Chapter Text
[Transmigration System Activation]
He stares at the ceiling, mind blank. He died blind, alone. A failure. He did his best, he worked harder than anyone, he sacrificed everything and he failed.
[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Important things must be stated three times! Welcome to the System. This System operates in line with the design concept “YOU CAN YOU UP, NO CAN NO BB”]
A wave of pain shudders through his ill-gotten body. It’s—Is he possessing it? Reincarnation isn’t surprising, but he would have thought—Is there no absolution even in death? Does the Sharingan-curse move across lifetimes?
[Greetings, Host. Welcome to the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way, a place where right and wrong are intricately woven.]
Is he in actual Hell?
[The System was successfully activated! Bound Role: Luo Binghe’s master, Cang Qiong Mountain Sect’s Peak Lord of Qing Jing Peak, “Shen Qingqiu.” Weapon: the sword Xiu Ya. Starting B-Points: 100. ]
Something like outrage sparks to life. Bound role? Master?
[Host has been bound to the Shen Qingqiu account. As the plot progresses, various point types will gradually become available. Please ensure that no score falls below zero, or the System will automatically mete out punishment.]
Right. Hell is looking more and more likely. Well, if anyone deserved it, it would be him. Itachi’s expression flashes before his eyes, and he exhales a careful breath. A karmic punishment would explain why his body was so incompatible with the spiritual Chakra his Clan was known for. It would also explain why the body he is wearing lived a worse life than he had, somehow.
[Warning! Shen Qingqiu’s backstory can be accessed by purchasing hints or by fulfilling quests. User’s continued attempts at accessing this information without authorisation will result in the loss of B-points.]
Oh? Shisui claws together enough willpower to laugh, the sound rattling in his chest like a death knell. Right. Punishment. The voice had said something about punishment earlier.
[Warning! OOC behaviour! Currently, you are at the beginner level, and the OOC feature is frozen. You must complete a beginner-level quest to unfreeze it. Before unfreezing, any act in violation of the original Shen Qingqiu character settings will result in a deduction of B-Points.]
Talking to it is beneath him. Then again, some things do need to be cleared up.
“You think to command me?”
The mechanical—false—whir is all that he hears. It comes across as confused, perhaps? If Shisui was a civilian soul he might have been impressed by the technique. As it is, he knows full well Uchiha children cast more impressive illusions before they start the Academy.
[Should the User’s B-Points fall below zero, User will automatically be deported back to User’s original world.]
Unlikely. Shisui feels his soul dig into the body by the moment. Moreover, while he can feel some sort of energy bound up with whatever passes for Chakra in this world, the spiritual Chakra he came with is his. Not even Danzō came up with a way to put a leash on his heritage.
“By all means,” he says, standing up. Agony washes over him again. It’s almost nostalgic. “Do your worst.”
He blocks out its blathering and goes about his tasks. The long, sleeping robe is the first to go, but the green silk monstrosity is not much better. He shrugs on the top layer and resolves to find some leggings and armour. The long hair goes after. The so-called System doesn’t like that.
[Warning! Warning! Warning!]
“I will have freedom or I will have death.” The sword is some sort of Chakra weapon. Well. It's a bit flashy, but it will do. Quality is quality and his body is familiar with it. The calluses on his hand fit the hilt well.
[—User will—]
He huffs. In other circumstances, he would probably be amused. As expected, the being doesn’t have anywhere near the power to expel his soul out of the body, now that the energies have mixed. Uchiha keep what is theirs, and his soul has had time to hook into it. What it can do, however, is try to control the body. An unwise move, all things considered.
The spike in pain is predictable, doubly so because it’s artificial. Then the memories start.
—Hunger—Living on the streets—Crying, alone, afraid—Cold—Lonely—Hunger—Hunger—Hunger—
—Getting caught—Getting branded—
Bless. Shisui started killing for his country when he was seven. If this creature thinks the fate of a pitiful civilian will distress him—
—Yue Qi—
—Q i u J i a n l u o —
On second thought, maybe it was onto something. Torture, murder, pain—that was Shinobi bread and butter. Sexual abuse was a different matter altogether. Shinobi and Kunoichi specialising in lipstick missions went through ten times the training hours and accepted a tenth of the missions the rest of them had. More importantly, Clan children--with the glaring exception of Captain Hatake--never went that route. One would have to get sterilised, for one, and that was never on the cards for Shisui Uchiha, son of Kagami Uchiha, one of the most prominent members of his Clan.
“You despicable, worthless—” How nobody came to check on the disturbance is beyond him, but that’s a boon, so it doesn’t matter. “How dare you try to use that as a weapon—”
The assault isn’t even the most infuriating part. The worst part is the boy’s sick twist of self-hatred. Xiao Jiu—and, later, Shen Qingqiu—had no real way of understanding or coping with the abuse. He hid his past like a dirty, shameful secret, thinking it was, somehow, a stain on his honour.
Any child in Konoha knew the rules. To employ sexual violence is to disrupt the unbroken line of inheritance passed down through generations. Anyone who tries will be hunted down without mercy or hesitation. During the war, if a blood-mad Iwa Shinobi were to assault a Konohan Kunoichi, and she lived long enough to report it, he would be put down by his own mother. You don’t mess with line theft. That’s how wars to mutual extinction begin.
—Haitang, the creature whispers into his hair, fingers cutting into his skin—
His body is frozen. It takes a bit to realise that his would-be overlord was aiming to unbalance his hold on the body by throwing him into a panic attack. It would have worked if Shisui wasn’t who he was. A field Shinobi who can’t deal with inconvenient panic attacks won't survive past the Genin rank. With that said, the intensity of the mental breakdown his body is experiencing is unusual. It’s affecting him physically, he can tell. It’s—
Huh. He’s heard of such things happening among the Nara. Specialisation has its place, but if you go and neglect your physical Chakra you might as well join a monastery because you will have become a liability. Uchiha never made that mistake, for all that the stories say they were, once the same way, and could become such again if they don’t keep their Chaka balanced.
Shin Qingqiu never learns that lesson. He was taught it, but he was most of the way insane before stepping one foot on the mountain. He said the right thing at the right time, all the while pursuing Spiritual cultivation like his life depended on it. His Shizun was a spiritual Cultivator and he seemed like the end all be all of an untouchable immortal. Beyond anything, Shen Qingqiu—Jiu, at the time—wanted not to be touched, by anyone, ever again.
Never mind that, how is he going to play this? He could not do anything, and die. That’s a solid option. This world interests him not at all, he doesn’t have any family and Shen Qingqiu settled what debts he considered worth repaying before he had ended things. Shisui could follow in his footsteps; it would be fair.
—Rogue cultivators coming to visit—
—I will take your core for myself. I will be with Haitang forever—
— Yue Qi left him here —
Or, he could stay at least for long enough to ruin whatever sick game the slaver calling itself System was playing. It is working toward some goal or other. Finding a soul, bringing it here and binding it to a suicide victim’s body has to have been expensive. Doing so in such a specific manner would cost even more. The being shackled the body and its physical Chakra. It has an unprecedented amount of control over it. Nobody goes through all that effort just because. The slaver wants this. Well.
He exhales a long breath, braces and twists his Chakra. As expected, his eyes feel like they caught fire, and his body seizes, overwhelmed. Hah, look at that. Unlike the amateurish attempts of the System, this is real pain. He’s digging out Chakra pathways where there were none, and he’s succeeding because he’s Uchiha Shisui, the firstborn son of Uchiha Kagami and Uchiha Ganrin. He activated his Mangekyō when he was seven years old. This is his birthright, his burden and his duty. No two-bit slaver could hope to keep his heritage from him.
“Right, then,” he says, grasping his Chakra and turning it inwards. He is a failure, a wreck and an utter waste of spirit and body, but he is Uchiha-born, Hatake-forged and Root-sharpened. Nothing and no one can manipulate his soul better than he can. “I’m curious if you can feel pain. Most things can—” His Chakra connects with the cool, artificial energy and pounces. The System’s whirring and burring grows choppy. Strained. “—How about some fire, to start?”
Burning the System out hurts about as much as he expected it to. It fought him as much as it could, but it stood no chance; not in this arena. If Shisui tried to follow the creature back, then he would be less certain. His body is his turf; his soul even more so. Mostly, however, spiritual battles come down to will and conviction. Shisui knows, at the very bedrock of his being, that fire comes for all things; it’s only a matter of turning up the pressure.
He passes out a freedman, blood flowing from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth. The spikes of adrenaline and wildly fluctuating heart rate probably caused some damage as well, and he’s pretty sure several of his muscles are torn. It’s all sorts of dramatic.
He could have probably torn himself out of the brief coma that came, after. It’s hardly life-ruining damage. Chakra exhaustion, organ damage, ruined optical nerves and whatever damage Shen Qingqiu had come in with. In short, the sort of damage that would keep. Shisui has two Sharingan eyes and all his limbs. He could walk out of this damn hospital bed. He could pull a White Fang and fall on his blade. He could go down to the Warm Red Pavillon and buy companionship for however long it would still feel good.
Shisui, instead, sleeps and sinks, lets the horrors of his past—of both his pasts—settle. Uchiha Shisui and Shen Qingqiu couldn’t be more different if one was moulded by the negative of the other. Noble and slave. Powerful and weak. Popular and hated. The only thing they had in common was failure. Shisui failed to accomplish the only thing he swore he would, ruining his family in the process. Shen Qingqiu never moved past survival to want.
Maybe he shouldn’t? Why drag this miserable production on longer than it has to? He banished the System already, tore out its tentacles and set them on fire for good measure. If Shisui died now, it would be on his terms. Shen Qingqiu serves no purpose—and Shisui wouldn’t take on his responsibilities even if he had plenty. He doesn’t owe that ruin of a person anything.
With that said—
The black hole in his chest is a paralytic; the drive to end it is missing. Right now, living is easier than dying. So, he’ll live. Should that change, he’ll die.
Easy.
It’s funny, how differently people look, now. Mu Qingfang, for example, came across as unpredictable, dangerous and manipulative to Shen Qingqiu. Now, he looks inconsequential. Clan medics—and medics in the KMH, for that matter—were the meanest of the mean; overworked, underpaid and cynical to the bone. In comparison, Mu Qingfang looks more like a lab tech, or a librarian. A good man, but one who learned how to keep his emotions at the door years ago. He lost patients and, he can just bet, handled it with grace and maturity, folding his pain away as irrational and unhelpful.
A freak, in a few words. Shisui knows better than to trust any of the so-called Peak Lords, but he would have disliked this one even without being primed. Good thing that he’s always worked best with people he doesn’t like.
“I am baffled, shixiong,” the man is saying, voice mild. “I understand you resent the Qian Cao Peak, but to maim yourself out of protest is surely a step too far.”
Shisui stares at him. It’s not that he doesn’t spot the opening for banter. Mu Qingfang left a serviceable empty space for him to fill with toothless rage, while the good doctor patches him up. Like Shisui is a spoiled child they learned to work around.
Are they wrong to think so? Everything has a cost and conditions. Why bother civilising the feral beast? The clever thing to do is step aside and walk away. Without a target, Shen Qingqiu will fall back to savaging himself, and leave the good doctor with more time to spend on his work.
“Ahem. May I?”
He inclines his head. Clever, yes, but not honourable. At some point, you kill the beast or you heal it. Letting things devolve this far is both cruel and dangerous.
“You are recovering well, Shixiong.” The note of surprise is the most sincere thing he’s said within Shen Qingqiu's earshot for a long time. “Your Qi is replenishing with remarkable speed.”
Is that so? Who knew how energy-intensive all that self-loathing was? A memory niggles in the back of his mind. Ah, yes. Heart demons, they call them here. Heart demons that cause Qi-deviations. How poetic.
“I need to meditate,” he says, instead. “Lingxi Caves. Fix what you can. I will be leaving by sundown.”
Oh? Shisui tracks the tell-tale signs of shock on Mu Qingfang’s face. He didn’t expect that. “You will—Seclusion is suicide in your case, Shixiong. You survived this Qi deviation by the skin of your teeth. You won’t survive the next one. ”
“Fascinating. Moving along, I assume Qing Jing Peak has figured out the logistics in my absence? They might as well continue as they were.”
“I can’t in good conscience—”
Right. “Your duty and responsibility to me ends when I walk out of that door.” He can tolerate hypocrisy if incentivised properly. He sees no reason to tolerate it now. “Past that, you have no say in where I go and how I organise my cultivation.”
Wretched world, it may be, but their terminology is admirable. These cultivating sects could have learned a lot from Konoha about practicality and justice, but Shinobi—Uchiha especially—would have benefited from their teachings just as much. The framework of cultivation is an elegant way to look at things. You are a cultivator, shaping your growth. Each cultivator is unique, their choices only informed by their abilities, wants and needs. Phenomenal.
“Shixiong—” Mu Qingfang looks at him. From surprise to shock; with the benefit of a new perspective, such things are easy to spot. Oh? Did you expect more of the same? Your martial sibling has a mental breakdown, so he goes off to sulk and spread his pain to the children he’s been allowed to raise. Life goes on as usual.
Be lucky Shen Qingqiu loved his Yue Qingyuan more than life itself. Shisui has been murdered by a very plausible and dangerous alternative.
“Yes, Peak Lord Mu?”
“I—If this one caused insult, it was done unintentionally.”
Uh-huh. He leans back on his pillows, eyes slipping shut. “Not at all, Peak Lord Mu. My mind is calm and my path is clear.”
Yue Qingyuan is next, of course. Shisui isn’t surprised.
“Sect leader,” he says and manages to drag himself out of the pit of apathy enough to focus. As expected, the man looks like he was just slapped.
“Qingqiu-shidi—This one has heard—”
Ah, yes. “Straight to the point. I like it. I am, indeed, going to seclusion. No, my mind cannot be changed.”
“Why?”
If only Shisui had any love for this fantastically broken man. Alas. “Because I want to,” he says and tilts his head. “I’ve tried my best and failed, time and time again. I don’t have any more energy for hoping repeating the same actions and hoping for different results.”
“Xiao Jiu—”
Shisui blinks and taps a thoughtful beat into his breastbone. Look at the facts. Yue Qingyuan cherishes his feral adopted brother with an intensity an Uchiha would respect. Fact. Yue Qingyuan was nuts. Fact. Yue Qingyuan deliberately provoked him. Fact.
Strange. Is it manipulation? Could be. People, in his experience, don’t recognise such things in themselves. It’s possible that Yue Qingyuan discovered what to say to distract Shen Qingqiu from whatever self-destructive action he was set on. Granted, the distraction was a result of rage and heartache, but it worked. Shisui can’t even be sure it’s a conscious choice.
“Next time you want to hurt me, slap me across the mouth,” he says. “Taunting me with my miserable youth is unnecessary. Would you swat a bug with your sword? ”
The big lump takes a step back, face freezing. He’s still moving, though. Still mimicking awareness. Seems like field Shinobi ain’t the only ones who learned to camouflage their panic attacks.
“If you mean to tell me it wasn’t deliberate, don’t bother,” he says. “If you didn’t know, that’s on you. You should have known because I’ve told you.” Ugh. What are you doing, Shisui Uchiha? Why are you wasting your time with these people? You are ANBU Crow. You have walked off a hundred times worse than some organ damage. “Right. Don’t let me detain you, Sect Leader.” When that fails to produce any meaningful results, he flicks his hand. “Go away. I’m getting dressed, and then going to the caves. As for Qing Jing Peak, I would suggest you split the overseeing duties between two Peak Lords. Peak Lord Liu and Peak Lord Qi should be an adequate pair.”