only trafficking in drugs. Not children.”

He nodded. That was what he suspected. 

It was strange for a family, even a wealthy one, to have a drug so specifically curated to affect but not harm cultivators. If they’d been the actual kidnappers, they wouldn’t have been nearly so careless, or merciful. 

This was getting interesting at least. 

“You figured out there wasn’t a monster?” Liu Qingge asked. 

Ning Ying Ying smiled brightly and nodded. “Shizun always teaches that the worst monsters are men! And it didn’t make any sense for a monster to only go after children of poor families, wouldn’t rich children taste the same?”

Unconventional, but true. Shen Qingqiu smiled, thinking about how much better a student his Ning Ying Ying was when she wasn’t distracted by Luo Binghe and his protagonist plot armor. It was a shame, genuinely, that the two of them were going to get married. But at least she’d be safe. 

And if Shen Qingqiu had the chance, maybe he could teach a few lessons about subterfuge for when she was part of a dangerous Harem.

It might save her some heartache.

The important thing out of all of this was that his students weren’t all quite as helpless as he worried they’d be. Well, not all of them.

And he knew exactly who was taking the children now that the Lotus family was crossed off his list of suspects. 

“Shizun?” Ning Ying Ying tugged at his sleeve to get his attention. “Do you want us to still look for the missing children?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Of course. Just make sure to avoid letting down your guards this time. It wouldn’t do for my students to be taken or hurt a second time in as many days.”

If his kids earned a reputation for being easy to kidnap (even if it was true) Shen Qingqiu would be spending the rest of his (likely short) immortal life fending off assholes trying to take advantage of a perceived weak spot Shen Qingqiu didn’t even have. 

Honestly, if he thought any of the other Peak Lords would be able to teach his students how to survive Luo Binghe half as well as him, he’d send every one of them off except Luo Binghe and Ning Ying Ying just so they couldn’t be used in some revenge plot or what not against the Original Goods.

But his Martial Siblings’ teaching abilities, if Liu Qingge was anything to go by, were not worth trusting. So Shen Qingqiu was stuck doing damage control as best he could on his own. 

“Yes Shizun!” she said, grabbing Ming Fan’s arm right as he finished cleaning and before he dropped the bloody rag he was using into a bucket of red and sudsy water. “We’ll go right away!”

Then she was gone and it was just him and Liu Qingge. 

Who was still looking at him like he was made of glass. 

“Let’s leave as well,” Shen Qingqiu fixed his appearance in the mirror quickly, making sure that he was perfectly presentable. “The others are just as likely to have gotten into trouble.”

Liu Qingge followed him. “I still don’t get why you don’t just let them clean up their own messes.”

Because that’s child abuse Liu Qingge!!

“I hate wasted effort, and it isn’t easy to teach children to play the Qin.”

“You actually teach them?”

Do you not?!

“Liu Shidi, did you think I handed my students an instrument and some ink and expected them to learn the five arts on their own?”

He shrugged. 

“...Liu Shidi do you not teach your students?”

“We spar.”

Fucker. Is that why your kids are always sneaking onto my peak and making messes?!

Shen Qingqiu’s grip on his fan tightened, but he resolved not to throw it at his martial brother. He had to remember there were more important things in this world and that losing his temper would not do him any good at all. 

What if he lost his temper and the Plot came back and something happened to Liu Qingge? Everyone would blame Shen Qingqiu again! They’d say he faked his friendliness to get Liu Qingge to let down his guard!

More than anything he had to remember he was the villain!

He headed straight for the woods again. 

“There’s no monster, why are we going back there?” Liu Qingge asked. 

“I know that. You know that. Even Ning Ying Ying knows that.” Shen Qingqiu kept walking. “Unfortunately, not all of my students can be trusted to know that. Out.”

Liu Qingge raised an eyebrow at him, looking like he was about to declare a spar right then, despite Shen Qingqiu’s damaged cultivation. 

Luckily, before he could say as much, the three students Shen Qingqiu had actually been talking to slunk out of their hiding spots. 

“Explain every thought that lead the three of you here to this Master, now.”

The tallest one of the trio stepped forward. “Shizun! We didn’t get anyone in town that had seen the monster take the children, so we assumed it was only taking children that wandered past the tree line, which matched with none of the children being from noble families!”

“Oh?” Shen Qingqiu said, closing his fan to press the wood against his cheek. “Do young masters and mistresses never play outside?”

His student blinked. “Uhm…they aren’t supposed to. Right?” He looked at his two friends on either side of him, one shrugged and the shook his head quickly. 

“Liu Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu drawled, “You’re a good son, yes?”

Liu Qingge nodded, his brow furrowed. 

“Did you do everything you were told as a child?”

“No.”

Shen Qingqiu smiled and snapped open his fan. “There you have it. Demerits for all three of you. This Master wants you to start your investigation over from scratch without any assumptions or leaps in logic.”

All three of the kids practically stumbled over each other trying to run back to town. A demerit on an outing was weeks of extra work, if not a physical punishment when they returned to the Peak. (Not that physical punishments were still an option! Shen Qingqiu wasn’t like the Original Goods! He was a modern man!) They would be very incentivised to be the first to get any actual evidence to try and wash those demerits away.

It was unlikely to work if they didn’t fix their preconceived notions. 

Liu Qingge scowled after them, as always. “Why don’t you just tell them the truth?”

“They wouldn’t learn.”

“I don’t understand you. You hold their hands while teaching them, but then don’t help while also teaching them.”

“Understanding my teaching method would require you to actually use your brain.”

Shit.

He hadn’t meant to say that. 

Fucking hell Shen Qingqiu! Why is your inner Cucumber coming out in a moment like this! Real it the fuck back in. 

Shen Qingqiu smiled. “I mean, Liu Qingge’s strengths lie…elsewhere.” Like his face. And his sword. 

“I can tell when you’ve insulted me twice.”

Liu Qingge crossed his arms. Which was a hell of a lot better than him reaching for his sword, so Shen Qingqiu counted it as a win and resolved to hold his tongue a lot better from now on. 

It shouldn’t be this hard.

<In Character! Awesome Job Host!>

Shen Qingqiu just had to remember what exactly awaited him at the end of the story if he walked in the Original Good’s shoes. 

A shudder ran through him. 

“Come Shidi, let’s see if anyone else has learned anything worth any praise.”

He headed back towards town. 

“You can always investigate on your own.”

“Why would I do that?” Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow as he looked back at his Martial Brother. “I already know who did it.” 

Chapter Text

Liu Qingge sputtered. “Then why—?”

“This is a learning opportunity. Not a night hunt.” Shen Qingqiu looked around the edge of the town where it met the tree line. Thankfully none of his kids were hiding in the area. He wondered where exactly the rest of them had disappeared to. 

“Did you know from the start?”

Ha. That would have been nice. Luo Binghe wasn’t involved so how would he know anything about this particular case beforehand? “No. If you paid attention, you would know as well.”

Liu Qingge didn’t say anything and Shen Qingqiu didn’t bother to explain any further. This lesson plan wasn’t for him anyways. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t teach a rock new tricks. 

Or something like that. 

“Shizun!” a young woman ran towards them, the two boys with her following closely behind. One of them was from the first duo they found in the woods, and he was clearly avoiding eye contact. 

Hmm.

Cowardly of him. If he was going to make it in this world he needed to get much better at faking confidence. 

“You have something to report to this Master?” 

“Yes Shizun. We went to the pavilion but you’d gone out,” she said, her hands cupped in a professional and clean bow. 

Promising. 

He waved her forward. “Tell me here.”

Her back straightened and there was a flicker of determination in her eyes. She must have been very proud of her hypothesis. 

“Shizun! This disciple believes the children are not being eaten by a demon or monster,” well, yes. Obviously. “We believe they are being sold as slaves to the next town over. That’s why it’s only been children without families to protect them, or at least with poor enough families they can’t afford to travel.”

Shen Qingqiu smiled behind his fan. “And who is selling the children?”

At this, the girl stuttered. “Oh…I–uh.”

“I see.” His smile dropped. “Come back once you’ve discovered more than the obvious.” 

He didn’t wait for them to bow before walking past her. They’d been here how long and his students are only just now realizing things he’d known from the briefing they received before they even arrived? 

This was more hopeless than he thought. Curse Airplane and his inability to write a character with more than two brain cells to rub together. 

“I thought you were looking for someone to praise?” Liu Qingge walked next to him, his eyes trained on Shen Qingqiu instead of scanning their surroundings. 

Shen Qingqiu sighed. He didn’t want to get involved himself, but he also didn’t want another child to get grabbed while his students groped around blindly. This entire trip was so much less promising than he’d hoped. 

Perhaps he could persuade Yue Qingyuan to allow more of these outings until Shen Qingqiu felt comfortable with the level his students were at? Then again, with how disastrous this had been, he might start a bit smaller. Do some mystery games or something on his Peak. 

Weiqi is supposed to mimic war strategy, but honestly these smaller situations were much more common and they couldn’t rely on help from the other Peaks unless Xian Shu suddenly decided to stop hating Qing Jing.

Hmm. Better to teach self reliance in the end. 

“I said I was looking for someone worth praise.”

The town was quiet.

Weird.

Shen Qingqiu looked around again. He didn’t see any of his other students. 

Were they looking for him in the Pavillion? He quickened his steps. The working women let the two of them in with large, bright smiles and flattering words as always.

There was no sign of any of the children.

His hand tightened on his fan.

“What’s wrong?”

“Liu Shidi,” he mused as he walked back outside and started casting a wider net with his senses. “If one of your disciples was in a town like this, how many regular mortal people would be required to capture them?”

Liu Qingge snorted. 

“Are you joking? If any one of my students lost to a town like this I’d kick them off the mountain myself.”

Shen Qingqiu nodded. As he suspected.

“Embarrassing,” he muttered. 

Then he stood straight, snapped his fan open, and walked to the nearest empty stall on the market street. 

It was closed up, all the wares hidden or locked away. Whoever owned it clearly didn’t work nights and had called it a day. 

Shen Qingqiu didn’t care about that though. The likelihood someone would be willing to talk to him was minimal to none. Instead, Shen Qingqiu was interested in something more physical. 

“Liu Shidi, cause a distraction for me,” he said. 

“What kind?”

“One that isn’t right here .”

Liu Qingge nodded and walked over to the other end of the market. 

Shen Qingqiu didn’t pay attention to the actions of his Martial Brother, but he did pay attention to everyone else. Once he was certain no one was looking his way, he slipped behind the stall and broke open the most obvious looking cabinet from the options. 

The ledger stuffed inside was faded and a bit crude, with a number of folded pages. He slipped it into his sleeve, shut the cabinet hard enough to jam it so that a non-cultivator would struggle to get it open just to be petty, and walked away before anyone saw him. 

Liu Qingge was by his side the moment he was about to step down a side alley. 

He clearly missed his calling as a blood hound in this life. 

“What did you get?”

“A hint.”

“I thought you said you knew who did it?”

Shen Qingqiu nodded, taking out the ledger and opening it up to read. “I do.”

“Then why don’t we just go straight there?” Liu Qingge looked for a moment at the numbers before giving up and glowering back up at Shen Qingqiu. 

It was just as Shen Qingqiu suspected. “Just because I know who is behind the disappearances, doesn’t mean I know where the children went.”

“So you don’t know where they are.”

“Of course I do.” He turned to the most recent page. Perfect. “They’re right here.”

Shen Qingqiu pointed to a small entry at the bottom of the page. Money had exchanged hands, going to the stall owner, but no amount of Tanghulu had been represented as sold or anything else that had any cost. Besides, it didn’t divide in a way that made sense per the stall earnings, which meant it was earned some other way.

The name next to the earning? 

“ Crane Holdings ,” Liu Qingge read. “Who are they?”

“No one,” Shen Qingqiu shrugged, closing the ledger and tucking it back into his sleeves. “A fake name to explain where everyone is getting their money.”

“Everyone?”

Shen Qingqiu smiled tightly as he turned yet another corner. “Everyone.” 

When they left the alley they were surrounded. 

Liu Qingge’s hand went to his sword but Shen Qingqiu didn’t bother. Looking around, it really was just the merchants from the market. They must have waited until the rest of the town was asleep or away to try and ambush the two cultivators. 

He wondered if they used the Lotus family’s drugs, or if they had some other method of taking his students off guard. Either way, Shen Qingqiu was going to need to teach situational awareness until their ears bled. This was ridiculous. 

There weren’t even any cultivators among the merchants. 

Just a mob of strangers.

Liu Qingge glared them down, his hand still on his sword but not yet drawing it. “You knew?”

Shen Qingqiu inclined his head. “I suspected from the moment one of the stall owners convinced another one to keep quiet. It was either this, or a member of the Lotus family powerful enough to keep people afraid to talk. But we cleared them earlier today.”

“We did?”

“Yes. Besides, it’s a traveling market. All the stalls have wheels, and none of the workers look anything like the natives in town. They’ve probably been traveling between smaller towns like this on the edges of larger cultivation sects, stealing children they didn’t think would be missed only to turn around and sell them.”

“You think you’re pretty smart,” one of the larger men said. He had a crudely made sword in his hand. 

Shen Qingqiu ignored him. The whole thing was painfully obvious, and exactly the kind of stupid “trick” mystery that Airplane liked writing in the earlier chapters before any intrigue was replaced with wife plots and papapa. 

Which was why he was so frustrated that even his better students couldn’t figure it out!

In a world like this basically any mystery only had two options! Fucking pick one and rule it out!

“Don’t kill all of them Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu said. “I want to be able to track down all of the children they sold.”

Liu Qingge nodded and unsheathed his sword fully.

“Shizun!” 

That girl and her timing. 

From the mouth of the same alley the two Peak Lords had just walked down, came a chorus of quick steps and more eager shouting. 

“Shizun! We figured it out—”

Ning Ying Ying practically screeched to a stop once she saw the situation she and Ming Fan had run into. Ming Fan wasn’t quite as lucky, and ran straight into Liu Qingge’s back—who shoved him aside when one unlucky merchant attempted to take advantage of the opportunity to attack.

“Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu frowned as the man was easily cut down. “Remember what I said.”

“Don’t kill all of them.” Liu Qingge rolled his eyes. “I remember.”

That was probably the best he was going to get, so Shen Qingqiu turned to his two students as Liu Qingge dealt with their ambushers. “Ning Ying Ying, you said you figured it out?”

The girl quickly straightened up and looked away from the one-sided battle so she could give him her full attention. “Shizun it’s a crime ring! The wealthy merchants started it and began pressuring the weaker ones until the entire market was in on it!”

“Oh? Where did you dig that up?”

Ning Ying Ying brightened even further. “We ran into Duan Li’s group and she was talking about how she couldn’t figure out who might be taking the children since there wasn’t any known trade outside of town other than the merchants. I just thought, ‘well maybe it’s the merchants then,’ so we asked some of the natives how long they were nearby and it matched up!”

“Not bad…” Shen Qingqiu was thrilled. Maybe Ning Ying Ying should be the next Peak Lord? She seemed like the only one capable of following in his—

He forced that train of thought to a stop immediately. 

There wouldn’t be a ‘next Peak Lord’ and Ning Ying Ying was going to become a pampered and spoiled wife among the largest harem Airplane could write. It was disappointing, but that wasn’t the point. The point was teaching everyone else the bare minimum to survive in a world hostile to them. 

Ning Ying Ying would just have to be a goal for them to aspire towards. 

If anything, she’s proof it’s possible.

He pet her on the head just a moment before remembering himself and pulling away.

It wouldn’t do to get attached. 

Chapter Text

Liu Qingge didn’t take long to clean up. He even left more than half of the merchants tied up instead of dead. 

“Your students are with the rest of the kids they grabbed from town,” he said as he wiped his blade clean. 

“The camp in the woods?” 

Where else would a large group of traveling merchants hide them? There weren’t exactly empty warehouses around in this world. 

Liu Qingge was looking at him disapprovingly. 

Shen Qingqiu smiled his best customer service smile. This was one of the numerous reasons he had told Yue Qingyuan not to send Liu Qingge. He didn’t want to change his lesson plans just because the man had the moral compass of a shounen protagonist! 

“The goal of the exercise was to discover the culprits. Not accidentally stumble upon the children.”

“So it was on purpose, you chasing everyone out of the woods.”

Shrugging, Shen Qingqiu stepped over to one of the men still conscious. “They weren’t going to die.”

Besides. Wasn’t Liu Qingge the one saying he should have just sent his students on their own to solve the entire investigation? Wouldn’t that have been much worse? He was at least here to clean up the mess and point them in the right direction when they got things wrong!

“You’re certain of that.”

What was his problem right now? “Liu Shidi. If they were going to die they would have been dead long before we made it into the town.”

“That’s right!” Ning Ying Ying stepped between them. “Shizun wouldn’t let innocent children get hurt! Especially not for no reason!”

Ah.

Shen Qingqiu felt his throat go dry. Ning Ying Ying had such an innocent view of her teacher. Wouldn’t let a child get hurt? To save his own skin, there wasn’t much Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t do. 

Liu Qingge though, instead of arguing or snapping back, or even ignoring Shen Qingqiu’s student as someone beneath him, frowned. “I…I didn’t mean it that way.”

He didn’t?

Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow.

Unfortunately raised eyebrows were not a feature his fan covered, and Liu Qingge noticed. 

“I didn’t. I meant—” He crossed his arms, his frown deepening further. “I wouldn’t have noticed. I would have just stumbled upon the camp looking for a monster in the woods.”

Shen Qingqiu blinked and shared a look with Ning Ying Ying. She too looked confused. 

“Obviously.” Shen Qingqiu wanted this conversation to be over desperately. “You’re Bai Zhan’s Peak Lord for a reason.” 

Liu Qingge would be the stereotypical hero who went in guns (or well, sword) blazing and accidentally solve a conspiracy involving an entire town because he happened to accidentally save the youngest daughter of the villain who just so happened to be the only good and loving member of the family. It was text book and very much the reason he had to be killed off by the villain so early on. 

For some reason, Liu Qingge didn’t seem to agree. His hand just tightened on his sword’s hilt as he put it away and walked over to the rest of the tied up merchants. “I’m taking them back,” he said. 

Shen Qingqiu looked down at the man he was just about to interrogate and sighed. 

It wouldn’t be worth it to argue now and then have to drag them all back himself. 

“Fine,” he said “I’ll go free my students and put them to work returning the children to their families. Or lack thereof.” 

Liu Qingge grunted but didn’t look back at them. 

“Come along,” Shen Qingqiu gestured for Ning Ying Ying and Ming Fan to follow him. Walking through the woods in the dark wouldn’t be fun, but with all of the merchants out of commission, there wouldn’t be anyone tending the children and it would be pointless to leave them hungry and cold just to avoid a sprained ankle. 

All in all, once the camp was empty (and raided since it wasn’t like any of the merchants would be returning for their things) and all of Shen Qingqiu’s students returned from delivering newly rescued children, he decided to have a last minute impromptu “feedback” session.

“What did we learn?” Shen Qingqiu asked, Ning Ying Ying and Ming Fan the only ones not on their knees in front of him. He pointed his fan at one of the students randomly. “You first.”

“I learned not to underestimate someone just because they aren’t a cultivator, Shizun.” He had a large bump on the back of his head. 

Shen Qingqiu nodded and pointed to someone else. The girl that had it half solved, Duan Li. 

“Shizun,” she said, not looking up, “We learned to solve the entire mystery before bringing it to you!”

“Wrong.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s perfectly acceptable to bring theories to someone else part way through an investigation for the sake of not losing what little you have learned. Try again,” he pointed to the boy next to her that was part of his group. 

“Uh…” He looked completely lost. “We…uhm…”

“So you learned nothing?” Shen Qingqiu felt like he was going to cry. “Every single one of you with the exception of Ning Ying Ying and Ming Fan have one month of mandatory training with me until this is resolved.”

Ning Ying Ying gasped and grabbed at his sleeve. “Shizun! We were almost captured too!”

He sighed. “Fine. Every single one of you has one month of  mandatory training with me until this is resolved with no exceptions.” 

It didn’t make much sense for Ning Ying Ying to actively throw herself and Ming Fan into such a long and tedious punishment, but he supposed she was quite an innocent girl. Maybe she just felt guilty that she ran to him to save her instead of handling it alone? But she already saw Ming Fan get taken down, so she did the right thing.

Whatever. If she wanted to not be singled out, he wouldn’t single her out. 

Ning Ying Ying smiled brightly next to him. 

No one else said anything so he sent them to their horses. He didn’t want to spend any more time in town and they could sleep once everyone was safe on Qing Jing. 

“How…many children Qingqiu Shidi?” Yue Qingyuan looked tired. 

Shen Qingqiu felt tired. “Almost a thousand.”

Which was what it said in the report that Shen Qingqiu had meticulously penned and which was right in front of him . 

Yue Qingyuan didn’t look at the report. He was too busy staring into Shen Qingqiu’s eyes as he fought desperately not to fidget. Was it too weird a request? Something Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t do even to save his reputation and Yue Qingyuan was starting to suspect Shen Qingqiu really wasn’t the original goods?

But even the system hadn’t had a problem with it!

“Zhagmen Shixiong—”

“I will assign An Ding—”

They said at the same time. 

Shen Qingqiu fought a blush. Fuck. Yue Qingyuan was still looking at him.

“You were saying? Qingqiu Shidi?” 

What he was saying? Definitely not a desperate attempt to explain himself and save face as the obvious villain. Why would he even try to explain himself to Yue Qingyuan? The man misunderstanding him was the kind of thing the original goods took advantage of, right? 

He had to think of something else worth saying. 

“Not An Ding.”

Yue Qingyuan sighed. “Shidi—”

No, actually he was going to stand his ground on this. An Ding was led by a traitor working with the demon realm. There was a sum zero chance in hell that he would actually be thorough and help all of the children sold into slavery by this crime ring. 

He could just make it into some petty payback thing. Try and get Yue Qingyuan to send Xian Shu or Bai Zhan to deal with it. 

“I don’t trust Shang Qinghua with something like this. The last time I ordered an item through him I received a subpar replacement.” This was true actually. He wasn’t sure if it was the merchant they ordered from or Shang Qinghua himself trying to save money, but his cinnabar paint had been laced with dried hibiscus petals which caused the pigment to brown as it dried. 

Luckily, Shen Qingqiu had only been painting for practice recently and hadn’t tried selling any of his works or that would have ruined his reputation as a Master of the Five Arts. He’d gotten very good at catching similar substitutes in his supplies from that point on and had sent a very kindly written letter reminding Shang Qinghua the value placed in the arts on Cang Qiong and why he was Yue Qingyuan’s second in command. 

For some reason, instead of getting exasperated or sighing and asking who Shen Qingqiu would send instead. Yue Qingyuan smiled. He did that a lot, to almost anything Shen Qingqiu said. Unless he said “go away,” which Shen Qingqiu realized was just about the only way to get the man to stop smiling at him. 

Even the one time Shen Qingqiu purposefully served him the tea he liked the absolute least as an excuse to get rid of it sooner. 

“Very well,” he said, folding his hands together on the table. “This Shixiong will handle it personally.”

What.

“You have more important things to do,” Shen Qingqiu reminded him. This was important to him sure, but that was because despite his character settings, Shen Qingqiu didn’t want kids to suffer for the crime of being born into Airplane’s shitty world building. Why would Yue Qingyuan care? Just because Shen Qingqiu asked?

Yue Qingyuan was still smiling, but there was something a touch darker in his gaze. 

“Qingqiu Shidi, I know this is important to you. But Liu Shidi told me what happened during your outing. I will handle the situation from this point on. You need to rest.”

Wait. What?

Did Yue Qingyuan think Shen Qingqiu was offering to handle it himself? No! That was so tedious! He had students to teach! And a Luo Binghe to spoil!

“That’s not—” 

“Qingqiu Shidi.” Despite the smile, Yue Qingyuan’s voice had a layer of steel. “You’ve only just come back home from your last outing. I insist. My students will put their very all into your request.”

He wanted to argue. It really didn’t make sense to send the students of the Sect Leader himself after a bunch of slaves that had been sold off over the course of what was likely years just to free them and take them back home. 

And what was with the ‘I know this is important to you’ nonsense? 

Important to who?

Shen Qingqiu?

Despite the thoughts running around in his head and the words stuck just behind his grinding teeth, Shen Qingqiu didn’t dare argue. 

There was something in Yue Qingyuan’s tone that felt like a warning.

It didn’t make sense, logically.

He knew Yue Qingyuan was the only one in the original book that would die for Shen Qingqiu, even though he knew he was guilty of all those terrible things. He’d even overlooked the horrible treatment Shen Qingqiu gave his students. 

Knowing this, it was obvious that Shen Qingqiu was never at any risk around Yue Qingyuan.

Yet…

Whatever. Shen Qingqiu had other things to worry about. He was originally going to force another Peak to deal with all of it anyways. “Fine. If Zhagmen Shixiong will excuse this one, then?”

Shen Qingqiu got up, ready to leave and start writing his most recent lesson plan out so he could put the sour taste of this meeting out of his mind.

A warm hand curled around his wrist before he could so much as take a step away. 

“A-Jiu,” Yue Qingyuan said, “I promise. I won’t leave any of them behind.”

Shen Qingqiu ripped his arm out of the other man’s grip when a shiver ran down his back. “Why would you?” he asked, outraged at the very thought. 

It was rhetorical. Of course he wouldn’t. He was the perfect upright Sect Leader that cared even about the unscrupulous and terrible Shen Qingqiu. He wouldn’t just leave a child behind for no reason. 

Why would he say that?

Did Yue Qingyuan suspect something was wrong and that was why he was being so insistent? 

Shen Qingqiu practically fled the room, his other hand curling around his wrist where it was still warm from Yue Qingyuan’s touch. 

His chest ached, and he didn’t know why.

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu had to dodge a sobbing Luo Binghe when he got back to his bamboo house. The poor kid looked terrible, despite having full reign of the place for the week or so Shen Qingqiu had been gone. 

Surely he’d been able to take care of himself?

Looking around, the bamboo house was in perfect order. Shen Qingqiu was unsure what might have happened in his absence, but it was unlikely to have been anything the protagonist couldn’t handle. And if Shen Qingqiu hadn’t been there for it, then he couldn’t be blamed for it!

Probably.

He frowned, once more taking in Luo Binghe’s appearance.

“Did Luo Binghe not sleep during this Master’s absence?” 

“No Shizun! This Disciple waited up until you were back!” His eyes were wide and if he were a puppy Shen Qingqiu was certain he would see his tail wagging behind him.

Shen Qingqiu frowned. “And why would you do that?”

“Uh…In order to…”

“Go. Sleep.” Shen Qingqiu opened his fan just to give himself something to do with his hands. “This Master has many things to do and doesn’t need to be bothered by a disciple who cannot care for himself while he is away.”

That worked, as Luo Binghe paled and immediately ran to the room Shen Qingqiu had given him. Hopefully sending him to bed early meant he would be able to make up whatever sleep he’d missed when the boy invariably woke up early to make breakfast. 

Meanwhile, Shen Qingqiu really did have things he needed to do. 

If a real life crime was too difficult for even his more experienced students, he was going to start with a fake one. At the very least, with the amount of web novels Shen Qingqiu read in his last life, coming up with a premise would be easy.

Taking his brush and some ink he ground himself, Shen Qingqiu began to write out the details of a fictional murder. 

The Deadly Picnic

Objective: To discover the murderer

You are called to investigate the suspicious death of Zhu Sunchen in an open field of chrysanthemum flowers. He is roughly thirty six, not a cultivator, and his body was found lying face up on a large yellow silk sheet. There is one visible wound from a sword stabbed into his back and out through his chest, piercing his heart. 

Shen Qingqiu set down his brush to massage at his wrist. Perfect calligraphy was hell on his hands, but he couldn’t be caught writing in any other way. And besides, it looked nice. 

Now he needed to come up with more specific clues.

He thought for a moment about who he wanted the culprit to be, and then began to write again. 

• Food was found half eaten and scattered around the body. 
• Among the food was two bowls for rice wine, one of which had red lipstick stained on it
• There was an empty pipe in the victim’s left hand
• Two sets of footprints were found leading away from the nearby road, but only the smaller set was found leading back towards the road

Shen Qingqiu kept writing. Naming six possible suspects and specific notes on each woman, including how they knew the victim and what their different alibis were. The answer was obvious, once anyone looked at all of the information and compared it. But they would learn how to at least do that with this exercise. 

Once his students figured out how to handle thought exercises like this, he could begin branching out. Set a scene somewhere on the Peak and ask them to take their own notes about what was important for an investigation.  

But first, baby steps. He had time. 

Setting aside the assignment, Shen Qingqiu stretched out his arms again. He would have Ming Fan make copies in the morning. In the afternoon, he would have all of the students from the outing gather in one of the larger rooms in the Teaching Hall and get them started. 

He yawned. 

Shen Qingqiu set his writing tools aside and began preparing to sleep. Everything was well enough in hand, he had back up plans if the lesson didn’t end up working and Yue Qingyuan had promised to make sure the children they hadn’t been able to save would be found and returned to where they belong. 

There was no reason for him to feel nervous or antsy. 

There wasn’t. 

Even Liu Qingge was getting along with him. All of his students were safe on Qing Jing Peak. Luo Binghe wouldn’t face the Abyss and blacken for another few years. 

His hand curled into a fist. 

Shen Qingqiu wasn’t going to be able to sleep like this. He walked over to the cabinet where he stored the tea Yue Qingyuan sent him, the one he liked, and started brewing himself a pot. As he set a heating talisman and scooped a measured amount of the blend into his most reliable pot, Shen Qingqiu began thinking about other situations he could write down for different deductive reasoning games. 

If he only used the one, they would only learn what to look for in that specific situation. Shen Qingqiu needed them to learn how to think for themselves so that they could act appropriately even in a completely unfamiliar circumstance. 

Maybe a few of them could have red herrings in the later lessons. Some evidence left behind by different monsters to get his students unsure about the cause until they laid out everything and were forced to discard deductions that didn’t fit everything they had.

When his tea was ready, Shen Qingqiu poured himself a cup and sat back down at his desk to grab a new sheet of paper. Then he began to write his second assignment down and drank his tea until the pot was empty.

“Shizun?” 

Shen Qingqiu sat up, his hand moving without thought into a sword sign that sent Xiu Ya at the intruders throat. 

It wasn’t until he looked over and saw Luo Binghe that Shen Qingqiu realized what he’d done. 

Mortified, he stood and called his sword back to him. “What are you doing in here?” Shen Qingqiu asked nonsensically. 

Luo Binghe was holding breakfast. 

There was light spilling in from the window, gentle from the morning sun. It cast a shadow on Luo Binghe’s terrified face and Shen Qingqiu felt sick.

Why did he do that? He should have just gone to bed the way he normally did so that he wouldn’t have woken up in such a panic. No. Luo Binghe shouldn’t have walked in without knocking even if he wasn’t in his bedchambers. 

This was why having someone in his house was such a bad idea. It made it harder to sleep and put not only Shen Qingqiu’s privacy at risk, but also Luo Binghe’s safety.

But they didn’t have a choice. There was no way Shen Qingqiu could get Luo Binghe to sleep in the same dorm as the children bullying him, and the only reason the child had agreed to stay here was because it was considered an honor for some weird reason. 

Shen Qingqiu forced himself to stay composed.

“Nevermind,” he said, looking away. “Set the food down and go get Ming Fan.”

“Yes Shizun.”

He heard the tray clink onto the desk, carefully avoiding any of the paper Shen Qingqiu had spent all night on. Then the door opened and closed and Shen Qingqiu finally felt comfortable looking up again. 

Another disaster. 

Before Ming Fan arrived, Shen Qingqiu needed to look presentable. He hadn’t even changed out of his robes before he fell asleep at his desk. 

Shameful. 

Shen Qingqiu took care of that quickly and was putting his hair up in an intricate hair crown when Ming Fan arrived with Luo Binghe in tow. 

“Shizun!” he said with a sharp bow. 

Luo Binghe was glaring at the poor kid. Shen Qingqiu wished he could do something to decrease the animosity between them. Ming Fan didn’t deserve the death he got, not really. He was a jealous child with a crush on a girl. 

Reading it in a book was one thing, seeing the actual child with both his flaws and his virtues was another. He really had to harden his heart. 

“Ming Fan,” Shen Qingqiu gestured for him to approach the desk. “Take this and make a copy for each student that was on our recent excursion. When you’re done, gather everyone together and I will begin the punishment.”

Luo Binghe smirked where he stood behind Ming Fan. There was no way he knew what Shen Qingqiu was talking about, so he was probably just happy someone else was being punished for once. Which was fair enough at this point. 

It was a little frustrating, since Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t be able to spend as much time with Luo Binghe for as long as he was teaching this extra class, but it might end up being a blessing in disguise. 

Ming Fan was quick about grabbing the aforementioned assignment and running off to his own room so he could spend the morning making copies. 

“Binghe, you’ll have classes with the outer disciples for the next few months.”

“What? Shizun—”

Shen Qingqiu held up a hand. “You are still my student, and you will stay in the Bamboo House. But you’re behind every single one of your Martial Siblings in all five of the arts and I will not have time to teach you personally for the time being.”

Luo Binghe looked like he was going to cry, but there wasn’t anything Shen Qingqiu could do. If he let Binghe take this extra class with the others, not only would he continue falling behind them in the arts, but he would also have even more insight to how Shen Qingqiu trained the other students. Which ran counter to his goal of trying to keep them safe from him. 

“If Luo Binghe would like,” Shen Qingqiu offered, “This Master can send him to Bai Zhan for some training as well?” 

Perhaps training under another (more respected) Peak Lord would appease him?

Luo Binghe cried harder.

Okay. Perhaps not. 

“Or this Master can find time in his evenings to go over Binghe’s classes when he is done for the day?”

This, at least, had Luo Binghe calm down and nod. “This disciple will not disappoint Shizun and will be able to join the main class before the month is up!”

No. Don’t do that. Shen Qingqiu would run out of excuses!

He grabbed a letter he wrote to one of the Hall Masters when he came up with this plan last night and handed it to Luo Binghe. “Here. Take this and head to class.”

Luo Binghe nodded so hard his curls bounced, than with a glance at Shen Qingqiu and the half eaten breakfast still left on his desk, he disappeared through the front door.

Once he was gone, the anxiety Shen Qingqiu had been fighting all night and well into the morning vanished with him. 

Chapter Text

The lesson would have been a disaster if it wasn’t for Ning Ying Ying.

Not a single one of his students understood the concept of pretend. They kept wanting to see the actual crime scene, no matter how many times Shen Qingqiu insisted all the information they needed was on the page.

Thankfully, Ning Ying Ying figured out the assignment and was able to explain it in a way that had the other students re-reading the information available with a much finer toothed metaphorical comb. 

Teaching, Shen Qingqiu was discovering, turned out to be much more difficult than just giving critical analysis and pointing out what someone was doing wrong. 

It made him miss the simplicity of writing his long scathing reviews on Airplane’s shitty web novel. At least then, he didn’t have the responsibility to teach the bastard how to write . 

Though, if anything Shen Qingqiu had said as Cucumber had actually gotten through to Airplane’s thick head, he might not be stuck in as desperate a situation as he currently was. 

After at least half the day, most of the students had figured out the general intention of the class and how the assignment itself worked, even if they were wrong about the information and culprit of the fictional murder. 

This supplementary class was going to take much longer than Shen Qingqiu originally thought. 

He hoped getting some distance from Luo Binghe will work just as well as trying to butter him up when it came to avoiding his future revenge. 

Then again, the looming threat of being the one to push Luo Binghe into the Abyss wasn’t going to go away just because Shen Qingqiu handed him off for someone else to deal with. 

Shen Qingqiu sighed behind his fan. Everything was so complicated. 

Focus on one thing at a time, he told himself. He needed to just focus on getting his students the tools they needed to survive for now, then he could focus on his own survival. He had time. 

Besides, once he had his students properly self sufficient, Shen Qingqiu could run to the other ends of the earth while Binghe was in the Abyss. Should he have to. That wasn’t his current plan, since he like his bamboo house and his Qing Jing Peak, but if it was an option. 

“Shizun,” Ming Fan approached him with a stack of scrolls. “Here’s everyone’s final essays for the assignment.” 

Shen Qingqiu had Ming Fan drop the scrolls on the desk in front of him and waved him off before he could drop into a bow. The first scroll he opened had impeccable calligraphy, but the dumbest conclusion he’d ever read regarding a fictional murder case. 

What in the, “There is no sign of a monster, so it must have been a hidden succubus,” nonsense?

He could feel his blood pressure increasing. 

“ Liang Ju ,” The boy’s head snapped up at the strain in Shen Qingqiu’s voice. “You’re training on Bai Zhan for the next week unless you can tell me what possible shred of evidence in the packet of information I gave you lead to the conclusion there was somehow a Succubus involved.”

His face paled. “Sh–shizun! There wasn’t any evidence that another monster could have–”

Shen Qingqiu snapped his fan shut. Liang Ju stopped talking immediately. 

“When did I say it was a monster?” His voice had to force past his grinding teeth. “Did you look through the information only for hints of monsters and ignore all the actual evidence I meticulously added?”

He grabbed another scroll and opened it with a snap of his wrist. This one was also wrong, but due to a misstep while comparing the alibis. “Pass,” Shen Qingqiu said, setting it aside. 

The next was similar, and so was the next one after that. 

Meticulous handwriting, and incorrect conclusions. 

In the end, luckily for Shen QIngqiu’s stress and inclination towards Qi deviations, Liang Ju was the only one that immediately assumed the murderer was a monster or demon. Probably since the last outing successfully beat at least that into their heads. 

Getting kidnapped by a group of normal humans without any cultivation was good for at least that. 

“Ming Fan,” Shen Qingqiu finished going through the entire stack of scrolls. As he expected, only a few of the students actually got the answer right, and even fewer were able to explain how, which made Shen Qingqiu assume the others had lucky guesses. “Over here.”

Ming Fan was quick to approach. 

“Tomorrow, make a copy of this assignment for each of the students before class,” he said, handing over one of the lessons he’d planned the night before in the same vein as the Deadly Picnic . “Then take Liang Ju to Bai Zhan and explain his punishment to whoever is actually there to carry out lessons.” 

Liang Ju looked like he was about to faint, but Shen Qingqiu couldn’t afford to have sympathy. Think like Bai Zhan get sent to Bai Zhan. Either way, going easy on these children wouldn’t keep them alive and that was the higher priority. 

Then. in a stroke of genius, Shen Qingqiu called up the students that had actually succeeded at the assignment.

“Duan Li, Ning Ying Ying, Ma Shen, Hou Yuan.” They each approached and Shen Qingqiu returned their scrolls. “I want you to split the class into four groups and study what everyone else did wrong in their analysis until the dinner bell rings.”

“Yes Shizun!” 

Then, tired from a long and disappointing day, Shen Qingqiu stood up and left the room. 

A headache was building behind his temples, and Shen Qingqiu was about to reach up and try to massage it away when he ran into an unexpected chest. 

“Qingqiu Shidi is working very hard as of late,” Yue Qingyuan said, reaching out to balance Shen Qingqiu before he fell since someone stepped directly in his path! 

Shen Qingqiu quickly stepped back and out of the Sect Leader’s reach so he could at least feign propriety. “Do you mean to say this Master had been neglecting his duties as of late?” he asked, trying to remember if there was something he should have been doing in the time he was teaching himself the Five Arts alone on his Peak. 

“Not at all,” Yue Qingyuan’s smile strained. “I only meant to point out how much Qingqiu has been pushing himself, despite being poisoned.”

“It’s a poison without a cure ,” Shen Qingqiu said with a half shrug, “I have to learn to live with it if it isn’t going to go away.”

Speaking of without a cure, Liu Qingge was going to visit some time this week now that they weren’t traveling together. Maybe Shen Qingqiu could remind him to keep a leash on his students. 

Yue Qingyuan looked down at him, something pinched between his brow even as he smiled. “Mu Qingfang is still researching the poison. It seems premature to assume we will never find a cure simply because one has yet to be found. Have faith in our Shidis.” 

He held back a scoff. Sure, there was a cure, but Shen Qingqiu wasn’t exactly interested in being subjected to it. “Well,” he said in a forced, pleasant voice, “I wish Mu Shidi luck.”

Then he stepped to the side and tried to walk away and towards his house so he could light some incense and try to cultivate his headache away.

Unfortunately, Yue Qingyuan took this as an opportunity to fall in step with him all the way back to Shen Qingqiu’s bamboo house. 

When he still didn’t leave, even as they approached the front door, Shen Qingqiu was forced to turn to him and offer tea.

Yue Qingyuan’s smile was blinding as he accepted, forcing Shen Qingqiu to look away, even as he quickly raised his fan to hide his blush.

Still, it would be a good excuse to get rid of one of his shittier teas. 

Shen Qingqiu left Yue Qingyuan to shut the door behind them and immediately grabbed a calming incense that he lit with a snap of his fingers and set away from the tea table so as not to overwhelm their senses too quickly. Then he set to work on brewing the tea. This one was a heavy, sharp tasting blend with an unfamiliar spice that stayed behind on Shen Qingqiu’s taste buds until he ate something fatty to take it away. 

There wasn’t anything he could serve with the tea lying around in his house, and both Ming Fan and Luo Binghe were busy with the tasks Shen Qingqiu assigned them. Yue Qingyuan would have to deal. 

When Shen Qingqiu poured out two cups, Yue Qingyuan was quick to grab his and take a sip despite the obvious heat. 

Shen Qingqiu didn’t touch his own cup, just focused on the building headache that came with Yue Qingyuan’s presence. 

A headache that somehow got worse when Yue Qingyuan said, “It’s gratifying that Qingqiu Shidi remembers this one’s favorite teas.”

Thankfully Shen Qingqiu wasn’t bothering to drink from his own cup, or he might have spit it out all over the Sect Leader’s face. 

This was one of Yue Qingyuan’s favorites? Wait, did that mean the reason he looked so pleased every time Shen Qingqiu used him to get rid of his most hated teas, was because they were actually to his taste? 

Was Yue Qinyuan the reason Shen Qingqiu had so many ostentatious and unpleasant teas lying around in his house?!

That meant…

Shen Qingqiu frowned and waved his plans for a complete restructuring of his tea collection goodbye. 

He would have to pay attention to Yue Qingyuan’s reactions to the teas more thoroughly and keep at least two or three blends he enjoyed for when the Sect Leader visited. Which was the opposite of his original plan to get rid of them all and replace them with the sweeter more floral teas that Shen Qingqiu preferred. 

Yue Qingyuan just looked so damn pleased.

Ugh.

It looked like there would be more unpleasant tea in Shen Qingqiu’s future.

He frowned behind his fan and continued ignoring his own drink, until Yue Qingyuan reached over and poured some sugar into Shen Qingqiu’s cup and stirred it in.

Unwilling to look ungrateful, Shen Qingqiu finally took a sip. 

The sugar didn’t completely hide the spice of the tea, or prevent the aftertaste from sticking to his tongue, but it made it almost bearable to drink and between the two of them the pot was eventually emptied. 

Chapter Text

After a week of drilling it into their heads nonstop with lessons and study groups, Shen Qingqiu’s students were finally getting the hang of things. 

While they were doing all that, Shen Qingqiu was working on his first official painting since waking up as Shen Qingqiu. 

He’d spent so much time teaching himself how to paint. Time was spent studying the way the different pigments, how they affected the stroke of the brushes, and how the color changed as they dried. He made himself familiar with each of the brushes in his collection and with the different fibers of the silk canvases. 

With all of that, Shen Qingqiu should at least be able to mimic a master’s art style…

So why did none of his paintings look any good?

He was practically chewing on the wooden handle of his brush at this point as he glared down at the figure he was painting by a koi pond. It simply wasn’t good enough. While the koi pond itself looked mostly fine, the man he had been trying to paint for the past two hours looked nothing like Yue Qingyuan no matter how regal he tried to make it. 

The painting was ripped in half before Shen Qingqiu could stop himself. 

That’s fine. It wasn’t the kind of thing he could reasonably pass off as the work of a Master anyways. He needed to try again. Start all over from the beginning. Maybe he could paint a cliff over view of the Sect instead. 

Shen Qingqiu rinsed off his brush and grabbed a new length of nearly translucent silk. 

This time, he focused on the familiar view of the Sect from above and used that to guide his hand. One he had the general shape of it, and the cliff carved over it, Shen Qingqiu began to draw a tree along the right edge, with twisted branches, to add more depth to the image. 

For the background, Shen Qingqiu used muted blues and greens and a very light touch that allowed some of the silk’s natural translucence to shine through. The cliff was darker, with warm browns making up the tree and a touch of yellow on the edges of the grass to mimic the shine of sunlight.  

It too didn’t meet Shen Qingqiu’s expectations, but there was also nothing heinous that stood out to him the way his failed painting of the Sect Leader had, so it was allowed to stay in one piece as he draped it along one of his tables to dry. 

Then he began to put his paints away, and started thinking about what he was going to do about Shang Qinghua. 

There wasn’t anything he could really do until after the Immortal Alliance Conference, since Shang Qinghua was the one that causes the entire mess in the first place, and Shen Qingqiu wasn’t allowed to prevent Luo Binghe’s fall into the abyss. 

Which meant that Shen Qingqiu wasn’t allowed to prevent the disaster happening to the Immortal Alliance Conference at all, and he had to save the students somehow after the demons breached the barrier. 

He set down his brush.

What the hell was he doing? Focusing on learning to paint and fix his calligraphy? 

So what if that was important to his image as Shen Qingqiu!

He needed to get better at fighting. His cultivation was already weak compared to his Martial Siblings, but it wasn’t like he could warn them about what was going to happen so that they could be prepared. No, it was on Shen Qingqiu’s shoulders as always.

Fucking hell.

And Shen Qingqiu was just starting to relax, knowing that his students were getting better at his critical thinking classes. Now he needed to make sure they could fight, too. In case they got caught up in fighting the demons that—

Wait a second. Shen Qingqiu stood up and walked over to where he kept the list of his personal students. 

Looking down at the names, there weren’t any that were still at his Peak that had been studying for a ridiculously long time. None that would look suspicious at least, if he held them back from attending. 

Maybe , Shen Qingqiu grabbed a scroll he used to take notes in English about his plans for the future, he could use their incapability as a reason to hold them back from the conference all together.

He began to write. It would be perfectly tailored to each student and their flaws, flaws which became more and more noticeable the more time he spent trying to train them out of them. But as long as he had a valid excuse, Yue Qingyuan would let him do pretty much whatever he wants. 

Ming Fan, would probably have to go since he was the Head Disciple which meant Shen Qingqiu would have to increase his actual training.

That might work out, if he kept Ming Fan busy he wouldn’t have time to play Bully. 

It was probably safe to send out Ning Ying Ying as well, since Luo Binghe would protect her. 

The problem was coming up with an excuse for Luo Binghe to go when most of his other, more experienced students wouldn’t. 

Shen Qingqiu grabbed a fan and began fiddling with it. 

There was no helping it, really. Luo Binghe would have to prove himself more capable than the rest of Qing Jing Peak before the time of the Conference arrived. 

A headache began to build again and Shen Qingqiu waved his fan lazily at himself in a futile attempt to blow it away. 

Getting frustrated wouldn’t help. He knew that. 

There was really only one thing to do other than fret, and it was to work on his own cultivation. 

Even if he had to deal with the poison, so long as he didn’t set off an episode and he regularly cleared his meridians, Shen Qingqiu should be able to cultivate just fine. 

Leaving the room a mess…

Well, Shen Qingqiu had time. He began to bring his room back into order, leaving only the drying painting out and tossing the two torn halves of the failed painting in a trash bin. Once that was done, he slipped out of his outer robes for comfort’s sake, sat against the wall, and began to meditate. 

Yue Qingyuan was reading his Head Disciples report on the task of locating and securing the freedom for the children the Merchant Group had already sold. Fortunately, it hadn’t actually been that long since their operation began, and Xiao Jiu’s estimate of around a thousand children being grabbed was accurate. 

Of course it was. Xiao Jiu was always meticulous in his intelligence gathering, and he would never have brought an uncertain report to be acted upon. 

Setting aside his Head Disciples letter, Yue Qingyuan found his thoughts, as ever, returning to Shen Qingqiu. 

He was worried originally when Xiao Jiu woke up from his Qi Deviation and didn’t recognize him. But it might have been a blessing in disguise. 

Yue Qingyuan hadn’t been able to spend so much time with him since he’d left him behind at the Qiu’s Manor. Before, Xiao Jiu would chase him away the moment he had even the inkling of an excuse, now there was some thread of propriety that, for some reason, stopped Xiao Jiu from doing that.

They even shared tea regularly. 

Though, Yue Qingyuan stood up from his desk and walked over to a painting hung on the wall, Mu Qingfang had mentioned the possibility of Shen Qingqiu’s memories returning eventually. And with the recent situation with the merchants and their slave ring…

More than anything, Yue Qingyuan wanted Xiao Jiu to be able to put the horrors of their past behind him. But he clung so tightly, that even still he sought out—

Yue Qingyuan shook his head. 

His thoughts wouldn’t stop until he could see Xiao Jiu was okay. 

Making sure he was presentable first, Yue Qingyuan headed to Qing Jing Peak.

When Xiao Jiu opened the door, it was clear he’d been busy with something. His hair wasn’t nearly as meticulously brushed as he preferred it, and rather than the robes befitting a Peak Lord of his status, he was wearing something that had been hastily tied over his sleeping robes.

“Did this one interrupt Qingqiu Shidi’s Meditation?” 

Xiao Jiu was hiding a blush behind his fan. He’d always had a rather thin face, one that made him painfully easy to read. It always made Yue Qingyuan wonder how their Martial Siblings could ever misunderstand him.

“If Zhagman Shixiong is aware, why is he visiting so late at night?” His barbed words had gotten much softer. They almost felt like a cat’s gentle nip on it’s owners fingers when startled. 

Yue Qingyuan stepped a little closer, so Xiao Jiu wouldn’t be able to close the door on him. “I wanted to give Qingqiu Shidi an update on the children.”

“...Come inside,” Xiao Jiu said, backing up just enough that he could still shut the door after Yue Qingyuan entered. “I’ll put on some tea, but be quiet. My disciple is sleeping in the next room.”

Yue Qingyuan kept up his smile. He didn’t understand why Luo Binghe was here, sleeping in Xiao Jiu’s Bamboo House, when he’d spent their entire apprenticeship unable to sleep in the same room as any one else. 

How often was Xiao Jiu waking up in the middle of the night, unaware of why he felt so ill at ease?

The tea was one of Xiao Jiu’s favorites, which meant Yue Qingyuan had to force himself to drink it. Either he’d figured out Yue Qingyuan’s tastes over the course of their many meetings the past few months and wanted to get rid of him sooner, or he was indulging himself. 

“You found the children?” Shen Qingqiu asked, sipping his tea. 

“We did,” Yue Qingyuan assured him. “The next step will be securing their freedom so we can return them to their families.”

Xiao Jiu’s hand stilled where it had been reaching for his fan. A flicker of something strangely unfamiliar flashed across his face before Yue Qingyuan could decipher it. Then it was gone and Xiao Jiu grabbed his fan to hide behind. 

“Most won’t have families to go back to.”

Yue Qingyuan nodded. “We’ll find them homes.”

“And what if some of them have spiritual roots?”

Ah. So that was where this was going.

“Would Qingqiu Shidi like me to bring them to Cang Qiong?”

“ No .” The desperate look in Xiao Jiu’s eyes caught Yue Qingyuan off guard. 

Then the fan was back up and in place and Xiao Jiu was clearly trying to regulate. 

Worried, Yue Qingyuan reached out to Shen Qingqiu’s wrist to make sure he wasn’t nearing a Qi Deviation. 

He should have known better. Bringing up something as painful as this, even without the memories attached, was dangerous when his Shidi was so prone to Qi Deviations. 

Thankfully, Xiao Jiu didn’t pull away, though it looked like he wanted to. Yue Qingyuan was able to calm his own worries once he sent a small stream of his Qi through Shen Qingqiu’s meridians and checked everything was appropriately in place and unblocked. 

Xiao Jiu didn’t allow the intrusion for long. 

“If Zhagmen Shixiong is done informing this Master of the children’s fates, I trust he can see himself out.” He pulled his wrist out of Yue Qingyuan’s hands and fled to his bedroom.

Ah.

Yue Qingyuan sighed. 

Would they ever be as close as they were before? Or was his betrayal truly so deep that even the washing away of Xiao Jiu’s memories could not bury it?

He stood to leave, when he noticed something that stood out in a bin next to one of Xiao Jiu’s supply cabinets.

It was a painting.

Yue Qingyuan chuckled as he gently picked it up and uncrumpled it. Xiao Jiu had always been far too harsh on himself, ruining and discarding works of art that any other cultivator would call an unparalleled master piece. 

This one was no different, the layers of blues and greens in the Koi pond gave the illusion that the viewer could very well fall in if they leaned too close. And the pop of orangish yellows that crested the waves and reflected the light of the sun gave the Koi fish the ability to slip in and out of the water seamlessly.

He was about to respect Xiao Jiu’s wishes and return the destroyed painting to the bin, when he saw its other half that had been hidden underneath it.

His eyes went wide.

That…was a painting of Yue Qi.

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu woke up early again, another one of his endless anxiety attacks keeping him from a full night’s sleep.

It was getting ridiculous. He hadn’t had nearly this much anxiety in his previous life, and he’d been actively dying then too. 

Was it because it was inevitable, whereas in this life, Shen Qingqiu might find a way to survive?

There was no way to know. 

It also didn’t matter. There was to be a meeting between all available Peak Lords and Shen Qingqiu had to get ready. They might question him again, or insist on another round of possession tests if any of the others found out about his insistence about the fate of the children.

Then again, not allowing Yue Qingyuan to bring them back to the Sect even if they had the ability to cultivate sounded like something the Original Goods would do. Even if Shen Qingqiu’s reasoning was completely different.

How could he put even more children in the direct line of fire?

Making sure to be absolutely extra meticulous (he was still burning in embarrassment that Yue Qingyuan had seem him like that last night) Shen Qingqiu got ready for the day.

“Shizun?” Luo Binghe knocked on the door, careful not to enter without announcing himself after the last time, “This disciple brought breakfast.”

“Enter,” Shen Qingqiu said, setting down his comb.

Breakfast, as always, tasted delicious. Once the two of them had finished eating, he told Binghe about his plans for the day. 

“This Master will be at Qiong Ding today,” Luo Binghe’s smile dropped, “So I will be unable to go over Binghe’s studies. You can study with Ning Ying Ying instead, so long as you do not interfere with her own lessons.”

That should be a good compromise, right? Letting the two love birds flirt all day? Especially since he won’t be able to have his usual ‘punishment’ class. Ming Fan was already aware and had been told to take over tutoring for the rest of the advanced students to be assessed tomorrow. 

For some reason, this did not seem to appease Luo Binghe. 

“Why does Shizun have to go to Qiong Ding? ” 

Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow. “There’s a Peak Lord meeting.”

Since when did the students get to question the Master about what he did with his time? Luo Binghe, just because you’re the protagonist doesn’t mean you should be so insubordinate! No other Peak Lord would be understanding about this kind of attitude! Especially not the Original Goods!

Luo Binghe couldn’t say anything else to that, and Shen Qingqiu shooed him away to get ready for the day. 

Gathering the materials Shen Qingqiu had prepared for this meeting, he himself headed out for the day.

Luckily, he didn’t run into anyone before getting into the main meeting room. 

Was he early? 

Shen Qingqiu walked in to find a couple of the Peak Lords in their seats, but no sign of Yue Qingyuan or Liu Qingge yet. 

That would explain how he managed to dodge them on his way here. 

He sat down, even as the other Peak Lords present gave him a bit of a side eye. He could go over his notes, but he already had them memorized and that would just scream that he was feeling insecure. So Shen Qingqiu just sat in his seat and waited, fanning himself lazily with a fan he’d painted while practicing his brush strokes. 

Yue Qingyuan was the next to arrive, talking to Qi Qingqi with his usual soft smile. 

They seemed to get along well.

Yue Qingyuan looked up and caught his eye, so Shen Qingqiu looked away, unwilling to be caught staring. 

The rest of the Peak Lords slowly started filtering in, even Liu Qingge. 

The last one to arrive, barely on time and frantic, was Shang Qinghua. 

He didn’t look like much of a threat, Shen Qingqiu supposed. He had wide eyes, with bags under them that implied a lack of sleep. His hair was comparatively short and a mess despite being pulled back, and his over all demeanor reminded Shen QIngqiu more of a scared mouse than a treacherous rat.

Then again, that was probably how he got away with his schemes. 

It was difficult to be weary of someone pathetic. 

Shang Qinghua must have noticed Shen Qingqiu watching him, since his head snapped up and his wide, tired eyes looked over towards him. 

He froze, then did a small awkward wave that let multiple scrolls fall from the pile in his arms that he then had to pick up. 

What a showing. 

The meeting began the moment Shang Qinghua fixed his mess and took his seat. 

Shen Qingqiu’s presentation was short and concise, as always. And Yue Qingyuan smiled all the way through it, as always. 

He finished his entire report with a succinct thesis statement so that his meaning could not be misconstrued. 

“If we don’t teach our students the ability to think on their own, we won’t have a next generation of Peak Lords to take over when we ascend.”

Liu Qingge looked unsure, but nodded. Likely because he had been there when Shen Qingqiu’s entire student body failed him. Yue Qingyuan also agreed, obviously. Then again, his Peak taught leadership and the qualities necessary for it, so out of everyone there he had students most likely able to succeed in this way.

It wasn’t currently enough to win against Luo Binghe, but if Shen Qingqiu emphasized the need to get stronger as a whole, they might have a better chance of making it through. Though that also hinged on the assumption Luo Binghe would not feel as bitter towards Cang Qiong as a whole and attack directly. 

“We’re the most powerful Sect in the Cultivation world,” Qi Qingqi said, “But you make it sound like there’s some threat hanging above all our heads.”

A murmur of agreement was to be expected. After all, Peak Lords had pride in their Sect, and if they only had to worry about the world as it currently was, Cang Qiong was not under any threat at all. Besides, as Peak Lords, they were young and newly instated comparatively. Their Ascension was a long way away. 

Luo Binghe, however, was less than a decade from merging the Realms and destroying everything .

But only Shen Qingqiu knew that. 

He grit his teeth behind his fan, casting a glance at Shang Qinghua, who was bored and not paying attention, he forced himself not to get frustrated.

“The sword of Damocles,” he said. “There will always be a threat hanging over the heads of anyone in power, more so the more confident they feel in their position.” He glared down at Shang Qinghua and then at Yue Qingyuan. “If we fail to bring up the next generation properly, we fail to uphold the ideal of our predecessors and the thread holding the dangling sword above our throne will fray.”

“You’re one to talk, when it comes to molding disciples.”

Shen Qingqiu let the insult wash over him like water. They were talking about the Original Goods after all, not about Shen Qingqiu himself. 

“Harsher methods make smarter students.”

“Everyone,” Yue Qingyuan interrupted, his voice gentle and soothing. “We may disagree about exactly how to teach our students, as is natural given the different natures of our Peaks, but Qingqiu Shidi might be right about training our Disciples.”

The Peak Lords calmed down, and Shen Qingqiu took his seat. Frustratingly, it seemed no one understood exactly what Shen Qingqiu was arguing, but at least Yue Qingyuan would be available after the meeting for him to yell at. Maybe he could actually get his intentions across that way.

Yue QIngyuan stood up to call attention to himself. 

“The Immortal Alliance Conference is only a few years away,” he said, “It would hurt none of us to be more thorough in the training of our Disciples. And if Qingqiu Shidi was able to acknowledge his own blindspots and take steps to reduce them, I don’t see why we cannot follow in his footsteps.”

The table quieted as the rest of the Peak Lords digested their leader’s decision. 

Some faces were sour, likely because it was Shen Qingqiu who suggested it, but some were contemplative. Even Liu Qingge was taking the decision in properly.

Shang Qinghua though, was staring at Shen Qingqiu and Shen Qingqiu was staring right back.

Chapter Text

The rest of the meeting was boring. Liu Qingge talked about the monsters he hunted, Qi Qingqi talked about the performance her fairies were planning to host, Mu Qingfan mentioned he was still looking into cures for SHen Qingqiu’s poison while treating the average every day scrapes and bruises of the students (mostly from Bai Zhan.) Shang Qinghua complained about being over worked. 

It was during one of his usual tirades that Shang Qinghua said something particularly dull and Shen Qingqiu forgot to stop himself from scoffing. 

The reaction was immediate. 

Every other peak lords’ eyes zeroed in on him. But before Shen Qingqiu could even get defensive, Yue Qingyuan’s voice cut  through the tension like a serrated blade.

“Shang Shidi, please continue.”

Shen Qingqiu appreciated it, and looked towards the Sect Leader only to see his own eyes were sharp and threatening… and cast around the table at everyone other than Shen Qingqiu. 

He stopped himself from doing anything else out of character, like pressing a hand against his suddenly warm chest. 

Oh. He cared about Yue Qingyuan. 

Oh.

Oh no, he cared about Yue Qingyuan.  

This ruined everything. 

He had to-to stop this. He couldn’t care about the most self-sacrificing indulgent idiot in this sect that was a one way ticket to-

Shen Qingqiu could practically see the water prison, his limbs went numb at the very thought.

If he wanted to protect the Sect, there was no guarantee he’d be able to. Even the Original goods had sacrificed himself—

What? No. Hadn’t he fought against the accusations? 

Shen Qingqiu thought back to that part of the book. But no, he hadn’t. Shen Qingqiu had just accepted every charge against him and his sentence willingly.

That didn’t make any sense.

Shen Qingqiu was a bastard who would do anything for his pride and his life so why would he let Hua Hua Palace of all places drag him that low? 

… Was Shen Qingqiu more loyal than he thought? What a startling revelation. The scum villain with his one redeemable trait.

The trait that doomed Cang Qiong. 

Because when he thought about it— why else would Luo Binghe burn them to the ground? They already renounced him! He was in prison! His cultivation ruined! 

What did he have left other than the belief that his sacrifice might protect—

Protect—

The image of Yue Qungyuan’s soft smile flashed through his mind and Shen Qingqiu felt his heart stop. 

The idea of following in the Original Goods footsteps was terrifying. It had given him nightmares for months when he first transmigrated. 

It was too late. 

Shen Qingqiu would do anything for this man.

He could never let them know.

Once the meeting was over, Shen Qingqiu forgot his plans to hound Yue Qingyuan about his lesson plans and instead fled immediately to his Peak. 

Even when someone called his name, he ignored them, uncaring about the reputation he was trying so desperately to repair.

Something…

He had to do something about this!

Once he was back in his Bamboo House, Shen Qingqiu started to change his plans.

He already knew what to do for his students. Keep them separate from Luo Binghe so that he can’t resent them, or ideally even remember most of them, and teach them the techniques required for surviving in a world that was, again, actively hostile towards them. 

The other Peak Lords… he needed to get some distance from them as well. 

His change in demeanor, trying to use them as a shield against Luo Binghe by not stoking fires of animosity, that was going to have to be reversed. 

Liu Qingge had proven to be obnoxiously stubborn and genuine. After Shen Qingqiu saved his life there was no way he’d ever let anyone hurt him—even if that meant dying to defend his honor.

He could not allow that to happen. 

Qi Qingqi hadn’t survived, but most of her disciples had so her death was probably more easy to avoid. Mu Qingfan was fine. He was a survivor and knew how best to bend with the wind. He’d been able to mostly deal with the Original Goods and Luo Binghe at the height of his power by just being professional and the best at what he did.

He’d have to do some plotting, but Shen Qingqiu could probably pinpoint each of his Martial Siblings’ weaknesses and flaws. Maybe he could even hit two birds with one stone and point it out by being merciless and spiteful. 

That would be easy enough to target verbally, being candid like that was actually easier than forcing polite distant speech and trying to keep up his perfect aloof persona. 

It would be harder to enforce, but Shen Qingqiu had at least some experience now as a teacher that he could draw from. 

The most important thing would be cutting the ties that were starting to build before it was too late. 

It rankled, the idea that all this time being friendly and amicable so that he himself would be protected and have a shield when Luo Binghe came for him was a wasted effort that would make this harder.

Once more sitting at his desk, Shen Qingqiu grabbed a new sheet of paper and began to write everything he knew about his Martial Siblings. 

Starting with Yue Qingyuan himself. 

Luo Binghe came home immediately after his lessons, instead of studying with Ning Ying Ying. Completely ignoring what Shen Qingqiu told him to do. 

“This Master remembers giving Luo Binghe very specific directions for the day,” Shen Qingqiu said once the young man entered the office. He froze once he noticed Shen Qingqiu was in the room.

“Shizun!” he said, dropping into a bow, “This disciple only wanted to make sure the Bamboo House was clean and ready for Shizun after his long meeting with the other Peak Lords!”

Not said, was the question Luo Binghe surely meant. ‘What are you doing back so early?’

Shen Qingqiu just sighed. How was he supposed to get Luo Binghe to develop healthy relationships with the people around him when he insisted on acting like an indentured servant?

“Shizun?” Luo Binghe stepped closer, as if to reach out towards him. 

“Sit down,” Shen Qingqiu ordered, clearing his plans off the table before Luo Binghe could get a glimpse of them. “Tell me how your classes are going.”

Eagerly, Luo Binghe dropped to the floor in front of him and began to recite everything that had happened throughout his day. He got so excited, he even brought out some of his practice calligraphy to show off.

Shen Qingqiu hid his reaction behind a mask of cold indifference. The calligraphy was…

Unimpressive. 

Especially compared to students like Duan Li or even Liang Ju.

Instead of letting that show in his expression, Shen Qingqiu focused on the ways Binghe had improved since the start of his official lessons. 

That allowed the conversation to flow and not be too depressing, and the way Luo Binghe looked up at him with light and innocence in his eyes almost gave Shen Qingqiu hope for a peaceful future. 

Then Luo Binghe reached up towards him and Shen Qingqiu flinched back, violently before he could stop himself. 

“Shizun…? He said, his voice soft. “You’re crying.”

What?

Shen Qingqiu stood immediately, covering his face with whatever fan was closest for him to grab, and touched his cheek. Luo Binghe hadn’t been lying, there was a tear that had escaped and traced itself down his cheek. 

Shameful.

He let the Protagonist see him like that? 

How did this even happen? The moment was peaceful, he hadn’t even been thinking of the inevitable destruction of his home and Martial Siblings. He’d been completely distracted by Luo Binghe’s homework!

More tears fell against Shen Qingqiu’s wishes and he had to fight to keep his breath even.

“Go to your room,” Shen Qingqiu forced his voice to sound collected and calm. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, but he would be damned if he showed even a moment more of weakness. “This Master has something to attend to.”

He left the Bamboo house out the back door, unwilling to risk Luo Binghe not listening to him or heaven forbid trying to comfort him. 

The clear pool was off limits for his students, so he headed there. If he was underwater his tears wouldn’t stand out, and the atmosphere would help. It would help. 

He couldn’t afford to carry this weakness with him.

Shen Qingqiu stood at the edge of the water and stared at his reflection. 

No weaknesses.

Caring was a weakness.

Caring was what got Yue Qingyuan killed in the original story. 

Shen Qingqiu couldn’t let anyone care about him. 

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu was barely paying attention to the class, letting Ming Fan and the other chosen students lead in his stead as they went over the most recent assignment. Everyone had gotten much, much better at reading and digesting information without relying on assumptions and while they weren’t all getting the right answers all the time, the essays had actually become readable without Shen Qingqiu losing what sanity he had left. 

It was time to move on to the next step. Shen Qingqiu needed to talk with his class leads to set it up though and the incident with Luo Binghe last night was stopping him from talking to anyone one on one. 

In the meanwhile, he needed to get up the nerve to approach Yue Qingyuan. 

Asking for something for Qing Jing was easy, ‘Zhagmen Shixiong I need new paints,’ always got the answer ‘Of course Shidi.’

But asking him to change something fundamental about the workings of the Sect itself would involve convincing him without making it look like he was relying on Yue Qingyuan’s blatant favoritism. 

No, wait. Shen Qingqiu had a thought. He shouldn’t start with Yue Qingyuan if he wanted to avoid accusations of favoritism that might damage the Sect Leader’s reputation. 

The person he should convince first was Liu Qingge.

After class, Shen Qingqiu broke the students into study groups as always, changing who paired with who so they didn’t get too comfortable. Then he headed to Bai Zhan.

Liu Qingge, surprisingly, was at the training grounds watching his disciples fight. 

“Shen Qingqiu,” he said as a greeting.

Honestly it was no wonder he and the Original Goods didn’t get along when his level of proprietary was this bad. 

Fortunately Shen Qingqiu was modern enough not to mind. After all, it wasn’t like he was the one that clawed and scratched his way into the position of Peak Lord. He’d been given it just by dying.

“Liu Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu landed and put his sword away. “I have a proposition.”

His answer was an unbothered grunt, that was again waved away in Shen Qingqiu’s mind as ‘just how Liu Qingge was.’

“It involves the poor showing my students gave during our trip down the mountain.”

Liu Qingge glanced towards him. “You sent one of them to my Peak,”

“Oh, yes. Did he manage to learn anything?”

Liu Qingge snorted. “How to dodge.”

“Yes,” Shen Qingqiu looked away from his Shidi and towards the gaggle of children all beating down on each other. “That’s around what I was expecting.”

Liu Qingge though, was still looking at Shen Qingqiu. “You want to send more?”

“Not just to your Peak,” Shen Qingqiu took out his fan, “And less sending them over and more exchanging them temporarily.”

He snorted and shook his head. “No one on Bai Zhan would have any interest in learning to paint.”

“Perhaps,” Shen Qingqiu watched as one of the younger children jumped onto one of the taller ones to grab at his hair. Jeez. And Liu Qingge complained about how Shen Qingqiu fought? “But teaching things like calligraphy and manners would go a long way towards making sure the next generation of Peak Lords don’t have Bai Zhan accidentally angering Qing Jing.”

There was a blush on Liu Qingge’s cheeks, only noticeable due to how pale he was. 

He was determinedly looking away from Shen Qingqiu, but his eyes kept flicking over as if looking away was actively difficult. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but then closed it. 

Shen Qingqiu just waited, Liu Qingge didn’t exactly have patience as one of his virtues. 

“Fine,” he grit his teeth together. “Let me know when and I’ll send my older students.”

“This Shixiong thanks his Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu smiled, only for Liu Qingge’s blush to grow even darker. Likely because he was mortified how easy it was to convince him when just under a year ago they’d been bitter enemies. 

Having gotten what he wanted, Shen Qingqiu got back on his sword and headed to Cian Cao.

“Shen Shixiong,” Mu Qingfang greeted him at the door. “Is the poison acting up?”

He looked either confused, or worried. Either way Shen Qingqiu waved him off and said, “This Master simply wanted to discuss something with his Shidi.”

“Did he now?” Mu Qingfang stepped back, allowing Shen Qingqiu inside. “What did Shixiong wish to discuss?”

Shen Qingqiu looked around a moment before answering, hoping to both build up Mu Qingfang’s interest in his unusually social behavior and to get a better glimpse of who Mu Qingfang was before the Abyss arc. 

The room was busy, filled with trinkets, notes, and medicinal supplies. It also smelt terrible, a mixture of herbs and incense that were left out with no care as to whether their scents suited each other when intermingled. 

But it was clean, and not a complete pigsty, so Shen Qingqiu was able to stop himself from wrinkling his nose in disgust. That would not help him here. 

For now, he needed to convince Mu Qingfang to agree with his plans. Then he could slip, slowly, into the next step of his plan. 

“It is to my understanding that the majority of Mu Shidi’s patients are Bai Zhan Disciples.”

Mu Qingfang raised an eyebrow. “That is correct. However, as Shen Shixiong knows, we are not at liberty to refuse to heal any of the Sect’s members no matter how often they are prone to injury…or Qi Deviation.”

Lifting his fan to cover the lower half of his face before he could be caught scowling, Shen Qingqiu cursed in his own mind. 

Damn it Shidi! That’s not why I’m here! Stop being so damn suspicious!

“Of course,” Shen Qingqiu forced a smile underneath the fan, “This Shixiong was simply curious if it might make it easier on Mu Shidi and his Disciples if the more common broken bones and superficial cuts that naturally come with sparring were treated by others on Bai Zhan Peak, so that they needn’t make the trip all the way here.”

Mu Qingfan didn’t immediately agree or disagree. Instead, he mulled it over, his hand stroking his beard and his eyes looking out the window, no doubt at the over worked students of his Peak.

Every Peak had roughly the same amount of inner and outer disciples, but there were twelve Peaks. Which meant that should every students in Cang Qiong get sick or hurt, there would be twelve patients for every healer in Cian Cao, no matter how much experience they had. 

Wouldn’t it be a dream, to cut down the average number of patients needing direct healing so that they could focus their time and energy on the cases that were more dangerous or complicated. 

“This is about your presentation at the Peak Lords’ meeting.”

Shen Qingqiu gave a slight nod.

Even so, Mu Qingfang held his tongue. 

“It would be beneficient for every student in the Sect to learn through temporary exchanges,” Shen Qingqiu argued. “My students need to learn better how to fight, surely yours could too. Bai Zhan could—”

“Learn how to think?” Mu Qingfang looked amused. 

Shen Qingqiu once again covered his expression with his fan, having lowered it in his eagerness to explain his plans. “I was going to argue they could learn how to socialize…” He thought back to Liu Qingge’s insistence that Shen Qinngqiu shouldn’t be necessary to watch his students while hunting a monster. “But yes. It would be nice if they knew how to use their brains I suppose.”

Bewilderingly, Mu Qingfang laughed. “Well then, Shen Shixiong. It seems we might benefit a trial run of sorts between the three Peaks. I have no doubt you were able to convince Liu Qingge?”

“I was.”

Mu Qingfang nodded. “Then let me know when the preparations are in place. I will send some of my youngest as they are the least stubborn in their ways and most eager to learn.”

“This Shixiong thanks you.” 

That worked! Shen Qingqiu was absolutely winning right now. 

Tickled at his most recent successes, Shen Qingqiu was about to head back to his own Peak in order to decide which of his students not in his ‘punishment’ class he would be sending away.

Just about to step on his sword at the edge of the rainbow bridge, he was interrupted.

“The Sword of Damocles.”

Shen Qingqiu turned around. 

Shang Qinghua was standing there, behind him looking as if he ran half a marathon to get there in time and for once not carrying any work with him.

“Pardon?” Shen Qingqiu said, scowling down at him.

“The Sword of Damocles, where” he panted, taking in a deep breath to finish his sentence, “Where did you hear that story?”

Chapter Text

Hmm. That was a problem.

Shen Qingqiu had assumed using an unfamiliar parable would be fine, since he was the Peak Lord of the Scholarly Peak which meant he knew more about literature and history than anyone else. If someone had heard him quote something they didn’t recognize, wouldn’t they simply infer it was a story they hadn’t read but was known to Shen Qingqiu?

“I read it somewhere,” Shen Qingqiu kept his answer vague. If he gave an actual answer, Shang Qinghua (spy that he was) might actually try to find it only to discover Shen Qingqiu was lying. 

And the last thing he needed was Shang Qinghua of all traitors to be suspicious of him. 

Who knew what kind of poison he might whisper in the Sect Leader’s ear?

If Yue Qingyuan found out he wasn’t the Original Goods, Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t have to worry about Luo Binghe’s blackening. Yue Qingyuan would hunt him down instead!

“I’m sure you did,” Shang Qingqua was finally able to stand up, though his breathing was still heavy. Shen Qingqiu wondered what had an Immortal Cultivator push himself so hard. Surely he didn’t run from his Peak to Qing Jing and end up looking for Shen Qingqiu around the entire mountain. “If I remember correctly, it’s mandatory reading in Literature history classes in most colleges.”

Shen Qingqiu blinked. 

His first thought was that he was surprised Shang Qinghua went to college. Then, he rationalized that the Sect was kind of like a really specialized college, but it still didn’t make sense because Shang Qinghua wasn’t a part of Qing Jing so he wouldn’t have studied Literature History—something Shen Qingqiu might be able to change with his new plan.

Then all these thoughts froze in place, because The Sword of Damocles wasn’t taught in the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way.

“You—!” Shen Qingqiu gripped his fan tightly and tried to take a step forward only to almost stumble. “You went to college?!”

That was not what he meant to say.

Shang Qinghua’s jaw dropped. 

“Seriously Shen Bro?! That’s your first question? Not ‘how did you know that’?”

Well, the questions were kind of related. You couldn’t really blame Shen Qingqiu for getting them mixed up in his head after a shock like this.

“No,” he said, raising his hand to knead at his forehead, “No, you’re right.”

Shang Qinghua laughed, looking far more relaxed than Shen Qingqiu had ever seen him. Not that he sought him out very often, rather, he tended towards the opposite. 

“I was wondering what happened!” Shang Qinghua collapsed, sitting awkwardly on the grass. “You were suddenly getting along with Yue Qingyuan, and not spurning Luo Binghe…even being able to save Liu Qingge!”

Wait. 

Shen Qingqiu frowned. “What?”

“Yeah!” Shang Qinghua leaned forward to balance his cheek on his knuckles. “It really threw me off that you stepped in to help Luo Binghe when like, your disdain for him is a whole plot—”

“Not that,” Shen Qingqiu interrupted, using his sharp no nonsense teacher voice. Shang Qinghua sat up straighter, “The other thing. With Liu Qingge.”

“Being able to save him?”

“What do you mean by that?”

Shang Qinghua’s face fell. “Ugh, this is why you can’t rely on unreliable narrators…your audience is gonna just believe whatever the protagonist wants them to.”

Did he just say Luo Binghe was an unreliable narrator?

Wait.

Did he imply that he was the one to write this fucking book .

Shang Qinghua didn’t notice Shen Qingqiu’s sudden turn from vaguely friendly to fully murderous. Still caught up in the high of meeting another Transmigrator. 

“In the original story, Shen Qingqiu got caught in the Lingxi caves by Liu Qingge while he was having a Qi Deviation. When Shen Qingqiu tried to help, he was attacked and fell into his own Qi Deviation he barely survived. It looked pretty bad, from the outside, but then the demons tried to invade and there really wasn’t time to explain. It’s quite a tragedy—”

“Airplane,” Shen Qingqiu was barely listening.

Shang Qinghua looked up. “Ye?”

“You’re Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky?”

“Well, ye…ah?”

Shen Qingqiu reached for his sword. 

“Whoa! Hold on a sec Shen-Bro!” Shang Qinghua was on his feet faster than Shen Qingqiu expected possible of him. “I—I’m a victim too okay! It’s not my fault we got sent here!”

It was one of the most difficult displays of self control Shen Qingqiu had yet to struggle with his entire time transmigrated, but he managed not to draw Xiu Ya.

“It’s entirely your fault I’m here,” Shen Qingqiu hissed through grit teeth, trying not to be so loud they could be overheard. “If you hadn’t written that shitty novel, I wouldn’t have spat blood from anger until I died!”

Shang Qinghua looked aggrieved. “What! Hey, no one said to care that much about a web novel!”

“It’s your web novel!” Shen Qingqiu could not believe the audacity of this man. “You’re supposed to want people to care about it!”

“That’s unrealistic! Only one person actually cared about the plot, everyone else was just there for the sex and gorey battle scenes!”

Letting go of his sword entirely, Shen Qingqiu instead grabbed his fan, so he could throw it with unerring precision at Shang Qinghua’s stupid head. 

He yelped, ducking miraculously quick again, and Shen Qingqiu was forced to continue standing there, scowling. “The fundamental value in a story is the plot and characters!”

Every aspect of his scholar-self was screaming about the wasted potential of the Novel they were trapped in. How it could have been so much more than thousands of chapters of nothing.

“Jeez,” Shang Qinghua was balanced on the balls of his feet, ready to disappear if he truly felt fear for his life. “You sound like cucumber-bro.”

Shen Qingqiu’s face went red.

Shang Qingqua noticed.

“... Cucumber-Bro?! ”

He regretted throwing his fan. It would be an invaluable shield at this moment. 

For some reason, discovering Shen Qingqiu’s hidden past as Airplane’s biggest critic made the man happier than ever. He was practically bouncing. 

“Holy shit! You’re like, my most loyal, favorite fan dude!” Shang Qinghua actually had the audacity to step forward like he was going to grab Shen Qingqiu by the shoulders, or worse, hug him. “I can’t believe we get to meet in person! You’re the main reason I even kept writing when I lost control of the story.”

Shen Qingqiu felt his jaw drop at the insult. “You—” he could barely even form the words. “You think you were writing that crap for my sake!?”

Shang Qinghua, in contrast to his previous behavior, didn’t back down this time. “Well, yeah? Even though you ranted for like a hundred words every chapter, you still read every chapter. So you clearly liked it?”

The last of his control snapped. 

When Yue Qingyuan found them it was to a very indignant and messy display that looked much, much more like the result of two children in a school yard fight than two immortal cultivators. 

Shen Qingqiu was so mortified he locked himself in his Bamboo house for a week, leaving Ning Ying Ying and Ming Fan to take over his classes and not even showing his face to Luo Binghe despite sharing a residence. 

Chapter Text

Yue Qingyuan knocked on Shen Qingqiu’s door every day of the week he’d locked himself in. It could’ve been tempting to let him in, especially the time he brought a new tea blend or the time he found the fan Shen Qingqiu had attacked Shang Qinghua with. 

Unfortunately, every time Shen Qingqiu heard the Sect Leader’s voice, he remembered the shocked and then delighted expression on his face after he found Shen Qingqiu fighting with Shang Qinghua like an actual child. 

There was no pleasant explanation Shen Qingqiu could think of for why Yue Qingyuan would look so pleased at the sight of two of his Peak Lords being caught in a situation like that. Especially not with some of the words Shen Qingqiu knew he’d thrown out while trying to bash Shang Qinghua’s mousy mug against the dirt.

Was he happy to finally have proof that Shen Qingqiu wasn’t as proper as he pretended to be? 

No matter how he thought about it, Shen Qingqiu’s mind only came up with the worst explanations. There was no way the Original Goods would have ever been caught in such a disrespectful position. 

Then again, despite the mortification, Shen Qingqiu knew he could use this to his advantage in the next step of his plan. He was already planning on making enemies. 

Yue Qingyuan’s smile flashed in his mind again and Shen Qingqiu banged his head against the wall. 

“Shizun?” Luo Binghe’s worried voice called out from the other side. 

“Run twelve laps around the Peak!” he ordered, just to get the kid away from him while he continued to have his melt down. 

After a week, Shen Qingqiu’s isolation was forced to come to an abrupt end when Liu Qingge knocked down his front door. 

“...Can this Master help Liu Shidi with something?” Shen Qingqiu drawled, as he stared at the pieces of his door.

Liu Qingge for his part, looked entirely unsure what to do with himself now that he’d managed to break in. 

“I’m here for the Qi transfer.”

Fuck.

Shen Qingqiu forgot about that.

“Fine.” he gestured towards the area they usually used for the treatment sessions. 

Neither of them said anything until Liu Qingge was done and still sitting awkwardly behind Shen Qingqiu.

Eventually, when Liu Qingge didn’t move away, Shen Qingqiu took it into his own hands to stand up and leave. He was about to be very rude and simply walk into his sleeping chambers with the door closed behind him until Liu Qingge took the hint, but before he could, Liu Qingge managed to find his voice. 

“When are you sending your students over?” he said. 

Shen Qingqiu turned around. “After I’ve spoken with Yue Qingyuan and gotten his permission.”

Liu Qingge scoffed. “It’s not like he’d tell you no.”

See? This was the exact obvious favor that Shen Qingqiu needed Yue Qingyuan to stop showing. If he hadn’t been so damn obvious, even in the original book, Luo Binghe wouldn’t have known that sending him the Original Good’s limbs would be enough to trick him into an ambush.

“Is there something else you needed, Liu Qingge?” Shen Qinqiu let some of his annoyance bleed through into his tone. 

Liu Qingge frowned, but didn’t look surprised. 

Honestly, he was probably more used to the venom of the Original Goods than the forced air of polite nonchalance that Shen Qingqiu had been using to try and get on his good side.

“Are you sick?” Liu Qingge continued to blunder forward.

“What? Of course not.”

“No one’s seen you for a week.”

“I was working on something,” Shen Qingqiu lied. “It’s not the first time I’ve been unavailable for a short period of time.”

Liu Qingge crossed his arms and shrugged. 

Shen Qingqiu was running out of ways to tell him to leave and eventually sighed and offered him a cup of tea. At least then Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t be standing around with nothing to do with himself. 

After tea, Shen Qingqiu was able to get rid of Liu Qingge, only to have Yue Qingyuan and Mu Qingfang show up at his broken door to replace him.

What was this? Some kind of intervention?

“Is Qingqiu Shidi feeling better?” Yue Qingyuan asked, smiling.

Shen Qingqiu would have closed the door in his face if it was still in one piece. 

“This Master’s house is not currently acceptable to receive guests, I’m afraid.”

Mu Qingfang raised an eyebrow and cast a very pointed look at the broken door and then the used tea set still on the table. 

“It’s of no matter,” Yue Qingyuan said, stepping inside anyways. “We only wanted to speak to Qingqiu Shidi about his plan to implement an exchange of students between three of the Peaks.”

“Of course.” Shen Qingqiu said, turning to go put another pot to boil. 

He wouldn’t be able to chase them out and still get what he wanted from them. That was the general downside of the entire two-plus part plan. It was hard to get things you wanted from people that didn’t like you, and Shen Qingqiu needed people not to like him so that they wouldn’t be dragged down with him. 

It was a balancing game for now, until the practice was entrenched well enough that it would continue even if Shen Qingqiu got dragged to the Water Prison half a decade early.

Yue Qingyuan hadn’t looked away from him, and his gaze was definitely amused. 

Was he still remembering that embarrassing ordeal? Shen Qingqiu tried his best to force down a blush. There was no chance he’d be able to hide in his Bamboo House for another week, but the thought was desperately tempting. 

“Qingqiu Shidi,” Yue Qingyuan said as Shen Qingqiu poured him a cup of the sweetest tea he had, “You’re offering to send your students to Bai Zhan?”

“I’ve sent them to Liu Qingge as punishment before. This wouldn’t be much different.”

Yue Qingyuan shared a look with Mu Qingfang. “But you often complained about Bai Zhan disciples harassing the disciples on your Peak.”

“And what was done about it?” Shen Qingqiu didn’t roll his eyes. If his disciples were going to get up by Bai Zhan, he might as well make it official. And since Mu Qingfang agreed, there would be the added benefit of his children learning how to care for wounds.

Fighting and first aid, other than hiding and not being found in the first place, these were what his children needed to learn most if they wanted to survive. 

“I understand.” Yue Qingyuan was looking so damn pleased it actually hurt. It was akin to staring at the sun for too long. “Then this Shixiong has nothing he can say against it. We can come back in a month after the exchange and see how effective the lessons were for the students.”

Shen Qingqiu nodded. 

Mu Qingfang hadn’t said anything yet, and it was starting to get suspicious. Why bring him, if he wasn’t going to be part of the discussion about their disciples? 

Once his second pot of tea for the day was finished, Shen Qingqiu once again led his guests to the door to see them out. 

Except this time, his curiosity got the better of him. 

Mu Qingfang was the more suspicious of Shen Qingqiu between the two of them. Mostly because Yue Qingyuan didn’t seem to have any ability to suspect Shen Qingqiu of anything. Or maybe he did, but just didn’t care.

Either way, Shen Qingqiu feigned a mild dizzy spell just to have an excuse to touch Yue Qingyuan gently on the arm without it looking too completely out of character. It was subtle, and Shen Qingqiu did manage his goal of sneaking a small talisman on the hidden part of Yue QIngyuan’s sleeve.

He also, however, managed to answer his question without using it at all. 

The moment Yue Qingyuan even suspected Shen Qingqiu might not be at 100% perfect health, he gestured to Mu Qingfang to check his pulse and meridians and fortunately the stress of even more embarrassment must have shown since Mu Qingfang wasn’t suspicious at all.

He was even less suspicious once Shen Qingqiu couldn’t take their hovering anymore and shoved both of them out of his house and closed what was left of the door on them. 

No more hiding at home, he decided, glaring at the broken door. It was obviously doing more harm than good. 

Turning on his heel, Shen Qingqiu began to get ready for the day. There was plenty he could still do, and out of all of it—the first thing he needed was a new fucking door.

Chapter Text

Shang Qinghua hadn’t expected him.

Shen Qingqiu knew this, because his fellow Peak Lord and Transmigrator jumped half his height into the air and exclaimed so when Shen Qingqiu showed up at his door. 

“I need to put in a repair order,” Shen Qingqiu said, mostly ignoring Shang Qinghua’s theatrics. 

“Cucumber bro…you’re going to give me a heart attack if you keep doing things like this,” Shang Qinghua whined. “I almost forgot you weren’t Shen Qingqiu for a second.”

Shen Qingqiu wasn’t really sure how to take that. A compliment on his ability to blend in? An insult on his personality? He forced the thoughts away before they could spiral and worsen his mood further. 

“I need a new door.” He waved his fan slowly, trying to loosen his hold on it a touch so it wouldn’t join the long line of broken fans that have suffered a momentarily lack of control and need to be fixed. 

Shang Qinghua didn’t move to start working on his request, still lounging in the pose he’d struck after Shen QIngqiu disturbed his office. “A new door? What, did Yue Qingyuan finally get sick of being locked out?”

His fan went flying, striking true in the middle of Shang Qinghua’s forehead. “That’s your Sect Leader you dolt.”

“Owwww,” Shang Qinghua nursed his only slightly red forehead dramatically. “So he did? Really?”

Shen Qingqiu rolled his eyes. “It was Liu Shidi.”

“I thought you  two were getting along?”

“We are,” Shen Qingqiu shrugged and used some spiritual energy to bring his fan back into his hands. Luckily he’d used little enough energy in his attack that it was mostly unharmed. “That, for some reason, does not lead to a decrease in property damage, I’ve discovered.”

Shang Qinghua sighed. “My precious freetime…” he mumbled, finally reaching for a request form to fill out and send to whoever it was on his Peak that went and replaced all the doors Liu Qingge destroyed.

It wasn’t a complicated request, so Shen Qingqiu continued to stand over Shang Qinghua’s shoulder until he was done. And in a record breaking amount of time compared to when Shen Qingqiu actually went through the appropriate channels and had Ming Fan deliver his requests. He should come in person more often.

“Uh, Cucumber-bro?” Shang Qinghua looked nervous for some reason. 

“Hmmm?”

“Did..uh…did you need anything else?”

He closed his fan. “No.” 

Yue Qingyuan was in his office alone and with an alarm ward in case any one else tried to come in. Then he took the talisman off his sleeve. 

Xiao Jiu had been subtle, Mu Qingfang hadn’t noticed at least. But Yue Qingyuan had spent far too long with Xiao Jiu’s schemes to not catch one of his favorite tactics. 

It was flattering, he thought as he sent some energy through the talisman to read what its purpose was. Xiao Jiu wanted to eavesdrop on him. He hadn’t been interested in anything Yue Qingyuan did in private since they both became Peak Lords and Shen Qingqiu’s place on Cang Qiong had been properly secured. 

There was a temptation, actually there were a few temptations, stemming from Xiao Jiu’s talisman. He could just destroy it. The more obvious he made it that he’d discovered the talisman the more likely Xaoi Jiu was to show up at his Peak, flustered, looking for a way to explain himself. Then he’d see Xiao Jiu in person without having to go seek him out. 

But that might backfire, if Xiao Jiu thought Yue Qingyuan was disapproving of his nature, he wouldn’t feel as comfortable around him. And Yue Qingyuan had been doing a very good job at getting Xiao Jiu more comfortable around him. Not back to how they should be yet, but better. 

Yue Qingyuan missed having his trust. 

He didn’t deserve to have it, of course. But Shen Qingqiu didn’t know that.

It still hurt, knowing their shared memories were gone. But seeing Shen Qingqiu attack Shang Qinghua a week ago was something like a wake up call. Even without his memory fully intact, that really was Xiao Jiu, still here. Safe, where Yue Qingyuan can actually protect him, unlike when they were on the streets. 

He even bit the same way when he was angry. 

So instead of destroying it, he set the talisman off to the side in his bedroom. His office was no good, he might have to actually discuss things he didn’t want Xiao Jiu to hear. But in his bedroom, he could pretend it was just the two of them. 

Just like before.

Shen Qingqiu wasn’t learning anything from his talisman wire tap. Mu Qingfang had gone with Yue Qingyuan to visit him because they were both actually worried about his health with all the Qi Deviations and the poison and him hiding for a week straight. 

But he also didn’t get anything particularly useful once they parted ways. Just Yue Qingyuan going back to his Peak and humming some happy sounding tune or other. 

Which was infuriating, since that tune was now stuck in Shen Qingqiu’s head and he couldn’t be caught humming or his Martial Siblings might chain a possession sensing talisman to his wrist. 

When he came back to his Peak, it was to take back control of his little punishment detail and to choose some of the younger disciples to be sent to Mu Qingfang’s and Liu Qingge’s Peaks respectively. 

He was going to send Luo Binghe to Mu Qingfang as well, since it would be valuable for him to see how kind and caring the other Peak Lord could be. And he could learn healing techniques properly instead of relying on his blood for every single fucking thing. It really took the intrigue out of the story.

The trick was going to be how he convinced the boy to go. He wasn’t finished catching up with the rest of his class yet, and other than Shen Qingqiu’s plan to ingratiate some of the kinder Peak Lords to the Protagonist before he blackened or became too bitter, he would usually prefer not to interrupt his studies. 

Especially since, comparatively, he’d be a bit of a bad showing from the Scholarly Peak.

Still stewing, Shen Qingqiu grabbed a guqin from his Bamboo House and went to the quiet pool behind it. It was easier to concentrate with his fingers plucking the strings in a familiar tune, and he let possible conversations play out in his head. 

The problem, was that he couldn’t make an argument that Luo Binghe wouldn’t be able to counter as Protagonist. That’s just how these kinds of books worked. The reality of the world bent to the will of a singular man. If it was a bit more realistic—

He stopped that thought process before it turned into another long monologue of cursing out Airplane. 

Not sending Binghe to Liu Qingge was the right choice. He knew that. Liu Qingge was a terrible teacher in the scheme of things, but more than that, Luo Binghe had a history of being bullied by the students at his Peak almost more than the students that followed Ming Fan around. And he didn’t really need to learn how to fight, it was something that came naturally to him as half Heavenly Demon. 

Which of course, is why he should have gone to Liu Qingge’s Peak to start with! Then Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t have to be stressing over all of this! He’d be some annoying Side Villain that at most killed his Shizun and then didn’t do anything else really? 

Though, Shen Qingqiu hadn’t killed Liu Qingge according to the author. So would it be another case of Luo Binghe getting justice for Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu falling on the sword for it just like in cannon. But with less resentment in Luo Binghe’s actions? 

How much of the story was guaranteed?

Liu Qingge is alive, but even if Luo Binghe had been his student front he start—

The Abyss Arc wouldn’t have happened.

Liu Qingge would have killed Luo Binghe the second the mark showing his heritage appeared during an invasion. 

So why did the Original Goods push him into the Abyss and accidentally end up saving his life? To protect his own reputation? 

He played a sour note and it drew him from his thoughts. 

Frowning, he re-tuned the instrument, and re-played the note.

Still sour. 

“Why does Shizun keep playing the same note?” a soft voice asked. 

It was Ning Ying Ying, and the knowledge that it wa her and not anyone else was what allowed Shen Qingqiu to keep his composure despite not expecting anyone to approach him.

She was sitting next to him, legs crossed, their reflections in the moonlight of the water. 

“It’s sour,” he answered, tuning the instrument again. “I may need to repair this guqin if it can’t work properly.”

Ning Ying Ying chuckled, smiling at him and completely at ease. Very few people could boast feeling at ease at Shen Qingqiu’s side. 

In fact, it was probably only the two in all the Sect.

“Only Shizun would say a note is offkey when everyone else would marvel in the magic of his music.”

He frowned. “Ning Ying Ying should learn to recognize when an instrument is not playing properly if she ever wants to inherit this Master’s Peak.”

Wait shit. He’d said that without thinking. Ming Fan was the Head Disciple. Why would he give her false hope when the Peak was doomed anyways? Just to tie her down more thoroughly and break her heart when her home is destroyed?

There was a tug on his sleeve and Shen Qingqiu looked down at his side, instead of forward at their reflection. She was looking down, the shadows of the early evening obscuring her features. 

“Shizun forgets,” she said, and Shen Qingqiu fought the urge to pull her into a hug. It would just lead to more bad rumors. “I already told Shizun that this student will be married someday and unable to take his place as Peak Lord.”

“Ying Ying—”

“I—” she tugged his sleeve closer to her, “I told Shizun already that a girl with my history would not be appropriate for Peak Lord.”

Fuck it. 

He raised his arm, the one she’d been tugging on, and wrapped it around her shoulders so that she could tuck her head into his shoulder. 

“This Master will follow his favorite disciples wishes,” he said and she pulled him just a bit closer, “But only so long as his favorite disciple remembers her worth on this Peak is not diminished by her past.” 

They stayed like that until she’d fallen asleep and ruined the silk of his outer robe. Carefully, he settled her down in a more comfortable position and started playing the guqin again. Quietly, so as not to disturb her. 

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu hadn’t exactly been expecting sweet dreams when he’d had nothing but nightmares since transmigrating, but he definitely wasn’t expecting whatever this dream was supposed to be. 

Recreating the events from the book, maybe? But usually those nightmares involved the Water Prison and missing limbs and Yue Qingyuan—-

He shook his head. 

That was a thought that would stay not thought, thank you. 

In the dream, he was watching Luo Binghe bringing his mother flowers. 

<System Warning: You are currently entering an important plot branch: Dream Demon Enchantment>

Well. That would explain it then. 

“Shizun!” 

And now he had an armful of Luo Binghe. Great. That’s two students in one day, the Original Goods must be rolling in his non-existent grave.

“Luo Binghe,” he said, gently prying him off. 

He got the hint and immediately stepped back and into a shallow bow. “This Disciple apologizes. He simply hadn’t seen Shizun in so long and got worried.”

Its been less than a week. For fuck sake. 

“Propriety should still be the filter through which Luo Binghe perceives the world.” He would hate to run out of outer robes he could still feasibly wear. And it was already so tedious making sure Shang Qinghua didn’t fuck up his orders. 

“Uhm. Shizun?” Luo Binghe said, ignoring his very reasonable lecture. “Where… are we?”

Considering they were watching Luo Binghe in miniature giving his mother flowers in a vague and unsettling background with walls and open fields overlapping each other, he didn’t think it was a stretch to answer.

“In your dreamscape.”

For some reason, Luo Binghe’s entire face went red. “Uhh, Shizun, I— why are— how are you—?”

“Calm down,” Shen Qingqiu said. “You need to control your mind or you’ll give further access to the demon.”

“Demon?”

“Mm,” Shen Qingqiu acknowledged. “Can you feel the demonic energy?”

Shen Qingqiu could, now that he knew to look for it. It was thin, strategically scattered at the edges of the dream where someone’s attention is least likely to linger. 

Luo Binghe nodded. It was probably even easier for him, since his cultivation was actually hardwired towards demonic energy. 

“We’ll have to find the demon and exercise him. Be careful not to let your emotions control you no matter what illusions you see.”

Then he walked towards the woman in her bed. 

She was clearly sick, but there was no food for her to eat. Only the wild picked flowers and the tiny crying Binghe were by her bedside. 

A hand gripped his sleeve.

This was starting to get strangely familiar. 

System.

<Host!>

Why the hell am I here??? 

He kept his face passive as he scolded the System for getting him confused with Ning Ying Ying. It wasn’t like he’d fallen asleep next to her. He took her back to her room and tucked her in and went home! So how could the wires be crossed?

<¯\_(ツ)_/¯>

While he and his very annoying brain parasite were arguing back and forth, Luo Binghe was saying good bye to his mother even as his younger self gave a determined and impassioned speech about getting her food so she could get better. 

It was very heart wrenching. Even worse than when he read it in Airplane’s prose.

But the immersion of the seen was taken a bit away, by Luo Binghe not letting go of Shen Qingqiu’s sleeve. 

Kind of like those plays that tried to use audience engagement that never really worked for him. 

Luo Binghe was clutching at his chest and Shen Qingqiu frowned. Was that the first heart-demon then? Shen Qingqiu leaned down to offer comfort, just as he had to Ning Ying Ying, when the scene twisted into smoke and disappeared. 

Replacing the woman was a group of children, dressed in average clothing and in what could be a busy street if the rest of the people weren’t strangely faceless and manakinesque. 

In the middle of the group of children was mini-Binghe. 

Fuck.

Luckily he was already reaching out for Luo Binghe, because it allowed him to drag the boy back as he tried to run towards them. Some of the screaming faces in the crowd of bullies were familiar, faces Shen Qingqiu had scene either on Bai Zhan’s Peak or his own. But others weren’t familiar to him at all, and were too plain and human to be even a beginner level cultivator. 

Damn it Airplane. Did you really have to go the boring ‘everyone in the child’s life bullies him except the one pretty girl’ route? This was beyond the social and teaching skills Shen Qingqiu had!

“Let me go!” Luo Binghe screamed, his eyes glowing red despite how thoroughly sealed away his powers were. 

Shen Qingqiu didn’t listen. “Stop! You— it’s a trick! An illusion! They aren’t real .”

“Of course you would say that.” Red eyes turned to meet his and a sharp pain thundered in his chest. 

Ah.

Attacking Shen Qingqiu now. Jokes on you, he’s great at repression. It’s like, his number one thing. 

The scene melted down and reformed. Now they were in the woodshed. 

Luo Binghe was curled in on himself, his back exposed to the cold air where long red welts had been raised and crossed over. 

Shen Qingqiu frowned. Luo Binghe’s cultivation really was behind his peers—he wasn’t even trying to use it to help speed up his healing. 

Fortunately, even as the real Luo Binghe scratched and bit, the Dream-Binghe just curled in on himself, not causing any damage. Just as he almost managed to pull away, Ning Ying Ying opened the door and stormed in. 

The Binghe on the bed jumped up, trying and failing to hide his wounds. 

The Binghe in his arms stopped fighting to get away, and instead gripped Shen Qingqiu’s robes as if to pull him closer instead. Which was a nonsensical change that had Shen Qingqiu almost stumble into him due to the very sudden lack of resistance.

Just as Ning Ying Ying was sitting down to help Dream-Binghe dress his wounds (she was a very clever girl. It looked like she’d mixed some herbs together into a paste) The scene shifted again. 

This time, to the evening just before they found themselves in the dream. Ning Ying Ying asleep on Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder. 

Ah.

He understood now, as Binghe’s grip tightened in what must have been frustration. He must see Ning Ying Ying as having betrayed him because of her comfort with his abuser. 

That must be why she wasn’t here. 

Shen Qingqiu gently pried Luo Binghe’s grip open so that he could step away. He was trying to fight to get out from Shen Qingqiu’s grasp earlier, and now that there was less of a fear of him hurting himself by attacking his own mind, it was best to allow it. 

One last reminder though. 

“Luo Binghe,” he said. The boy blinked up at him, eyes rimmed red. “This is your mind. Control it.”

Then he stepped back, to give the boy space, and somehow everything shattered. 

“What?!” someone shouted. 

Shen Qingqiu turned around to see a new figure. It must be Ming Mo. The demon looked confused. 

“How the hell—? You just brute forced—?” 

The poor demon seemed to be at a complete loss for words. Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow. 

“And whose illusion was so easy to shatter?” he asked. 

Meng Mo didn’t look thrilled by this line of questioning. In fact, his eyes glowed both brighter and darker and he waved his hand and Shen Qingqiu was no longer standing on the edge of the Quiet Pool with his disciple. 

He was in a dark room, alone, with every part of his body aching as a soft voice whispered from the walls. 

A sharp pain burst in his chest that brought him to his knees. 

The voice kept whispering, sweet promises and Shen Qingqiu almost reached out for it, almost begged it to get him away. 

But then he remembered that voice wasn’t for him and he closed his eyes and he breathed and the scene started to change. 

It went from frigid to furnace. From a dark room to a never ending hall as Shen Qingqiu ran, flames licking at his heels. He ignored cries and shouts and just kept running until all of that too was behind him. 

Dripping water put out the flames. 

Shen Qingqiu felt every muscle of his body freeze in place.

No.

No no no.

Nonononononononononono

There was a curtain of water, that filled the air with burning steam. Shen Qingqiu tried to back away, but slipped, his foot having stepped on a shard of—-

The metal shards glistened, reflecting the water and the widening of Shen Qingqiu’s single eye. 

He knew this sword.

Even having never seen the blade before, he knew this sword. 

The pain in his chest returned, but this time Shen Qingqiu could not force it away. 

With every thought, the pain grew encompassing. Yue Qingyuan. This was his fate if nothing changed. Shattered. Destroyed. 

For what? 

A worthless man like Shen Qingqiu?

He couldn’t even reach out to hold the shards. Instead, leaning forward to press his forehead to the floor in supplication as he begged in his heart for this to not be real. 

Red eyes glistened in the reflection behind him. 

Before he could turn around he opened his eyes and sat up, a scream ripping from him that had been silent in the dream. 

In seconds, Luo Binghe had stormed into his room, a panicked and worried expression on his face as he reached out. “Shizun—!”

Shen Qingqiu flinched away, backing as far into the wall as he could in a futile attempt to keep his distance. 

The boy did not come any closer. 

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu refused to react to anything, forgetting he had limbs or even a tongue to speak. He only noticed Luo Binghe had left the room because his sense of danger calmed the slightest, knowing that without his presence Shen Qingqiu was safe to rot. 

The pain in his chest did not go away.

He would circulate his Qi, but there was no point. His cultivation…was ripped away from him. Wasn’t it?

Something warm on his shoulder and he flinched again. 

Warm was bad. 

That meant he wasn’t alone. 

Then the smell of Jasmine and white musk hit him and the tension fled him entirely. 

That was Yue Qingyuan’s scent. 

His hands slowly lifted until he could curl his fingers into the silk of Yue Qingyuan’s outer robe. He pulled him closer. Desperate. Practically clawing into him. 

Yue Qingyuan was warm. Not cold shattered shards scattered along the floor of the prison. 

Shen Qingqiu could not get close enough. 

When Shen Qingqiu woke up properly, it was to a hand carding through his hair. 

He leaned into it before remembering every aspect of his current life that meant he should absolutely not be okay with some random person petting him while he slept. 

Sitting up fast enough that he hit himself on the hand before it pulled away, Shen Qingqiu made a valiant attempt at composing himself and not looking like an absolute mess. 

“Xiao Jiu,” Yue Qingyuan’s voice was soft. 

Shen Qingqiu flinched at the nickname. Yue Qingyuan noticed, because of course he did, but didn’t say anything.

“Qingqiu Shidi,” he sat on the bed beside him. “...you were screaming?”

Fuck . There was no way the Original Goods ever woke up screaming in fear. Shen Qingqiu was doomed if he couldn’t spin this somehow. But the cold ache from the dream was still so strong, he couldn’t even bring himself to open his mouth.

What if he tried to speak, but it was a fountain of blood that came out instead of words?

When Yue Qingyuan took his hand, Shen Qingqiu flinched. But not away, like with Luo Binghe. His hand actually gripped Yue Qingyuan’s harder. As if even his most base instincts were unwilling to let this man pull away. 

Then he remembered the dream. 

The shards. 

No waiting. He had to put his plan in motion now . 

He sat up, forcing himself to let go of Yue Qingyuan’s hand and to look away as he frowned.

“This Master is fine.” He forced his voice to sound steadier and stronger than he felt. “Zhagman Shixiong needn’t interrupt his duties.”

“One of my duties is seeing to the care of my Peak Lords.”

“Which is why I prefaced by saying I was fine,” Shen Qingqiu didn’t look at him.

“Qingqiu Shidi is rarely honest about his own state.”

He flinched. “You needn’t specify. You can say you don’t trust me without cushioning it.”

Shen Qingqiu had to remember that this was something built by the Original Goods. This was also good for his plans in general. It was easy to push people away when they didn’t trust you. 

<+10 B Points! Super in Character!>

He was getting very good at ignoring that stupid system. 

Something brushed against his cheek. Shen Qingqiu couldn’t stop himself from looking.

Yue Qingyuan was leaning closer, his hand raised so that his knuckles were close enough to touch. 

“You’re still having nightmares,” he said. His eyes were tight, and they flickered over to the door where Luo Binghe was standing. 

Shen Qingqiu brushed him away. Suddenly cold. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He couldn’t let Luo Binghe know about this. After the Abyss arc, if he knows Shen Qingqiu’s mind was weak to nightmares—

He shivered and Yue Qingyuan tried to cover his shoulders with a robe, but he pushed away. 

“ Leave, ” he hissed. “ Both of you .”

They did. Eventually. 

Mu Qingfang was sent in to check on him, but by then Shen Qingqiu had gotten his bearings. 

He was appropriately dressed and working on an essay to send out about a recent art work that was being heralded as a “Masterpiece.” The plan was to start burning bridges by being insufferable, and if there was one thing he knew how to do it was to be an insufferable critic.

If the use of “Masterpiece” regarding Song Geming’s FireHawk painting is in reference to the concept that he might have finally achieved some kind of Mastery over the artform and thus can graduate from his studies as an apprentice I might be lenient in allowing its use as the piece has no true technical faults. 

However. If it is in reference to the piece being a work of art above reproach or at the highest order of the artform as I suspect most critics to be arguing, then it is a laughable fallacy. The piece FireHawk brings nothing new to the public conscious. Its no different from an average painting of a phoenix, other than using a simple Hawk as its base instead of an actual phoenix, which I suspect is done not out of an artistic appreciation of the animal but rather a lack of phoenix’s that might sit still for any form of portraiture. 

There is also no depth at all to the painting, only the most basic background of a mountainside, with no indication whether the FireHawk is close or far from it, which could have been easily shown with a higher degree of control over the brushed lines or with a contrast of soft blue shades. Using neither was a mistake I would not allow even the youngest and most inexperienced of my own disciples to get away with unexplained. 

It was as Shen Qingqiu was putting his final insults down that Mu Qingfang approached him. One weary eye towards the scroll. 

“I was not aware Shixiong had gone to see Song Geming’s FireHawk ,” he said, gesturing for Shen Qingqiu to hold out his wrist so he could check his meridians. 

But Shen Qingqiu was done being agreeable and did not comply. 

The pain of each of his limbs was still there, shadowing every gesture and even the thought of another man touching him was…

“This Master is fine and doesn’t need to be checked upon.”

Mu Qingfang blinked and then rolled his eyes. 

This alone was a surprising reaction. Mu Qingfang had always kept impeccable composure before.

“And they were worried you’d been possessed,” he mumbled as he took something out of his bag.

Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow. Wait what. He even leaned over, subtly, to see what his Shidi was grabbing out of his bag. He’d never seen a visibly exasperated Mu Qingfang before and he wasn’t quite sure how to react.

Quick as a snake, a hand grabbed his wrist and Shen Qingqiu flinched, attempting to break the grip. 

“Sorry Shixiong,” Mu Qingfang said, blowing some kind of powder in his face, “But you know how the Sect Leader gets when he’s worried. This will help you sleep.”

Shen Qingqiu was too busy trying to blink the strange powder out of his eyes to pull away when he felt his meridians being thoroughly investigated. Mu Qingfang was done by the time he managed to pull away.

“You–!” he was red in the face. Never had he felt more mortified! What kind of doctor was so disrespectful of his patients wishes?!

Mu Qingfang, despite what he’d said, looked unapologetic. “I may not have needed to use tricks since your Qi Deviation, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t prepared for things to go back to normal.”

He set out a packet of medicine that smelled suspiciously similar to what was just blown into his face.

“If you take these at night it will help, and I won’t have to come back.” There was something like a twinkle in his eye.

Shen Qingqiu grabbed the packets and chased the bastard out of his home. 

The packets were placed in the back of his tea cabinet and Shen Qingqiu had to re-get ready for the day from scratch. Scowling. Was that honestly how the Original Goods had been treated? No wonder he was a villain! Shen Qingqiu would be a villain too if he was constantly being harassed by his Martial Siblings and having medicinal powders blown into his face. 

Class, fortunately, is less frustrating. His students, after the first few weeks of struggling, have finally realized what it is that Shen Qingqiu is trying to teach them. Even the stupid ones. And while Shen Qingqiu was originally going to send his best behaved students to Qian Cao, he’s suddenly changed his mind.

“Liang Ju, Ning Ying Ying,” he called up two of his students as the rest speculated over the cause of death of a fictional Cultivator. “After this month I will be sending you with four of your younger Martial Siblings to Mu Qingfang to learn under him.”

The two looked surprised, but only Ying Ying dared to comment. “Have we done something wrong, Shizun?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He waved her concern away. “Mu Qingfang is the greatest healer of our generation, if I were to attempt to teach you healing techniques it would be lack luster in comparison. Everyone on our Peak will at some point learn from him and I am entrusting the two of you to be the first.”

Liang Ju was the slowest on the uptake, which would be frustrating for an apparently impatient Mu Qingfang, and since Shen Qingqiu was going to send Luo Binghe over anyways, sending Ning Ying Ying with him meant a bare minimum of chaos for the other Peak Lord to handle. 

He wouldn’t honestly be surprised if they stumbled the whole class into some rare toxin that could only be cured by his Shidi’s most expensive ingredients. 

And if Mu Qingfang was married to his duties enough to play games with Shen Qingqiu, then he had no doubt as to the safety of his students on Qiong Cao. 

Or else. 

Chapter Text

“But Shizun!”

“No buts,” Shen Qingqiu said, avoiding looking at Luo Binghe. “I am sending you with Ning Ying Ying and four others to Qiong Cao to learn from Master Mu.”

“You promised this student would join the main class!”

Shen Qingqiu had done no such thing! You’d made that arbitrary decision on your own!

“This is part of the main class,” Shen Qinqiu said. “We’ve come to a temporary exchange agreement. The only reason this Master is even considering sending Luo Binghe is because I am sending a number of students from different levels in their training.”

Luo Binghe still did not look pleased. Despite the fact that he’d be going with Ning Ying Ying and away from Ming Fan. 

“Luo Binghe can be sent with the group headed to Bai Zhan instead?” he offered. Though, as of right now that was most of Ming Fan’s group without Ming Fan. He still had duties as Head Disciple. 

Maybe Luo Binghe would rather learn to fight? Though he’d rejected earlier and Shen Qingqiu wasn’t necessarily thrilled at the idea of helping his future enemy being a better fighter. Or learning too much about Liu Qingge’s fighting style. 

 Fortunately, Luo Binghe seemed to hate that idea even more. He shook his head desperately. “This disciple would never—”

“Okay, calm down.” Shen Qingqiu fought the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose as he often did with his more frustrating students. He couldn’t afford to allow Luo Binghe to have any increased reasons to hate him. “As this Master said, it’s only a temporary exchange.”

“The Outer Peak lessons were also temporary!” Shen Qingqiu was really, really regretting letting Luo Binghe get away with so much so far. 

“Luo Binghe was the one who needed supplicant lessons to catch up to his peers,” he reminded him. 

He looked aggrieved, probably thinking about how he’d only needed supplicant lessons due to the rampant bullying on the Peak. But that was hardly Shen Qingqiu’s fault (not that Luo Binghe knew that.) One of the first things he’d done was to stop the bullying! 

“Shizun is saying this student is not good enough?” Fuck.

Fuck Fuck Fuckity Fuck. 

He sighed and gestured Luo Binghe closer so that he might pet the top of his head. Ignoring the system’s annoyance as best he could. 

“This Master is saying, that of all of my students, Luo Binghe is the most prone to being around when others get hurt or getting hurt himself. Is it selfish to want my student to learn how to take care of himself and his Martial Siblings?”

That seemed to finally have the desired affect. 

“As Shizun says,” Luo Binghe didn’t meet his eyes. 

Shen Qingqiu nodded. Finally. “Make sure to take care of Ning Ying Ying and your other Martial siblings…especially Liang Ju. And they should in turn help Luo Binghe.”

He didn’t look so certain. 

Did Luo Binghe still feel betrayed by Ning Ying Ying? 

Had Shen Qingqiu somehow messed up the plot that badly?

Ugh. Whatever. Even if there’s added tension, there was no changing the love interest in a pre-written story. 

He dismissed Luo Binghe to go finish his homework. 

Just as there was no changing the villain. 

One more week of the supplemental lessons meant one final lesson for his students to see if he needed to keep going or if he could go back to his usual schedule with the occasional field trip. 

“A man stabbed in the back wouldn’t have fallen like that,” Liu Qingge said, looking at the (very realistic if he did say so himself) dummy that Shen Qingqiu was positioning. 

Shen Qingqiu made a final adjustment, added a small talisman hidden under the dummy’s ribe, and stepped back. ”That’s the point. I want to see if they notice the discrepancies or if they stumble forward with their assumptions.” 

“I still don’t understand what the point of this is.”

“Your students spar with wood swords before they are good enough to to hold a real blade,” Shen Qingqiu explained as patiently as he could. “This is the same thing. They’re learning to deduce on something harmless so that they can do it properly when it’s real.”

Liu Qingge was looking at him, the grumpiness of his face slightly fading. He almost seemed thoughtful. 

“Shizun!” Ning Ying Ying and Ming Fan ran up to the two Peak Lords and did quick, matching bows. “The rest of the scene is set and ready for inspection!”

“Excellent,” he said, not bothering to hold back his praise. “Lead the way.”

They did, and overall it was well done. The two had done exactly as Shen Qingqiu asked and set the scene by reenacting what he told them “happened.” This meant accurate blood splashes (with fake blood) and the objects thrown and destroyed in a relatively accurate mess as well.

He only neede to correct one or two things before he felt the lesson was prepared. 

“Ning Ying Ying and Ming Fan will take notes for the next week during lesson time as the rest of the students investigate.”

“Yes Shizun!” They chorused, in sync again. 

“The important thing is not how accurate guesses are, but how the students think and use the information provided. Note when they are working from information to create a conclusion and when they have a conclusion in mind and are attempting to find or force information to support it.”

He handed a scroll to Ming Fan. “This is the official lesson plan. Inform the rest of the class while this Master speaks with Master Liu and I will return to begin the test.”

The two children ran off and Shen Qingqiu finally allowed himself to give his Shidi his full attention. 

There was something still off about his expression, but Shen QIngqiu ignored it in favor of entering his Bamboo House and getting started on tea. 

He made one of the more pretentiously flavored blends just to keep up his image and took a seat. 

Neither of them said anything for a while. 

But Liu Qingge was more impatient than him. 

“I don’t understand why you’re putting so much effort into these lessons.”

That’s because you don’t put any effort into any lessons Shidi. He carefully didn’t say.

Instead, Shen Qingqiu took a sip of his tea. Then set down his cup and picked up one of his fans. “...This Master felt quite embarrassed at the showing of his students before and is determined to correct them.”

“If you taught them to fight properly they would have been fine.”

Oh. Hey. 

Fuck you too. 

“Because Liu Shidi spends his time teaching his students to fight and absolutely not mimicking the creation of a Gu Insect on his Peak where all the children fight constantly until one emerges as a clear victor.”

“Shizun!” Luo Binghe ran into the room, interrupting them. “There’s a body in the middle of the Peak!”

Liu Qingge, stopped from whatever he was originally going to say in retaliation, raised an eyebrow and cast an unsubtle glance back at Shen Qingqiu. “It looks like this one should have joined your ‘Supplemental lessons,’” he said. 

“This one has his own supplemental lessons,” Shen Qingqiu admitted through grinding teeth. 

“Shizun?” Luo Binghe looked confused at the blatant disinterest between the two Peak Lords. 

Damn it Binghe. Shen Qingqiu sighed and tapped his folded fan against his temple. “Luo Binghe, ten laps around the Peak for forgetting etiquette.”

The boy looked aggrieved. “But—!”

“And,” Shen Qingqiu was not finished. “Another ten for disrupting your Martial Siblings lesson. Go now.”

Luckily Luo Binghe wasn’t nearly as slow on the uptake as some of his Martial Siblings, because one Shen Qingqiu scolded him for “interrupting” an embarrassed flush dawned upon his cheeks and he ran out of the room.

Shen Qingqiu watched him go.

Liu Qingge snorted. “Wasn’t that the one you asked for personally.”

“Shut up.”

It was finally time to drop off his students at Bai Zhan. He’d already sent off the group to Mu Qingfang’s, trusting Ning Ying Ying to get them all there in one piece. It wasn’t like it was down the fucking mountain. 

But the group he was sending to Bai Zhan…

They were the ones that struggled the most to sit still and the ones that most often picked fights. It was a fifty-fifty shot to see if learning from Bai Zhan would help them realize the errors of their ways or if they’d get worse.

Then again, if they got worse, they could just stay over here and not come back.

And Shen Qingqiu had let them know exactly that.

“Is this it?” Liu Qingge asked, looking unimpressed at his students. There was an equal sized group behind him, of the youngest disciples on his Peak. None of which had originally been chosen by him, of course. Since Liu Qingge didn’t do that.

“These are some of my most experienced students,” Shen Qingqiu lied. “Try not to damage their hands or faces.”

His disciples all shivered and sent him betrayed looks.

What? He was being considerate! Scholars and artists needed functioning hands and pretty faces! And Bai Zhan was full of the types of cultivators that didn’t care about that.

Liu Qingge somehow managed to scoff and roll his eyes at the same time. 

“They better not come back worse,” Liu Qingge gestured at his students to follow Shen Qingqiu as Shen Qingqiu gestured at his own to do the same and follow Liu Qingge.

“This Master is unsure how that would be possible, but will take your fears under consideration.”

Liu Qingge rolled his eyes again. 

He did that a lot. 

“Let’s go,” Shen Qingqiu started walking away, towards the Rainbow Bridge. Some of the children he’d been given were too young to fly on their swords. “We have another class to meet before we begin our lessons.”

He wasn’t sure if it was because they were still young and therefore impressionable, or if Liu Qingge had threatened them somehow, but the children followed without arguing or causing too much trouble. All in a line, like ducklings. 

When he caught the students from Qian Cao crossing into his Peak, they were a different story.

Clearly Mu Qingfang had taken this as an opportunity to give his older students a bit of a break by sending every troublemaker the bastard had. 

They varied in ages, just like the group Shen Qingqiu sent to him, and none of them stood still for long, often running off when they “thought they saw a medicinal herb” or whatever other excuse they thought would be acceptable. 

Shen Qingqiu put up with it, for now. If only because they’d learn very quickly once the actual lessons began and he didn’t want to take out his frustrations with Mu Qingfang on his students. 

He had other plans for them.

Like teaching them how to get away with things. 

His Peak wasn’t just for scholars after all, they were strategists too. And if he was clever about it, Shen Qingqiu could slip those lessons in with the calligraphy and literature.

Mu Qingfang would surely be delighted that his students were learning such important things to go with their medical knowledge.

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu integrated the two exchange classes with his youngest class. The ones that hadn’t left the Peak yet, and were still focusing on their basics in the arts and spiritual cultivation. 

That made it easier. He’d already drafted the lesson plans and explained them to the Teachers handling them, and he had a session at the end of the day where he went over the homework or tests in person so no one could say he was handing off his work to be done without him. 

On top of that, he reintegrated the disciples from the “supplemental lesson” that had passed the final week into their original classes and dropped the ones that had failed a class lower. 

Adding this second layer into his usual classes was a subtle way to keep teaching what he wanted his students to learn most, while also allowing Shen Qingqiu to not have to teach all of it personally and keeping it further on the down low when it came to the other Peak Lords finding out. 

He didn’t want them to think he was teaching his disciples how to get away with murder.

… Did he want them to think he was teaching his disciples how to get away with murder?

That was a pretty good way to burn a bridge or two, right? 

Though, if they didn’t do anything about it, future Luo Binghe might blame them for being “complacent” like he did in the original novel. 

On the down low it was. 

“Ming Fan,” he called, and his Head Disciple popped his head into the room. 

“Yes, Shizun?”

Shen Qingqiu grabbed the finished essay about the FireHawk and held it out. “Take this to post.”

Sending that out would be a fun start to his fall back into villainy. And once Shen Qingqiu got a good grasp on the general reaction to his scathing remarks, he could start moving the goal posts. 

There was a knock on his door.

Damn, and just when he’d sent off Ming Fan too.

Shen Qingqiu stood up and went to see who was bothering him. 

He honestly shouldn’t have bothered. 

Shining brighter than the sun hidden behind him in the doorway, was Yue Qingyuan. 

“Is Qingqiu Shidi busy?” he asked. 

“Yes,” he said, trying to close the door. 

Yue Qingyuan didn’t move, and neither did the door. Something, Shen Qingqiu suspected it might have been a foot, was in the way.

“This Shixiong wanted to go over the plans for the Immortal Alliance Conference if Shidi is available?” 

He stopped trying to close the door.

This was, unfortunately, a good opportunity to get more information on the Conference itself and try and see where the cracks in the defenses were for when everything inevitably went to shit. 

That it involved spending time with a smiling Yue Qingyuan would have to be ignored for now. 

For the sake of Shen Qingqiu’s heart if nothing else. 

He found himself thinking back to the time he’d tried and failed to paint the Sect Leader. It was no wonder it simply didn’t look right, how could someone like Shen Qingqiu hope to capture half the majesty of the most powerful Cultivator in the world when he could barely look at the man without hiding his own face in response.

“Shidi?” Yue Qingyuan asked again.

Shen Qingqiu turned away, leaving the door open and grabbing the sweetest most cloying tea he owned. The one he didn’t particularly like, but he knew Yue Qingyuan couldn’t stand. 

Yue Qingyuan sighed, audibly, when he saw it. 

Which was a lot. 

Yue Qingyuan was always pulling the “holy smile of a thousand suns” thing and had genuinely yet to break since Shen Qingqiu recovered from his Qi Deviation. It had gotten close in some Peak meetings, and very close with some of the teas they’d tried before. The only expression Shen Qingqiu had seen from the Sect Leader other than the smile was the worried puppy dog expression. 

Yet, when Shen Qingqiu turned to see why he’d sighed so damn loudly, Yue Qingyuan was still standing there smiling . No different than usual. 

He brewed the tea anyways. If Yue Qingyuan was going to act like a teenager, he could act like a petulant child. It was only fair. 

Once they were situated and Shen Qingqiu had glared Yue Qingyuan into taking at least one sip of the concoction pretending to be tea, he cut straight through the small talk.

“Zhagmen Shixiong has completed the preparations?” he asked.

“Not quite.” The tea remained in place. “This Shixiong wanted Qingqiu Shidi’s opinion on some of the preparations before sending them off to be finalized.” 

Shen Qingqiu nodded. Made sense to him. He held out a hand to receive whatever Yue Qingyuan had to show him and received a small stack of paper. 

Going through it, there were maps, lists of the types of monsters, and the types of formations and arrays that would be used. Most of it was very thorough, the wellbeing and potential lives of disciples were on the line after all, but there were a few places Shen Qingqiu noticed that could use some tightening up.

One thing in particular, was how far away the spectators were from the arena. It made sense if the spectators were just spectators and the extra distance would allow them time to get away should something happen, but the majority of them were actually Immortal Masters far more experienced than the children inside and any distance from the arena was time lost in a crisis.

A crisis Shen Qingqiu couldn’t stop, despite knowing it was coming.

As he was scribbling his notes, Yue Qingyuan continued their conversation. 

“Does Qingqiu Shidi know which disciples he’ll be sending to the Immortal Alliance Conference.”

“I have some ideas,” he flipped to the next page, not bothering to look up. “But it’s unlikely there will be many, if their recent showing down the mountain is anything to go by.”

“Qingqiu Shidi has always been very particular—”

“That’s unlikely to change any time soon,” Shen Qingqiu snapped. “Or would Zhagmen Shixiong rather we lose our title as the most powerful Cultivation Sect in the Alliance?”

Shen Qingqiu almost expected to hear him sigh again.

But he didn’t, and when Shen Qingqiu looked up from the half-edited stack of paperwork, he saw what looked like a softer more genuine smile on Yue Qingyuan’s face.

Was this man a fucking Masochist? Why did his smiles get softer everytime Shen Qingqiu snapped at him? 

“Some would say Huan Hua Palace is the strongest Sect.”

Oh this bastard.  

Shen Qingqiu dropped his brush and the paper he’d been writing on. “Did you just put that washed up old creep on the same pedestal as our sect?! The only thing they have that can even pretend to be better than us is the amount of money they extort from the people they send their disciples to help so they can continue covering their shitty mountain in gold leaf—”

Yue Qingyuan chuckled. His eyes were soft, and had to close to allow his smile to get as wide as it had, and he was fucking chuckling. 

“It’s been some time since I’ve heard Xiao Jiu come to my defense,” he said. 

The nickname made Shen Qingqiu flinch. 

Right. 

He almost forgot for a second. 

These people weren’t his to care for. They were borrowed from someone else. Even if that someone else messed up in the worst possible ways, in the end everyone here thought Shen Qingqiu was the Original Goods. 

Shen Yuan was just a replacement. 

Yue Qingyuan noticed. “...I meant Qingqiu Shidi.”

“The array here is a mess,” Shen Qingqiu said, keeping his composure and slipping back into character. “The rest should be fine, if you follow the notes I made. If that’s all this Master has other duties to attend to.”

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu started implementing his new lesson plans, including in the class with his exchange students. 

He also woke up one day to a very unrepentant Luo Binghe having made him breakfast. Shen Qingqiu had to practically chase the boy back to the Peak he was supposed to be studying on. Then he went back and enjoyed the slightly cold but irrefutably delicious food.

No sense in wasting it.

Over all, everything was going smoothly. He hadn’t really had a chance to piss anyone off (except Yue Qingyuan, who seemed incapable of getting angry) but he also hadn’t gone out of his way to endear himself to anyone like he had with Liu Qingge before.

And while it was mostly too late to get Liu Qingge to hate him again, he was coming up with ideas for a way to convince him that he’d saved Shen Qingqiu’s life somehow and they were now free of debt between them. 

The problem with that was, unfortunately, two fold. 

On one hand, Shen Qingqiu himself had no desire to be in any actual danger. 

On the other, Yue Qingyuan wouldn’t let Shen Qingqiu anywhere near any perceived danger, so making any plans that involved faking the danger was also out. 

It was fine though. He had time. 

Slow and steady wins the race, right? 

Actually, he sat up and grabbed a brush, he could do something now to help.

Liu Qingge was a big fan of straightforward and honorable fights. 

There was no way he’d forgive Shen Qingqiu if he taught Bai Zhan disciples some of his tricks, right?

Smiling, he began to detail his next lesson. This one would be in person, of course. He couldn’t risk his teachers misunderstanding the directive here. 

Knowing would be a boone anyways, since it wasn’t like Demons went around fighting honorably. Shen Qingqiu himself was evidence of that, with the poison still circulating in his veins. 

Perhaps he can have a small duel tournament for the class, just to see where all the students were currently and how he might be able to “help” them. 

No, it would have to be about more than just fighting. There’s no reason to set his students up for embarrassment. Maybe some kind of all around thing, that his kids could cheat at—

He blinked. 

Okay maybe not cheat. That’s too much. Maybe just something they’d have an advantage with? 

But using any of the five arts would be too obvious. The only other Peaks that taught anything close to them were Qiong Ding and Xian Shu, and only because those two Peaks taught everything . 

Shen Qingqiu crossed out the idea entirely. 

Back to the drawing board. 

There was a knock on his door. 

Shen Qingqiu stilled and looked up. Ming Fan was in class and Luo Binghe was out of the house for the next few weeks. He’d have to get the door himself, which meant getting up and interrupting his entire train of thought. 

Whoever is behind the door right now better have something fucking important. 

He wrote and underlined “Teach Liu Qingge’s kids underhanded tricks to piss him off disguised as interpeak lessons ” in English as a reminder of what his intentions were in his lesson plans, set down the brush, unclipped his sleeves, and set aside his ink. 

Then he stood up and went to open the door. 

“Hey, Shen-Bro.” Shang Qinghua shoved his way inside. “So I’ve been thinking about the whole thing with the—”

He stuttered to a stop after glancing at Shen Qingqiu.

“C-Cucumber-bro?”

“Yes?”

“You’re lookin kinda scary right now.”

Shen Qingqiu shut the door. “You’re here for a reason, right?”

That perked Shang Qinghua back up. “Oh, yeah! You’re doing like, an exchange right? I was thinking that might be cool to participate in with some of my students.” He walked over to some cushions set out for guests and dropped down onto them in a modern lounging pose that looked far too natural for someone dressed the way he was.

Shen Qingqiu honestly didn’t have any interest in sending his students to An Ding. What could they possibly learn? Business skills? How would that help them against Luo Binghe?

“Like, my Peak gets treated like trash right? Always doing ten times the work and getting almost no credit, if I have a students that doesn’t have bags under their eyes I know to check to see if they’re even doing their job! So it would be a nice break fo the students, but also wouldn’t some of the kids from other Peaks realize just how much we do for them all the time?”

Shen Qingqiu wasn’t listening. 

It didn’t have anything to do with Luo Binghe, The System, or The Abyss and he’d very quickly lost interest and gone back to planning his own lessons. 

Though, if his writing was anything to go by, Shang Qinghua was probably talking out of his ass with nothing meaningful to say at all. 

Especially since he didn’t stop talking for the next hour and a half. 

Shen Qingqiu had finished his lesson plans and begun preparing paints for a Phoenix Painting he was planning to use as a passive aggressive “I’m Better Than You” play against the artist who painted Firehawk even though Shen Qingqiu knew his own talent was hardly exceptional. 

“You can paint?” Shang Qinghua asked, leaning over his shoulder. Shen Qingqiu shoved him off. 

“I’m the Peak Lord of Qing Jing, I have to be able to paint.”

Shang Qinghua looked confused. “Yeah but… I mean you’ve been here less than a year. There’s literally no way to be a Master of the Five Arts in less than a year. Wouldn’t painting something give that away?”

“That’s why I’ve been practicing.” He finished grinding his paints and started choosing his silk for the canvas. Something absurdly expensive would be best. 

“Practicing?” Shang Qinghua leaned over again, weirdly interested for a guy who was in charge of Supply, Logistics, and Business and in no way was related to any of the Arts. 

“I’m not going to show you.” Shen Qingqiu could barely stand to look at his early paintings. Hell, he could barely stand to look at some of his recent works. One of the only reasons he was willing to work on something for actual display right now was because he was using it to be an asshole to a stranger. 

He set the brush in the paint and started to make the initial lines.

Shang Qinghua whistled. “Wow. No sketch?”

“If you don’t shut up I’m kicking you out.”

And, like the unserious person he was, Shang Qinghua forced himself into the posture of a disciple and mimicked zipping his mouth shut. Shen Qingqiu wasn’t optimistic, but he also didn’t care enough about this painting for him to avoid any possible interruption Shang Qinghua might provide.

Shen Qingqiu began to paint.

It didn’t take long. He had all the colors he wanted to use set out, which gave the image the benefits of a limited color palette, and he also had an idea of what exactly he was painting. Which was a Phoenix based upon the most common bird in China. The duck.

He’d seen enough of them that the anatomy and positioning of it was simple, and he’d spent enough time painting the Quiet Pool as practice that the pond the duck was resting in was easy to paint as well. 

“Light a candle,” he ordered Shang Qinghua. Somehow he hadn’t gotten bored yet or wandered off or started talking. 

Once the candle was lit, he used that as reference for the flames of the Phoenix, and the smoldering of those same flames where they touched the water. 

The piece wasn’t particularly impressive in Shen Qingqiu’s eyes, but it also didn’t have any massive flaws and that mattered more for his intentions. So he cleaned his brush, set it down, and left the painting to dry. 

In the morning he would have Ming Fan take it to display for public consumption. 

Shang Qinghua was staring at him strangely.

“What?”

“...nothing,” he said, eyes flicking over to the drying silk canvas. “I just remembered something I uh, have to go do.”

Chapter Text

The first post-class lesson with the exchange students was a headache. 

For one, neither group were capable of siting down for more than five minutes, and for two they hadn’t been exposed nearly as thoroughly to the Original Goods so there wasn’t that inherent fear Shen Qingqiu had been taking advantage of. 

He snapped his fan shut loudly enough to regain the class’ attention. 

“If you’re incapable of sitting through lessons, that will be the first lesson I teach you.”

Shen Qingqiu didn’t have experience with etiquette classes or lessons, but he’d watched enough dramas where a girl was forced to sit through them in order to marry her lover or because she was secretly a princess and didn’t know. So he’d just use the vibes from those. 

Strict, specific, and with harsh punishments for failure. 

If he didn’t sleep tonight, that was nothing compared to how the students in front of him weren’t going to sleep tonight. 

By hell or highwater they would be sitting still for their next fucking lessons. 

It was about an hour into the forced etiquette lesson when one of Bai Zhan’s snapped. 

“Did you just try to attack me?” Shen Qingqiu asked, grabbing the non-spiritual sword by its blade. 

The boy blanched. “Sh-shizun says if we want to escape lessons we have to beat the teacher in combat…”

“Do I look like your Shizun?” Shen Qingqiu could not believe the fucking audacity. “There is no escaping this lesson. That defeats the purpose of me teaching it. You will learn with no exceptions.”

Then, just because he was ticked off, he sent some spiritual qi into the blade and destroyed it. 

What if he’d been a normal mortal? What if one of the etiquette teachers he had was teaching and one of these kids just attacked?! 

What the fuck was Liu Qingge teaching these kids?!

 The kid sat back down, his eyes never leaving his destroyed sword. 

Then Shen Qingqiu started explaining how the act of learning was important, and the ability to sit down and listen to a teacher was something practiced and expected on his Peak.

“Do you think your Shizun wants you to return to your Peaks having learned nothing?” he asked. Fortunately the students all shook their heads, and from there he was able to set at least a base precedent. 

Until another Bai Zhan disciple tried to attack him and he had to institute “sitting in the corner and facing the wall as you think about your choices” as one of his punishments. 

Then he had to institute “reading a passage in front of the entire class to prove Literacy” as one of his punishments.

Then he had to institute “holding a full and open bottle of ink on your head so you don’t move in class” as one of his punishments. 

By sundown he had about a dozen unique punishments for just about any kind of misbehavior he had to deal with including: trying to attack him, falling asleep, interrupting the lesson, bothering classmates, using the time to cultivate instead of learning, and passing notes in some strange attempt to unionize against him.

The class as a whole was exhausted and Shen Qingqiu was frustrated.

He kept teaching.

They won’t forget this any time soon, and at the very least his teachers won’t be coming to him complaining about how they can’t handle these new uncultured students. 

Shen Qingqiu didn’t dismiss them until the sun began to rise again, allowing them just enough time to bathe and eat before lessons started for the day. 

They’d be fine. 

They were cultivators after all. 

If Shen Qingqiu can force himself to stay up teaching himself the Five Arts than kids younger than him can sit through lessons professionals were teaching after just one day of missed sleep, right?

Fortunately, Shen Qingqiu himself didn’t have any plans for the day that involved him being presentable so he went back to his bamboo house and started to take his hair down. The crown was heavy and causing his scalp to ache. 

Then he grabbed his Guqin and started practicing on half remembered songs and tunes that let his mind shut down or wander. He couldn’t be caught sleeping in the middle of the day, but this was almost as good.

Especially when he wasn’t trying to play anything specific, just floating from one tune to another as his fingers moved. 

It helped where he didn’t even realize he actually needed help, a loosening of tightness in his chest that left a cool aftertaste along his limbs. 

“Shizun’s music is amazing…”

The note he’d been about to play soured and the tightness in his chest returned. 

“Luo Binghe is meant to be on Qian Cao.” He was sure the child could hear the strain in his voice, even as he tried to hide it. 

“This student just wanted to make sure Shizun was being taken care of.” 

Shen Qingqiu turned around, no longer able to handle the feeling of Luo Binghe standing behind him, out of sight. “...Does Binghe realize how insulting it is, to have one’s student imply this Master cannot take care of himself?”

Luo Binghe froze. “I–I didn’t mean—”

“Enough,” Shen Qingqiu sighed. “Since Luo Binghe is here, he may as well tell this Master how his studies are going.”

That, at least, would give Shen Qingqiu an idea of what Mu Qingfang is teaching his students. 

“Yes, Shizun!”

Luo Binghe eagerly took a seat and began regaling Shen Qingqiu with stories of classes on Herbs and Tonics and Healing Technique Theories. Once he’d run out (which was quickly seeing as he hadn’t exactly been learning very long) Shen Qingqiu was finally able to convince him to head back and get ready for the rest of his classes. 

Shen Qingqiu woke up to the smell of tea being brewed. He frowned, adjusting his hair crown and looking around. He must have fallen asleep at his desk again. Then, who was in his house?

His back stiffened and he moved to get up and see, when the door to his office opened. 

“Qingqiu Shidi, you’re awake.” 

He let out a sigh, whether relief that it wasn’t Luo Binghe having come back again or frustration that it was Yue Qingyuan, even he wasn’t entirely sure. “Zhagmen Shixiong,” he said, “I apologize for not being prepared appropriately for company.”

“It’s fine,” he came fully into the room, tea set in hand. “Qingqiu Shidi has been working very hard recently. It was good to see you sleep so deeply.”

Deeply? 

Shen Qingqiu blinked. He had been sleeping better recently. It was just that extra long class that was effecting him. He wondered whether that was because he’d finally settled on what he was going to do? Maybe the anxiety was keeping him awake? 

Either way, being caught sleeping at his desk like a college student was mortifying and Shen Qingqiu didn’t even have time to check himself in a mirror before Yue Qingyuan was setting up for tea in front of him, carefully placing his notes and writings aside. 

It smelled delicious. 

And familiar.

Fuck, the bastard made Shen Qingqiu’s favorite again, didn’t he?

He reached for the cup Yue Qingyuan handed him and chugged it before it had time to cool. Then he set the cup down and tried to school his face into something appropriate for his title as Peak Lord. 

Yue Qingyuan smiled and poured him another cup. 

This one, he took a bit more time drinking and savoring. 

Shen Qingqiu didn’t say anything. He didn’t know why Yue Qingyuan was here, but it wasn’t like the other man didn’t visit randomly as often as he wanted to. He’d get to the point, whether the point was talking about inter-peak issues or worrying about Shen Qingqiu’s health. 

And after being caught sleeping at his desk, he really didn’t have enough face left to chase off his superior. The least he could do was make it look like he was still working and wouldn’t fall back asleep the second Yue Qingyuan left him alone. 

It continued to stay quiet for what was becoming an uncomfortable amount of time as the two of them drank their tea.

“...Is there a reason Zhagmen Shixiong is here?”

“Oh,” Yue Qingyuan set down his cup. “Yes. Shang Qinghua sent a missive to me.”

Ugh. “Is this about him wanting to join the Inter-Peak Student Exchange?”

“Mn. Shidi doesn’t sound thrilled by it.”

Shen Qingqiu tried not to make a face. He didn’t want any extra intention going towards Shang Qinghua. It had become painfully obvious that his fellow Transmigrator was a much worse actor than Shen Qingqiu. If he let something slip that was suspicious about the future, the plot, Luo Binghe, or the System, it could very well have disastrous consequences.

He also didn’t really want to trade students with him.

“Shidi doesn’t need to worry,” Yue Qingyuan smiled brightly. “I thought it would be more useful and less disruptive to trade some of my own students with An Ding.”

Well, Shen Qingqiu supposed that made a begrudging sort of sense. Leaders who understood the logistics of their company were often the best leaders, and Yue Qingyuan was also a sap who couldn’t say no so Shen Qingqiu imagined all Shang Qinghua had to do was bring his sap story to the man in order to get what he wanted.

It was a wonder the Sect was as capable as it was when it was lead by such a soft heart.

Shen Qingqiu frowned.

Right. He was supposed to be gaining some distance. Not becoming more and more comfortable with the Sect Leader.

It just…

It was just nice. Sitting across from him.

Shen Qingqiu took another sip of the tea. He could always push him away more thoroughly tomorrow.

Chapter Text

He was going to ward his house specifically against Luo Binghe for the rest of the exchange program. This was getting ridiculous. 

“This disciple made breakfast.”

“Luo Binghe the exchange is for less than a month.” Shen Qingqiu forced himself not to knead at his forehead, where a headache was starting to build. 

“But—”

“There are things you could be actively learning that will help you in the future and instead you’re wasting time and energy running back to my Peak every morning.”

“This Disciple just wanted to be useful to Shizun.”

Hearing the Protagonist sound so pitiful was painful, but Shen Qingqiu couldn’t afford to bend on this right now. He was too early in his plan and he really needed Luo Binghe away for just a bit before he could get everything properly settled. 

Shen Qingqiu racked his brain quickly. 

Could he send a missive to Mu Qingfang and let him know one of his temporary students was out of his control? No. This was still very obviously Shen Qingqiu’s student who was acting out. Mu Qingfang wouldn’t feel any shame and it would just embarrass Shen Qingqiu too much to admit he couldn’t handle his own student. 

Fuck. Is he going to actually have to ward his house temporarily? Would something like that even work against the Protagonist or would it just become some minor thing that he has to overcome as like, a plot point?

“...Shizun?”

“Luo Binghe doesn’t respect this teacher very much, with how easily he ignores what I say,” he sighed. He couldn’t really blame the kid. The Original Goods was pretty cruel and it hadn’t even been a full year since Shen Qingqiu started trying to change Luo Binghe’s opinion of him.

“Th-that’s not true!”

And of course he wouldn’t admit it. That was practically asking for punishment. 

Shen Qingqiu would have to think more on this. 

“Go to your lessons now,” he said. 

Fortunately he didn’t have to fight or argue his point this time and Luo Binghe obediently went off. 

If only he’d stay obedient like that for more than ten minutes. 

Shen Qinqiu got up to make some tea for himself.

When the reports from his teachers came back about the exchange students for the week, Shen Qingqiu was happy to note a significant drop in disruptive behavior. Apparently some of the teachers had taken to “taking notes” everytime one of the students did something or was caught not paying attention “for their report to the Peak Leader.” 

This trick essentially stopped all adverse behavior. 

Shen Qingqiu let himself smile just a bit, wasn’t he such a good teacher? The Original Goods should have invested a bit more in non-traditional punishments like this instead of always relying on violence. 

The class review for today would be much easier now that the students weren’t refusing to learn properly. 

With that thought, Shen Qingqiu headed out to meet the students outside, where he was planning to host the class. 

It was later, the sun almost starting to set, since Shen Qingqiu wanted them to experience a full proper day of classes just like the rest of the week. Besides, it shouldn’t be too long of a class this time. 

If they behaved. 

“Is everyone here?” he asked, counting heads. 

“Yes, Master Shen.”

Oho? Much better.

Shen Qingqiu smiled behind his fan. 

“Today’s lesson will be a bit different.” There was something like a sigh of relief that breezed through the entire class. A lessening of tension. “We will be playing something like a game.”

This was the idea Shen Qingqiu had. Children liked games, and the fastest way to teach certain skills was to force someone to use those skills. 

The students, for some reason looked more nervous at that. 

Didn’t most kids like when their teacher had them play games instead of lecturing?

“We’ll be playing a modified Hide and Seek on the Peak,” Shen Qingqiu explained. “You have until full Sundown to hide somewhere on this Peak. If you can prevent me from finding you and tagging you before then, you’ll be able to skip a day of classes with no punishment.”

Now the kids looked excited. Especially the Bai Zhan group. 

Shen Qingqiu figured they’d prefer something more hands on. 

Now, if they can hide from Shen Qingqiu by the end of this exchange, then they’ll have learned what he wanted to teach them. A life saving skill. 

A life saving skill they can use against their teachers. 

<Is Host enjoying teaching? :[] >

Enjoying is a strong word for it, Shen Qingqiu sent back. It’s the most tedious thing he’d ever done short of actually reading Proud Immortal Demon Way . 

<Host is acting out of character. Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t put so much energy into teaching other Peak Disciples>

Sure the Fuck I would! Shen Qinqiu argued. It’s an exchange! Besides, if Mu Qingfang and Liu Qingge are going to send me their problem students, the least I can do is help them learn a few tricks.

<...Host is planning something ¬_¬ >

…I’m not not planning something.

Then he went back to ignoring the system. As long as it didn’t dock him points he really didn’t care about it’s snide remarks about his plans. If the system had its way he would die, Yue Qingyuan would die, and all of the students here would die.

So it could choke. 

“You can use any technique you want as long as it works. You have one incense stick to hide before I will come after you,” he said out loud to the students. 

They didn’t even wait for him to say go before disappearing in all sorts of directions. 

One of them actually dared to head for the Rainbow Bridge connection. Which was ambitious. 

And kind of stupid.

Did she think Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t expect her to cheat?

Huh. She might actually be the easiest one in the class to teach, now that he thought about it. 

He waiting the given amount of time before heading in that direction. 

It was better not to give her false hope, or more time to get further away. If the other Peak Lords found out Shen Qingqiu was quite literally playing a children’s game with the students, he’d never live it down. 

Just imagining Yue Qingyuan’s smile was enough to have him beet red.

Nope. 

He had to keep this to his own Peak.

Luckily, probably due to her focusing on getting as far away as she could instead of actually hiding, the girl was easy to find. 

It was a Qian Cao disciple. 

“I remember mentioning the point of the exercise to be hiding on my Peak. Not running for your own,” he said, tapping her gently on the forehead. 

She went pale.

“M-Master Sh-Shen”

“Come on,” he gestured for her to follow him. He really didn’t want to get caught here. How would he explain it? Hey, don’t mind me running around random Peaks with this Female Qian Cao student we’re playing a super normal and fun game of Hide and Seek? Ha.

When they got back, Shen Qingqiu was able to relax a bit more. 

He took the student back to where he’d started the lesson, a small clearing near his bamboo forest, and had her sit down. “Your assignment until the rest of the class is found is to write an essay on why your technique failed and list at least five other ways you could have tried that might have faired better.”

Then he went looking for the rest of them. 

The easiest to find were the ones hiding without even trying to hide their spiritual energy. Like little beacons spread out for him to pick up one by one. Each one, once found, was given the same assignment as the first girl. 

One was hidden in Binghe’s old woodshed, at least three were hiding among the bamboo, and one had dared to hide in the Clear Pool. His punishment was not being allowed to dry himself as the sun set on top of writing his essay. 

The other students looked less bothered once they saw his punishment. Eager to finish their essays and not have to suffer anything extra. 

There was a couple that had the relatively clever idea to hide in the student dormitories to try and hide their energy. Which would have been a bit harder to notice if their energy wasn’t so painfully different from the clear and peaceful stream of energy his students cultivated. 

Once he’d gotten all the easy kids, he started actually having to look. 

The Bai Zhan kids were all pretty easy to find. Hiding up in trees, between rocks, behind buildings, etc… nothing that was too difficult to think of and check. 

One of the Qian Cao kids had dug out a patch of dirt to hide under, which was kind of clever combined with hiding his energy. But the suspiciously human sized pile of freshly turned dirt was enough to spike Shen Qingqiu’s interest. 

Hilariously, one of the Bai Zhan kids actually tried to run once his hiding place was revealed. Which scared a couple of other kids into running even though Shen Qingqiu hadn’t yet found their specific hiding places. 

In the end, Shen Qingqiu found all of them long before the sun touched the horizon.

Chapter Text

He should have guessed everything was going too smoothly. 

So the “Emergency” Peak Lord meeting really shouldn’t have caught him by surprise. 

“What did you just say?”

Ming Fan looked pale, and was trembling like a solid wind might blow him off his feet. 

Which was something Shen Qingqiu honestly should have trained out of him at this point. Wasn’t he the Head Disciple? Shouldn’t he be a little bit better at keeping his emotions under control and unnoticeable? Especially when it came to his official duties, like giving bad news as a messenger between Peaks. 

“Sh-shizun, this Disciple said that the Xian Shu Peak is requesting an emergency meeting between all the Peak Lords t-today.”

Yeah…that’s what he thought he said. 

Shen Qingqiu frowned behind his fan and looked down at the stack of work he’d been very steadily getting through. 

“Fine. This Master will be there.”

Ming Fan looked relieved. Shen Qingqiu wasn’t sure why, it wasn’t like he could refuse a summons for literally no reason. Unfortunately. Could he? Wait, no. He needed to know what was going on. He didn’t remember something like this happening in the book, but it was also entirely possible it did and just didn’t have anything to do with Luo Binghe.

“You’ll be in charge af the exchange students today since I will be off Peak. Make sure they’ve been paying attention in class and behaving. If any of them is disrespectful, simply write down the incident and their name and I will deal with it when I get back.”

He shouldn’t actually have to deal with anything, fortunately. His little trick of getting his teachers and assistants to write down everything ‘for the Peak Lord’ has proven to be an effective deterrent since the first lesson. But Ming Fan nodded seriously and ran off to continue his usual duties. 

Shen Qingqiu set down his fan and set about changing his robes to something more respectable than his usual daily wear since he would be at an official meeting. Then he picked it back up and headed for Yue Qingyuan’s Peak. 

It wasn’t a chaotic mess, yet. But it was clearly headed that way. 

Especially since, the moment Shen Qingqiu walked into the room, Qi Qingqi had turned to him and screamed, “You! I don’t know how but I know this is your fault.”

Which was really painfully unfair. 

But useful. 

Shen Qingqiu lazily fanned himself. “I’m sure,” he said, before ignoring her entirely and turning to Yue Qingyuan. “And what did I do this time?”

Mu Qingfang ran forward to grab Qi Qingqi as she lunged. Liu Qingge as well, stood by, half a step away and on alert. But his complexion looked…off. His expression too, looked even darker and more frown-y than usual. 

“Qingqiu Shidi, thank you for coming on short notice. We’ll start the meeting now.” 

Everyone took their seats, even Qi Qingqi though she had to be wrestled into it until she calmed down enough not to be practically spitting fire. 

Shang Qinghua, for some reason, looked the most stressed out of everyone there. 

“One of our Cang Qiong Disciples has gone missing.” 

…What?!

Yue Qingyuan continued to explain, his voice soft, warm, and informational. Avoiding any blame or emotion in the entire speech. 

Liu Mingyan had disappeared some time a week ago now. She hadn’t been to any classes, or assigned to any off Peak missions. The last anyone saw of her, she was asleep in the dorm with the other girls, and when they woke up, she was gone. 

At first, no one really noticed anything was wrong, and just assumed she woke up early to train. Then they assumed she had a mission, or was visiting her brother. 

Shen Qingqiu snuck a glance. Yeah, that could explain the expression. 

After a week of no contact, and checking with both the Peak Lord and Liu Qingge, it was finally confirmed Liu Mingyan was missing. 

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuckity Fuck. 

Liu Mingyan???? Seriously???? She was one of Shen Qingqiu’s favorite characters from the book! It couldn’t be that by saving her brother, Shen Qingqiu accidentally doomed her instead?!

He glanced over at Shang Qinghua, very much understanding why he looked so damn nervous now and made a face at him. Shang Qinghua made a face back that could be probably translated to say something like: I don’t know bro this didn’t happen in my book! What do we do?! 

Which didn’t help.

“It has to be something to do with that–that strange exchange thing Shen Qingqiu is doing!” Qi Qingqi yelled. “Why is he suddenly so interested in other Peak Disciples?”

Shen Qingqiu scoffed. “What makes you think my Exchange Program is for anyone’s benefit but my own? It’s simply smarter to have those proficient in Healing and Fighting teach healing and fighting to my disciples.”

“See!” She gestured at him.

Yue Qingyuan looked like he was fighting off the biggest headache of his life. 

“If Liu Mingyan is still on the mountain, we will find her.” He tried to appease and sooth the Peak Lord. To little avail. “I’m more worried if she’s not, and what that might mean.”

Shen Qingqiu thought for a moment. “...She did draw the attention of that Demoness,” he muttered.

There was a click and Shen Qingqiu looked up to see Liu Qingge having stood and gone to draw his sword, ready to leave the room if it weren’t for Yue Qingyuan’s hand on his arm. Qi Qingqi’s face was pale. 

Yue Qingyuan threw a look at Shen Qingqiu that was even easier to determine than Shang Qinghua’s. Something like: not helping.

Which was fair. 

“We shall determine the situation first,” Yue Qingyuan said. “We do not want to provoke the Demon Realm based off conjecture.”

Ah. So he did already guess that, which was why this was a Peak Lord meeting and not just between Liu Qingge, Yue Qingyuan, and Qi Qingqi. 

But even though Shen Qingqiu had been the one to bring it up, he was pretty sure that wouldn’t be the situation. After all, Liu Mingyan had fought her in the original novel as well and she’d still very much only had eyes for Luo Binghe. Which, duh. He’s the protagonist.

So why would she go after Liu Mingyan this time? It didn’t make any sense…

Maybe Liu Mingyan had been the one to go after her? It seemed like the kind of thing her brother would do, and despite everything, they were still related. Though Liu Qingge wouldn’t have waited months to plan revenge.

“Did Liu Minyan recently have a break through?” Shen Qingqiu asked. “One that would have her confident in her strength?”

The arguing and ‘discussion’ of the room quieted with the wave of Yue Qingyuan’s hand. 

“You think she may have gone after the Demoness herself.” It wasn’t a question. 

“I’m simply exploring all possibilities,” Shen Qingqiu answered. “What’s more likely, that the Demoness somehow managed to get through all our defenses and not get noticed or caught? Or that a young cultivator whose brother is the Martial Peak Lord trained until she felt she was strong enough and then snuck out for a rematch?”

Qi Qingqi looked startled. “Liu Mingyan wouldn’t do that. She’s not an idiot.”

Unsaid, was that her brother would have absolutely done that at her age.

Shen Qingqiu let that show on his face.

Liu Qingge nodded, as if the explanation made perfect sense and was only natural. “I’ll go look for her—”

“No!” Every Peak Lord shouted at once, Shen Qingqiu included. 

Yue Qingyuan’s smile looked like cracked glass. “Liu Shidi, perhaps you should take someone with you? Someone adept at diplomacy perhaps?”

Liu Qingge nodded again. “Then I’ll take Shen Qingqiu—”

“NO!” 

It seemed everyone was on the same page at this meeting. For the first time ever.

Shen Qingqiu leaned back in his chair. “I don’t mind going.”

Yue Qingyuan shot him a look that could almost be described as ‘pleading.’

Chapter Text

“Let’s at least search the mountain first,” Mu Qingfang said, helpless. “We have no evidence she went anywhere near any demons, grudge or not.”

“I agree,” Yue Qingyuan did not give either Shen Qingqiu or Liu Qingge the chance to argue. “Search the mountain for now, and then… then if necessary I will send a team out to search for her down the mountain.”

Qi Qingqi didn’t look convinced. “What if she really isn’t on the mountain, and we just wasted time?”

“It takes longer than a single week to travel to the Demon Realm,” Shen Qingqiu said with an eye roll. It wasn’t like he was defending Yue Qingyuan’s decision or anything, the question was just stupid. Besides, it wasn’t like access to the Demon Realm was common knowledge in general, how would a disciple like Liu Mingyan get there? Not easily!

He ignored the sudden pinched expression of Shang Qinghua. It wasn’t like she had access to a demon with the ability to make portals. 

“Besides,” Shen Qingqiu continued to ignore pretty much everyone else’s expressions. “How long would it truly take each Master here to search their Peak?”

Pride alone made that difficult to argue against, except of course for Shang Qinghua who definitely looked like he was about to say something until Shen Qingqiu glared him into submission. 

Shen Qingqiu did think it was strangely ironic, how the lessons he was teaching were actively being used by the other Peak Lords. He followed them out of the meeting room and watched as every one split up to go to their own Peaks. 

A hand gently stopped him from doing the same. 

“Qingqiu Shidi,” Yue Qingyuan said, a pinched look to his eyes. “When you’re done looking, please come right back. Don’t—”

Shen Qingqiu raised both his eyebrows. 

Unlike usual, Yue Qingyuan seemed to actually hear the words coming out of his mouth. 

“We’re going to reconvene. Please don’t go after Liu Shidi’s sister on your own, even if you figure something out.”

Why would he? Shen Qingqiu tilted his head slightly in confusion before acquiescing and finally being released to his Peak. It didn’t take long to search, especially with the practice he’d gotten recently. 

He was even obediently headed back when he noticed something. 

A cloth with familiar embroidery. 

Shen Qingqiu lowered himself to the rainbow bridge. It was just lying there, whatever enchantment Liu Mingyan placed on it to keep from blowing up and revealing her face, was now keeping it from being blown off the bridge by the wind. 

He leaned down to pick it up. 

Why was Liu Mingyan on the bridge to Qing Jing Peak? 

Shen Qingqiu frowned, looked back towards Qiong Ding, then back towards his own Peak. 

Deciding he still had time, Shen Qingqiu began to make his way back. He needed to check on something real quick. 

He had already searched his Peak for the girl herself. Obviously. But he hadn’t been as thorough as he could be. He hadn’t looked for any clues that she had been there previously and left. 

If she had, there might be some kind of clue as to what happened that lead to her losing her face covering. 

And if she had been on his Peak and not approached Shen Qingqiu or any of the teachers, there was only one place left to check. The students’ dormitory.

She was looking for one of them. 

Luo Binghe was possible, but so was any number of his female students that she might be acquaintance with. 

Shen Qingqiu followed this trail all the way there until he ran into a familiar face. “Duan Li,” he said, causing her to startle and almost drop what she was holding. “Is that a demon chasing talisman?”

“Shizun!” The girl dropped into a bow. “Y-yes Shizun. A friend asked for one, but she ran off before I could help her…”

He felt a mild headache coming on. “Was this friend Liu Mingyan by any chance?”

“How did you—?”

“Did you see where she went?”

“Down the mountain Shizun, less than a shichen ago.”

That didn’t match the timeline, which only gave Shen Qingqiu a moment’s pause. He really didn’t want to waste any more unnecessary time on this, and if he could just find the girl and bring her back he wouldn’t have to continue to both Yue Qingyuan’s worried nagging and Qi Qingqi’s vicious accusations. 

Following the logic so far, Shen Qingqiu hopped back onto his sword and headed to the bottom of the mountain. 

There was a mild trace of demonic and spiritual qi and Shen Qingqiu thought about what might have caused Liu Mingyan to abandon her original plan and run off.

Had she seen a demon and chased it away? If so, were they currently fighting, or had she already defeated it?

Or worse, had she been defeated? If it was Shang Qingqua’s icy prince that she’d accidentally uncovered there might not be anything Shen Qingqiu could do about it—he notoriously hated human cultivators and Shen Qingqiu wasn’t at demon-lord levels even with his mildly improved cultivation. 

He continued to follow the trace to a small, less popular inn on the outskirts of the nearby town.

Now, why would the traces lead this way?

The door opened smoothly when pressed, clearly well taken care of, and there was a nice looking but worn lady at a desk who looked up in delight as he entered.

“Oh welcome dear guest!” she said with a formal but stiff bow. 

Shen Qingqiu bowed in return, not forgetting his manners for even a moment. “Madam,” he said, lifting his head and looking around as inconspicuously as he could. “I’m sorry to impose but have you seen a young lady come by? She might have entered your inn to stay the night.”

The lady looked torn. “I don’t think I should say.”

Shen Qingqiu pondered offering a bribe, but another look around at the immaculate keep of the place and the perfect folds of the woman’s dress, and he figured she was likely the type to take pride in her work and the offer of a bribe would only make the situation worse. 

“I was sent by her brother. He hasn’t seen her for a few days and is worried for her safety.”

Then Shen Qingqiu took a roll of silk and the brush pen next to the ledger the woman likely used to keep track of her guests and drew an image of Liu Qingge. He would have drawn one of Liu Mingyan, but he’d never actually seen her face.

He lifted the image for her to see and a sparkle shown in her eyes. Yes, Liu Qingge was quite pretty, even when drawn by Shen Qingqiu’s hands with a shoddy brush and no real effort behind it. Some men had all the luck. 

“He looks just like his sister!” she exclaimed, then covered her mouth. But it was enough for Shen Qingqiu, at least he knew where the girl was. 

“No need to be worried,” he said, setting the shoddy painting down to dry. He was probably just going to throw it away, but he didn’t want the ink to get everywhere when he did. “I really am with her brother.”

Then he made his way upstairs, knocking on and opening each of the unlocked doors before finally coming across one that was actually locked and had noises coming from inside. 

Using a touch of qi, but not enough to do any damage to the well cared for wood, Shen QIngqiu forced the door open, only to slam it shut immediately after.

His face was a flaming red and he only had to wait a moment before the door was open again, and equally red Liu Mingyan, head bowed and face covered with one of her hands, stepped out. 

Sha Hualing was lounging upon the bed in the middle of the room, the sheets the only thing covering her modesty as she made a vulgar gesture towards him.

“Shen Shibo,” her voice did not waiver but he could see the red crawling up higher on the back of her neck. “I–I can explain.”

Chapter Text

“I truly do not care.” Shen Qingqiu stopped her before she could get a single word out. “Get properly dressed and we will return to the mountain where your Shizun and your brother are searching for you.”

He tossed her the veil and she caught it, quickly affixing it in place before Shen Qingqiu could so much as catch a dimple. Thank fuck, he thought to himself. Qi Qingqi would skin him alive if she knew he’d seen her precious favorite student’s face.

Before he could turn around, however, the demoness was at the door, just behind Liu Mingyan. “It’s the great Master Shen~” she said lazily. “How’s that poison treating you?”

“Pardon?”

Her eye twitched. “The without-a-cure?”

“Oh, I’d forgotten all about that,” Shen Qingqiu lied. “It seems demons have the habit of exaggerating.” 

Liu Mingyan looked confused, but said nothing. Shen Qingqiu was just about to tell her to “come along” and leave the Inn and it’s plethora of future Luo Binghe wives when he felt a wave of demonic qi from outside. 

He scowled. 

“A trap?”

The demoness leaned lithely along the door frame. “In my defense, I wasn’t exactly planning on dragging you back to the demon realm. But since you’re here, that Sect Leader of yours seems like the kind of man who pays a high ransom~”

“I thought bride-napping was an old tradition. I wouldn’t have guessed a child like you would be so eager to model out dated methods of wooing.” Shen Qingqiu sent a quick glance to Liu Mingyan only to see she was as surprised and caught off guard as he himself was. 

And it wasn’t hard to guess Sha Hualing’s intentions based on what he saw earlier when he’d barged into the room. 

No wonder she ran amuck in Luo Binghe’s future harem. It honestly had him re-contextualizing so much about the girls’ relationship and interactions in the book. How much had he missed just because he was only focused on the monsters and Luo Binghe himself?

Shen Qingqiu was starting to regret sneaking off. He should have at least told Liu Qingge where he was going. 

“They say if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

Shang Qinghua’s shoddy writing was going to give him a stroke. 

“Yes,” he kept his voice flat and unimpressed. His mind was coming up with about a dozen ways to get out of this that weren’t fleeing without Liu Mingyan. “That’s why demons have such long and healthy relationships.”

Sha Hualing turned red, and Shen Qingqiu forced himself not to step back when she stepped forward to threaten him. 

Liu Mingyan’s sword appeared between them. She looked furious, an expression Shen Qingqiu generally expected more from her brother.

“You meant to kidnap me? Steal me away to the Demon Realm? Was that your plan all along?”

The red quickly faded from Sha Hualing’s face and replaced with an out of character uncertainty that she quickly forced away as well. “...It’s romantic.”

This time, it was Liu Mingyan’s turn to go red in the face (at least the parts of the face still visible) and she stepped forward to attack. 

Shen Qingqiu stepped back and allowed the two to fight, hoping that it would delay the rest of the demons from closing in at least for a little bit as Sha Hualing had her ‘fun.’ While they were distracted, he managed to send off a small, targeted, blast of Qi. 

It wouldn’t do anything if no one was looking for it…but he was very close to the mountain and all the Peak Lords should be on high alert looking for signs of anything strange. So there was a good chance at least one would notice that, and the wave of badly hidden and suppressed demonic qi nearby. 

While they couldn’t get back up the mountain, and this was likely supposed to be a stealth mission, the demons just weren’t very good at those kinds of things. Shen Qingqiu was pretty sure the only reason Sha Hualing had managed to even lure one of the disciples down here in the first place is because she was a Liu. 

Watching the two fight would have been more amusing if he didn’t know that their Sect was going to pay for every scratch and damaged door in the entire Inn every time one of the girls got too showy or threw the other one into a wall. 

Unfortunately, it looked like Sha Hualing was going to win, again, and Shen Qingqiu didn’t need a Liu with a bruised ego effecting their escape attempt. So he stepped forward, calling out his own sword to stop one of Sha Hualing’s more eager strikes and putting her off balance.

“Time to go,” he told Liu Mingyan, who tossed one more scornful look towards Sha Hualing before agreeing and following Shen Qingqiu outside. 

He was hoping they’d bought enough time for someone to notice, or for the demons to be less on guard at their escape.

Honestly he should have known better, as the moment they stepped outside the two of them were surrounded. 

Shen Qingqiu did not like how they were looking at them. Fucking—he was talking to Yue Qingyuan about upping patrols down the mountain. There shouldn’t have been so many demons around so close without anyone noticing. He took out his sword.

Then he cheated and used his Qi to send razor sharp leaves towards eyes and throats to make enough confusion and frustration to hopefully escape the encirclement. 

The moment there was even a small break, Shen Qingqiu called his sword back, grabbed Liu Mingyan by the wrist and flew as fast as he could, only to be blocked off once again by a large unfamiliar demon with a very gross leer. 

Liu Mingyan moved as if she was going to attack, but Shen Qingqiu didn’t even think. He pushed her back and sent out a quick talisman to blind him at least temporarily before kicking him as hard as he could in the crotch. 

Luo Binghe would definitely kill him if he let so much of a scratch affect one of his future wives!

His hair was grabbed by someone else as he tried to run past and Shen Qingqiu slashed backwards, catching the arm of the demon and a small chunk of his hair with his blade. Shoving Liu Mingyan once more out of the way as she grabbed her own sword despite having already spent her energy on the fight with Sha Hualing.

Then a blast of familiar Qi, like a meteor, struck into the middle of the group of demons.

Liu Qingge appeared, a bloodthirsty grin on his face, as he cut through the invading demons the way a child might run through a daisy patch, just grabbing them as they go. 

“Well,” Shen Qingqiu relaxed, tripping a demon as they tried to flee. “That’s that then.”

 Sha Hualing appeared out of the corner of his eye, still reaching for Liu Mingyan, and Shen Qingqiu stepped between them, careful not to actually hurt either of them—not even the demoness attacking. It was only a minor impediment to her, but it was enough with Bai Zhan’s war god on the scene for Sha Hualing to toss one last desperate glance to Liu Mingyan before joining the rest of her crew and running for her life. 

Finally, Shen Qingqiu put down his sword. 

Liu Qingge did not stop his pursuit of the demons until Shen Qingqiu and Liu Mingyan left the scene themselves, headed back to the mountain where Shen Qingqiu could drop her off at her own Peak and wash his hands of the whole headache. 

Did they make brain bleach for situations like these?

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu split from the Liu’s pretty much the second they re-entered the Sect and headed to his own Peak for a bath, and maybe some meditation to help him forget…certain things. 

But as soon as he gets to his Bamboo House, there’s a familiar figure waiting for him, pacing as if impatient or worried. 

When he turns around, Yue Qingyuan doesn’t have his usual smile, or his soft kicked puppy expression he gets sometimes randomly. There’s something unfamiliar and slightly dark behind his eyes instead. 

Then their eyes met, and Yue Qingyuan relaxed into his usual serene smile and Shen Qingqiu almost would have brushed the whole thing off as him being paranoid—except as Yue Qingyuan’s eyes roved over him to check everything was in place, they stopped at where Shen Qingqiu had been forced to make an impromptu haircut with his sword. 

“Qingqiu Shidi,” he said, his voice soft. “Who—”

“It was the demons, obviously.” Shen Qingqiu brushed him off. “But at least a third of them are dead now, thanks to our Sect’s war god. I’m sure his little sister can explain the situation thoroughly.”

Shen Qingqiu himself did not want to touch it with a ten food pole. Besides, what he had at this point in time was mostly guess work rather than anything he could prove, except the demonic ambush.

And while his guess was a mix of what they’d originally expected with Liu Mingyan sneaking off to pick a very specific fight, there was some things he had to piece together that only more information would help him fill in. Was she gone for a week looking for a way to the demon realm only to come back and get some assistance?

But then how did Sha Hualing lead her away from the Sect? Did they already meet up and make plans for later? These were the questions only Liu Mingyan herself could answer and Shen Qingqiu didn’t really want to bother.

He’d only get misunderstood anyways, and while that was for the best in the long run of painting himself as the villain, he could do so with less effort right now by simply not bothering to do anything at all. 

A hand wrapped around his wrist and Shen Qingqiu’s attention was drawn up to the man holding him. 

“Qingqiu Shidi,” a warm, calloused hand carded through his damaged locks. “You’re beautiful hair…”

A flare of heat went straight through him. 

Unfair!!

Completely unfair!!! 

Shen Qingqiu tried to shove Yue Qingyuan away, but the senior cultivator was sturdier than a person should legally be allowed to be and he just ended up looking like he was placing his hands on Yue Qingyuan’s chest.

His face was practically melting with the heat and Shen Qingqiu couldn’t tell if it was his embarrassment or how close Yue Qingyuan was standing that was causing it. 

“This master can do something as simple as fix a bad haircut,” he tried to reassure. 

Yue Qingyuan’s grip tightened for a fraction of a second before releasing his wrist entirely. Sighing, he didn’t bother to step back and save Shen Qingqiu’s heart from exploding. Instead he looked disappointed, that kicked puppy expression Shen Qingqiu recognized was back and even more irritating than ever. 

“Qingqiu Shidi, I thought we agreed you would return to Qiong Ding like the rest of the Peak Lords with anything you found?” His voice sounded stressed, the way Shen Qingqiu sounded sometimes when talking to Luo Binghe, or Ning Ying Ying when they went directly against his directions and got hurt. 

This was not a fair comparison though, since Shen Qingqiu was not a child. And was not hurt. 

Besides, “If I waited to report my findings we would be missing a disciple instead of reuniting her with her Peak and brother.”

He walked past Yue Qingyuan, and to his front door. Immortal cultivators rarely sweat, but his clothes smelled like demon and Shen Qingqiu really wanted to get out of them. And fix his hair, it was bad that someone had noticed it being uneven immediately. 

Yue Qingyuan’s eyes tracked him until the door slammed between them. 

Yue Qingyuan waited until Xiao Jiu was safe inside his Bamboo house before leaving. Seeing evidence of his fight in the ragged edges of his Shidi’s hair had him shaken. It wasn’t enough that he’d been poisoned? That they’d attacked the Sect while Yue Qingyuan was away? Now they had the audacity to sneak into nearby villages and towns to try and sneak the students of his Sect into the Demon Realm? 

A shudder ran through him. 

What if Liu Qingge hadn’t made it in time? What if Yue Qingyuan hadn’t noticed that sudden spark of familiar Qi and sent him immediately? What if Xiao Jiu’s poison acted up and he’d been caught off guard by demons?

Would they have tried to steal him away too?

He stopped, almost freezing in place, his hand sliding to the hilt of his sword and stopping there. 

No…this was something that needed to be nipped in the bud immediately. 

Liu Qingge, Qi Qingqi, and Liu Mingyan were waiting at Qiong Ding. Originally, he was going to bring Shen Qingqiu with him to help explain what exactly happened and what he’d been thinking running off the way he did, but seeing him in that disheveled state…

No, he wasn’t about to force Shen Qingqiu to parade around like that. Xiao Jiu had too thin a face to be seen by anyone else as less than perfect. 

Yue Qingyuan would check on him again later tonight. 

Making sure to keep his expression soft and understanding, with a touch of the natural worry that came with a student almost getting kidnapped by demons, Yue Qingyuan had everyone sit down and then turned to Qi Qingqi’s disciple. 

“Liu Mingyan, can you tell us what happened?”

She flushed bright red, though her posture remained upright and perfect. Clearly, she at least had a sense of shame, unlike her brother next to her. 

“D-did Shen Shibo say…anything?”

“He wanted us to hear it from you,” Yue Qingyuan hedged. If he squinted that was probably what Shen Qingqiu meant by not giving him any straight answers, right? 

Liu Mingyan calmed down at that and gave a nod. 

Qi Qingqi’s expression twisted, much like it had when she realized Shen Qingqiu had gone after her disciple and sent what basically amounted to an emergency beacon for help. Had realized he’d risked himself for the disciple she had accused him of being nefarious towards. Something she had never expected, but Yue Qingyuan had experienced far too many times. 

When Shen Qingqiu had been faking smiles and forcing himself to get along with everyone, Yue Qingyuan had been relieved that at the very least, he’d created a distance between himself and the others so the likelihood of him getting hurt was smaller than it had ever been.

But recently, with Xiao Jiu’s biting comments and the work he was putting towards improving his Peak and the rest of the Sect, Yue Qingyuan almost felt like he was suffocating, constantly.

The entire point of dragging Xiao Jiu back from that fateful immortal alliance conference was to have him within reach so Yue Qingyuan could keep him safe for once. Instead he’d gone into a Qi deviation so severe he almost died, fought with a Qi-Crazed martial god of war, been permanently poisoned by a demon, and now forced into a corner where he had to cut his own hair to escape. 

What was Yue Qi even doing, if he couldn’t protect Xiao Jiu from anything at all?

Liu Mingyan took a deep breath and began to recount what happened as straightforwardly as she could. 

“I thought I could prove myself,” she began, her brother nodding along in understanding even as Qi Qingqi’s expression grew darker. “But she never took any of my requests to duel seriously. And would disappear too quickly, forcing me to chase her. Eventually I asked Duan Li from Qing Jing Peak if she could make a tracking talisman for me so I could track down the demoness and finish one of the fights we started. But before I could, I sensed her right outside of the wards.”

Yue Qingyuan followed along. He was going to add demon culture as part of mandatory Sect curriculum after this. If Liu Mingyan had known her actions were the equivalent of showing romantic interest to this Demoness, it’s unlikely she would have been so persistent and much of the mess that happened after could have been avoided. 

Sha Hualing likely used these meet-ups to get a sense of Liu Mingyan’s level and have an excuse to lead her right where she wanted them for the ambush Liu Qingge described. 

“How did you find the demoness the first time?”

Liu Mingyan didn’t meet his eyes. “It was chance,” she said, a faint flush on the upper parts of her cheeks where they peeked through the veil. “I had left the mountain for an early morning training session away from the Peak when I ran into her and called her to a rematch.”

Yue Qingyuan nodded, wondering if it really was as coincidental as Liu Mingyan thought it was.

“Why didn’t anyone see you for a week?” Qi Qingqi asked, piecing the timeline together. “If you were only gone for short periods of time?”

Liu Mingyan furrowed her brows. “Some people saw me? I went to Wan Jian to improve my sword at one point, and Qing Jing as I said.”

“So you were running around so much that the only people who saw you were people not part of our Peak?” Qi Qingqi had a raised brow, looking horribly unimpressed. 

“I’m sorry Shizun,” she ducked her head, “I wanted to prove myself to you after failing my duel when it mattered. If I had won against the demoness at that time, Shen Shibo wouldn’t have—”

She couldn’t finish her sentence, not meeting the gaze of any of the Peak lords around her. 

Yue Qingyuan felt himself soften. “That wasn’t your fault,” he reassured her, nodding over the girls head at her teacher. “That’s the fault of the demons that attacked the moment they thought they had a chance.”

Qi QIngqi nodded back, understanding his silent order. Liu Qingge, he would have to explain it to him directly, but he would be willing to do what needed to be done.