Work Text:
Although they had both, for varying reasons, been the subjects of intense gossip and interest among their peers, and despite the years they spent coexisting in a sect that felt much smaller than you would expect, considering it spanned a mountain range (high peaks wreathed in clouds certainly lent something to mystique, but Cang Qiong was nestled in more humble, and more importantly, more traversable and hospitable mountains), the first time Liu Qingge met Shang Qinghua was not until the ceremony at which their masters, the then lords of the peaks, officially introduced their chosen heirs to the world.
----------
Liu Qingge was born into a family of wealth and power. His father was a respected general who had many times led his forces to victory against great odds, and been elevated in status and gifted many riches by the king he served in return. With no children by his official wife, he nevertheless was given four sons by his concubines. This was a man blessed by the gods, they said. See how hard work and piety is rewarded!
Although most people only knew of three sons.
Liu Qingge was born early, and small. The midwife who delivered him predicted that if he survived his first year, he would likely always be small, and more sickly than others.
He had three older half-brothers already, young still but sprouting like weeds and knocking around their agemates at play as easily as a bear does a man. Any could see they would grow as broad and tall and strong as their father.
Liu Qingge’s mother—who was agreed by all to be the most beautiful by far of all the general’s women, and thus remained in high favor despite failing to deliver a son until now—saw the writing on the wall. To protect her son, she made a snap decision.
So Liu Jingmei was introduced to his father as a daughter, his mother’s fine features already recognizable in his own small face.
A weak and sickly son would be a public embarrassment, and may cause people to wonder if maybe the general was not quite so favored by the gods after all (and if he was not, what was the reason why they had withdrawn their favor from him?). But a rich man who produces a beautiful daughter could afford to be proud of his accomplishment, and coddle and spoil her.
Most importantly, as a daughter, Liu Jingmei could be tucked away in the women’s quarters of the general’s estate, physically apart and safe from his brothers’ notice and attention.
(As a woman, his mother knew how women think. So she suspected as the general’s beard turned from black to gray, other mothers in the household looking out for their own children would remind them that with no son by the official wife, the heir to their father’s riches and noble title would need to be chosen from amongst them. And a filial son owed a duty to the woman who birthed him.
The general was a mostly honorable man who mostly tried to raise honorable sons. Maybe they wouldn’t take it so far as she feared. But if they knew of a brother, a rival, who no one had expected to live anyway…)
(As a man, his father knew how men think. So he suspected his sons—so handsome and strong and perhaps too well-indulged, might be too willing to assume having separate mothers was enough to excuse any indecencies, and would lose their heads at the glimpse of a true beauty, especially when they had never been denied before. So he as well, unknowing of the deception taking place in his own household, supported Liu Jingmei’s mother in keeping her child close.)
Liu Jingmei grew up in hanfu in the women’s style, and wore his hair as young women did. But he always knew he was male. Though his elegant features and delicate frame shared almost nothing in common with the men he saw serving his father or in town, he never doubted himself. And to her credit, his mother always addressed him as son in private, never seeking to confuse him as to his rightful place in the world, but always only stressing secrecy. Only in front of others was he “daughter.”
Liu Jingmei did not know what his mother’s long-term plan was. His father would want to marry him off someday, and on the wedding night the ruse would be irreversibly and embarrassingly exposed. Maybe she hoped with enough good food and care, he would grow strong enough to shuck his women’s clothes, outshine his brothers, and be accepted as his father’s heir like something out of a fairy tale.
It was more likely, he thought, she had simply made the decision she thought was best at the time, and hoped to find a solution further down the road, only a solution never arrived.
But as much as he loved his mother, he was not willing to spend any more of his life living a charade.
So when he turned thirteen, Liu Jingmei sat down and wrote his father a letter explaining he had fallen madly in love with a young man from a foreign land he had met in the market while out shopping for hair ribbons with his maids, and was eloping with him back to his homeland on a ship that Liu Jingmei knew was set to depart before the letter would be found.
His father would be furious, but any search parties he sent out to drag him home by force, or to demand a dowry from the illusory fiancé, would be sent in the wrong direction.
He wrote his mother a separate letter, explaining the truth: he was leaving to join a cultivation sect. He would learn the sword, and cultivate a strong body, and become a great man, but one beholden to his ideals alone and not to any king.
Finally, he discreetly sent a note to a stableboy he’d noticed staring at him admiringly, asking to meet alone that night after the rest of the household had gone to sleep. And when the boy finished disrobing, Liu Jingmei knocked him unconscious by swinging a shovel at his head, changed into the boy’s clothes, and saddling a horse, left that night.
Cang Qiong Mountain Sect was not the closest cultivation sect to his home, but it was large enough that he decided he could easily get lost in the incoming group of disciples, so he made his way there.
At the entrance exam—as older, trusted disciples milled around observing the potential recruits digging in the dirt and decided who to recommend for acceptance to their masters, who were enjoying tea from a viewing platform and seemingly not paying much attention to the proceedings—Liu Jingmei found himself approached quite early on by the Xian Shu Peak Lord herself.
When the woman stopped in front of him, he paused in his digging, surprised and pleased but also a little wary at the special attention when here, he was supposed to be a nobody.
The woman looked down at him with a warm smile, and in a conspiratorial tone, told him that in this sect, women didn’t need to disguise themselves as men to become cultivators. How did she feel about joining her on Xian Shu? They would get her a nice hot bath to clean the dirt from her pretty face. Hiding must be such a burden. Wouldn’t it be nice to live as herself?
Liu Jingmei, who had been raised so carefully to be demure and ladylike and always display proper behavior in public so he would never be caught out, had thought he was finally free and done with all that. Had thought he was getting to be himself. But now he was being told this wasn’t himself. That was.
So, he was being offered exactly what he wanted—better even! He could be a Peak Lord’s hand-selected personal disciple! And all he had to do was be the person she’d extended the invitation to.
And maybe that was him after all. She seemed quite sure. Maybe he’d lived the lie so long it became truth? And if women here truly lived no different than men, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Would he even notice the difference?
…something in Liu Jingmei snapped.
He threw such a terrifyingly violent fit that several armed disciples were forced to restrain him, for fear that he would injure the Xian Shu Peak Lord. He fought them off like a hellcat, and so charmed the Bai Zhan Peak Lord, he was accepted as one of his new disciples then and there.
Liu Jingmei was later miserably embarrassed by his behavior. Lord Xiu Zewu did not deserve his ire for trying to be kind to who she believed to be a scared and wary girl. He wanted to be a righteous cultivator.
But also, righteousness and politesse were not one and the same. So he would be someone who showed others the respect they were due in both word and action. But he would not go so far for anyone he did not believe deserved it, even if it would have been polite. And he was more than happy to forget most or all of what society had demanded of a noble daughter—because what did knowing the steps of a tea ceremony, or the correct order of address for government officials, or the language of fans have to do with being righteous? Nothing at all.
Bai Zhan gave him the freedom to run as wild as he wished. And while cultivation would never give him the height or breadth of shoulders of his statuesque father or brothers, it resolved his frailty and gave him strength of body beyond what any amount of army drills or expensive medicines could have achieved.
In time, no one’s physical cultivation could surpass Liu Jingmei.
----------
Shang Qinghua had always had supernaturally bad luck, in this life and the previous.
You can’t choose your family, and the first parents he remembered had been married too young. Like many others before them, they discovered that having a child did not magically make them happy. Some people simply aren’t meant to be parents.
(But their second families were very happy, so maybe, long-time friends and neighbors would uncharitably gossip from the privacy of their own dinner tables, it was not Shang Qinghua who was so unlucky to have been born to them, but they who were unlucky to end up with him.
Perhaps a child could have saved their marriage, his parents wondered late at night, each in bed with their new spouses, if it had only been a different one, the ones they have now).
Being born unloved was an inauspicious start, and it didn’t get much better from there. But it didn’t get significantly worse either.
His parents didn’t love him instinctively and wholeheartedly as parents should, but they weren’t cruel, abusive, or negligent. He wasn’t beaten or starven, shouted at in anger or talked down to in disgust. He was fed and clothed and taken care of, and otherwise left to his own company, like a pet dog once the novelty wore off and it lost the cuteness it had as a puppy.
He wasn’t asking to be happy, really. It would have been enough to be merely content with his life. But starting with this first disappointment, his life remained plagued with petty miseries rather than big ones. That was why he simply called it a never-ending streak of bad luck.
When it rained, it seemed to rain only whenever he was stuck out of doors or wished to be, and his umbrella was always somehow broken or misplaced. His bike chain would slip off at the steepest part of the hill, and his money always fell through a fresh hole in his pocket. The store was usually out of his favorite snacks, but when it had them, they would be stale. His bus was consistently late (except when he was, and then it was early), and if he tried to make friends, something embarrassing would always happen to scare them away.
If he tried to complain, people would remind him there were children with dead parents, children without enough to eat, children whose parents beat them, people with terminal illnesses, people living on the street, people trapped in government prisons and concentration camps. And he dared whine about his life?
(It's why he eventually wrote Binghe’s backstory the way he did. If it needed to be truly horrible to justify indulging in self pity, to justify wanting recompense for the unhappiness he felt, for thinking he deserved better, then let it be horrible enough that no one could say that desire was selfish.)
So it went on.
The stress and lack of sleep leading up to the gaokao exam caused him to score poorly, and thus saw him shuttled off to an unremarkable private university that went bankrupt before he graduated. Without the funds or the desire to retest and try again from the beginning, he instead managed to find a low-level position through a classmate’s uncle.
And it seemed things were turning around, until it was uncovered that the uncle was embezzling. Having been hired on the man’s reputation, Shang Qinghua found himself given the boot along with his benefactor. He found a job as a waiter, but shortly after slipped on a wet floor and broke his leg. Confined to his apartment until it healed, he began writing for Zhongdian to earn money for rent, although he lost his initial outline when his computer overheated and died.
He couldn’t afford even a haircut after having to replace the laptop, but heard that beauty schools offered them for free. But it came out so terrible the instructor had to buzz it all off herself.
He sighed as he watched bootleg Proud Immortal Demon Way merchandise rake in more money than anything he officially licensed. But a lot of the fan-made stuff was better looking, so he didn’t blame them.
He never once rolled higher than a two-star character on his gacha games (and even on banners that guaranteed 3-stars or above, the game would glitch but still take his diamonds).
His water was shut off, sending him into a panic over the state of his bank account, until he figured out it was an error caused by one swapped numeral in the account numbers, although the process of sorting it out with the utility company took frustratingly long. And it kept happening. To try to cheer himself up, he pierced his ears—something he’d been wanting to do for a while—but ended up with a terrible infection. His apartment was broken into, although there wasn’t much worth taking, so the biggest hassle was arguing with his landlord over who should pay to fix the door.
He couldn’t say he was surprised to die from something as stupid and inconsequential as spilling cup ramen on his computer. It was a disappointing, frustrating end to a disappointing and frustrating life.
And while he’d like to say he had hoped…he didn’t actually expect much, so wasn’t disappointed to learn he wasn’t born to loving parents this time around, either. His new family needed as many children as possible to keep the farm running.
It should have been a quiet, simple life. But so many things can go wrong on a farm—drought and frost, locust and disease, endless methods of injury—he knew that if he didn’t want to struggle harder than he ever had in his first life (and it was clear his bad luck had followed him), always just managing to scrape by and expected to be thankful for that, he needed to get out as soon as he was able.
He was big for his age, this time around, so when Shang Jian was fourteen, he followed his older brother along to the fights hosted in various barns around the surrounding countryside on warm evenings—there was not much by way of entertainment in their community, so they made it where they could—and allowing them to assume him older than he was, joined in.
Being big was an advantage, for sure, but it did not instantly translate into being good at bare knuckle boxing (now he finally understood why his old high school classmate back in his previous life grew so annoyed any time someone assumed he was great at basketball simply because he was tall!) but these old farmers were desperate enough for some fresh blood and variety in their betting games that he was able to make at least a little bit of traveling money to squirrel away.
And when he thought he had earned enough, he announced to his parents that after the harvest, he was leaving to earn his fortune in the world. His mother did at least wish him luck and pack him some food when he went, even if chipmunks chewed a hole through his bag and ate it all while he slept that first night on the road.
When he got to a town near the Tian Gong mountains, where there was plenty of business and opportunity, he did think to himself that the name sounded vaguely familiar. It was when he learned that the town was so populous because of the sponsorship of the nearby cultivation sect, that he was introduced to his System, learned where exactly he was, and at the age of fifteen, found himself a disciple of Cang Qiong.
It was late to begin cultivating—they apparently like to start them between ten and twelve—and he didn’t have a lot of potential that might have let him in otherwise like that promising young man, Yue Qi, but he was good at digging holes and An Ding always needed new disciples. They were always deserting or getting killed on supply missions.
They didn’t even bother to teach disciples on An Ding how to use a sword, so any who wanted to learn mostly picked it up by sneaking away from their duties to join other peaks’ classes or asking an older disciple to teach them. But fighting wasn’t cultivation’s only use.
The other disciples on An Ding called him packmule and said it was all he was good for. The big, dumb guy was a tried and true trope. He would curse them out under his breath, and steal copies of the cultivation manuals and other books destined for the likes of Qiong Ding and Qing Jing to learn as much as he could while the other disciples slept.
If he was grateful to the System for anything, it would be filling in his own past self’s knowledge gaps in diplomacy, war strategy, economic systems, project management, engineering, and how cultivation worked when in his novel, he had mostly handwaved all that away with “papapa and/or violence is the solution to any problem” and flimsy “because magic” explanations. Now he could actually learn it all for the first time, even if it meant sacrificing his sleep between long shifts of hard manual labor to do so. Hopefully he would absorb enough to make himself as useful as the original Shang Qinghua.
Other people might say that knowing he was destined to be a Peak Lord was a sign of good luck for once in his lives. He wouldn’t have to work his butt off and endlessly stress over whether it would all be for nothing, whether the position would be given to someone else. A cushy future was being handed to him!
But it was only good luck if you didn’t know it was going to be a very short life until Mobei-Jun killed him.
----------
So, the first time Liu Qingge met Shang Qinghua was not until the ceremony at which their masters, the lords of the peaks, officially introduced their chosen heirs to the world with their new names.
Shang Qinghua had gaped at him, then, standing further up the line between the Wan Jian heir and the Xian Shu heir until the girl, Qi Qingqi, had elbowed him rather viciously in the side.
Liu Qingge ignored him. It’s not like he wasn’t used to fresh disciples on Bai Zhan staring or sniggering at the “girl” before he beat them into the ground two or three or four times. This dumb packmule may be his new martial brother, but Liu Qingge would give him no more respect than the man proved he deserved, and Liu Qingge wasn’t holding his breath.
----------
The outgoing Peak Lords had decided that the newly formed martial family needed to get to know each other better and build a relationship with the people they would be spending decades serving besides once they ascended, ideally before they did so. They decided the way to do this was by mandatory weekly dinners, and sending them out on regular missions together.
The other peak heirs would be swapped around until they landed on the right compatibility, but, Liu Qingge’s Shizun explained, he would be permanently paired with the An Ding Peak heir.
As the strongest peak heir, Liu Qingge was the natural and, frankly only, choice to pair with the weakest. His Shang-shixiong had been selected by Liu Qingge’s Shibo for his administrative skill, was clumsy with a blade, and with anyone else, he might endanger his mission partner if that person were forced to split their attention in any dangerous situation rather than trust their fellow peak heir to be able to save themself.
For Liu Qingge, that would not be a problem. He was the only one they could trust to have the strength to save both himself and anyone he was with without putting either of them at risk, no matter how harrying or desperate the situation became.
While it would be reasonable to assume that Liu Qingge’s opinion of his new martial brother would plummet at this blatant disclosure, he was himself pleasantly surprised to find it was the opposite. Shang-shixiong, despite belonging to a higher peak and having half-again Liu Qingge’s height and weight to throw around, was fully aware of his martial shortcomings and immediately deferred to Liu Qingge rather than attempt to take the lead. It was refreshing.
On the very first mission together—which was supposed to be easy, just Liu Qingge escorting Shang Qinghua to meet with one of their merchants in the north who had sent a request to speak to Shang Qinghua specifically—the An Ding Peak heir had been taken hostage.
The merchant had apparently been replaced by a demon who wanted to lure his Shang-shixiong out to either use as leverage against his master or else kill him to send a message about his displeasure over some perceived wrong or slight. It wasn’t clear which, as it seemed the demon hadn’t quite decided between the two. Demons wanting revenge against cultivator sects wasn’t anything new, but it was a little confusing why this demon seemed to have a grudge against the An Ding Peak Lord in particular.
Regardless, Liu Qingge was quick with a sword, and managed to chop off the clawed hand held to his shixiong’s throat before it could pierce the delicate skin there. When the demon howled and staggered away, clasping the severed stump in its remaining hand, its head came off next.
After they found the body of the merchant and returned it to his family, and Shang Qinghua had arranged for a few potential replacements to submit business proposals so they wouldn’t lose the trade route, they left back to Cang Qiong.
On the way, Shang-shixiong was hit in the face by a bird mid-flight and tumbled from his sword, requiring Liu Qingge to dive after him. The other man was a bit woozy from the blow and spent the rest of the flight on the back of Cheng Luan, leaning heavily over Liu Qingge’s shoulders. While he had carried back bigger boars to drop at the Cang Qiong kitchens, Liu Qingge did agree that to any disciple less skilled in physical cultivation, the weight plastered against his back may have been a hindrance.
At least his Shizun and Shibo were pleased that their mission pairing saw such immediate success.
----------
The second time they were sent on a mission together—to collect feathers from a sunset peacock, whose feathers could be burned as incense for a sleep aid, destined for Qian Cao's medicinal stores—and after Liu Qingge fought off the two-headed, three-tailed tiger (the peacock itself wasn’t dangerous, but other beasts that lived in the area most assuredly were, which is why lower ranked disciples weren’t sent to handle this—what was essentially a foraging mission—instead), a tree fell on Shang Qinghua.
Or it would have if Liu Qingge hadn’t shoved him aside and caught it in a glancing blow off his narrow shoulders with a grunt. Unfortunately, when he shoved Shang Qinghua out of the way, the man stumbled and caught his foot in a divot, twisting his ankle. So Liu Qingge had to support his weight, the pair of them looking rather comical with the much larger man slumped against him with Liu Qingge’s head practically in his armpit as they limped along like some strange, ungainly three-legged creature (but still less ridiculous than how Liu Qingge had first tried to carry him on his back before giving the idea up) as Shang Qinghua tried to concentrate on supporting his swollen, wobbly ankle with qi (healing was another thing they apparently didn’t teach on An Ding, so it was slow going).
When they did finally find the peacock, Shang Qinghua had an allergic reaction and spent the entire return trip sneezing. Liu Qingge was worried he’d fall off his sword, either from how much his eyes were watering or from the force of the sneezes themselves, so had the An Ding head disciple ride with him again.
----------
While his Shang-shixiong was not too heavy for him to lift, because his shixiong was taller and broader, it did make carrying him rather awkward, so this time Liu Qingge suggested they ride instead of fly, even if it meant the mission would take longer to complete.
On the second day, Shang Qinghua’s horse threw a shoe, and while they were stopped to examine the horse for injury, they were attacked by bandits. Liu Qingge fought them off with ease, but Shang Qinghua’s horse bolted in the meantime.
Liu Qingge’s horse couldn’t carry two riders for very long, so they ended up having to walk to the next village and purchase a new horse there.
His An Ding Shibo was not happy about the expense.
----------
The fourth mission went well! Shang Qinghua was so relieved, he offered to treat Liu Qingge to some tanghulu to celebrate. It was only after they’d been handed the sticks by the street vendor that he realized he’d been pickpocketed, so Liu Qingge had to pay.
Before Shang Qinghua could take a bite, however, a woman—apparently not looking as she continued some conversation with someone inside—emptied a bucket of filthy water out the window above and onto his head.
Liu Qingge wasn’t sure whether Shang-shixiong was shivering from chill or disgust, but he gave Shang Qinghua his own stick of candied fruit to replace the now foul one, then took him to a bath house.
He decided he would need to be more vigilant from now on. Protecting Shang Qinghua on missions would mean more than simply protecting him from physical harm, it seems.
----------
At the next dinner, Liu Qingge forwent the arrangement of sitting in order of peak that they had fallen into, and lifting his table, shouldered aside Wei Qingwei—who scooted over with a squawk, dragging his table with him to make room—and made a point of plopping down beside Shang Qinghua.
His Shang-shixiong was so startled that he knocked over his tea. Liu Qingge reached out to right the cup, but it was too late, and the drink spilled onto the table and over the edge, soaking Shang Qinghua’s lap.
The man leaped to his feet, pulling the now steaming fabric away from his skin with a hiss of pain.
Liu Qingge glowered unhappily. “Apologies, shixiong. I will be quicker next time.”
“Eh?” Shang Qinghua’s head whipped back to him as he dropped the robe, then hastily lifted it again as he registered the heat and remembered why he'd done so in the first place. “Ah, no, Liu-shidi! My mistake. This kind of thing happens…mostly to me. As you may have noticed…
“Ah,” he turned an apologetic look toward Yue Qingyuan, then, as everyone was watching with varying second-hand embarrassment or bemusement.
“My apologies, Yue-shixiong, I will be excusing myself from this dinner. I need to change.”
Yue Qingyuan waved him away in understanding, and Shang Qinghua hurried off. Liu Qingge glowered down at his plate the rest of the evening, only answering Wei Qingwei’s attempts at conversation with one word answers as he contemplated a new strategy.
Protecting Shang Qinghua may be harder than he thought.
----------
At the following week’s dinner, Liu Qingge stopped in front of Shang Qinghua, standing there impatiently as Shang Qinghua nervously kept his eyes down as if waiting for the other man to depart. Shen Qingqiu loudly cleared his throat from further down the line, and Shang Qinghua, swallowing, slowly lifted his eyes.
“Shang-shixiong, I am going to sit beside you now,” Liu Qingge announced, annoyed and relieved to finally be acknowledged, as Shang Qinghua just sat there blinking rapidly. “Don’t drop your tea,” he added as he went to set his table in the space that Wei Qingwei once again rapidly cleared for him.
“Uh, of course you are welcome to, Shidi,” Shang Qinghua stuttered out, “but may I ask…why? You are sitting by me?”
Liu Qingge scowled, eyes darting around the room for a moment.
“Something may happen.”
Wei Qingwei turned his head at that, concerned enough to stop acting like he hadn’t been blatantly eavesdropping.
“What?! Did you get word of a threat against the sect, Shidi?”
Liu Qingge didn’t turn his head away from Shang Qinghua as he replied. “Not against the sect. Something may happen to Shang-shixiong.”
Qi Qingqi snorted from their other side. “Like what? He’ll spill his tea again?”
Liu Qingge nodded, quite seriously. “Yes. Or worse.”
Yue Qingyuan cut in gently from the head of the room (It was obvious everyone had been watching this little show rather than breaking off into quiet individual conversations as usual). “You can’t stop Shang-shidi from being clumsy,” he began, but Liu Qingge cut him off.
“Qinghua is not clumsy, he is cursed.”
This got the others sitting straighter.
“What?” Mu Qingfang asked, worried. “When did this happen?”
Shang Qinghua winced. “Liu-shidi exaggerates. This one is not cursed. Simply unlucky. I always have been.” He took a small bite of his food to stall for time, but as everyone continued to stare, he hurriedly finished chewing and put down his chopsticks again.
“Small things go wrong…for me. It’s been this way since long before I joined the sect.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a curse,” Shen Qingqiu mused. “Perhaps someone in your family line displeased a god.”
“Bad luck doesn’t mean a curse,” Qi Qingqi rebutted with a dismissive scoff, always eager to disagree with Shen Qingqiu.
“A tree fell on him,” Liu Qingge said.
Qi Qingqi blanched. “Well, still.”
“Really,” Shang Qinghua stuttered, raising his hands in a plea to stop. “These things happen! Sometimes trees fall! Sometimes they fall on people. It’s inconvenient but–”
“I’d hardly call a tree falling on me a minor inconvenience,” Wei Qingwei muttered under his breath.
“But nothing has happened to me,” Shang Qinghua continued at a louder volume, talking over him, “that could be considered more than simple bad luck. My life is not–” his fingers tightened around his chopsticks. “My life is not a tragedy and I have suffered no ill that anyone here has not ever suffered themselves at one point or another–”
“I’ve never had a tree fall on me,” Zhang Qingyan cut in.
“–It’s just a bit more frequent of a circumstance in my case,” Shang Qinghua continued, now a bit red in the face.
“If the curse could potentially endanger the sect through you…” Yue Qingyuan asked, sounding concerned.
Shang Qinghua slammed his hands down on the table.
“There is no curse!” he yelled. Panting, he abruptly stood and made his way out of the room.
They all sat in awkward silence.
“Bad karma from a previous life,” Wang Qingjie suggested.
----------
Fighting karma was something Liu Qingge wasn’t sure he knew how to do. It wasn’t like one could stab karma.
If he kept these bad things from happening to Shang Qinghua, would it continue to build to something worse as punishment for avoiding justice for his past incarnation’s actions?
Liu Qingge admittedly didn’t know his shixiong as well as he could, but he did not strike him as a person who deserved to be plagued like this for his entire life (and it would make missions significantly easier if these complications stopped). If anyone knew how tiny unhappinesses could wear at someone over years and years, it was Liu Jingmei.
He decided.
They would go on as many missions as possible. It would be a lot of work and dangerous too, but he would protect Shang-shixiong in every way he could, which was many because he was strong and resourceful, and together as righteous cultivators, they would do as much good as possible, hopefully earning his Shang-shixiong enough good karma to erase the bad following him.
He was confident in their ability to accomplish this goal. After all, you could say his own existence went against karma. If his father truly was meant to be punished or humbled somehow through the birth of a sickly, weak son, it hadn’t happened that way.
The unlucky fourth son hadn’t died like he was meant to. Instead, he’d become the Bai Zhan War God. So if that’s what a meant-to-be unlucky fourth son could do, what could a War God accomplish?
----------
Shang Qinghua did not seem to be thrilled by Liu Qingge’s sudden enthusiasm for missions, such that he was constantly volunteering the both of them, but the An Ding heir put up very little protest, simply dragging his feet until Liu Qingge ordered him to stop in case he tripped.
Liu Qingge had initially considered telling Shang-shixiong his plan, but dismissed the idea out of an abundance of caution. He would not risk having his shixiong’s motivations misconstrued as selfish if that might add more weight to his karmic burden rather than lightening it.
It was rather hard to tell if it was working. The number of incidents he had to save Shang Qinghua from over the last year remained high, but he persisted in his optimistic mood because he was getting better at it, getting faster at recognizing the threats as they appeared.
Even now, his hand shot up to block a small paper dart folded out of bright yellow paper from flying into his shixiong’s eye. He felt inordinately proud.
Another dart, this one made of bright blue paper, came from the same direction, but crashed silently into the dirt a few meters ahead of them. Shang Qinghua walked forward to pick it up, examining it.
“It's a paper airplane! I used to make these. I was really good at it, they flew pretty far,” he commented, before sending the ‘airplane’ back into the air with a flick of his wrist. “I wonder if I still remember how,” he mused. “Remind me to show you sometime, Shidi.”
Liu Qingge watch Shang Qinghua’s little folded piece of paper elegantly glide through the air before suddenly catching an updraft. Small children were tossing the things from a few of the rooftops, giggling as they watched them soar around on the breeze like colorful little birds. Adults were hanging up strings of lanterns, smiling indulgently.
“Some kind of festival?” Shang Qinghua wondered aloud.
Contemplating the ‘airplane’ in his hand, Liu Qingge tried to send his chasing after Shang Qinghua’s, but recognized he’d messed up almost immediately after throwing. He could pin a fly to a tree by the wing with the point of a spear from a hundred paces, but the paper was so light it was difficult to judge the force necessary.
But to his surprise, his little piece of paper made a loop de loop in the air before crashing, causing Shang Qinghua to let out a little burst of laughter and clap politely. “Nice one, Shidi!” And he felt himself blush, wondering if he should admit to the fact that he had not done the clever little trick on purpose.
But Shang Qinghua was already distracted, gazing around the village they’d arrived at and its decorations in slight puzzlement, before slamming a fist down onto his open palm.
“Oh! I remember this now!”
“Remember what?” Liu Qingge asked, bending down to retrieve the little paper dart.
“Eh?” Shang Qinghua turned to him. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking aloud, Shidi, but we shouldn’t stay here. Let’s keep going.”
“Why?” Liu Qingge threw the dart a second time and was pleased to see it fly a short distance before skimming down to the ground. “It won’t be safe to travel after dark.”
(The “for you” went unspoken.)
“Eh…well,” glancing at Liu Qingge and seeing he wouldn’t be swayed to anything that put his own ability to protect Shang Qinghua in jeopardy without explanation, the larger man sighed and rubbed the back of his head self consciously.
“You see, Shidi, this one gets a lot of information in the course of his work. News from here and there and other places. And sometimes, all that information starts to come together and form a picture. You know?”
Liu Qingge didn’t, but gave a slight nod of his head anyway.
“It’s the village headman’s daughter’s birthday. That’s what all the party preparation is for. But, this town is going to fall under a sleeping curse at the celebration tonight. Do you notice the plants and vines everywhere?”
Liu Qingge had. Many of the buildings were covered in some kind of ivy.
“Though the village has a headman, they’re actually matriarchal. They were founded by an immortal fairy long ago, and those of her lineage sometimes receive supernatural gifts, but only the women. The headman rules for now since the death of his wife, but only until his daughter comes of age.”
“Tonight,” Liu Qingge guessed.
Shang Qinghua nodded. “The daughter can control plants. Her aunt, the younger sister of the last headwoman, can ‘soothe the mind.’ If I remember, it’s like a healing trance kind of thing. She’s the town’s doctor.
“The daughter can’t control her gift very well, though. So when things–” he nodded at the ivy crawling up the walls, which suddenly seemed more ominous than charming, “-start growing out of control, her aunt pulls a whammy on her and sends her to sleep. Then they can starting pulling down the worst of the vines and stuff before they start growing into people’s walls instead of just on top of them.
“The problem is, the prince of a nearby village has been trying to pressure the headman to give him his daughter’s hand in marriage, but he won’t, because matriarchal, see? But tonight, that prince is going to arrive with a small army of men to force her to accept him as her husband so he can take over.
“These people don’t have anything close to a fighting force. Naturally, she’s going to pull out her plant powers to fight back. But once the vines have tasted blood in that quantity, they will go really out of control and become yao.
“If that happens, it won't be enough to make the girl sleep. They’ll be able to move and attack on their own, and they won’t discriminate between targets. Her aunt is going to have to use every last drop of her power to put everything living, plants and people, in the village to sleep. It’s going to kill her to pull it off.
“With the spellcaster dead, the sleepers will be as if in stasis, not needing to eat and never aging, but unable to wake until…well, nothing less than a dream demon could wake the sleepers, and they're extinct."
Liu Qingge thought. Was it really possible to figure out all this was going to occur just from gathering up little bits and pieces of information? It must be, if his shixiong had done so. Everything he described seemed more than plausible.
“Then we should stop it,” he concluded.
Shang Qinghua started to fidget nervously. “Ah, Liu-shidi, don’t you think with my luck, we would just succumb to the spell as well?”
“Hmm.”
Liu Qingge considered this.
“Fine. You wait outside the borders of the town. I’ll take care of it, then come back to collect you.”
Shang Qinghua blanched, glancing at the dark woods they’d left, and the glowing eyes of creatures blinking awake in the gathering dusk. Liu Qingge glanced that way too and reconsidered, grabbing Shang Qinghua’s wrist.
“Nevermind. This Shidi will be enough to protect you.”
Shang Qinghua heaved a large sigh.
“At least let me…” he dug around in his qiankun pouch, and pulled out a few small vials full of what looked like swirling smoke, but when he uncorked them, were actually liquid. He passed one to Liu Qingge.
“Down it in one go, Shidi.”
Liu Qingge obediently swallowed it down only to look up to see Shang Qinghua staring in fascinated alarm.
“You really…without even asking what it was…”
Liu Qingge’s eyes narrowed. “Is there a reason I should not have?”
Shang Qinghua let out an “eep” and raised his hands in front of him, the fingers of one hand curled around his own vial, which he quickly drank in show.
“No, of course not! It’s perfectly, well, mostly safe. It should keep you awake for roughly an additional 12-14 hours, somewhere in that range.…" he trailed off, sounding unsure. “Although I can’t say I’ve ever tested it against something actively trying to send me to sleep aside from my own body’s needs before.”
“Why didn’t you offer this before?”
Shang Qinghua cringed. “Of course, Shidi is right. As cultivators, it’s our duty to stand up against injustice…”
Satisfied, Liu Qingge reached up, and Shang Qinghua obligingly crouched down so he could be pat on the head.
“Why do you have this?” Liu Qingge suddenly asked, suspicious. He should have been aware of anything only “mostly safe” in his shixiong’s possession.
“I take it when the paperwork starts to pile up, Shidi,” Shang Qinghua admitted. “If I work through the night and then need to remain awake for the following day’s work.”
Liu Qingge rolled his shoulders, examining his own fresh alertness, feeling as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as on a restful morning, or after a particularly invigorating warm-up match. "This is useful," he said aloud.
Shang Qinghua looked a little considering at that, then the slightest bit contrite. "Yes, of course you’re right. I just brew it for myself, but if you think the sect can benefit, I will share the recipe with Mu Qingfang.”
Liu Qingge picked up an underlying hint of annoyance though, and he suspected that the annoyance was more real than the contrition. Likely Shang Qinghua knew how useful his elixir could be, but preferred to keep it to himself.
His shixiong did tend to see to himself before others, a reputation that had followed him from their disciple days when he’d been accused of fleeing for his life while his martial brothers stayed behind to fight a demon and met their ends. Whether true or not (and out of respect for their partnership, Liu Qingge had never asked), that reputation did heavily color his shixiong’s interactions with the other disciples in their generation and above it.
Liu Qingge did not see any problem with putting yourself first. Not everyone had the privilege of the strength to not have to make the choice between themselves and others—and wasn’t that the whole reason he and Shang Qinghua been partnered in the first place? Their martial aunts and uncles had not wanted the other peak heirs to have to spend their lives for Shang Qinghua’s.
It did no good to waste two lives if you could save one. But if you could save two, then you should.
So he did not blame Shang Qinghua then for wanting to look out for himself, or for withholding something useful but not vital from people who wanted to pry into his motivations to find fault with them or make assumptions, people who had not treated him with respect in the past and didn’t deserve it or favors in return.
But Shang Qinghua was revealing a small secret now for the good of Liu Qingge, and through him others as well, and that was another further step on his path to righteousness and salvation from his curse.
Liu Qingge grinned, causing Shang Qinghua’s eyes to go wide. The plan would work.
“It’s impressive, shixiong. This elixir of yours. I’m proud of you.”
His shixiong’s mouth dropped open, like he was about to say something, but when nothing came out, Liu Qingge pulled his sword.
“Which direction is this army arriving from?”
----------
Liu Qingge staggered through the woods, half-dragging Shang Qinghua as they always seemed to end up.
“I suppose I should have mentioned the crash.”
Everything had gone well. The army was sent home with their tails between their legs with minimal bloodshed, Cang Qiong had an alliance with the grateful new headwoman (Shang Qinghua had been especially interested in interrogating the aunt on her ability to potentially calm qi deviations, which had worried Liu Qingge, but of everything that befell his shixiong, that had never been one of them), and they’d been fêted long through the night and into the early hours of the morning.
While the elixir hadn’t proven necessary, they could not sleep while it was still in effect, even as the party wound down as the revelers went yawning to their own beds. So Liu Qingge and Shang Qinghua decided to head out as soon as the sky began to lighten enough to travel by.
“I honestly forgot, I’ve never used it on the road before. It keeps you awake for much longer than you’d be alert otherwise, but after all the energy leaves, you will need to sleep for longer as well.”
The tiredness has struck like a tidal wave. And the middle of nowhere was no place to be caught vulnerable with no one to watch for or defend against the many dangerous creatures and beings that inhabited the wilderness outside of safe areas like towns. He shuddered to think of something chewing on his shixiong while he slept a handful of paces away with his sword beside him, of no use whatsoever.
His eyelids felt like they weighed a thousands pounds and keeping them open was more difficult than any feat of strength, but he finally found what he’d been looking for. A shallow pit cave that Shang Qinghua had fallen in two days earlier, the opening of which had been covered by fallen leaves. It was really little more than a hole about two feet wide and three feet across extending about eight feet deep, although it opened up a little bit inside, maybe ten feet across at the bottom.
When he stopped propelling his shixiong along, the man stumbled a few more paces forward, then dropped to his knees and collapsed onto his side, pillowing his head on his arms and murmuring, “five more minutes.”
Grabbing his shixiong by the legs, he dragged him over to the hole and unceremoniously shoved him down feet first, threading his unnecessarily bulky body through the narrow gap and dangling him by the shoulders so he fell only a short distance once he let go. Then he dragged a fallen tree over to the hole and over the gap, rocking it up just enough so he could quickly slip in-between before letting it roll back over the entrance, hiding them entirely from view.
He collapsed onto Shang Qinghua’s wide chest, pillowing his head where he could hear the other’s steady, reassuring heartbeat, making sure his back faced the entrance so if any attacker or predator discovered their hiding spot, they would have to get through him first.
----------
Another day, another mission. This time they were paused at an inn for dinner, where the innkeeper had just regretfully informed Shang Qinghua they were out of pork cutlet, but he could offer a barley soup instead.
Shang Qinghua sighed—Liu Qingge knew he hated barley—and told the man a bowl of rice would do.
“What do you know about this town?” Liu Qingge asked as Shang Qinghua pulled out a piece of talisman paper and began folding it into a paper dart—he’d been trying to get it to work to send messages between the peaks without him or an An Ding disciple having to hand deliver them, which would be an enormous timesaver, but they were finicky and fragile besides.
“Eh?” Shang Qinghua asked, looking up, fingers slowing but still creasing the paper.
“Do you know if something is going to happen here? Like you knew before, in the town with the plants.”
“What’s the name of this place again?”
When Liu Qingge told him, Shang Qinghua scratched at his nose distractedly. “Uh, maybe? It could be this or another place with a similar name, I kinda forget. But it won’t be relevant any time soon, Shidi. Probably not for years. ”
“But you know of other things that will happen soon. And if you learn more, put more things together, then we can be prepared for them.”
Shang Qinghua made a face. “We can’t.”
Liu Qingge leaned forward, waiting until Shang Qinghua’s eyes, darting everywhere to avoid making eye contact, finally settled, resignedly, on his face.
“Why not?” Liu Qingge asked simply.
“It’s not our responsibility!” Shang Qinghua blurted. “The stage is set, these things are going to happen, so just let them happen! Other people will do something about it eventually, so let the person who’s supposed to do it, do it! We’re not supposed to be involved!”
“Why?” Liu Qingge asked again, still calmly.
“What do you mean, ‘why?!'” Shang Qinghua exploded out of his seat. “Because if I try to change things, I’ll…I’ll…” he paused, seeming confused. Then sat back down abruptly. “Really? I can really just…interfere…with no consequences?”
“There will probably be consequences,” Liu Qingge said, taking a sip of his tea now that Qinghua seemed to have calmed down a bit. “But I’m here to stop them from reaching you.”
“...Okay,” Shang Qinghua said. “We can try. They’re all relatively unimportant things and people but I guess that’s why…that’s why we should. I’ll write down what I can remember. I’ll…just have to keep you by my side, Shidi. Make sure nothing happens to you.”
Liu Qingge snorted at that, but let it go.
----------
Shang Qinghua had a little box he kept on a shelf above his desk in his leisure house. It was varnished in what Liu Qingge could appreciate as a lovely indigo with a simple snowflake carved on the lid, but was otherwise a bit plain.
He would sometimes see Shang Qinghua rolling up scrolls, pulling down the box, and placing them inside.
One particular day as he arrived to collect Shang Qinghua for a mission, the man had looked surprised at seeing Liu Qingge in his travel gear, then groaned. “Just give me a moment, I completely forgot we were leaving today, I need to let some people know.” He murmured a message to his head disiciple into a piece of talisman paper before folding it into a dart and sending it out the window (he’d worked out many of the issues, but they still were really only reliable within the same peak or one peak over at best), then hurriedly scribbled a note on a piece of paper and shoved it into the box on the shelf before sighing and heading into his bedroom to change.
Liu Qingge was curious. So, standing on the chair to reach, Liu Qingge pulled the box down from the shelf and opened it. There was nothing inside. He picked at the corners to see if there was maybe a false bottom, but failing to find any seams, he picked up a shiny rock that Shang Qinghua kept on the desk as a paperweight and dropped it in before closing the lid, and opening it again. The rock was no longer inside.
Shaking the box, Liu Qingge couldn’t hear the rock tumbling around in any hidden compartment. But maybe the stone was big enough that it got wedged in a corner or something. He tried a coin next, but after making it disappear he still couldn’t hear any rattling.
Wondering what else he could hide inside the box, Liu Qingge searched the desk for something that didn’t look too important (in case it really was vanishing). A lot of it just looked like sect paperwork, but under a stack of invoices he found a little book with a blank cover. Flipping through it, he caught something about chrysanthemums and pillars. He didn’t think his shixiong was into landscaping, so this was probably fine. That vanished too.
Pulling free his hair ribbon next, he let it spool into a little puddle on the bottom of the box, but tugged one end to drape just over the edge so a little bit stuck out the side. He had just closed the lid when Shang Qinghua came out of his room and froze.
“Uh, Liu-shidi…what are you doing with that?” he asked.
Opening it, he held it up to show Shang Qinghua and they both watched as the little piece of ribbon that had remained outside the box fluttered to the ground alone, prompting Liu Qingge to ask, “how does it work?”
Shang Qinghua dropped his bag to the floor and gripped his face in horror. “What did you put in there?” he asked, voice small.
When Liu Qingge told him, his face went so pale Liu Qingge was afraid his shixiong might faint.
Rushing to the desk and confirming the little book wasn’t still hidden under the papers there, Shang Qinghua dropped his head to the desktop with a loud thud before lifting it and dropping it again.
Much later, Liu Qingge would see Shang Qinghua contempating the pretty little box with a hammer in hand, before setting it down while muttering, “information flows both ways. Isn't it safer to know in advance than to be blind?”
----------
Liu Qingge started guarding Shang Qinghua even when they weren’t off-peak fulfilling the strict quota for missions Liu Qingge had imposed. It had already been clear to him for a long while that if he didn’t constantly keep track of his shixiong's surroundings for him, an outer disciple will trip and spill a bottle of ink onto Shang Qinghua’s robes, and then his laundry will be handed off to a disciple who has never done it before and will return it in rags.
Liu Qingge preferred to escort Shang Qinghua whenever he needed to attend to business on other peaks or wanted to go down the mountain to buy something (usually snacks, although they would typically be sold out of whatever it was by the time he arrived anyway, unless Liu Qingge accompanied him to buy it for him), especially since that rockslide that one time. And if Liu Qingge doesn’t remind him to take a parasol, who knows what will happen to his hair.
Managing his Shang-shixiong’s well-being is a full-time job, but he doesn’t mind.
Liu Qingge makes it a point to interrogate everyone who may interact with Qinghua before letting them near him, to ensure they are competent enough not to be a source of additional bad luck for his shixiong. The sight of the enormous An Ding Peak Lord half-hidden (and only half, because that’s as much as fits) behind the Bai Zhan Peak Lord was a familiar sight at this point.
He has been told before that he can be intimidating (he used to be told he was intimidatingly beautiful, but the last few years it’s been simply “intimidating.” His face doesn’t appear changed in any way in his mirror, so it must simply be the way he’s being perceived), so he is only mildly surprised and annoyed when it reaches the point that Yue Qingyuan approaches him to tell him to stop.
“How am I supposed to protect him if I stop?” Liu Qingge countered, crossing his arms and craning his neck to glare up at his sect leader.
“Shang Qinghua doesn’t need protection when we’re on the peaks, Shidi,” Yue Qingyuan replied, with a strained smile.
Liu Qingge could only give him an incredulous frown in return. Was his Zhangmen-shixiong not seeing the same things he was seeing? What a preposterous idea!
“I don’t follow,” he said, when it became clear that Yue Qingyuan was awaiting a confirmation that he would stop that he wasn’t planning on giving.
Yue Qingyuan pinched the bridge of his nose with a sigh, before replying. “Well, please know we all appreciate the work you do to improve the reputation of the sect out in the world. Isn’t it about time for you and Shang-shidi to leave again? I’ll let his head disciple know.”
----------
It wasn’t unusual by this point for Liu Qingge to be inside Shang Qinghua’s leisure house, and he had been many times before.
On this particular night (It was a good night, Liu Qingge hadn’t even had to cut a bat out of his shixiong’s hair), Shang Qinghua had been complaining about feeling unnecessary on his own peak, as the head disciples of An Ding and Qiong Ding apparently were some powerhouse team intent on making everyone else look bad with their competency, as he unlocked the door and held it open for Liu Qingge to preceed him in, yawning loudly.
And while Liu Qingge headed for the kitchen area and the tea set, Shang Qinghua walked straight through the sitting room, past his office, and into his bedroom, and leaving the door wide open, began to get undressed for bed.
Liu Qingge, feeling a bit hot in the face from where he’d paused uncertainly, cleared his throat, and Shang Qinghua jumped.
“Shidi!” he shrieked, clutching his discarded outer robe to his chest like a maiden and doing nothing to cover its wide expanse. “You’re still here!”
“Of course I’m still here!” he shot back, bewildered and a bit indignant.
“Of course you're still here…” Shang Qinghua repeated weakly. “Right, I guess I’ve just gotten so used to you around, I didn’t really notice…”
They both stared at each other blankly for a moment before Shang Qinghua finally asked, “are you going to go?”
Liu Qingge turned redder, but turned his head aside to stare at the wall. “You’re the one who invited me in,” he noted, chafing just a little. “We have an early start tomorrow,” he added as a reminder, mind already on the next mission from Qinghua’s list.
“It is late…You can stay here if you’d like,” Shang Qinghua said, dropped the robe onto the back of a chair and a bit self-consciously turning to the porcelain washing bowl on a stand by the window. “But you need a good night’s rest too, and I imagine your own bed is more comfortable than anything I have to offer.”
“Qinghua is comfortable,” Liu Qingge mused thoughtlessly.
Shang Qinghua dropped the bowl, which shattered on the ground. At the sound, Liu Qingge was already in the room, pushing him back to sit on the bed and examining his hands and bare feet for cuts.
Ordering him to stay put, Liu Qingge left the room and came back immediately with a broom.
Shang Qinghua was still on the bed, but pulled his feet up to sit cross-legged as Liu Qingge swept up the shards.
“You mean that time with the energy drink,” he said after a moment.
“Yes.”
“Well, I…I can’t let you sleep on the floor, Shidi. It’s bad for your back, and now there might be little pieces of porcelain too small to sweep up waiting to stick in your skin.”
Liu Qingge grunted, thinking at least the cool air on the flight back to Bai Zhan would help cool some of this embarrassment. He’d grown too proprietary, like Wei Qingwei had been joking. He needed to remember that as much as Shang Qinghua was his responsibility, as much as he often felt like Shang Qinghua belonged to him and him alone, that all they were was—
“So,” Shang Qinghua concluded, “we can share my bed. You don’t take up that much room, Shidi. I’m sure we can both fit if you press close to me.”
Shang Qinghua enveloped Liu Qingge quite perfectly. And maybe Yue Qingyuan was right that Shang Qinghua didn't need to be protected on the peaks all the time. It should be fine, like this, to relax and enjoy the moment. Just for a little while. They had another mission in the morning.