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It was an entirely ordinary day when everything went wrong. 

Yue Qingyuan was finishing up the last of the paperwork that needed his attention before he was scheduled to leave for a diplomatic meeting with a few of the other sects when his head disciple burst into his office. “Zhangmen-shizun, there's an emergency at the Lingxi Caves!” she exclaimed. “You need to come immediately!”

By the time that they arrived, there was a small crowd of people milling about near the entrance to the caves, one or two who seemed to be seriously injured. Fortunately Mu Qingfang had also responded quickly, as he was just stepping off of his spiritual sword when Yue Qingyuan began questioning the bystanders for details. 

“It's Liu Qingge, Zhangmen-shifu! He's having a qi-deviation, he's gone berserk!” One of the Qiong Ding disciples exclaimed, and Yue Qingyuan firmly tamped down on the harsh shiver of terror that raced up his spine at the mention of qi deviations in the Lingxi Caves. He ignored the way that his old scars suddenly begin to ache.

He didn't have the luxury of being uncomfortable about this, especially not when there was a sudden and ominous rumble and crash of sound echoing out from the cave. Yue Qingyuan dashed inside, pulling the still-sheathed Xuan Su from his belt. It only took him a few seconds to reach the cavern that Liu Qingge was in. It was the same cavern that Yue Qingyuan had been confined in, because of course it was. Or, it was most of the cavern. Unlike Yue Qingyuan, Liu Qingge hadn't had most of his bones snapped like dry twigs, Liu Qingge hadn't been forced to desperately and fruitlessly claw at the unyielding stone walls. Liu Qingge had used his sword to devastating effect, destroying a peripheral support column at the far end of the chamber and causing a landslide of rock to collapse into the cavern, entirely sealing off further access to the caves and half-pinning the snarling, thrashing peak lord under a pile of scree.

Liu Qingge's maddened eyes fixed on Yue Qingyuan and he redoubled his efforts to scramble free, heedless of the gouges the sharp stones carved into his flesh. With a final slash of Cheng Luan, Liu Qingge freed himself and lunged at Yue Qingyuan with a battle cry. The destabilized rock pile behind him tumbled further out, burying more of the cavern in stone, but the War God didn't pay that any mind.

Yue Qingyuan took one step forward and deflected Liu Qingge's wild swing with Xuan Su, while his free hand clamped down on the back of Liu Qingge's neck. He forced Liu Qingge down to the ground in a split second, and in the next he sent a pulse of controlled, stable qi through the man's meridians, washing over the riotous snarl of qi that had tangled around his meridians like a strangling vine. Liu Qingge immediately went limp.

Yue Qingyuan gave his shidi one more pass of qi to ensure he was stabilized, then let go of his neck with a sigh. “Mu-shidi, please come down here!” he called out towards the entrance, before turning his attention to the rockfall on the other side of the cavern. 

Because those rocks were different. They gave him something else to focus on that wasn't the smell of blood, the far-too familiar walls, the harsh buzz of misaligned qi, the choking sensation of being trapped and alone and helpless. 

Yue Qingyuan focused on counting the new rocks and warding off his mounting panic. It was fine. It was fine, he just needed to stay here long enough to ensure that Mu Qingfang could assess Liu Qingge's state and confirm that he wouldn't have a relapse if they tried moving him. He only needed to wait a few minutes–

And then Yue Qingyuan remembered that Liu Qingge wasn't the only person who had been cultivating in the Lingxi Caves today, and his fragile grip on his composure slipped.

Yue Qingyuan shot upright, his heart hammering, and snapped his attention to Cheng Luan.

There was blood on the blade. 

There was blood on the blade, and Shen Qingqiu was nowhere to be seen, and the passage was blocked and Yue Qingyuan had blood and dirt under his fingernails and dust in his lungs and tears in his eyes as he scrambled desperately and hopelessly against the barrier that had him trapped in the Lingxi Caves, trapped when Xiao Jiu was suffering, when Xiao Jiu was waiting for him, when Xiao Jiu might be hurt or dying or dead already and–

“Zhangmen-shixiong!” The sound of a voice interrupted the keening wail that had become the background noise, and Yue Qingyuan sobbed.

“Please let me out Zhangmen-Shizun please I need to help him please I promised, I promised, I promised!” Yue Qingyuan begged, scrabbling more desperately at the rockfall that was barring his way. 

Some of the rubble or some other debris landed on his shoulders, tried to pull him away, but Yue Qingyuan batted it away and continued his efforts to escape, to get free, to rescue Xiao Jiu. Nothing else mattered, not the distant voices shouting about qi deviations or the feeling of blood dripping down his face. 

Then everything dissolved into pain and blood and darkness and Yue Qingyuan lost his grip on the stones, falling into oblivion. Flames licked at his skin but they were cold flames, long dead, leaving behind only ashes and emptiness and the knowledge that Yue Qingyuan was too late, that Yue Qingyuan had failed, that he had never done anything in his life but fail.

There was a quiet sort of desolation in that, in the knowledge that everything he had ever done had gone wrong. 

Distantly, Yue Qingyuan heard the mumble of voices, but the words were unintelligible. Yue Qingyuan didn't care to listen to them anyway, not until a name cut through his haze. 

“–Shen Qingqiu, he's– Qing Jing Peak–”

Yue Qingyuan let out a choked breath that might have been a laugh or a sob, because that was right. There were more sins on his conscience. Xiao Jiu had come back to him, and what had Yue Qingyuan done? He had ruined everything, again. Shen Qingqiu, now, forced to share the characters of his name with the people who he hated, the people who had put him into danger again and again and again. Qing, for the martial family he despised, lead by a leader who he loathed. Qing, for the peak he lived on and where he never smiled. Qing, for the people who had failed him, who doomed him in the Lingxi Caves not once but twice. And Qiu, for the family that had enslaved him. That Yue Qingyuan had failed to rescue him from. That had hurt and abused and wounded him, body and soul. 

Yue Qingyuan had brought him here, saddled him with that blight of a name.

Yue Qingyuan had made decisions that he had thought were right but only ever made things worse. When had his mistakes started happening? Right from the start? Yue Qingyuan should have never operated on his own judgement, it only ended in disaster. 

And he was so tired of trying to do things right. 

When the void beckoned this time, Yue Qingyuan threw himself into it, and let himself fall.

Mu Qingfang allowed himself a brief moment to breathe as the violent qi deviation that Yue Qingyuan had been in the grips of settled enough for the worst to have likely passed. They weren't out of the woods yet; the sheer force of Yue Qingyuan's qi, combined with his connection to Xuan Su, made trying to re-align his qi an uphill battle that Mu Qingfang had to fight for every inch of progress, but the end was in sight, at least.

“Shizun!” one of Mu Qingfang's disciples rushed into the room, and Mu Qingfang winced and braced for yet another emergency to be dumped into his lap. “It's Shen Qingqiu, he's been seen on Qing Jing Peak, unharmed!”

Mu Qingfang had almost finished heaving a sigh of relief when Yue Qingyuan suddenly convulsed and the spiritual pressure in the air grew heavier. Yue Qingyuan jerked his head as if he was in the throes of a nightmare and mumbled out a word.

“Qing… Qiu,” the last syllable came out as a sob, and his qi spiked dangerously again. Xuan Su, resting in a sword stand across the room, suddenly began to rattle in its sheath. 

Mu Qingfang sucked in a hiss of a breath and desperately poured more qi into Yue Qingyuan, but trying to stabilize the flow was like trying to swim up a waterfall. “Fengmei!” he snapped out, and his assistant rushed towards Xuan Su to attempt to calm the violent reactions of the spiritual sword. 

She didn't get the chance. 

Yue Qingyuan screamed and Xuan Su ripped free of its sheath on its own, the unleashed spiritual pressure driving Fengmei and Mu Qingfang both to their knees. In the next heartbeat, the spiritual sword streaked across the room, plunging straight through Yue Qingyuan's chest. 

Yue Qingyuan's eyes shot open, blazing with qi, and one hand came up to touch the few inches of Xuan Su’s blade above where it was embedded in his heart. He coughed, flecks of blood speckling his lips, and the roiling qi in the air suddenly twisted and darkened, dimming the light of the room and compressing Mu Qingfang's heart and lungs like a lead weight on his chest. 

A chill ran down Mu Qingfang's spine as he realized what was happening. “Zhangmen–” he tried to choke out, but the spiritual pressure within the room somehow increased even further, preventing Mu Qingfang from even being able to breathe, let alone reach his patient. 

There was a beat of time where everything seemed to stand still, tension crackling through the air like a cable stretched to its absolute breaking point. 

Then Xuan Su exploded into a million shards and the qi backlash sent Mu Qingfang straight through the wall of his clinic. 

By the time that Mu Qingfang regained his senses, an uneasy crowd had gathered around him and the now-demolished treatment room. “Mu-shizun, there… there's no sign of Zhangmen–shibo,” someone told him tentatively as he winced and took stock of his own injuries. All relatively minor, perhaps a concussion.

“Is… is the sect leader dead, Shizun?” someone else asked. 

Mu Qingfang looked over at the rubble and could still feel the faint lingering wisps of demonic qi. He frowned grimly. “No. He isn't dead.”

Shen Qingqiu sighed and relaxed a little further into the hot water of his bath, using a nail file to work loose the last specks of blood under his nails. He was supposed to be in secluded cultivation right now, but Ruixue-jie had been grappling with a very difficult pregnancy and Shen Qingqiu was the closest thing that the Warm Red Pavilion had to a medical professional. He had slipped out of the Lingxi Caves to provide assistance during the birth and it was a good thing, too. If he hadn't been around to stabilize them, both mother and child likely would have died. 

He obviously hadn't bothered to inform anyone of his plans, not wanting to have to explain why he had interrupted his secluded cultivation to visit a brothel. Tonight, he'd take the opportunity to relax in a comfortable bed, and tomorrow he'd slip back into the caves with no one being the wiser.

Well, aside from the disciples whom he had ordered to prepare this bath for him, but they would keep their mouths shut if they knew what was good for them. He had already trained them well enough to only need to level a single glare to get them to immediately stop whatever nonsensical babble they wanted to inform Shen Qingqiu of when he first arrived. He wasn't concerned. 

As Shen Qingqiu braided his hair and slipped into his inner robes to sleep in, there was a faint rumble from somewhere off in the distance, and the hairs on his forearms prickled and stood on end as a ripple of some unidentifiable energy passed over him for just an instant. Shen Qingqiu frowned and went to his window to look outside. The night was quiet and peaceful once more, with no sign that there had been any disturbance at all. 

Whatever that phenomenon had been, it seemed to have nothing to do with Qing Jing Peak. Probably Bai Zhan or one of the others causing problems. Not his headache to deal with. 

Just to be safe, though, Shen Qingqiu laid Xiu Ya on the bed next to him as he laid down to sleep.

Shen Qingqiu immediately snapped into wakefulness at the sensation of a hand touching his cheek. In the next instant, Xiu Ya’s hilt was in his hand and the blade sung as it carved a deadly arc through the air. 

A jarring impact ran up his arm as the sword came to an abrupt halt. The glow from the spiritual sword threw the rest of the scene into stark relief. 

Yue Qingyuan, or something that strongly resembled him, stood over Shen Qingqiu’s bed, and he had stopped Xiu Ya by grabbing the blade with his bare hand. He seemed to be uncaring of the dark rivulets of blood dripping down his wrist.

The figure was dressed in robes that were ragged and streaked with both dirt and blood. The face was almost an exact match to Yue Qingyuan, but the features were harsher somehow. Hungrier. There were scattered reflective patches dotted liberally over the man's skin, almost resembling scales, but a closer look revealed them to be shards of metal, either embedded deep into the skin or somehow melted into it. The figure’s eyes literally glowed with a maddening yellow gleam, and they were fixed directly on Shen Qingqiu.

Upon making eye contact, the creature wearing Yue Qingyuan's face smiled broadly, revealing inhumanly sharp teeth. “Hello, Xiao Jiu,” it murmured, and its free hand reached for Shen Qingqiu's face again. 

Shen Qingqiu hissed and tried to yank Xiu Ya free. No use. He might as well have been trying to move a mountain. He was forced to abandon his sword as he flinched away from the clawed hand and scrambled off of the bed, putting some distance between himself and the thing. “What the hell are you?” he snapped, backing away until his legs bumped against his desk.

The creature dropped Xiu Ya carelessly on the ground and stepped around Shen Qingqiu’s bed with the unhurried ease of a persistence predator. “Well. That's a very philosophical question. I've been so many things over the years. Yue Qi. Qi-ge. Yue Qingyuan. The Xuan Su sword. I suppose that I am all of them, to some extent or other. Or perhaps I am what is left behind when everything unnecessary is stripped away.”

Shen Qingqiu made a sword sign and Xiu Ya flew to settle in his grip again. “Stay away from me, demon,” he growled, brandishing the blade. 

“No,” the thing replied simply, continuing to advance on him. 

“I'll kill you,” Shen Qingqiu threatened with gritted teeth. 

The demon laughed. “You can't, Xiao Jiu. I've always been stronger than you, especially now.”

Shen Qingqiu snarled wordlessly and lunged forward to attack. The demon moved faster, and in the next instant, Xiu Ya was clattering across the floor and Shen Qingqiu was pressed back against his desk, Yue Qingyuan's hands planted on either side of his body, penning him in place. Shen Qingqiu flinched and braced for pain, but the demon just leaned in close enough for Shen Qingqiu to feel the body heat radiating off of him, to feel the faint, discordant buzz of the thing's qi. 

“Xiao Jiu has always been more clever than Qi-ge, though. If you want to win, you'll need to rely on that,” Yue Qingyuan murmured in Shen Qingqiu's ear. 

Shen Qingqiu jolted and snapped his attention back to the demon. Why would the thing give him advice ? When he met the demon's gaze, he could have sworn there was just a split instant where the yellow glow flickered, and Qi-ge stared at him out of Yue Qingyuan's eyes. Qi-ge, who promised to protect him. Qi-ge, who promised to come back. Shen Qingqiu scrambled behind himself to grab a heavy paperweight from his desk, smashing it against the side of Yue Qingyuan's head and sending the demon reeling backwards. Shen Qingqiu took the opportunity to dash out of the room, frantically trying to put more space between them. 

Think, he told himself furiously, bursting out of the door of the bamboo house and not pausing for an instant in his sprint to get away. There's got to be a solution to this, you just need to work it out. 

What was he dealing with? Not a shapeshifter, something that powerful wouldn't need to pretend to have someone else's face. Possession? It seemed like the most reasonable answer, but Shen Qingqiu had felt the thing's qi. It was Yue Qingyuan's, just overlaid with a thick demonic taint. There was not a demon using Yue Qingyuan's body; Yue Qingyuan was a demon. 

Yue Qingyuan had become a demon.

There were cases of this, so rare as to be considered practically mythological. If a cultivator qi deviated and surrendered themselves to their heart demons, they would almost always die. But supposedly there was an infinitesimal, one-in-a-million chance that a particularly strong cultivator would instead merge with their heart demons and become a demon themselves. There were several high-ranking demonic families who claimed such a lineage. 

According to legend, demons created in such a manner were powerful but volatile, driven primarily by the emotions that had spawned the heart demons in the first place, and utterly uninhibited by any sort of self-restraint. 

“Xiao Jiu can run if he likes. Qi-ge will always find him,” the demon trailing after Shen Qingqiu called cheerily.

If Yue Qingyuan was now one of those demons, then Shen Qingqiu would need to identify and exploit the heart demons that had consumed him. What was it that drove Yue Qingyuan now, what emotion had he wrestled with that had been so overpowering to drive him into a fatal qi deviation? 

What was it that had caused Yue Qingyuan to target Shen Qingqiu of all people? 

…Well, it didn't exactly take a genius to guess the answer. It was guilt. Before this, the man could hardly say a word to Shen Qingqiu without stammering out some infuriating apology or other. Apparently Yue Qingyuan had stewed so long in his pointless and pathetic feelings that it had turned him into a monster, and now he was making that Shen Qingqiu’s problem. Shen Qingqiu privately seethed about that and made a sharp right, veering in a direction to circle back around to the bamboo house. 

So, then, guilt. Shen Qingqiu couldn't just claim to forgive Yue Qingyuan; there was no way he would be believed in the first place, and even if he was, it was entirely possible that the demon would decide to kill him if it were freed from its fixation. 

No, Shen Qingqiu needed to make use of the guilt. It was the only form of leverage he had.

Shen Qingqiu scrambled into the bamboo house and lunged for his storage chest, frantically digging through the assorted items inside. 

His hand closed around smooth cool jade just as the sounds of footsteps behind him came to a stop. “Is Xiao Jiu looking for something?” the demon asked, sounding almost amused. 

Shen Qingqiu took a deep breath and rose to his feet, turning to face his pursuer. He tilted his chin up and gathered as much self-importance and disdain as he could manage while still being dressed only in his inner robes. “I wonder, demon. Do you remember this?” he demanded, holding up the object that he had retrieved.

The creature’s gaze drifted down to Shen Qingqiu’s hand and it tilted its head to one side. Shen Qingqiu grit his teeth and refused to flinch as the creature took a step closer to him and reached out to curl a hand around the wrist of the arm that Shen Qingqiu had extended. The grip was gentle, with only enough pressure exerted to tilt his hand slightly and allow the moonlight spilling through the window to better illuminate what he held.

But Yue Qingyuan didn’t let him go, not even after he smiled and raised his glowing eyes to meet Shen Qingqiu’s black ones. “I do,” he replied. “This is the first guan I bought you, and I gifted it to you for your coming-of-age ceremony.”

“Hmph,” Shen Qingqiu scoffed, and inclined his head towards the rest of the chest behind him. “And the rest of those, you remember them too?”

“Mhm. Does Xiao Jiu want me to make a list?” Yue Qingyuan asked, still smiling.

“No,” Shen Qingqiu retorted, jerking his wrist out of Yue Qingyuan’s grasp. The demon’s clawed hand let him go without resistance. He took the initiative to step forward and grasp the demon by the front of its robes, giving them a harsh yank. “I want to know if you actually remember what it was that you promised me, all those years ago. Did you promise me expensive silks and accessories and tea sets? Was that the promise you made to Xiao Jiu ?”

The sharp-toothed smile faded. “No. It wasn't.”

“What did you promise me, Qingyuan?”

“I promised… that I would come back. That I would save you,” Yue Qingyuan replied.

“And did you?” Shen Qingqiu demanded.

The demon averted its glowing eyes. “No.”

“Do you think that this bauble, that any of these trinkets, makes up for that? Do you think that you’ve done enough to make amends for leaving me to die? ”

“No.”

“So your brain actually does work sometimes. What a surprise,” Shen Qingqiu sneered. He tightened his grip on Yue Qingyuan’s robe and tugged, dragging the demon’s face lower. “Changing yourself from a worthless slave to the most powerful sect leader of our generation didn’t absolve you of your debt to me, did you think that becoming a demon would be any different?”

“No, Xiao Jiu,” Yue Qingyuan replied quietly.

“Good,” Shen Qingqiu said, and released his grip on Yue Qingyuan’s clothing, giving his chest a shove. Yue Qingyuan went with the movement, stumbling back a step. “Now you’ve gone and made another fine mess for me to deal with, just like the undependable lout you are. It’s obvious that you cannot be trusted, so I will be taking things from here. You will obey my every word, do you understand?”

Yue Qingyuan shivered once and nodded, his head bowed.

“You’re not the sect leader any longer. You’re not human any longer. The only thing that you are now is mine .”

“Yes,” Yue Qingyuan agreed, not raising his head.

“Kneel,” Shen Qingqiu demanded, and the demon dropped to his knees with a thump. Shen Qingqiu grabbed his chin and tilted his head up, his other hand holding up the jade guan. “I won’t ask you to promise your obedience, because we both know that your promises are worth nothing. But you can consider this guan a reminder of how you failed me. Of what you owe me. So you had better not forget it.”

“I won’t,” Yue Qingyuan murmured.

Shen Qingqiu let out a near-imperceptible sigh and tucked the accessory away. “Good. Now, I’m going back to bed. You can sleep on the floor like the animal you are,” he sneered, letting go of Yue Qingyuan’s chin and wiping his hand on his inner robes. He turned away and climbed back into his bed, pulling the sheets around himself and trying to calm his racing heartbeat. This was obviously some bizarre dream, and he’d wake up in the morning to everything being back to normal.

There was a faint rustle and creak of floorboards from the direction of Yue Qingyuan as he presumably laid down. “Goodnight, Xiao Jiu,” the demon said.

Shen Qingqiu tightened his grip on the sheets and closed his eyes.

Shen Qingqiu did not wake up in the morning to everything being normal, because he did not wake up in the morning at all.

Instead, he was dragged out of sleep in the middle of the night for a second time, this time due to a clamour of voices and noise rapidly approaching the bamboo house. Shen Qingqiu cursed under his breath and sat up, jolting a little at the sound of a rumbling growl. His attention snapped to the door, where Yue Qingyuan stood facing it, tense and coiled as if ready to spring. 

“Qingyuan!” Shen Qingqiu snapped. “Heel!”

The demon flinched and glanced backwards over his shoulder at Shen Qingqiu, wavering for a split second before abandoning his guard position at the door and striding over to Shen Qingqiu.

“Behave yourself. It will only make more trouble for me if you commit a massacre,” Shen Qingqiu snapped, getting out of the bed and going to greet the newest round of unwelcome guests. He yanked open the front door of the bamboo house just as Mu Qingfang and Wei Qingwei reached his doorstep. A small horde of other cultivators were following at their heels. “Can I help you?” Shen Qingqiu demanded archly.

“Shen-shixiong! You’re alive!” Wei Qingwei exclaimed, sounding almost convincingly relieved.

“Apologies for disturbing you, shixiong, but I was wondering if you… noticed anything strange on your peak this evening?” Mu Qingfang asked.

“I assume that you are referring to Yue Qingyuan?” Shen Qingqiu replied, and smirked when Mu Qingfang inhaled sharply. “I find myself severely questioning your medical expertise when you were evidently incapable of doing anything to prevent such a severe qi deviation.”

Mu Qingfang winced. “Indeed, I fell short in my responsibility. However, the current situation demands priority at the moment. I am relieved to see that you are unharmed, Shen-shixiong. Do you know where Zhangmen-shixiong went?”

“I hardly imagine that he can be called Zhangmen-shixiong any longer. And he’s here,” Shen Qingqiu replied. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as Yue Qingyuan stepped up behind him, an oppressive amount of demonic qi emanating from him.

The group of cultivators and Wei Qingwei all drew their swords, and Yue Qingyuan grabbed Shen Qingqiu, pulling the man to stand behind him as he stepped forwards with a snarl.

“Qingyuan, down!” Shen Qingqiu snapped, gratified when Yue Qingyuan immediately dropped to his knees again. He grabbed the demon by the hair and forced him to fold forward into a kowtow. “I told you to behave.”

“I’m sorry, Xiao Jiu,” Yue Qingyuan mumbled against the floor.

“Useless beast,” Shen Qingqiu growled, letting go of Yue Qingyuan’s hair after pressing his forehead just a little bit harder into the ground. Then he straightened up, fixing their gaping audience with a glare. “As you can see, I have resolved your problem. You all can go away now.”

 Wei Qingwei blinked, his gaze darting between Shen Qingqiu and the demon huddled on the ground. “Uh, Shen-shixiong? How did you…?” he trailed off, clearly not sure how to put the question into words.

“Everyone gossiped about how I had the sect leader wrapped around my little finger, is it so hard to believe that I can still exert that influence over him now?” Shen Qingqiu asked.

“...um, yes?”

“Shen-shixiong, I–” Mu Qingfang started, but Shen Qingqiu cut him off.

“You what? Do you have some kind of miracle cure for this idiot?” Shen Qingqiu asked, giving Yue Qingyuan a light kick in the ribs. The demon didn't so much as twitch. “All of the stories I heard about this phenomenon indicate that the process is irreversible.”

Mu Qingfang grimaced, his gaze drifting down to Yue Qingyuan. “I haven’t confirmed it for myself, but I expect that you are correct. Even if there was a way to reverse it, I expect it would kill Zhangmen-shixiong.”

Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow. “And is that the solution you are proposing? Shall we put the sect leader down like a rabid dog?”

“That– of course that's not an ideal option, but… cultivators that become demons are generally intensely dangerous. I'm certain that Zhangmen-shixiong would not have wanted to become a threat to his sect and his martial family, and–”

Shen Qingqiu snorted and planted his foot on the back of Yue Qingyuan's head, pressing his face into the floor. “Does this look like a threat to you? I have him under control. And since Zhangmen-shixiong is… permanently indisposed, that makes me the highest authority in the sect. I certainly won't be just throwing away our strongest weapon.”

“Are you certain that he's sufficiently restrained?” Wei Qingwei asked, frowning.

“Shall I demonstrate?” Shen Qingqiu drawled. He stepped back from Yue Qingyuan and drew out the jade guan. “Qingyuan, stand.”

The demon rose to his feet, his attention fixed on Shen Qingqiu. The Qing Jing Peak lord seized him by the wrist and drew his hand up, settling those razor-sharp claws delicately against his jugular. “Well, Qingyuan? Do you feel like getting even for the disrespect I've shown you so far? Or are you happy to be my obedient little pet?”

The corners of Yue Qingyuan’s eyes crinkled slightly. The hand at Shen Qingqiu's throat slid forward, but the claws didn't so much as graze his skin. The backs of Yue Qingyuan's fingers stroked lightly down the side of Shen Qingqiu's neck, just once, before the demon dropped his hand. “Xiao Jiu asks questions he already knows the answers to,” Yue Qingyuan replied.

Shen Qingqiu couldn't entirely suppress the shiver that ran down his spine at the touch, but he covered it with a scoff, turning his attention back to their other guests. “There, see? Perfectly docile. You can go away, now.”

The remaining cultivators reluctantly took their leave after Shen Qingqiu promised to attend a meeting of the peak lords in the morning to discuss the most recent development.

As expected, dealing with the fallout of their Sect Leader’s metamorphosis was a headache. Shen Qingqiu eventually got sick of the endless circular discussions and solved the matter by seizing control of Qiong Ding and then informing the rest of the sect that if anyone had a problem with the current arrangement, they were free to leave.

He also got a very pretty collar for his new pet, partially to emphasise his control over Yue Qingyuan for others and partially because seeing a visible mark of ownership on his Qi-ge made something in Shen Qingqiu's chest settle.

When Shen Qingqiu had fit the intricately carved jade- and lapis- and onyx-inlaid collar around Yue Qingyuan's throat, Yue Qingyuan had smiled so happily, like this was his most ardent dream come true.

Of course, in the interest of maintaining a fairly peaceful existence, it was agreed that outsiders should be told that the Sect Leader had gone into long-term secluded cultivation.

But, well, after the mess that Yue Qingyuan had made of the invasion force headed by Sha Hualing, it was essentially impossible to keep the whole thing under wraps. Shen Qingqiu was really not looking forwards to needing to deal with round two of this nonsense.

At least he had a convenient outlet to vent his frustration upon.

It had really only been a matter of time before busybodies decided they wanted to stick their noses into Shen Qingqiu's business. He looked over the gold-colored robes of the latest petitioner with disdain. If there was one thing that he resented most about being the de-facto Sect Leader, it was needing to endure being exposed to self-important blowhards so frequently.

The annoyance bowed briefly, not deeply enough for Shen Qingqiu's liking, before presenting a lengthy missive with a large number of signatures at the bottom. "Shen Qingqiu, the cultivation sects have determined that there is too much risk in allowing you to exert full control over the demon Qingyuan. He is a threat to all the cultivation realm and the human world, and he must be contained more securely. Surrender the tether,” the man demanded.

Shen Qingqiu leaned back in his chair and crossed his ankles over one another where they rested on top of Yue Qingyuan's bent back. "Well, who am I to deny the will of the combined cultivation sects?" he remarked, withdrawing a jade guan carved with the image of a crane from his sleeve. "Catch."

The emissary's eyes widened and he fumbled to snatch the item out of the air, clutching it to his chest. 

The moment the guan left Shen Qingqiu's hands, a change came over Yue Qingyuan, his head snapping up and his glowing yellow eyes fixing on the man on the other side of the receiving hall. He stood, apparently paying no heed as Shen Qingqiu's feet slid off of his back. 

"How... How does it work?" the emissary asked nervously, his face going pale as the demon began stalking towards him. 

"Hm, I wonder. You'd better figure it out quick," Shen Qingqiu replied with a razor-sharp smile.

Unfortunately for the emissary, he did not figure it out. Shen Qingqiu leaned back in his chair and watched the show.

After the screaming had finally gone quiet, Yue Qingyuan picked up the man's hand and pried the fingers open, plucking the guan from his grip and letting the appendage fall back to the floor with a sodden thump. He turned back towards Shen Qingqiu and smiled. "Does Xiao Jiu think he can get rid of me that easily?" he asked. 

"Apparently not," Shen Qingqiu replied, propping his chin up on one hand and apparently unconcerned about the bloody mess on the other side of the hall. 

Yue Qingyuan strode back over to Shen Qingqiu, reaching out with a clawed hand to grip the back of the peak lord's neck. His skin was tacky with drying blood. "Xiao Jiu doesn't flinch from me," Yue Qingyuan murmured, leaning in close. 

Shen Qingqiu raised one eyebrow. "You've got something stuck in your teeth," he replied. 

Yue Qingyuan's eyes widened and he jerked back, raising a hand to his mouth. Shen Qingqiu snagged the guan out of his other hand, and Yue Qingyuan immediately sank to his knees. 

"Such a disobedient pet," Shen Qingqiu remarked, gripping Yue Qingyuan by his hair and yanking his head back. "I expect you to clean up your mess.”

“As you wish,” Yue Qingyuan agreed breathlessly.