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Panting, Takami Miho took the gorge at a hard run. She vaulted over it, hoping to put some distance between herself and her pursuer. Unfortunately, the man drew his sword without pausing for even a moment. The blade hung in midair, catching the glint of the sun and dazzling Miho. With a signal, he sent it whipping out before him even as he himself surged forward. By virtue of its palpable spiritual energy, the jian hovered above the canyon drop. The man leapt after it. The toe of his white-booted foot only touched the blade; that alone was enough to support his qinggong-fuelled jump. His body rose in a graceful arc, then seemed to float down towards her. The wind whipped his green and cream robes and his jet-black hair out behind him. Time itself seemed to distend, that Takami Miho might better appreciate his artistry and the ephemeral perfection of this moment.
Show off, Miho thought. Christ what an asshole.
“This doesn’t have to be such a production,” the man said, calling his sword back to him with an idle roll of his wrist.
He was, of course, the very picture of an immortal cultivator. In fact her pursuer was the quintessence of the type, to the extent that it seemed to have been patterned off his example rather than the reverse: ageless beauty without parallel, dao incarnate, like a perfect painting of a man, blah blah blah. Characterisation probably ran thin, out here in the margins of both the Doylist story and the Watsonian setting. Honestly, fuck the Mysterious Morokoshi arc.
“I’m sure that to you the idol is a few pounds of jade, and so perhaps a month’s worth of meals,” the cultivator continued, advancing. “To the villagers, it’s irreplaceable. There are better ways to solve your problems, and if you won’t give the idol back, I’m afraid I’ll have to take it from you.”
Miho sneered, drawing her katana. So what if he had a good character design? No way was this MOB extra actually capable of taking her down. She just had to scare him off, knock him about a bit and then be on her way.
The cheeky fucker rolled his eyes at her. It was only then that Miho noticed that the stranger’s sword hadn’t actually returned to its sheath when he’d retrieved it. In fact it had slipped around with that irritating flash-quickness cultivators sometimes employed, and was now poised at her neck. So, that was happening.
“Rookie mistake,” the man lamented with a shake of his head. “Who let you run about so under-baked?”
Miho swallowed.
“Okay, so. The thing is, I don’t actually have the idol on me anymore.”
The man gave her an unimpressed look. He tapped his fingers on his fan guard: his sword, still poised at Miho’s neck, actually cut through the very first layer of her skin. He clearly had fine control over the blade, but if she breathed too hard, or made a sudden movement, the jian could slice her windpipe clean through. And the thing was, Miho had never been in danger like this yet—not since she’d come to this world. Not even before that, really. She’d had a pretty uneventful youth. In fact the only time she’d ever faced anything like this, she’d died—her head lopped off neatly in an instant by a wire she’d been hurled into at speed when the car had crashed. When her body had careened out of the seat and right over the side of the high mountain road. When she’d flailed at nothing, a hundred feet in the air—when the fall would certainly have killed her, if the power line hadn’t done the job first.
“Fuck,” Miho whispered in her own language, panic sweeping through her in an instant. “Fuck, I’ve only been in this shitty, ridiculous world three stupid months, I don’t fucking know what I’m doing! I didn’t ask for any of this isekai bullshit, or to be sent on this stupid fucking side quest, or to be hunted down by some NPC cuntivator. I can’t believe I’m gonna die in a jidaigeki!
The cultivator regarded Miho composedly throughout the whole of her doubtless-incomprehensible babbling session, then sighed.
“Technically,” he said in creaky, somewhat-stilted Japanese, “it’s a xianxia. So it’s ‘transmigration novel bullshit’.”
The profanity emerged from the cultivator’s perfect mouth like droppings from a beautiful dove that had been Disney-princess perched on your finger when it had decided to answer the call of nature.
Miho blinked at him. “What.”
“Nani?!” the cultivator parroted back bitchily. A lazy wave of his hand brought his sword zipping obediently into its scabbard. “There’s one I haven’t heard in a while.”
The cultivator marched forward, grabbing Miho by the neck of her robes and shaking her like a cat might a disobedient kitten. He was twig thin, but somehow ridiculously strong: back at it again with the cultivator cheat-codes.
“Now, listen very carefully,” the man said, capturing Miho’s gaze with his intense dark eyes, “because this is vitally important. I need you to tell me what happens in the conclusion of Naruto. Be as careful and precise as you can; frame-by-frame would be best.”
It seemed that Miho was not quite done blinking. “I—sir, that finished like, nine years ago, in—I think it was November, 2014? Where did you even leave off?”
“Unimportant,” the cultivator said, shaking his head. “Start from the beginning of the 2014 Shonen Jump run. That way, I'll be able to evaluate your recap skills and takes as you go.”
Miho saw in the man’s eyes the desperation of an otaku who’d started reading the series in 1999 and had, at the very last moment, been cruelly sundered from his weekly issues. She swallowed.
“So—let me try and—right. Right, okay. You know Kakashi’s former team-mate?”
“The one who turned out to actually be Obito Uchiha,” the cultivator nodded. “Continue.”
The mysterious transmigrated (?) cultivator had some follow-up questions. Actually, he had a lot of follow-up questions. His Japanese grew much more fluid as they spoke, as though he was remembering it.
In another life, he’d begun reading Naruto in translation when he was nine. He’d conned his sweet, credulous parents into believing he needed them to pay for extra-curricular Japanese lessons in order to facilitate his (nonexistent) plans for an eventual career in business. Once he was relatively proficient in the language he’d switched over to a wholesale supplier, as it were. Unfortunately, having seriously sunk his costs here, having broken the pot that was his wallet and burned the boat that was years of his time, he had died shortly after turning twenty four, leaving behind only:
- his unfinished, unexciting-even-to-him graduate thesis on the narratological and ludic strategies of online fiction,
- a box his little sister found and threw away (contents: one My First Dildo) before their parents could clean out the place (because they had a mutual agreement in place, and brother-and-sisterhood transcends even death), and
- over twenty web-novel subscriptions, which it took his parents months to figure out how to cancel.
Privately, the transmigrated cultivator reluctantly acknowledged that his deep investment in Nauto and Sasuke’s friendship took on a slightly different colouration, in retrospect—given that he himself was now happily married to a vengeful, sexily-blackened-but-now-redeemed bad boy. To think that he would have ranted about how underwhelming this ending was for years without ever realising why this particular lack of satisfying closure bothered him. Embarrassing.
Having thus pondered the vicissitudes of fate, the cultivator turned back to his sort-of-captive—the young lady he’d remembered to release from his grasp at some point during her recounting of the second March issue.
“Now do Bleach,” he said.
Miho groaned. “Seriously? Because you are not gonna like that one any better. Who the fuck even are you?”
The cultivator waved his fan in a lax circle. “Tough question, as you might have guessed. But let’s say Shen Qingqiu.”
Takami Miho snorted. Her eyes widened, however, when she realised he was serious. “No fucking way.”
Shen Qingqiu frowned. “What’s so weird about that?”
Then an intimation of the horrible, and thus almost inevitable, truth came upon him. Oh no.
“You’re Shen Qingqiu? ” Miho pressed. “The Lord of Qing Jing? The Xiu Ya Sword? The Empress of the Demonic Realms? ”
“Yes,” Shen Qingqiu cleared his throat, “well—”
“The uke protagonist of Resentment of Chunshan? ”
And there it was. Of course Chunshan had managed to spread to Japan, only to be taken up faster and more thoroughly than matcha powder had been. Why the fuck wouldn’t it have? Shen Qingqiu decided to observe his standard, procedural response to reminders of the existence of this text; he simply pretended not to have heard that sentence, in hopes of making whoever had been unwise enough to refer to it believe that they themselves had only thought about it rather than managing to mention it out loud.
“Only for the past nine years,” Shen Qingqiu offered, feeling it wrong to take credit for Shen Jiu’s accomplishments. Shen Qingqiu had tried to discharge his duties better than the original goods had managed, but bastard though the poor wretch had been, it was Shen Jiu whose cultivation prowess and mastery of the arts had actually earned the Xiu Ya sword his spiritual tool, fame and position.
“So you’re the one who sealed the rift between the realms,” Takami Miho said, with real awe in her voice (which Shen Qingqiu found very disconcerting, actually!). “You unmasked the treachery behind the attempt to murder the last Demonic Emperor, and helped cure the Jinlan Plague, and, in “Song of Bingqiu”, they say you took a whole bottle of wine right up your—”
“I think you’re aware that those accounts are highly fictionalised!” Shen Qingqiu snapped, twisting his closed fan is his hands. “For fuck’s sake, this whole place used to be a YY!”
“And now it’s a BL,” an impressed Takami Miho said, nodding like she was getting it. “Because you like, transmigrated and changed the whole fucking genre by making the main villain fall in love with you. Yabai shit, dude.”
Shen Qingqiu’s head snapped up.
“Luo Binghe,” he hissed, “is the protagonist. And it’s danmei!”
Seeming to fully take in what he’d just said a moment after he’d said it, Shen Qingqiu was unable to process the conversation further. His shoulders slumped, and he literally face-palmed. A big badass with even bigger drama-queen energy: Miho could vibe with it. So he was sensitive about his seme-half. Fine! She considered the subject closed, like a bookstore that had sold clean out of pirated translations of Resentment. Miho switched tacks.
“Listen, senpai. Isekai-sensei! The idol thingy’s back at my inn, under the mattress. I’ll return it to the village just as soon as I’ve used it to get into the Cave of Endless Reflections. The statue is like, the MacGuffin to open the sealed door. You know, it’s the ‘glazed armor’, as your people might call it. I need to get into the cave, grab the ice-blade, power up a bit and then hop back on a boat to Not-Kyoto-Yet.”
Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow at her. “Unfortunately, it isn’t.”
Takami Miho frowned. “Isn’t the MacGuffin, you mean? Nah bro, the village elder definitely said—”
“She meant that the idol unlocked spiritual doors within you, idiot,” Shen Qingqiu huffed. “Trust me, the Cave of Endless Reflections can only be opened with the lost jade idol of the burnt village of Cua Van. Ask me how I know.”
“Um. ‘How do you—’”
“Oh my god, that was rhetorical. First off, it’s the lost jade idol of a burnt village with a Vietnamese place name, and we’re in fantasy Hubei. So like, good luck with all of that. Second, Luo Binghe, the protagonist of this world, discovered the lost idol in the original novel by accident in the treasure horde of the Black Benefactor, who’d destroyed Cua Van years ago for turning its back on him as its protective spirit. It was a poignant parallel with Binghe’s own moral corruption, and I’m frankly surprised that one of the few times Airplane very nearly managed a good arc didn’t stick with you. Third, and foremost, my fuckboi-in-law has the ice-blade in this timeline, because he’s retired, which means that whenever he gets bored he completes Binghe’s side-quests. Tianlangjun’s using the ice-blade to make daiquiris, which I should never have gotten drunk on pear blossom wine and told him about—you think pear blossom wine tastes like pears, Miho?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Wrong. The pear season is just when they ferment the rice malt. Pear blossom wine tastes like shit. Look, how much do you need the ice-blade specifically? Because Tianlangjun is going to be just, insufferable if that goes missing. Man loves his piña coladas. And getting caught in the rain.”
Takami Miho puffed up her cheeks, considering the question, then exhaled slowly. “I mean, I’m supposed to come back with a blade with a blue sheen and some kind of ice powers. I can’t really get around that one.”
Shen Qingqiu snorted. “Is that all? Mobeijun has about a thousand ‘ice blades’ in his armoury. You can probably even get one katana-weighted, if you give his smiths the length of a training montage. And you’ll get to meet Airplane-dada, if that’s any inducement. Not that it should be.”
Before Takami Mino could voice further questions, Shen Qingqiu realised he’d entirely forgotten to ask— “So what year was it, three months ago? When you left?”
“Left,” eh? That was a polite way of putting it.
“It’s 2023,” she answered. “So if you’ve been here nine years, then I guess time’s passing at the same rate.”
“Huh. It wasn’t always. And people are still reading 狂傲仙魔途?” Shen Qingqiu looked Takami Miho up and down. “No offence, but uh. Really?”
“See,” Miho pointed at him, “I’ve been meaning to ask you—who the fuck is Airplane, and what’s a—what are any of those sounds you just made?” She understood middle Chinese, not whatever that had been.
“Proud Immortal Demon Way?” he tried. “The Dark Lord's Wild Corruption? From Woobie to Chuunibyo: The Rise and Rise of The Sky Pillar and the Demon Attached to It? I don’t know what you’ll have retitled it. You know, the webnovel we’re living in.”
“Er, no, it’s not?” Takami Miho really tilted her head to look at him, reminding Shen Qingqiu of nothing so much as a Princess Mononoke forest spirit. “First off,” she parodied Shen Qingqiu’s rant, “what the fuck is a ‘YY’? Second, this isn’t even a web novel, it’s a shojo manga. I know, because I edited it.”
Shen Qingqiu’s brow furrowed. “You’re suggesting that you transmigrated into this world, but simultaneously into an entirely different plot, a different medium, and a third, discrete genre?” Shen Qingqiu bit his lip, considering it. “What’s your story, then?”
Takami Miho plopped down on the grass and crossed her legs under her; Shen Qingqiu took the opportunity to perch elegantly on a convenient boulder. (How sure was this guy that he wasn’t the localised protagonist? Look at Gay Wizard Ancient China over here, just giving out free boulders whenever Shen Qingqiu needed to rest the Rear-End Bits of Chunshan without mussing his overcomplicated robes!)
Miho gave him the broad outline, which involved certain important foreigners whose existence Shen Qingqiu had heard of without ever particularly marking. He was confident they’d never been mentioned in Proud Immortal Demon Way, but neither had he clocked their recent rise as at all strange. They seemed of a piece with the world he lived in.
“Cultivators got name-checked as a thing over in the west,” Takami Miho said, “but they only came up in passing. I don’t know if I was supposed to run into any—this quest was really vague in the manga. I’m off-screen, you know?”
“And you’re certain the writer didn’t read Proud Immortal Demon Way either?” Shen Qingqiu pressed, unlikely as the prospect of an old-hand professional shojo mangaka taking up Airplane’s finest seemed.
“She’d have told me,” Miho insisted. “We talked about her influences a lot! The spiciest she got was Rumiko Takahashi. She found Madoka Magica disrespectful to the genre.”
Shen Qingqiu tsked with disapproval. “Oh, come on. It’s a natural outgrowth of Shinbo’s previous work and the genre-critical strains present in even, like, Pretty Cure.”
“That’s what I said!” Takami Miho agreed. “In my head, silently, because I was only a junior editor fresh out of school, and she’s a pillar of the industry.”
“Mm,” Shen Qingqiu considered. “So maybe at some point, bits and pieces of Proud Immortal Demon Way entered the popular consciousness. Because the ice-blade arc was very nearly good—just the sort of thing someone with more time or artistic integrity than Airplane had at his disposal would want to polish up. At second or third hand, your mangaka could know it without knowing it.”
“Then all my story has to be is compatible?” Miho asked.
“Right. Since Binghe isn’t bothering to take over the entire world in this timeline, all you’d need is a line or two about cultivators. Maybe one mention of a demonic emperor off in—what are you calling us?”
“Morokoshi.”
Shen Qingqiu snorted. “I mean, I guess that’s fair, given that we’re all using Dongyang.”
“Oh come on, not even Dongying? Disrespectful, dude.”
“But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Shen Qingqiu mused, tapping his fan-guard against his lips and trying to process the fact that he wasn’t living in a semi-private transmigration novel anymore. “People call it Dongyang. This is a whole world. It has its own power-flows—there are international relations.”
Takami Miho frowned, rolling her shoulders. “I mean, don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little?” Major characters were realish, sure. Her protagonist was very annoying, and very real. But everyone here? Even the poorly-sketched MOBs in crowd scenes?
Shen Qingqiu sighed. He began to elucidate a complicated moral parallel via an early Gundam series Miho had never actually seen; he got a few minutes into it before she managed to stop him. Shen Qingqiu wallowed for a moment in his disgust, lamenting Miho’s youth and her failure to take advantage of the great cultural opportunities their home-universe had provided them while she had a chance. He then started over.
“You’re still trying not to know these are real people, who you affect. ‘It’s fine to steal the idol, because that village is populated with extras.’ But that’s a textbook early-stage isekai response. If you let yourself think about it, you know it’s stupid. This place is bigger than the inside of any one person’s mind.”
Certainly this world was bigger than Airplane could have dreamt of, in his papaphilosophy—but really, no one could have invented every blade of grass in this valley. The never-described canyon their vantage point overlooked. The processes of weather and geology necessary to create both. If they were meaningfully inhabiting a medieval Asia, then that was so much vaster even than the storyline of an Emperor like Luo Binghe. It was a million people banking, and growing tea, carrying out labour that Shang Qinghua simply hadn’t understood. The clothes on Shen Qingqiu and Takami Miho’s backs had required sheep, and shepherds—weavers, wagons and cartwrights. All those people had extra-narrative interactions, lived whole lives just so a Host or Main Character could pass them in the market, once. The barest instantiation of a story involved, necessitated, so much raw universe.
“So don’t go killing anyone because you can,” Shen Qingqiu advised Takami Miho. “Because you think you’re supposed to, and you haven’t tried everything in your power to get out of it. If you don’t regret it now, one day you’ll change your mind. One day, this place will be your home. And then it’ll be too late to take the things you’ve done here back.”
Takami Miho let herself drop down in the grass. Scrubby meadow-growth cushioned her cheek. It smelled as vegetal and alive as she could wish. Realer, even, than her distant, rural-childhood memory of the last time she’d laid in the grass like this.
It was a strange thing to warn someone about. Decent advice, certainly, and given in good time, but it left Miho wondering what the man who said it had done to earn his caution. She hadn’t yet given thought to still being in this world in a decade, in two or three. She wondered what that would feel like; what she and this world would do to one another, in all those years.
“Yeah,” she murmured, after a moment. “Yeah.” Another passed, before she spoke again. “I think it was easier, just to—” she sighed. “Even though I know this genre. People always realise it counts, that’s how this goes.” Why hadn’t Miho thought it would happen to her? What was she trying to protect herself from? It wasn't as if she could go back.
“Well,” Shen Qingqiu exhaled, “no one in pain or danger is ever as smart as they were on paper. Especially not before they get experience in.”
Consolation, Miho supposed, of a sort. As much as he was prepared to offer her, anyway. “So are there more of us, do you think?” Takami Miho wondered, looking up at the sky. “Are we all like, off in bordering story-fiefdoms?”
“Airplane and I share what used to be Proud Immortal Demon Way,” Shen Qingqiu corrected her. “But he’s been here decades without running into anyone but me. I’m under the impression that this novel was structurally weak, and that we stabilised it. By living here, nourishing a stable environment that can host multiple plots, maybe we’ve managed to create a branch-seedling—like a splinter universe, or a genre cluster.”
Shen Yuan vaguely wondered whether this could be how universes usually started. Could he and Takami Miho even be certain that they were from the exact same place? (Honestly, if Bleach had ended better in his home-universe, he’d take it.)
Maybe their own home(s) had begun like this: calved off from something bigger, a little world nurtured with investment until it grew robust and became a full-fledged universe in its own right, with stable, universal laws that solidified as you observed them. How, then, did such a process start? Did someone pour enough hours of labour or love into a work and strike a spark? Had Airplane rose-and-ground this world into being? Had Shen Yuan wanted Luo Binghe so much that one day, the universe had given him to him?
“Anyway,” he said, dismissing his own unquiet thoughts, “it’s not the sort of question my System likes to answer.”
“You got a System?” Takami Miho asked, sitting up in indignation. “All I got was a character customisation screen!”
“You got character customisation?” Shen Qingqiu responded, indignant right back.
Takami Miho frowned at him. “I mean, I’d have bet money that you did, given, uh.” She gestured at his general air of Celestial Twinkiness: looks-wise, this guy was definitely Chu Winning. (Immortality had done well on Netflix: she understood that reference!)
Shen Qingqiu huffed. “This is my xianxia-sona. The System just shoved me into someone who looked about 40% like me. I once wound up hiding in a close copy of my old body, and it took my husband a hot minute to recognise me and call bullshit.”
“You were a web novel NEET who looked 40% like this?” Takami Miho asked, her voice flat.
Shen Qingqiu felt amorphously attacked, yet unclear on what exactly he was being criticised about: it was like a surprise visit from his aunties.
“I was ‘in education’, thank you. Anyway, how much could you have possibly changed your appearance in a little PlayStation loading screen?” he sneered.
“I mean, I used to have a penis, for one,” Takami Miho countered.
“…ah,” Shen Qingqiu said, looking extremely embarrassed.
“Oh no, I mean, this was,” Takami Miho gestured to her body, “my call, not like, ‘System took my penis’ or anything. Huge relief, honestly. This blinking cursor asked me, ‘do you want a male physical avatar?’ and I thought, ‘oh wow, actually I really do not, no.’ Trans-migration, baby.”
“Oh. Right.”
As an early-twenties edge-lord, Shen Yuan had been painfully self-critical. By extension, he had been everything-critical. He had occasionally said careless things about people in Miho’s position, because he’d been frantically avoiding considering the ways he himself might differ from the norm. The strain of this hyper-vigilance had made Shen Yuan edgy, paranoid. It had circumscribed his academic work like an invisible wall; he’d been seriously negligent with a body that had sometimes felt like his enemy.
In the ‘real world’, Shen Yuan had never actually been the person he’d thought he was, or had tried to be. Guarded and wary, he had not always discovered in himself and offered up the decency that he now found came naturally to him. Mencius argued that people were naturally good; unless socialised away from decency, any human would instinctively try to save a drowning child. That hadn’t always felt as true and important to Shen Yuan as it did now. He had lived, in the nine years since his death—had altered himself as much as he had Proud Immortal Demon Way. By now Shen Qingqiu felt like his name, even more than Shen Yuan did. So Shen Qingqiu could see what Miho meant, even if her experience wasn’t exactly his own: he could understand becoming yourself, in such a place as this.
And if anyone ever tried being cruel to Binghe about his orientation in the way Shen Yuan had been casually cruel to himself about his, Shen Qingqiu would have their fucking eyes. (It mattered not at all to Shen Qingqiu that Luo Binghe could more than defend himself.) And given his stance on that, he certainly owed Takami Miko commensurate grace.
“You said you needed to power up,” Shen Qingqiu continued after a pause. “And that you didn’t know what you were doing, yet. Well,” he cleared his throat. “I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to training disciples, since coming here.”
“You’d take me on?” Miho looked up at him, and found that he’d come to stand before her. He extended a hand to lift her to her feet.
“Someone has to, you’re a mess,” he sighed. “But we’ll get you sorted. You really are going to be all right, Miho,” he said with a slight, certain smile. Like he was confident about it. Like he was going to see to it that she was.
And Miho, who’d been alone and on the run almost since arriving in this world, sort of felt like crying about it, honestly.
Takami Miho looked into the eyes of the demonic emperor (“black as a starless night”, exactly as Liu Su Mian Hua had promised) and swallowed hard. While flying her up to Qing Jing Peak on his sword (katanas didn’t come with that functionality, like, at all), Shen Qingqiu had prepared Miho for this introduction about as well as he could:
“Whatever you do, don’t call me Shizun in front of my husband. It’ll annoy him, and he is not a man you want to annoy. Anything less formal would be disrespectful, and he won’t like that much better. Go with Japanese loan-words to avoid the question. Sensei is best. You can call him Senpai—just, try to make it clear that you’re calling him senpai as in ‘my husband’ rather than senpai as a replacement for ‘shixiong’, because there you run into the same ‘hell is other disciples’ problem.”
En route, they’d passed a random farmer. Shen Qingqiu had paused, circled back, flown them down and asked Takami Miho to explain her whole transmigration to this poor guy, in the vernacular middle Chinese her initial Language Learning stat buff had thankfully allowed her to pick up. The old man had just looked at her like she was stark raving, darting ‘are you hearing this shit? I presume you’re taking this cursed girl to a healer?’ glances over to Shen Qingqiu all the while.
Miho was shocked that had worked; back in not-yet-Kyoto, this sort of explanation was an absolute red flag. It was clever of Shen Qingqiu to figure out the technicality; it was like when you steeled your nerve and stole Lu Bu’s horse Red Hare in Dynasty Warriors, then ran the fuck away while he gave unrealistically-fast chase on foot. The guy’s range was long, but it was finite. Apparently, they were now standing outside it.
After their encounter with the farmer, Shen Qingqiu had coached Takami Miho extensively. She was to tell Luo Binghe that ‘transmigrators’ often weren’t allowed to reveal their status, even when they really wanted to. That their actions were sometimes dictated by an inflexible plot that could take out them, and even the universe they inhabited, if they failed to play their parts in the awful turns of a partly-predetermined destiny.
So Shen Qingqiu was evidently hoping, between her testimony and his protagonist husband’s ability to connect the dots, to bypass his own region-lock. God, it had to suck to never be able to discuss any of this shit with your own partner? Especially given all the Chunshan-typical drama the two of them had been through, and how close the fluffier follow-up ballads indicated they were.
Shen Qingqiu really was doing her a solid in taking her under his wing. Takami Miho couldn’t have hoped for a better internship. So like, yeah, why the fuck not?
Miho’s willingness to act as the couple’s go-between faltered slightly in Shen Qingqiu’s cosy, pleasant reception room (the stuff of a million cottage-core mood boards). At the sound of their arrival, a man had emerged from the kitchen in an apron. He was as weird-handsome as Shen Qingqiu, so like, three guesses as to whether this was the male lead. He purred “Shizun” in a way that made Miho understand, fully and immediately, why Shen Qingqiu had nixed her own use of the term. The Demonic Emperor’s big, bright eyes narrowed, however, when they swung to Takami Miho. The strange bindi thing on his forehead seemed to glow redder, in a kind of 'fuck off out of my cottage', Danger Zone way. His big curls were coated with a light dusting of flour, like he’d been baking bread; Miho was pretty sure that he could somehow kill her with his full-of-secrets hair alone (and might do it, too, if she tried to stay for dinner).
“Binghe,” Shen Qingqiu said. His tone went sticky-slow and burnt-sugar indulgent, like what it’d sound like if a Taiwanese brown sugar bubble tea learned to talk. The sweet pour of Shen Qingqiu's voice snapped Luo Binghe’s gaze back to his husband, and eased Luo Binghe’s shoulders. He looked suddenly younger, his gaze more open.
So Shen Qingqiu was the top, then? Huh. Guess it sort of made sense, given the presumed-if-not-actual age gap (if not Shen Qingqiu’s whole like, Twink Aesthetique™.). This must be what he’d meant when he’d said the legends were sometimes erroneous.
“Binghe, this is Takami Miho,” Shen Qingqiu began in middle Chinese, “who I’ve taken on as an apprentice. She’ll be sort of outer disciple.”
“Ah. A new disciple, Shizun?” Luo Binghe responded mildly, dusting flour off his large, strong, yaoi-hands—how was he making dusting off flour menacing? How?
The Emperor then used a surge of red demonic qi to burn away any remaining impurities. It felt like a pointed escalation: 'You seem to still be in my cottage.'
“Her origins are most interesting,” Shen Qingqiu continued, apparently not even a little deterred by the attitude Spooky Uke was copping with him. Like this shit was normal, to Shen Qingqiu.
“Husband,” Shen Qingqiu said—and he swallowed. There was an earnest light in his eyes. “I think you’ll find her story very instructive, if providence will allow her to tell it. I must beg you to attend her carefully, and to thoroughly consider her words.”
Shen Qingqiu seemed more comfortable with this formal register than Miho herself was, as yet. Like this manner of speaking was as real to him as Japanese, or even his native modern Chinese—just him, in translation.
The intensity of Shen Qingqiu’s appeal fixed Luo Binghe’s attention. “Shizun, is something wrong?”
Shen Qingqiu shook his head. “No. Or rather, nothing new. In fact, I hope that soon a great many things might be made right. Binghe, please.”
Bewildered but obedient, Luo Binghe lowered himself to the floor, urged down by his husband’s hand on his shoulder. He sat across the table from where Takami Miho had knelt, at Shen Qingqiu’s direction.
Shen Qingqiu took a deep breath, and exhaled it. His hand clenched on his fan; it had gone white at the knuckles.
“Miho?” he asked. His voice was admirably steady, as though this wasn’t much to him either way; Miho wanted to learn the trick of that one off him, too.
She nodded. Takami Miho opened her mouth, and managed to begin by telling a wide-eyed Luo Binghe that she’d been born in a city that had never yet existed.