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Chapter Text

When Liu Qingge became aware of himself, it was in flashes and movements. 

He felt his throat ripped raw as he screamed and his limbs nearly tore themselves out of their sockets as he attacked. His blood burned in his veins, his qi shrieked in his meridians, and he felt his core shudder under the stress.

Liu Qingge was having a qi deviation and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

That didn’t stop him from trying.

His eyes stung as rogue power escaped any way it could from his body, trying to prevent a core collapse — but he was able to make out that he was in Ling Xi Caves. It took him a little longer to discover who his opponent was. It took a glimpse of a celadon sleeve for him to understand it was Shen Qingqiu.

But of course it would have been. Who else?

He felt a twinge of suspicion that the lord of Qing Jing Peak may have even provoked his deviation before he set it aside. Whether Shen Qingqiu had done so or not wasn’t important at the moment. Liu Qingge did not want to kill him if he wasn’t certain of his guilt. He did not want that shadow of doubt on his soul; a permanent stain on his perfect control.

Less perfect now, of course, no matter what happened from here.

Thankfully Shen Qingqiu was a slippery bastard and more than smart enough to know that even while having a deviation, Liu Qingge was more than his match in battle. Shen Qingqiu stayed well clear of his wild swings and powerful lunges. 

In many ways, it should have been a battle Liu Qingge relished — the feeling of for once being able to fight Shen Qingqiu without a third party stepping in to try to mediate. He’d always wanted to properly dump him into the dirt and force him to admit defeat. It wasn’t something that Shen Qingqiu’s pride would abide in front of others, but Liu Qingge suspected that if it was just the two of them, where Shen Qingqiu would never be made to openly acknowledge that it’d happened, he might be coaxed — forced — into submitting. 

That couldn’t happen this time, of course. Under these circumstances, Shen Qingqiu’s defeat would be more likely to lead to his death. As much as he disliked and distrusted Shen Qingqiu, it was not his death he truly wanted.

Liu Qingge could barely feel himself move now. He should have felt the dirt and stone churn beneath his bare feet, the cling of his robes on sweat-damp skin, the satisfying flex of muscle, and the hum of blood in his veins.

Instead he felt almost nothing. He was even somewhat detached from his own emotions — not in his usual way of experiencing a cool and steady battle flow state, but more as if he were watching something someone else was doing from another room. If he hadn’t been so focused on regaining control so he wouldn’t kill Shen Qingqiu, he thought he might have even been tempted to wander away in search of a more thrilling battle. One he could participate in properly. 

Without his permission, his body screamed a primal, wordless threat.

Shen Qingqiu was screaming too. 

To Liu Qingge’s surprise, Shen Qingqiu wasn’t screaming in fear or anger — or, not only fear and anger. Though he couldn’t make out the words, the tone was clear enough — he was trying to talk him down and bring him back to reason. 

There was… concern there. To his credit, it even sounded sincere.

The idea was unsettling enough to sober Liu Qingge a little. His qi reacted similarly. Liu Qingge felt some of it pull back into his core and strengthen it again. It wasn’t quite enough to snap him out of his deviation, but it gave him more resources to try to regain his control. He grasped blindly for what he needed and felt a searing pain as mind and body seemed on the verge of splitting apart.

Liu Qingge’s figure lurched like a wooden puppet suddenly and abruptly halted in place, his limbs swinging and then hanging limply.

Out of the corner of his eye, Shen Qingqiu moved and for the first time Liu Qingge was able to see his face — pale and drawn; the concern he’d heard in his voice being further betrayed by his expression. He saw the man saying his name, his body tense with wariness. Shen Qingqiu hesitantly crept closer, hand lifted in a soothing motion. 

Startled again by the idea that Shen Qingqiu seemed to genuinely want to help him, Liu Qingge’s grip on his wild power weakened — only a little, but it was enough for his body to obey its instincts and move again to attack.

Shen Qingqiu was only defending himself — Liu Qingge could see that clearly — but it’s still no pleasant thing to watch yourself die. His mortal shell crumpled beneath him and he watched it fall, leaving ‘himself’ behind. All he could do was stare down at it at his feet and watch helplessly as the lines of pain and rage left his expression.

His attention was pulled away from his body as he recognized Shen Qingqiu was having a panic attack, his face pulled into a rictus of horror and regret. The peak lord known for his proud composure and smug serenity was nothing less than shattered now. Still reeling with shock, Liu Qingge watched as the other man unraveled, muttering about not having meant to, about having tried to help. 

Liu Qingge believed him.

But there was still a spark of resentment there. An automatic thought of, If you had not been here, I would have lived. He had no way of knowing that, of course. In fact, if he allowed himself to look at it objectively, he would probably arrive at a different conclusion — but Liu Qingge wasn’t in a state where he could coolly analyze and accept what had happened gracefully.

Emotions began to flood back into him then and he realized he didn’t want to accept things. 

He wanted to act on this new grudge and long-standing resentment between them. He saw Shen Qingqiu collapse beside his body and knew that if he attacked now, there was no way the other man could resist. He could get his revenge.

That sobered him instantly.

Liu Qingge abruptly turned his attention away from the pile of celadon silks and to his own body. He might have still had a chance to live if he did something immediately. He refused to become a wrathful ghost, murdering someone who had only tried to help and forcing his sect-mates to destroy him. He tried for what might have been more than an hour to fit his spirit back into his body, but he kept being pushed out again, as if he were being pulled away.

Something about their battle must have drawn the attention of someone outside of the caves, because several peak lords — armed and wary — made their way inside. Mu Qingfang and Yue Qingyuan broke into runs the moment they saw them, leaving the others behind as they gathered around their fallen bodies and checked on them.

Voices became a cacophony as everyone spoke at once; their words bouncing off of the cave walls and colliding into unintelligible sounds. Liu Qingge had no idea how they understood each other. He didn’t bother to try — what was there to understand other than that he was dead and Shen Qingqiu needed aid in order not to follow him to the afterlife? He trusted that neither Yue Qingyuan nor Mu Qingfang would allow something like that to happen. 

Resigned to the inevitable, he watched as his body was carried out of the caves in one direction and Shen Qingqiu was carried off in another. 

Liu Qingge followed after Shen Qingqiu, of course. 

Shen Qingqiu might have only been meaning to help him, but he did still kill him. It’s only fair Liu Qingge get to entertain himself by haunting him a little.

***

It’s immediately clear to everyone who interacts with him that what happened in Ling Xi Caves changed Shen Qingqiu.

He was obviously doing his best to pretend that nothing was wrong, but everyone who knew him was aware it was a lie, even if only one by omission. There’s something in the way he paused a moment before responding. The wary way he watched people from underneath his lashes or from behind his fan. The oddly relaxed manner he behaved in situations he’d normally be defensive or snappy. 

The most damning was how polite he was. Not just in that superior way he had before of using good manners as a weapon — he’s even borderline friendly and forgiving when ‘friendly’ was something he seemed to use to taunt those he knew and ‘forgiving’ was complete anathema to him. 

This rightly concerned the peak lords, who discussed Shen Qingqiu frequently after they left him to rest inside of his little bamboo house, huddling together outside as if they could not wait one minute more to talk over what they’d witnessed. Yue Qingyuan only needed one careless smile from Shen Qingqiu to agree to various tests for possession by ghosts or demons to be conducted. 

Liu Qingge stayed out of the house when people arrived to perform those tests. Though he wasn’t possessing Shen Qingqiu, or even interested in doing so, the last thing he wanted was to be discovered and exorcised. Thanks to his senses still being sharp, if not as good in ghost form as they were when he was alive and properly in control of his qi, he overheard the other peak lords agreeing that Shen Qingqiu must have had a qi deviation that lead to a minor form of amnesia.

They agreed that Shen Qingqiu seemed to remember a fair amount of things and it was safe to let him continue with his peak lord duties. It might even be better than usual, they said with tentative hopefulness. He seemed calmer and more content. They just won’t mention what happened in Ling Xi Caves or what happened to Liu Qingge. They don’t want to trigger his trauma again. It would be better if the memories come back to him more naturally, if they ever came back at all.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is all an act, frankly,” one of the peak lords said with cool bitterness. “He might think we will blame him for Liu Qingge, so he pretends to have forgotten everything and plays nice so we won’t say a single harsh word.”

A few people made hushing noises, but no one actually defended Shen Qingqiu. Not even Yue Qingyuan, whose blind preference for the man generally infuriated everyone.

They left and Liu Qingge pushed his way through the walls of the bamboo house — a convenient ghostly skill that almost made up for how much effort it was to interact normally with physical objects. He looked across the room to see Shen Qingqiu gently coaxing a trembling teenager with dark, fluffy hair through serving him his lunch. He was very patient with him, speaking softly as he ignored the mistakes the young disciple made. Once lunch was served, the boy hurried to leave without seeming to flee from his sight, but from the way Shen Qingqiu’s green eyes followed the boy’s exit with an expression of resigned pity, it was as clear to Shen Qingqiu as it was Liu Qingge that the boy was terrified. 

If any of the peak lords could see the way Shen Qingqiu sighed and dropped his masks all at once, they wouldn’t believe that he was faking anything. 

He looked exhausted and a bit lonely, falling out of his perfect posture to slump and lean on the table as he listlessly picked at the offerings, wincing at their bland flavors. It seemed to surprise him at every meal and he always ended up picking at his food, relying mainly on any raw or lightly-dressed fruit or vegetables to sustain him. 

Of all the peaks, only Ku Xing and Liu Qingge’s own Bai Zhan were said to have worse food — at least if you heeded the opinions of the Zui Xian peak lord, who repeatedly begged them all to let her create menus to suit the other peaks’ preferences. Liu Qingge felt a twist of regret that he had not permitted it. He knew the peak lord would have sincerely listened to his thoughts on dietary needs and efficiency and not created anything that would be wasteful. He’d just ignored her coaxing because Shen Qingqiu did, who pretended he was above such earthly concerns as requiring his food to be a pleasure to eat. At least Ku Xing had its ascetic precepts to follow as its excuse for declining. 

Though he felt a bit sorry for Shen Qingqiu in the moment, it didn’t prevent Liu Qingge from moving over to concentrate some of his qi into two fingertips and use them to flick a small empty dish off the edge of the table.

“Aiyah…” Shen Qingqiu sighed, rolled his eyes, and immediately set to cleaning up the mess himself, apparently not questioning how the dish fell over in spite of being left several inches from the edge.

Not like the Shen Qingqiu he knew. 

Not at all.

The Shen Qingqiu he knew would have raged, or at least shouted for a disciple to clean up the mess as he glowered at them for not doing it properly or quickly enough. Even if he were faking his amnesia, in private there would be no reason for him to pretend mere exasperation rather than anger, even if he chose not to involve someone else to vent it on.

***

After a few weeks of haunting Shen Qingqiu it became clear that the person currently wearing the Qing Jing peak lord’s face and performing his duties was someone else entirely. 

It wasn’t mere amnesia at work either — it was a different person. How the tests for possession didn’t say exactly that, Liu Qingge had no way of knowing, but his unique position to be able to watch Shen Qingqiu without detection let him collect all the evidence necessary to convince him of this fact.

Well — it really hadn’t even taken him more than a few days to come to that conclusion, but it went from insight to conviction as the evidence piled up over the weeks.

Piece of evidence number one:  Shen Qingqiu was nice to his disciples.

Though of course Liu Qingge did not willingly spend a great deal of time around Shen Qingqiu before — certainly not nearly every hour of the day, sometimes watching him from afar and sometimes literally hovering over his shoulder as he examined what the peak lord was working on — he still knew quite well that Shen Qingqiu was not kind to his disciples. At best he might flatter one that was well-connected, or praise someone who toadied up to him, or be more gentle with the girls than the boys, or turn a blind eye to mischief if it was against someone he didn’t like. 

But this was different.

He seemed to have a genuine interest in his disciples now. He took the time to patiently guide the less apt until they understood something. He was gentle with those who were skittish around him, carefully teasing them into relaxing. He challenged and tricked those who seemed up to the task to step out of their comfort zone and rewarded them for it. He taught them things that Liu Qingge was sure that there was no way for Shen Qingqiu to know. He certainly taught them in ways that he never had attempted before, based on the confusion and cautious delight of the disciples. He praised often, usually explaining what they had done well. He seemed uncomfortable with attempts from disciples to humble themselves for him or curry his favor, merely thanking them for serving him until they learned the more reasonable ways they could now gain his approval.

Most importantly, he put a stop to the bullying that ran rampant on Qing Jing Peak.

It started with a speech delivered to all of his disciples and was followed by swiftly punishing those who assumed it was just lip service. He even went so far as to talk to individual disciples, trying to make them understand his sincerity. 

Only those who showed no attempts to alter their poor behavior suffered any amount of the old icy, spiteful side of him. Whoever had replaced Shen Qingqiu had that part of him perfectly in-character. 

One sharp glance was enough to quell most disciples’ desire to jockey for a higher position in the social order by trampling another underfoot. Those who were too stupid to understand it was no longer tolerated — or thought themselves above this new law and more clever than their master — were cowed into submission by one overbearing loom and a snap of Shen Qingqiu’s fan like a viper’s strike; made all the more terrifying for the contrast to the new, gentler behavior. Shen Qingqiu hardly needed to use words at that point — they were ready to promise their master anything to avoid seeing a resurgence of their old shizun.

And that was how he was referred to in whispers behind their master’s back: ‘The Old Shizun’ or ‘Shizun Before’ as opposed to a simple ‘Shizun’, which was often said with quiet awe or bright eyes. It was as if the children instinctively knew what Liu Qingge knew in spite of not having the same amount of access.

Piece of evidence number two:  He’s extra tolerant with Yue Qingyuan.

It sounds like such a small thing — for Shen Qingqiu to smile with polite neutrality and, after the bare minimum of what can be considered an appropriate amount of time for a visit (that is to say, as long as it takes for one of them to finish their cup of tea) Shen Qingqiu shows signs of wanting him gone — but it’s huge. Just about anyone in the sect would know that. 

Shen Qingqiu ‘Before’ would be barely civil to the sect master during his single monthly visit — but if he missed even one of them, even for good reason, Shen Qingqiu’s petty rage would know no limits.

Yue Qingyuan came at least twice a week now, basking as much as his dignity would allow in the tepid hospitality this new Shen Qingqiu offered and almost beaming when Shen Qingqiu used carefully constructed methods of prompting him to leave, excusing himself for being busy or tired, or having the table cleared and feigning ignorance that Yue Qingyuan wasn’t finished. The sect leader would always smile gently and make his goodbyes when he could no longer himself feign he didn’t understand he was wanted gone and came back a few days later with a new gift and a warmer smile.

Shen Qinggiu seemed bemused by it all, appearing more on-edge by attempts from Yue Qingyuan to speak of their past than the visits themselves. He was even sometimes friendly until he realized it encouraged the sect master towards greater displays of intimacy. At the flash of panic in his eyes when Yue Qingyuan tried to reminisce, Liu Qingge realized that Shen Qingqiu was still under the impression that everyone believed he was recovering from simple exhaustion. If he knew everyone thought he was suffering from amnesia, he might have been relieved that he could just close the conversation by claiming not to remember.

From the murmurings Liu Qingge overheard at Qing Jing Peak, some people thought that the sect master was attempting to court Shen Qingqiu, but Liu Qingge could tell they were mistaken. This was the love of a father or older brother trying to regain favor from a beloved child whose trust he’d lost. Liu Qingge knew what that looked like, even if he hadn’t experienced it himself. 

It made him pity Yue Qingyuan, who did not know the child he sought was gone. This pity must have been what made this new Shen Qingqiu suffer through the visits, if the guilty flashes of expression he occasionally let slip were any indication.

Piece of evidence number three:  He smiles — and means it.

As his disciples and even the other peak lords (several of whom visit him, though not as frequently as Yue Qingyuan) begin to relax and open up with him, Shen Qingqiu smiled.

It transforms his face when he smiles. And he has so many different smiles that it becomes easier and easier to think of him as an entirely different person from the original. The old Shen Qingqiu had only three smiles:  cold, bitter, and cruel. 

Sometime in the second week, Shen Qingqiu began to laugh. Mostly when he was by himself while he was reading, but sometimes the disciples or peak lords caught him off guard and he slipped. 

Liu Qingge didn’t blame any of them for staring whenever that happened. 

He stared too.

It was hard to play his small pranks on Shen Qingqiu too soon after he’d seen one of his smiles or heard one of his laughs. By this point he knew that whoever it was inside Shen Qingqiu’s body had nothing to do with his death, but he felt almost obligated to haunt him anyway. 

To be fair, it was partially out of pure practicality, not merely lingering desire for petty revenge. He felt his ability to affect the physical world increase the more often he did so. He did not want to fade away with no grudge or fixation to keep him bound to the mortal world, so he made it his duty to investigate this new Shen Qingqiu and test how he could get him to reveal more of himself.

To judge if he was a danger to the sect, of course.

Surprisingly, his ‘pranks’ passed mostly unnoticed, apparently written off as inattentiveness, accidents, or coincidences. Sometimes it caused Shen Qingqiu to show a new smile (mostly colored by confusion, of course) or even made him laugh.

Liu Qingge thought it spoke well towards the spirit that inhabited Shen Qingqiu’s body not being malevolent. Perhaps it could still be dangerous in some other way, but its basic nature seemed benign. That must have been why the detection attempts by the other peak lords saw no issue with him replacing the original Shen Qingqiu. 

Pieces of evidence number four and five:  He sometimes talks to himself and/or an accomplice. 

This is the most conclusive evidence of all, of course. They say it directly, out loud, that Shen Qingqiu is someone else from another world.

At that point it becomes less of a clue than a registered fact.

At first Shen Qingqiu merely muttered or ranted to himself while alone, often speaking to someone invisible that Liu Qingge was only just barely able to sense exists and was not some madness the man was still aware enough to keep hidden from others. Then one of Shang Qinghua’s visits dissolved into an altercation that for several troubled minutes Liu Qingge expected would provide him with a new ghostly companion — in Shen Qingqiu’s favor, of course. The trembling, mousy peak lord Shang Qinghua would struggle to defeat either Shen Qingqiu even if he caught them dead asleep and weaponless. 

The discovery that both were souls from another world, transported against their wishes into the bodies of these peak lords and doing their best to… correct something that might go wrong in the future was startling — especially knowing that Shang Qinghua was the same person he’d always known. 

It was unclear exactly what they meant about their missions since wherever they came from presumably had different, more casual and more whimsical ways of speaking that they fell into the habit of using when alone together. It was difficult to follow along sometimes, especially as the topic of their mission often became derailed any time Shang Qinghua said something to throw Shen Qingqiu into a fury — which was often and for reasons Liu Qingge couldn’t always understand. (Though he was willing to give this new Shen Qingqiu the benefit of the doubt that it was justified.)

Liu Qingge came to understand that in the other world, “Brother Cucumber” (Shen Qingqiu) and “Brother Airplane” (Shang Qinghua) were passing acquaintances, albeit of the sort where “Cucumber” offered patronage and advice to “Airplane”. This somehow gave “Cucumber” the social status to blame their current circumstances on “Airplane” — who accepted the shame with a cheerful sort of disregard that was far more endearing than the purely scurrying Shang Qinghua that Liu Qingge had always known. 

By the end of the first meeting, in spite of the violence Shen Qingqiu showed him, this somehow made them friends — which “Airplane” declares openly and “Cucumber” pretends not to tolerate or appreciate.

It takes him a bit of time, but Liu Qingge can only arrive at the conclusion that they are immortal fairies sent to thwart some grand tragedy that Shang Qinghua predicted that involves the most trembling of Shen Qingqiu’s disciples. Liu Qingge has vague memories of fighting with the original Shen Qingqiu over taking this Luo Binghe as a disciple, so it is somehow not surprising once he recognizes that.

He also hears that the previous souls — of both Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua — are never to return. The two fairies are relatively sure once they discuss it and feel it’s confirmed by what they hear from their fairy guides from “the System” (perhaps their way of referring to the Heavens). It seems that “the System” says that they are to live out the rest of their lives under these names, whether they succeed in their missions or die in the attempt.

Liu Qingge was… fine with this. Surprisingly fine with this. 

Isn’t it better for the sect? From how closely he’s watched this Shen Qingqiu (he cannot bring himself to fully accept their fairy names — easier to think of them by the names they must now accept as their own), the fairy is just as talented in his role as the original, only much nicer. And they are charged with performing a service that will affect the world for the good of more than just their own sect. Even Shang Qinghua apparently has his uses, or why else send him?

It’s interesting to him that neither really knows why they were selected to be brought to this world. They were apparently taken at roughly the same time, though Shang Qinghua arrived in his new body first, charged with working hard to attain his position as peak lord of An Ding and not much else.

Of course, it’s obvious that Shen Qingqiu is the true instrument of the world’s salvation.

He was the one who had complained about the prophecy and no one acting on it to prevent the tragedy.

He’s even admirable, taking as well as he did to being stolen away from his life of leisure and safety in order to patiently teach the children and expose himself to all manner of threats he’d be immune to in his previous world. Liu Qingge can’t help but find him even more fascinating the better he gets to know him and see the contrast between the outwardly mature and tranquil Lord of Qing Jing Peak and the funny, even if sometimes childishly petty person he shows in private.

The contrast between the two is even… cute?

This realization stops Liu Qingge in his tracks as he absently followed along after Shen Qingqiu who was currently trying to sneak off the mountain to add to his secret collection of ridiculous novels. Liu Qingge had been reflecting on how none of the people they passed would ever dream that in a few hours the elegant and scholarly Shen Qingqiu would be safely in his rooms raging under his breath as he verbally ripped the story to shreds with eyes lit up with glee. 

Liu Qingge was even looking forward to listening to him do it.

Though he could not breathe, Liu Qingge still felt his breath catch as a sudden conviction overwhelmed him:  this ‘cute’ Shen Qingqiu must be protected. At all costs.

The two fairies had made it clear in their discussions that within the next several years, events would begin to align with the dark prophecy they were charged with preventing from becoming tragic truth. This cute Shen Qingqiu would then have less of a chance to patiently teach, gently tease his students, bully his fairy friend, eviscerate the unworthy, and do silly things when no one was looking — like build towers out of his flavorless dumplings or curl up with a ridiculous book and make fun of it to himself (out loud and sometimes with funny voices). 

Liu Qingge would do his best to protect him as much as he could. It’s the least he can do for someone who was going to try to save the world, after all. It would be a way to continue to perform his duties by the sect as well.

And in the meantime, he doesn’t feel it’s wrong to consider Shen Qingqiu’s smiles and laughs reward enough.

He hurries to catch up with his new charge, eyes now moving to look for threats rather than trying to pull apart the fairy’s secrets.

***

It was probably a very good thing that he had decided to nominate himself for protection duty rather than a half-hearted haunting. 

For more than one reason.

Chapter Text

The first time Liu Qingge had reason to protect Shen Qingqiu, it was barely worth recounting as having done such a thing deserving of the name ‘protection’. 

As Shen Qingqiu browsed a bookstore (the bookish fairy did his best to make time to visit at least one bookstore a week), a hanging shelf made heavy with thick tomes and pieces of art gave way just as he passed beneath it.

Without a second thought, Liu Qingge’s arm snapped up to block the shelf from dumping its contents on the inattentive immortal. Liu Qingge blinked with surprise, unaware that he could do that — but glad to know now that he could.

Perhaps the original Shen Qingqiu would have elegantly sidestepped without a backwards look, but the fairy’s attention was consumed by a book that made his eyes gleam like jade as he read it, as always too impatient to wait to read at home when he could get a taste of a story immediately. In spite of being rather excellent when he was focused, his senses were still not quite attuned to his new body yet and with the added distraction, it was almost a wonder this was the first time Liu Qingge had any reason to step in and perform his self-appointed duty as his bodyguard. 

Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t have been hurt badly, but it certainly wouldn’t be pleasant to have a stone sculpture and several books fall on you, no matter who you were. The embarrassment alone for not avoiding it would probably kill some of the disciples.

The fairy voiced an almost dreamy sound of question as he turned to look back at the items that spilled to the floor before the shelf phased through Liu Qingge’s forearm and swung like a pendulum through the shop. Liu Qingge watched as Shen Qingqiu slowly came out of his literary daze and seemed to process what happened. He almost smiled to himself as he saw Shen Qingqiu’s brows suddenly snap together as if he’d reviewed what he’d seen and realized there was something odd about it.

Before Shen Qingqiu could do more than close his book and glance around, the shopkeeper hurried over and buried him under apologies and gifts. Considering how often Shen Qingqiu shopped there (and his lingering bad reputation from the original peak lord’s attitude, no doubt), it was not surprising that it took more than a quarter of an hour for the fairy to settle the shopkeeper’s nerves and reassure him he was not offended. 

That didn’t stop him from accepting the gifts. It did not appear that immortal fairies were adverse to being plied with books and sweets and he happily carted home his prizes shortly after receiving them, with only a single lingering glance at the broken shelf before he left.

***

The next day, Shen Qingqiu almost walked off one of the Rainbow Bridges because he was reading and walking again. If Liu Qingge hadn’t been there to step on the hem of his robes, he might have gone over. Would the fairy have had the reaction time to draw his spirit sword and fly?

Every time Shen Qingqiu pulled out a book after that without the intentions of sitting or standing as he read it, Liu Qingge made a point of causing it to be knocked out of his hands. It took several days of tugging at his sleeve, plucking the book to the side so it slipped, or just directly batting it out of his hand for Shen Qingqiu to stop the terrible habit. 

In fact, the fairy seemed to think he’d become inexplicably clumsy based on the very deliberate care he took when handling delicate or dangerous objects after that. 

Liu Qingge would feel bad about it if not for how his blood (did ghosts have blood? whatever passed for blood then) ran cold at the memory of Shen Qingqiu’s boot swinging out over empty air. And to think how short a time ago it was that if he’d seen the same thing, he’d have watched curiously to see if the celadon-draped figure would have actually fallen before acting.

***

A little more than a week after the bookshop incident, as Shen Qingqiu glided his way through a beautiful demonstration of a new sword sequence he was teaching his youngest disciples, Liu Qingge noticed an older disciple from another peak speaking with a Qing Jing disciple. 

It would have been just one of dozens of such similar incidents every day and not worth taking any notice of if the young disciple hadn’t returned shortly with a flame-red weiqi board in her arms. 

She carried the goban to a pavilion and dug around in a pouch at her hip to retrieve two covered bowls that were likely filled with playing stones. Then the girl fell to anxiously glancing back at her shizun, evidently waiting for the moment he was finished with his instruction to approach him. 

After a few minutes of having his attention repeatedly pulled away from Shen Qingqiu’s martial instruction by the girl’s nervy behavior, Liu Qingge recognized her as a student that Shen Qingqiu paid special attention to. She was a quiet, well-behaved child who didn’t stand out from her peers, but she had blossomed once Shen Qingqiu had praised her weiqi skills. Even Liu Qingge, who rarely played the strategy game himself, could tell she had a natural talent for it. It might have continued to go unnoticed if not for Shen Qingqiu’s encouragement, as she did not seem to be the sort to seek to stand out in any way under her own initiative. When playing with her shizun, however, the girl allowed Shen Qingqiu to tease her into vibrancy, following her master’s lead for dramatic plays and laughter rather than the more serious and dignified way he normally played while teaching. 

She obviously was hoping that her shizun would agree to a casual game with her at the pavilion and was tying herself in knots in anticipation of delivering the invitation. 

It made Liu Qingge think on how his own students behaved whenever he’d returned to the mountain and took the time to instruct them personally rather than leaving it up to the senior disciples and training manuals. Granted, the longer he stayed on the mountain, the less eagerly they sought his instruction as his boredom set in and his patience unraveled, but for the first week or so, especially with the younger disciples, there was this same earnestness. 

For a moment, Liu Qingge reflected that he hadn’t even once attempted to visit his disciples and check in on how they were doing. 

He suspected that the peak lords had kept his death hidden for fear it would eventually make its way back to Shen Qingqiu if the disciples knew, so he supposed they were not in mourning, at least. (Shen Qingqiu knew already thanks to Shang Qinghua — his death was apparently part of the prophecy as a casual marker of time before the greater tragedies began. Shang Qinghua hadn’t let on that Shen Qingqiu’s arrival had directly followed his death, however, which gave Liu Qingge the odd feeling of being rudely ignored.) The Bai Zhan disciples likely assumed he’d followed his usual behavior and, supposing he were not still meditating in Ling Xi Caves, had left the mountain again in pursuit of a mission or a hunt for some troublesome beast terrorizing the region. 

Liu Qingge felt no pressing need to visit Bai Zhan, so he let the thought pass for now. 

Though he didn’t know any of his disciples well enough to feel regret that he would not be able to guide them further, he permitted himself a sense of nostalgia as he watched the girl hurry over to Shen Qingqiu and invite him to sit under the cool pavilion and play weiqi with her on her new board. Shen Qingqiu smiled and accepted, sending Luo Binghe, the boy of prophecy, off to acquire tea and snacks. A few other students requested permission to sit and watch, which Shen Qingqiu granted after a glance for the girl’s receptiveness to the presence of the others. 

Liu Qingge followed the group to the pavilion and admired the flame-red goban along with the rest (albeit silently) as the girl enthusiastically explained she’d written to her family about her new passion for the game and they’d promised to send along a new goban and set of stones to celebrate. She was thrilled by how quickly it had arrived.

Once Luo Binghe had returned with the tea and was invited to sit and watch with the others, the game began with an easy-going, casual atmosphere that suited playing as the breeze soothed the heat of the late afternoon. 

Liu Qingge paid little attention to the game, instead focusing on those who sat at the pavilion. The girl’s anxiety was settling under the tranquil atmosphere, her shizun’s gentle attention, and the familiar structure of weiqi. The other students were acting similarly to the young hostess, sipping at their tea and watching the game as if they could leech the talent from her (and earn an extra share of their shizun’s regard, perhaps). 

Shen Qingqiu likewise divided his attention. Like Liu Qingge, he watched the others, using their responses to guide them into the mood he seemed to want to create.

Perhaps not surprisingly considering his mission, Shen Qingqiu focused more of his attention on Luo Binghe, who sat to the side from the other students and watched the game with the intense concentration a hunting dog might pay to the entrance to an animal’s den — as if he were waiting for the moment to pounce. Shen Qingqiu cast subtle glances the boy’s way as he made certain moves, smiling to himself behind his fan as he saw the boy frown when he made plays that seemed less optimal and smirking when the boy’s eyes widened as he recognized traps and other strategies hidden behind the ‘poor’ moves. 

It would probably shock everyone to understand their shizun was carefully trying to draw Luo Binghe in. As Luo Binghe had been the focus of the most intense dislike the previous Shen Qingqiu had displayed, the boy had few friends and, understandably, distrusted Shen Qingqiu’s attempts to grow closer to him now. Though Shen Qingqiu had put an end to the others’ bullying and even made an excuse to move the boy into the empty room in his own home, Luo Binghe was as wary as a street dog and suspicious of the better treatment, clearly always ready for it to end as suddenly as it began. 

Shen Qingqiu was patient, however. Eventually he would win the boy over, the same way water eventually smoothed stone.

Crickets tentatively began their serenade by the time the two players started to feel comfortable enough to launch into their more performative plays, making a show out of laying their stones with sharp clacks and playfully taunting each other. Some of the students had quietly excused themselves while a few others had taken their places. Luo Binghe had gone to brew more tea and begin dinner.

It was during one of these dramatic actions that Liu Qingge noticed something odd.

As the girl laid down a stone, he saw a small spark flick out from the contact. A sudden uneasy feeling seized him and he moved closer to the players. He was now close enough to see little metal pieces set at the points on the game board. He also noticed the stones were made of a pretty quartz often used in fire-strikers for wealthy households as they were more attractive than cheap flint. 

Just those two things alone would be bad enough, but he had the unsettling thought that the goban was likely treated with some sort of lacquer to make the wood so red. 

The combination of factors would be a recipe for a fire.

If he were alive, he could simply intercede directly and they could change the stones for ones less likely to cause an issue. Like this, his best option was to cause small mischief in hopes it would annoy them into stopping. He pushed qi into his hand and used it to knock over Shen Qingqiu’s bowl of stones, scattering them over the floor of the pavilion so they lay glittering in the light of the setting sun.

“Aiyah…” Shen Qingqiu sighed, looking with some confusion at his sleeve as if wondering how he’d managed to knock the bowl off the edge of the goban when he hadn’t made any careless gestures. Some of his students volunteered to pick up the stones for him, but he declined, lightly self-depreciating for what he’d concluded was his own mistake.

Frustrated, Liu Qingge knocked over the girl’s bowl of stones as well.

In retrospect, he should have taken into consideration that she was anxious and not especially confident in herself. Her mortification was instant and intense, not questioning her own guilt at all. Liu Qingge watched helplessly as Shen Qingqiu focused on soothing her rather than wondering about the bowls being knocked over, even though he’d been looking her direction at the time and probably should have noticed she hadn’t been responsible. Instead, Shen Qingqiu gently teased her that his mistake hadn’t been intended as her lesson and they should probably set their bowls on the floor of the pavilion instead. 

They resumed their game.

Liu Qingge sighed in the breathless way only a ghost could. He was considering whether trying to knock over the goban would be too alarming and result in events that would lead to his being exorcised when it happened:  the girl laid down a stone, the friction against the piece of metal on the point created a spark that caught the wooden surface of the goban on fire.

Everyone sat for a second in stunned silence as the flames spread like the surface of the board was made of oil rather than wood. An ominous hiss broke the silence.

Shen Qingqiu was the first to react, whipping his fan in a curve to create a shield between the students and the board. At the same time, Luo Binghe returned with a tea tray, his attention focused down as he did his best not to trip or dump the tray’s contents through a moment of carelessness. 

Liu Qingge watched as realization that the boy was not protected crossed Shen Qingqiu’s expression. Everything happened almost all at once, and Liu Qingge had to reflect to separate every action, one from the other: 

The goban exploded the next instant, flinging large shards of wooden fragments everywhere.

The shield held, protecting the students who cried out with fear and dropped to the floor, covering their heads. 

Shen Qingqiu snapped his free hand out, using his draping celadon sleeve to protect the unprepared Luo Binghe from most of the debris. As a result, he’d done nothing to protect himself.

Liu Qingge moved himself between Shen Qingqiu and the board, becoming an invisible shield that prevented Shen Qingqiu from being pierced by the fragments that would have wounded or even killed him. No one seemed to notice this except Shen Qingqiu himself, who watched wide-eyed as the fragments were deflected inches from him.

A series of sharp stings peppered Liu Qingge’s incorporeal body before the wood sloughed off of him to drop to the floor. As if the splinters had actually punctured him, Liu Qingge felt his energy drain away. The memory of the brief pain quickly faded away with his energy, so he ignored it in favor of focusing on Shen Qingqiu. 

He drifted aside, having no choice now but to watch what else happened.

There was a moment of silence as the exploded goban sizzled and hissed, crackling with flames. Several people took unsteady intakes of breath as if to speak or shout, but whatever they might have used their breaths for was immediately drowned out by the crash of a tea tray and a horrified shriek of, “Shizun!”

Luo Binghe was at Shen Qingqui’s side immediately, his dark eyes swimming in tears as he clutched at his shizun’s still extended arm, holding him by his wrist. Blood was dripping from a wound where a dagger-sized shard of wood had impaled Shen Qingqiu’s hand. A small pool of blood had already gathered on the floor beside him. Liu Qingge felt himself scowl at the evidence of his failure to completely protect his charge. 

A small sound of pained surprise escaped Shen Qingqiu before chaos descended.

One of the other students recovered before anyone else, declaring she’d return with Mu Qingfang before she dashed away, as fleet-footed as a deer. A few of the more sensitive disciples — including the girl who had been playing opposite Shen Qingqiu — dissolved into hysterical tears. Luo Binghe was hardly in any better state, trembling and aghast as he clumsily tried to treat the wound; becoming visibly upset as he tried to decide whether to remove the shard from the wound or leave it for Mu Qingfang. Meanwhile the wreckage of the weiqi table was still sizzling menacingly.

To be fair to the children, it was certainly understandable to be distressed, but — 

“Enough!” Shen Qingqiu said sharply to get their attention. An imperfect silence went into immediate effect. “The danger is not passed. Move away from the pavilion — all of you.” 

He gently pushed Binghe to a safer distance and sent a firm look to the others. Those who were too overwrought to follow their shizun’s order were hurriedly pulled away by those who were calmer. Shen Qingqiu ignored his injury and once again used his fan as a spirit tool to focus his qi and smother the flames until the wood no longer hissed.

Once satisfied there was no longer a threat, Shen Qingqiu found himself buried under a pile of worried and upset disciples who stained his silks with their tears and wrinkled them with their grasping hands. With the resigned patience of a well-loved guardian, Shen Qingqiu quickly soothed them all, save for Luo Binghe and the girl who had invited him to play weiqi, who were both too deeply traumatized to be calmed by a few headpats and soft words. 

Shen Qingqiu was still consoling the girl when Mu Qingfang arrived and set several of them off again when he exclaimed over the damage their shizun’s hand had taken. The children who still hovered around him returned to clinging and the girl who had at least been soothed enough not to cry curled up to unleash a new flood of tears. Luo Binghe stood grim sentinel behind his shizun, his eyes staring at the injured hand like it was a piece of evidence that proved his guilt in a heinous crime.

Liu Qingge was almost relieved to be a ghost as he watched it all, vaguely aghast at the outpouring of sentiment. 

Only Shen Qingqiu showed any degree of stoicism, and he was the one who’d been injured. This did not go unnoticed by Mu Qingfang or the equally sharp-eyed Luo Binghe. They both cast wary glances at him, as if expecting his calm to suddenly melt into frothing anger at any moment. That nothing of the sort happened seemed to make them thoughtful.

It was only after the wound was treated that most of the students calmed down enough to be sent on their way. The girl whose new weiqi set was the focus of the last hour took a bit longer to coax into a more relaxed mood so that one of her shijies could escort her off to dinner. Luo Binghe was even harder to satisfy, hovering like a lingering spirit until Shen Qingqiu and Mu Qingfang moved inside and were plied with tea and their dinner.

As they ate, the two peak lords came to the conclusion that the accident happened because the craftsman of the goban hadn’t realized they were carving the weiqi board out of Phoenix Wood and the unfortunate addition of the decorative metal points and quartz playing stones had just been the perfect storm. 

Mu Qingfang earned a very lovely smile from Shen Qingqiu for recalling he had a goban he never used and offering to send it over as a gift for the girl so she didn’t have only bad memories associated with the incident.

Liu Qingge missed the rest of their conversation, closing his eyes and drifting for several minutes as his exhaustion caught up to him. He was only roused when the doctor accidentally passed through him on his way out of the room.

***

After Mu Qingfang returned to his peak and a few of his worried disciples had checked in on him again, Shen Qingqiu sat alone in his room, kneeling beside the low table opposite his bed. From the small expressions that crossed his face, he seemed to be thinking about something that consumed all of his attention and provoked quite a lot of emotions within him.

Finally Shen Qingqiu’s face smoothed and he cast an all-too-knowing glance Liu Qingge’s direction. It wasn’t perfect — Shen Qingqiu’s eyes were directed about an inch too far to the left for that — but it was close enough that Liu Qingge felt a shiver run up whatever passed for his spine.

“I know you’re here, Ghost. Can you reveal yourself? Or speak?” 

Liu Qingge didn’t even bother to try. 

He still felt exhausted from earlier and knew that even if he knew how to oblige, he wouldn’t be able to manage it. He hadn’t even been certain that he would be able to protect Shen Qingqiu from the explosion, and perhaps paired with his earlier, pettier, attempts to end the game by pushing the bowls of stones off of the goban, he had stretched himself thin. 

He’d have to put more effort into building up his ghostly foundation if this little effort was too much.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’ — very well. I don’t need you to confirm you’re here, but I do hope I have your attention for now.” Shen Qingqiu waited, head tilted as he stared blindly towards where he thought he was. When Liu Qingge didn’t answer, he shrugged and said, “I wanted to thank you for your efforts today. I know I would have been badly injured without your intervention. I realize now that you had tried to warn me before the explosion too. Right? Knocking the stones off the goban?” 

Liu Qingge uttered one of his soundless, breathless sighs and rolled his eyes as he crossed his arms over his chest and continued to watch the fairy who wore a face that less and less resembled his old foe’s. Especially when his lips curved in an impish expression like the one he wore now. He wasn’t sure there was ever a time the previous Shen Qingqiu had worn anything close to that expression — at least not while on the mountain. The man would probably have been a lot more popular if he had.

When there was still no answer, Shen Qingqiu chuckled a little. 

“Or were those incidents just another of your little tricks? I had noticed things getting knocked over or moved or getting stuck for a few seconds, these last few weeks… I just didn’t leap to ‘ghost’ as an answer. I hope you forgive me for the oversight.” 

Liu Qingge smiled wryly to himself. It hadn’t occurred to him that knocking over the bowls of stones could end up in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation. If Shen Qingqiu was already growing used to strange little accidents happening, it’s no wonder he wasn’t startled enough to investigate. 

He’d have to find a better way to practice manipulating the material world to avoid similar circumstances. From Shen Qingqiu’s period of long thought and the expression on his face now, as if he’d just sorted through all of the stories he’d ever read and heard told about ghosts, the fairy probably had many ideas he’d like to try out with a presumably friendly ghost.

“If you’ve been here with me this long, I imagine there’s something you want me to do for you.”

Not true, Liu Qingge thought to himself — and then he corrected himself just as quickly. No, that wasn’t quite true. He didn’t have personal unresolved business in the world he needed help with, but he did want something from him. Since he was very much in favor of the fairy’s mission to thwart the dark prophecy, that probably counted towards ‘wanting the fairy to do something for him’.

“I’ll have a think on it and get back to you,” Shen Qingqiu continued, his voice thoughtful. He must have been going through what he knew of Shen Qingqiu and trying to figure out if there was a person who might have unfinished business with him. The fairy shook his head slightly and got to his feet. “For now, I should sleep. If I stay up for much longer, I worry that Binghe might come in and fuss about me staying up too late, and I don’t want him to think I’m ignoring him when I’ve been working so hard to have us get along. Besides — I’m tired. Perhaps you are too?” He waited politely before reaching up to remove the pin from his crown and letting down his hair. “Good night, Ghost. Sleep well…” 

Shen Qingqiu moved around his bedroom, extinguishing the lights before musing out loud, “…Do ghosts sleep?”

Liu Qingge politely left the room as Shen Qingqiu began to undress for bed, though he returned a bit later to linger by the open window, as he always did.

Ghosts, as it happened — at least whatever type he was — did not sleep. The closest it came was when he entered a fuzzy sort of state where he drifted for a few minutes at a time. It was rather like getting lost in thought. He paid no attention to the passing of time in that state, but he was still more than alert enough that he was pulled out of it whenever something caught his attention — as with earlier when Mu Qingfang accidentally disturbed him. Most often it wasn’t that dramatic — it was usually something as simple as Shen Qingqiu turning in his sleep or Luo Binghe waking up early to sneak in an extra round of practice before beginning breakfast prep.

Liu Qingge didn’t mind these silent vigils while Shen Qingqiu slept. One never really knew what might happen in the night where his presence might be useful. What if someone needed the Qing Jing Peak Lord? 

If it was left up to the bookish fairy, he’d probably stay up all night and sleep all day without the assistance of his personal disciples, who kept his sleep schedule to something more reasonable. Even then, the three of them were so indulgent with their sweeter shizun that it sometimes took concerted efforts to get the fairy out of bed in time for breakfast. 

The least Liu Qingge could do was make sure that if no disciples were awake to do that, he could start the process of waking him, which the disciples could finish once they heard the commotion.

He glanced over to the bed where a silver sliver of moonlight crept in from between the poorly closed shutters to drape over his lips, currently parted as the fairy sighed at whatever he was dreaming. 

Liu Qingge found himself wondering if he could touch them.

Touch him. (He quickly shoved the strangely worded version of his thought to the back of his mind. Of course that’s not what he’d meant.) If he needed to wake Shen Qingqiu, it would probably be more effective if he touched him. But he wasn’t sure if he could or not — so far he’d shied away from doing such a thing.

Certainly it must be a warning from whatever instincts he had in his ghostly body that touching a living person could be dangerous.

Why else would his heart race as he thought about it?

Chapter Text

Even after learning that a ghost lingered around him, Shen Qingqiu still had a habit of talking when he was alone in a room. But rather than speaking to himself or to the mysterious invisible fairy associate he referred to as System, now he addressed most of his musings to “Ghost” — treating him almost like a shy student who needed to be teased into answering him.

At first Liu Qingge couldn’t, even if he wanted to. A sense of exhaustion that overwhelmed him on the first day and lingered on the second, warning him not to try.

On the third day, Liu Qingge held himself back out of a desire to almost tease Shen Qingqiu in return, pleased on some level by seeing the expressions play over Shen Qingqiu’s face when he tried to think of ways to coax him into responding. It was like being a cat who was pretending to ignore someone’s attempts to get their attention.

He relented that evening, when Shen Qingqiu appeared to be worried at the silence and asked, “You’re still around, aren’t you? You didn’t get hurt protecting me, I hope?”

Liu Qingge immediately plucked the brush pen Shen Qingqiu loosely held between his fingers and drew it in an arc over the blank sheet of paper in front of him — too deliberate to be anything but him exerting control over the brush. Unfortunately for him, it was not the word he’d meant to write. His confidence was higher than his ghostly dexterity and the brush quickly clattered to the table, ink splattering in the middle of the page underneath the arc.

He scowled at the mess, but Shen Qingqiu looked delighted. Almost sulking at his inelegant results, Liu Qingge resumed half-ignoring Shen Qingqiu’s attempts to communicate, though this time with less cat-like contrariness than embarrassment at his failed grand display to impress the fairy.

Still, Liu Qingge was a little pleased to see Shen Qingqiu take his writing attempt and prop it aside on his desk so he could look at it from time to time as he worked. 

***

Liu Qingge wasn’t the only one to have noticed how cute the new Shen Qingqiu could be.

It would have been singularly astonishing how easily Shen Qingqiu charmed people into forgetting “his past” unless you were aware that he had a fairy’s soul. Presumably it had to do with him being a higher level fairy, as Shang Qinghua did not display the same ability. But everyone from Shen Qingqiu’s disciples, to shopkeepers, to even the other peak lords had some degree fallen under his spell, even if all most were interested in was becoming better acquainted and sharing common interests.

In fact, Liu Qingge quickly realized that everyone but Shen Qingqiu seemed to have noticed how he affected others.

The bookish fairy quickly gathered several admirers who watched him, spellbound, as he grew ever more comfortable in his role and showed no signs of reverting to “his old ways”. The others weren’t to know that wasn’t something he could revert back to — those “old ways” weren’t his to begin with, after all. 

Well… perhaps they weren’t except for his tendency to bully his fairy friend and scare or at least intimidate the backbone out of anyone who dared presume his sweeter nature had declawed him. These were qualities that the two shared (even if the fairy made them more charming). 

It was perhaps precisely this sweet-and-sour contrast that attracted the attention of some of the admirers. 

Specifically it drew the interest of the Beastmaster, lord of the Nameless Peak, which specialized in taming monsters and partnering with spirit beasts. Shen Qingqiu was apparently especially fascinated by the various creatures of the world, leading him to happily ply the Beastmaster (who’d retired his personal name when he assumed the title, as the lord of the Nameless Peak always did) with tea for hours in order to hear more about various monsters and spirit beasts he’d encountered.

The Beastmaster wasn’t the only suitor, but he was the one who seemed to feel he had the most encouragement, so he visited even more often than Shang Qinghua and Yue Qingyuan, who (while distinctly not suitors) between them visited so frequently that it was a wonder there was ever a day Shen Qingqiu had more time to himself than one needed to wash and sleep, much less enjoy a meal alone.

Because of this, Liu Qingge found the Beastmaster annoying. All the more because he’d got along quite well with him in the times their paths intersected — which wasn’t often, as both were frequently away from the mountain. 

Until recently, at least.

The Beastmaster wasn’t a bad person — none of the current peak lords really were (even the previous Shen Qingqiu could at least be depended on and was clear about who he did and didn’t like… which was almost a kind of honesty, though Liu Qingge would definitely not classify him as a ‘good’ person by almost any definition). 

Though he wasn’t a bad person, the Beastmaster had some rather unfortunate flaws. 

For one, there was a very good reason Liu Qingge was called upon to deal with rampaging monsters more often than the Beastmaster: the Beastmaster was a coward. If he knew a creature well enough, he could have any of them eating out of his hands in minutes — but when encountering new creatures, he approached even weak, benevolent ones with extreme caution, taking days, weeks, or even months to study them before he’d make any move to tame one. It was fine when time wasn’t an issue, but most of the time the sect got involved because it was.

There was never a more powerful Beastmaster, but power alone was a poor substitute for substance, in Liu Qingge’s opinion.

And, secondly (and most importantly), the Beastmaster was something of a habitual liar. Never out of malice (his level of maliciousness was inverse to the original Shen Qingqiu’s), but more out of an awareness that as powerful as he was, his cowardice put him well behind even many of his disciples, so he wanted to look as impressive as he was supposed to be. Even Shang Qinghua showed more honest backbone than the Beastmaster, and Shang Qinghua wouldn’t dare take credit for someone else’s work in order to look good. 

Liu Qingge’s opinion of the Beastmaster plummeted every time the reports on the monsters Liu Qingge had encountered and shared with the Beastmaster were relayed to Shen Qingqiu as if they were the Beastmaster’s own experiences. He’d made a point of sending them to the Beastmaster to speed his understanding of the beasts and make things go more smoothly for everyone, so it felt very like a betrayal of his good intentions. 

Quite a few of the Beastmaster’s tea cups ‘mysteriously’ ended up in his lap any time Liu Qingge caught him implying or even outright claiming credit for something Liu Qingge knew were his or even another peak member’s experiences or observations. It happened often enough that Shen Qingqiu stopped offering the Beastmaster quite so much tea and seemed to press him less on his stories.

It wasn’t just Liu Qingge who wanted to see less of the Beastmaster. He wasn’t even the most clever at discouraging his presence.

The disciple of prophecy, Luo Binghe, seemed to share his opinion on the Beastmaster, hovering with jealous attention every time the peak lord visited in a way he didn’t with the hapless Shang Qinghua or the reserved sect master. 

At first, Liu Qingge had taken the boy’s hovering as a display of another hopeful suitor trying to monopolize Shen Qingqiu’s time, but the more he watched the boy, the easier it was to see that he was just threatened by the Beastmaster’s invitations to take Shen Qingqiu down the mountain on adventures. Though the disciple hadn’t quite released his wariness of Shen Qingqiu in order to grow close the way some of the other disciples had, a fierce protectiveness had nonetheless sprung up in the wake of Shen Qingqiu taking an injury to protect him. 

Liu Qingge approved.

Luo Binghe was a highly observant and perceptive disciple, and he’d also clearly learned that drawing too much attention to himself rarely went well for him. So while he’d picked up quickly on the discrepancies in the Beastmaster’s stories, he didn’t dare bring them to his shizun’s notice. 

While the Beastmaster would never dream of harming Shen Qingqiu (and likely had no shot at doing so if he’d tried), Luo Binghe either hadn’t understood that yet, or didn’t care. He’d assessed him as an Undesirable Person and had decided to rid his shizun of the Beastmaster’s company.

The boy’s machinations were the first thing that had sidetracked Liu Qingge’s attention away from Shen Qingqiu since he’d become a ghost. Though he was usually careful to stay within earshot or at least in view of Shen Qingqiu, he kept an eye on Luo Binghe whenever it was clear the boy was up to something.

It took very little for Luo Binghe to determine what days and times the Beastmaster was likely to appear and how he approached Shen Qingqiu. The man preferred times the other peak lords were less likely to visit and walked from his peak to Qing Jing Peak, using a back pathway through the bamboo forest behind Shen Qingqiu’s house.

By the time Liu Qingge had recovered his energy, Luo Binghe had set up a strange contraption by the waterfall that was hidden within the bamboo forest. The contraption had a couple of differently sized vessels that intermittently filled with water and triggered the rise and fall of weighted sacks that tugged at one of a few different ropes that were tied to different bushes or stands of bamboo. Luo Binghe let that soft, distant rustling attract the Beastmaster’s attention for a few visits, altering the patterns each time and observing the peak lord’s nervous, but incurious reactions.

Roughly a week later, Luo Binghe had finished serving his master tea. With the slight smirk around his lips that Liu Qingge recognized as his Scheming expression, Luo Binghe left the room. Liu Qingge gave Shen Qingqiu a glance, knowing the peak lord would happily read his newest novel for the next few hours without leaving, so he followed the boy out of the bamboo house and to the tool shed.

Not long after, the Beastmaster walked along the path to discover Luo Binghe hip-deep in a pit he was digging next to the path. The Beastmaster stopped when Luo Binghe caught sight of him while he wiped sweat from his brow and climbed out of the pit to bow to him, his shovel politely tucked behind his arm like a sword — as if he might need it for protection. 

“Beastmaster-Shishu,” Luo Binghe greeted him.

“Ara… You’re Disciple Binghe, right?” the Beastmaster responded cheerfully. At the boy’s nod, he asked, “What are you doing out here in the forest? I thought this area of the peak was not often visited?”

Luo Binghe raised his gaze and offered a small, somewhat awkward smile, though his dark eyes had a watchful gleam that, truthfully, the Beastmaster should have recognized. Though he did tend to avoid interacting with predators, so perhaps he wouldn’t.

“Answering Shishu, I am digging a pit. As you said, this area of the peak is not often used. This is perhaps why a beast has moved in and made it its home.”

The Beastmaster flinched slightly, glancing down at the pit and then towards the bamboo forest surrounding them. Obligingly, the contraption produced a perfectly timed soft rustle. Both froze, but as they heard no other sounds, the Beastmaster chuckled nervously.

“Ah? Is that so? What sort of beast — do you know?” 

“Answering Shishu, I believe it to be a Tainttalon Grasscat,” the boy said, eyes suspiciously wide and innocent, as if he were eagerly awaiting his shishu’s wisdom, but too shy to ask for it directly yet.

“A-ah…!” the Beastmaster replied, turning paper pale with alarm. 

A Tainttalon Grasscat was precisely the sort of creature he’d avoid at all costs. They were clever, not terribly afraid of anything, and extremely dangerous even without factoring in the previous two qualities. Though they tended to prefer not to attack humans — especially not those with high cultivation — a bold one wouldn’t be shy about hunting the unwary. Especially as they could absorb cultivation power from what they ate. It might stalk a human victim for days before deciding to take a swipe at their prey, their razor-sharp claws leaving wounds that could be taken as insect bites or scratches from undergrowth before the poison took effect and the victim was left weak, helpless, and likely far away from wherever the Grasscat had made their den. The Grasscat could collect their weakened victim in the night with no one the wiser.

When the Beastmaster said nothing, Luo Binghe pressed him a little harder. “Does Shishu have advice to offer on the pit? Several of our chickens have gone missing, so I thought if I made a large pit-trap and placed a chicken on top of it…”

The chickens were certainly missing, though Luo Binghe was dutifully caring for those he’d abducted and hidden in the forest. Liu Qingge was sure they’d be miraculously located once the boy’s purpose was served.

“Ah — n-no. That… Aiyah…” The Beastmaster stammered as he nervously shifted his weight from foot to foot, eyes darting down the path the way he’d come and then again towards the little bamboo house ahead. Finally he took a breath and, somewhat miraculously, played the responsible role for once. “Come. If it is a Grasscat, Tainttalon or otherwise, it is not safe to be in the bamboo forest alone. Especially not so close to dusk.”

Though nervy, the Beastmaster waited for Luo Binghe before leading the way hurriedly down the path, hand frequently going to one of the talismans he wore around his neck, each of which could summon a favorite spirit beast. Liu Qingge followed them, amused as he watched Luo Binghe trot alongside the Beastmaster, his guileless expression slipping to a sort of playfully wicked satisfaction whenever the Beastmaster’s attention was drawn to some insignificant or entirely imaginary sound in the bamboo forest.

“Listen,” the Beastmaster said, stopping when the end of the path through the forest came into view. The porch of the bamboo house could be just seen from where they stood. “I will return to my peak and dig up all the information the Nameless Peak has on Grasscats, the toxin of the Tainttalon Grasscat, and how to deal with one. I’ll send it to your shizun as soon as I can. Please inform him and apologize to him for my not being available for the next few days while I do the research.”

“En! Thanking Shishu for his trouble!” Luo Binghe said, leaning forward with starry eyes and a beaming smile. “I’m sure Shizun can depend on Shishu for assistance if he needs it! It is not often Shishu is at the peak, so we are lucky he is here!”

Liu Qingge couldn’t help but snort to himself at the boy’s manipulative words. Predictably, the Beastmaster took the bait, seizing on the idea and running exactly the direction Luo Binghe likely intended with it.

“Aiyah… Zhangmen-Shixiong does have a task waiting for me… I have been delaying my departure from the mountain, but may not be able to put it off for much longer. Research may be all I have time for. Of course, you may rely on my disciples if Shen Qingqiu-Shixiong needs back-up…! It is too bad Liu-Shixiong…” he shook his head fretfully. “I will write your shizun if Zhangmen-Shixiong sends me away before I can help capture the beast.”

“En, Shishu…” Luo Binghe said, bowing to him.

The Beastmaster hesitated, glancing towards the house as if trying to decide whether or not to visit while he was there already, so Liu Qingge dragged his hand through the nearby poles of bamboo, knocking them together to produce a sound like a large creature trying to push its way through to rush at the two.

Almost bravely, the cowardly peak lord grabbed Luo Binghe’s arm and dragged him with him as he bolted down the path towards the house. 

With a confused and vaguely alarmed backwards glance, the boy went, gamely keeping pace until they were safely at the front of the house. He was soon agreeing to his shishu’s instructions to have torches lit along the perimeter of the house, dormitories, and animal pens for the next few nights to discourage attacks. Then the Beastmaster hurried off towards Qiong Ding Peak, clearly in hopes that Yue Qingyuan could be coaxed to send him away from the mountain quickly.

The next day, Shen Qingqiu was in possession of several copies from texts that had information about Grasscats, their various properties, and methods of dealing with them as well as a note expressing regret that it might be some time until their next meeting, until we next meet; etc. 

The Beastmaster had left the mountain later the same day.

Luo Binghe no longer played the timid disciple. Ridding himself of a peak lord he’d disapproved of was apparently all he’d needed to gain the confidence necessary to assert himself on his peak, and Shen Qingqiu accepted this new confidence without hesitation. 

The chickens were all the better for their little adventure and the meticulous care their kidnapper took of them. That said, they seemed to sulk when they realized Luo Binghe was no longer going to pamper them and ceased their production of the particularly large eggs that had been making their way to Shen Qingqiu’s table during their captivity.

Shen Qingqiu seemed interested in the information on Grasscats, if mildly confused about its inexplicable delivery, but he was not the least bit regretful of the loss of company, nor did he question the (apparently completely unnecessary, as far as Shen Qingqiu was aware) assurance that the Nameless Peak would be glad to deal with any issues with beasts and monsters that Qing Jing Peak might run into.

His attention was far too distracted by having come up with a method of communicating with his ghost to think twice about the Beastmaster’s parting gifts. 

***

The same afternoon the Beastmaster left to study the migration patterns of a kaleidoscope of Ambrosia Honeybee Butterflies (who collected nectar in hives scattered along their migration routes, which gave it healing properties that Mu Qingfang was very interested in — at the Beastmaster’s usual pace was a quest that might take him two years before he returned), Shen Qingqiu gently shooed the warmly attentive Luo Binghe to sword practice and sat down at his bedroom table with a fresh sheet of parchment paper.

Liu Qingge moved closer to watch as the peak lord weighted down the four corners of the paper and neatly wrote the words: YES and NO on two ends of the paper and HELLO and GOOD-BYE at the top. As the ink dried, he pulled an arrowhead shaped piece of wood from his sleeve and placed it deliberately on the middle of the paper in the empty space between YES and NO, the click sharp enough to draw a satisfied smile to the man’s lips.

There was a brief pause before Shen Qingqiu waved his fan, sending a little swirl of qi-backed air to completely dry any remaining damp patches of ink.

“Ghost? Are you here?” 

Shen Qingqiu had hung a scroll painting the day after the ink brush incident and asked him to confirm his presence by making the decorative tassel attached to the bottom move. It was really the only particular effort that Shen Qingqiu had requested of him so far and as it was a trivial thing to do, Liu Qingge followed the previously established protocol and made a negligent motion of his hand to move the tassel.

“Wonderful!” Shen Qingqiu enthused, sitting up, his eyes glittering with excitement. “I assume you can read? Come here. I’ve remembered something called a spirit board. We can use this to communicate. You can move this piece of wood to point to the word you wish to answer with.”

Liu Qingge thought for a moment before moving the arrow-shaped piece of wood first to “YES” and then to “HELLO” as that seemed to be what Shen Qinqiu had written it for.

“Hello!” Shen Qingqiu chirped before breaking into the biggest smile Liu Qingge had seen from him yet. “Excellent! I have so many questions for you!” 

Liu Qingge smiled. He could only imagine that was an understatement.

“I’ve noticed that any time you’ve done anything, well, big, you wouldn’t do anything else for awhile. I assume that ‘big’ things tire you out?”

That seemed to be correct, so he moved the arrow to “YES”, watching as Shen Qingqiu leaned forward to track the movement.

“Does this seem like it might be too tiring for you? Moving the planchette, I mean.”

Liu Qingge wasn’t familiar with the word ‘planchette’ but assumed it meant the arrow, so he moved it to “NO” — he was pretty sure he could do this for quite awhile without issue.

“Good! If you feel yourself tiring or, I suppose, hear someone coming, you can move the planchette to say ‘good-bye’ and we can stop. All right?”

“YES”

Shen Qingqiu leaned back with a smile, looking nearly as satisfied as Luo Binghe had upon achieving his goal with ridding them of the Beastmaster. The fairy was just not nearly so smug about it.

There was a brief pause while Shen Qingqiu appeared to organize his thoughts, absently tucking hair behind his ears as he stared down at the spirit board.

“Can you point the arrow in the direction you are? I’d like to look properly at you while I’m speaking to you, even if I can’t see you. It feels rude otherwise.”

Liu Qingge obediently moved to kneel on the other side of the table from Shen Qingqiu and then pointed the arrow towards himself. He was immediately rewarded by Shen Qingqiu looking up with another bright smile. If he had been physical, their eyes would have met — the fairy had managed to look directly at him, causing a little frisson to run through Liu Qingge’s incorporeal form.

“Hello, Ghost,” Shen Qingqiu said softly.

“HELLO” Liu Qingge gamely responded after a brief pause, feeling an odd intimacy in the conversation now that was absent before.

Shen Qingqiu dropped his eyes to the spirit board and smiled before it went a little wry. “A proper spirit board would have more to it so you could write full messages back to me, but that would probably be too troublesome and frustrating for both of us and I worry you’d tire too easily. We’ll stick with this simplified form for now until I can think of a better method. Unless you can speak yet? Have you tried?”

Hesitantly, Liu Qingge’s hand moved to the arrow and started to move it towards “NO” but he stopped before getting there. He hadn’t tried, but he didn’t know if he could, so he wasn’t sure whether or not to answer ‘NO’ when there were two questions. Instead, he left it where it was, a little away from the word, before he looked over at Shen Qingqiu.

“Shen Qingqiu,” he said firmly. Or thought he had, but he didn’t even hear himself.

He watched closely, but there wasn’t a flicker of response in the bookish fairy, who continued to stare eagerly down at the wooden arrow. Liu Qingge sighed and moved the arrow all the way to the word, “NO” — a little disappointed it wouldn’t be that easy. Something else to practice now, he supposed.

“No? Oh — no wonder you hesitated. I asked you two questions, didn’t I… Then you tried and cannot speak?”

“YES”

“What a shame. We’ll try practicing it.”

Liu Qingge thought for a moment before pulling the arrow back before moving it again to point to “YES”

“Oh. I appreciate you reinforcing the answer. Do you have to practice to move things?”

“YES”

“And are you getting better at it — or, I guess, is it getting easier?”

Liu Qingge pulled the arrow back. Rather than just pushing it back to ‘YES’ yet again, he decided to show off a little, scooping it up and flipping it in the air like a coin before setting it back on the affirmative. It certainly cost him more energy, but he thought it was the best way to show that he was getting stronger.

“Oh,” Shen Qingqiu breathed, looking as impressed as if Liu Qingge had leveled a mountain. 

Liu Qingge sighed to himself, the reaction giving him mixed feelings. It didn’t feel that long ago where leveling a mountain was something he might actually be capable of, if he wanted to waste a lot of effort to destroy a perfectly good mountain, which of course he didn’t. But on the other hand, it was a great deal of effort to interact with the world now and he was pleased with provoking that sort of expression out of the fairy… 

“Can you do anything else other than move objects?” Shen Qingqiu asked.

“NO” he indicated, though it was fair to say he hadn’t really tried. Then he remembered being able to move through solid objects and quickly moved the arrow over to “YES” — just to be sure he wasn’t lying.

“Ah? Which is it?”

“YES”

“What—” Shen Qingqiu broke off. “I guess that would be difficult to explain just with the available answers… Hmmm.”

The fairy took up his brush again, inked it, and wrote three new possible responses, waving his fan to try to dry the ink on, “PERHAPS”, “DON’T KNOW”, and “COMPLICATED”.

As he inked the words, he spoke, “Obviously these aren’t going to help you answer that question either, but not every question has a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, so it should still help a little.”

He set the brush almost carelessly aside on the inkstone and indicated his work with his expressive hands.

“Those should be clear enough, but just in case, ‘PERHAPS’ is an answer for questions that aren’t a strict ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘DON’T KNOW’ for answers you don’t have, and ‘COMPLICATED’ if you have an answer, but the other answers don’t suit. Will that work?”

“PERHAPS” Liu Qingge answered, mostly to amuse himself. 

Inspired by Shen Qingqiu’s little yelp at the slight smear the ink left when the wooden arrow passed over the edge of a word, Liu Qingge concentrated so he could dip his fingertip into the inkstone’s reservoir and leave behind two dots and a crescent shape. A child’s drawing of a smile was now tucked in the top corner of the paper, near HELLO. 

He felt like he’d run from the bottom of Cang Qiong Mountain to the top of his peak at full tilt from the effort that it took — writing words again would take quite a lot of practice and effort, no doubt — but he was more than satisfied when Shen Qingqiu sucked in a breath and held it. After a moment, the fairy’s cheeks flushed and Liu Qingge watched with wonder as he registered the unfamiliar softness of that expression on a face that once belonged to someone else.

Finally Shen Qingqiu released his held breath and quietly said, “You’re a person, aren’t you? Not a nature spirit or something like that, but someone’s ghost.” His eyes still stared at the drawing of the smile.

“YES”

“Someone I know?”

Liu Qingge wasn’t sure how to answer that one. After a few moments, he moved it from “PERHAPS” to “DON’T KNOW” and finally to “COMPLICATED”. On thinking about it, he moved it back to “PERHAPS”.

Instead of looking annoyed or confused by his answer, Shen Qingqiu just looked thoughtful, humming to himself and toying with his fan. The fairy was far more attached to his fans than the original Shen Qingqiu ever had been. Liu Qingge wondered if the fairy had an exaggerated idea of the original’s use of a fan or if it was his own habit he’d brought with him. It suited him either way. Whether he realized it or not, he ‘said’ quite a lot without using words.

Perhaps that, more than the sweet-and-sour attitude, was what had actually attracted the Beastmaster’s attention. It was like reading the body language of a creature. The original Shen Qingqiu was rarely expressive in this way — his choices in displaying emotions were all usually very calculated unless he was in a rage. (Or, based on what he’d seen in Ling Xi Caves, perhaps also in the rare cases he was truly alarmed.) But though the fairy certainly knew how to use his body language to deceive and was good at it, he didn’t seem to have any idea he unconsciously betrayed himself when he was feeling more relaxed too. Perhaps that was why those who tended to watch people more closely were drawn in by the fairy. 

“I suppose by that, you mean that I would know the name, but we’ve never personally met,” Shen Qingqiu finally said, interrupting Liu Qingge’s observations.

“YES”

Shen Qingqiu worried his lower lip, glancing up and to his left briefly before frowning to himself and picking up the fan to hold tightly in his lap. “Do you know who I am?”

“YES”, “COMPLICATED” Liu Qingge indicated.

“I’m Shen Qingqiu,” the fairy suggested.

“COMPLICATED” Liu Qingge said again, before moving it to “NO” and then “PERHAPS”.

The fairy laughed almost helplessly. “I suppose that might be difficult to answer. I wasn’t born with the name, after all.”

“NO” The fairy’s name had something to do with Cucumbers.

“To confirm — you are a ghost?”

It felt like the fairy was stalling or circling around the point, but Liu Qingge allowed it. It wasn’t as if he could direct the conversation as easily. 

“YES”

“Of someone who knew Shen Qingqiu?”

“YES”

“When you died… Was it a long time ago?”

“NO”

“Then recently?”

“YES”

“…are you…” the fairy hesitated before very carefully asking, “Do you have a grudge against me?”

“NO” 

Feeling a little frustrated, knowing they were so close to the point, Liu Qingge indicated “NO” multiple times until the fairy laughed rather weakly and reached out to press down on the wooden arrow to stop it from moving. For a moment Liu Qingge thought he felt the touch of his hand as it passed through his and froze.

“Enough. I understand. Calm down.”

Liu Qingge reluctantly withdrew his hand, huffing noiselessly and turning his attention to the heavy jade paperweight holding down one of the corners of the paper, forcing it to face a different direction.

The fairy chuckled with a little more energy that time. “Are you young?” The tone was almost teasing.

“PERHAPS” Whether or not he was ‘young’ was relative.

“Then, about my age?”

“YES”

“A woman?”

“NO”

“I thought not. That is a relief, though. You’ve been staying close for the most part, haven’t you?”

A little embarrassed, he indicated, “PERHAPS”

The fairy smirked as if he knew better. “I see. You’ve been giving me privacy.”

“YES”, “YES”, “YES”

The fairy leaned back and laughed until he was breathless. “I’m just teasing, it’s fine. It’s okay.”

Liu Qingge dipped his fingers in the ink and drew an angry face out of two dots, another crescent, and slashing eyebrows, which made the fairy laugh again. He was getting tired, but it was worth it to see the fairy begin to relax from his earlier tension.

“You’ve been here since I woke up from Ling Xi Caves.” 

He didn’t make that a question, but Liu Qingge answered anyway. “YES”

“And you were with me before?”

“NO”

“Then you know.”

There was no hesitation — he answered before Shen Qingqiu felt the need to clarify his question. “YES”

“Are you the real Shen Qingqiu?”

“NO” The arrow moved so quickly to deny it that Liu Qingge was surprised he didn’t rip the paper.

The fairy seemed stunned. “N-no?”

“NO”

There was a long pause where emotions chased over his face and Liu Qingge waited. 

“…But I would know your name?” the fairy finally asked.

“YES”

“And you died recently…”

“YES”

“Are you… Liu Qingge?”

“YES”

There was another long pause that somehow seemed to go on for even longer than it took for the fairy to process that he wasn’t speaking with the ghost of the original Shen Qingqiu. Finally the fairy sat forward and smacked the fan on the edge of his table as if irritated.

“…I thought you said you were young!”

What?

Confused, Liu Qingge indicated “YES” again and stared at the fairy, utterly dumbfounded.

“Aren’t you, like, a 50 year old man or something?” the fairy asked, tone somewhat strangled, almost as if offended.

“NO” For some reason annoyed, Liu Qingge moved the wooden arrow to the angry face and back to “NO”.

“Oh, fine. I’m asking Shang Qinghua later, don’t think I won’t.” The fairy pointed the closed fan in his general direction like an accusatory finger.

“NO” (angry face) “NO”

“Ha!” the fairy said, triumphant, almost crowing as if he’d caught him lying. “No need to be embarrassed. It’s fine to be older than me. I won’t call you Geezer or anything.”

“NO” (angry face) (angry face) “NO”

The fairy just rocked back and laughed and laughed until tears came to his eyes.

“GOOD-BYE” Liu Qingge indicated before getting up, ignoring the fairy’s giggling attempts to coax him back to the table. He was tired anyway.

***

“What do you mean, he’s younger than Shen Qingqiu?” the fairy demanded that evening, gripping the other fairy by the collar and almost knocking over the dinner set on the table between them.

Since it was too awkward to think of them by their assumed names when they were currently referring to the peak lords as different people, Liu Qingge reluctantly let himself think of them by their odd fairy names. Just for now.

“Er,” Airplane clarified, freezing as if it might save him from being menaced.

Liu Qingge smirked, leaning against the wall as he watched, arms crossed over his chest.

“Answer!”

“Ah! He’s Shen Qingqiu’s junior brother, both in age and by peak precedence… Please let go.”

“By how much?”

“Why does it ma— Aaah, stop pulling! I don’t know? A year? Two, maybe? I never really thought about it, so I don’t remember if I ever said! Why???” 

Released, the hapless fairy scrambled away from his fellow, glancing mournfully at the food that was now too far away to reach without getting back in range of the bookish fairy’s attack. Starting from the weiqi explosion incident, Luo Binghe took over preparing his master’s meals. The difference between what was served when the fairy had arrived and now was clearly night and day, even if he knew for a fact that the boy only put in his full effort for his master alone.

“I thought he was one of those cool ripped geezers! What the hell, Airplane!”

“Seriously, Bro, you’re being weird. What’s got up your ass about this anyway?” Airplane asked.

“What does he look like, then?” Cucumber asked, flopping back in his seat and toying with his fan, shoulders slumped with defeat.

Airplane rolled his eyes at his fellow fairy’s lack of reasoning ability. “He’s the peerless Liu Mingyan’s brother. He matches her, really.”

“What? Girlish?” Cucumber asked, head lifting and looking as if he were perking up by scenting a way to save face for his mistake in thinking of Liu Qingge as an old man. 

Before Airplane could answer, Liu Qingge flicked the teapot with its by-now lukewarm tea into Cucumber’s lap. This caused such great chaos that the conversation was immediately forgotten in the hurry to clean up the mess before Luo Binghe saw or anything got stained (in that approximate order of priority, it seemed).

It was the most childish thing that Liu Qingge had ever done in his life (even more-so than doing the same to the Beastmaster), but he was filled with enough satisfaction for two lifetimes because of it.

Chapter Text

The day after The Teapot Incident, Shang Qinghua burst into the sitting room of the little bamboo house, interrupting the beginning of a new spirit board session between Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu. They both looked over, Shen Qingqiu freezing as if being caught in some borderline unsavory act. 

Shang Qinghua didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he closed the door firmly behind himself and stared wild-eyed at his friend, face pale and body almost quivering with tension.

“Yue Qingyuan is leaving the mountain tomorrow.”

“…ah…” Shen Qingqiu responded, his expression blank. Then he straightened and calmly rolled up the paper spirit board to set it aside. 

They’d barely said more than ‘hello’ and established where Liu Qingge was sitting before they’d been interrupted, so Liu Qingge was mildly annoyed. From Shen Qingqiu’s behavior, it didn’t seem as if he was angry about what happened the previous day, but it would have been better to clear the air and affirm he’d meant no harm. Not that Shen Qingqiu could have possibly taken any harm from his petty revenge, but after the first heady rush of ‘being troublesome’ faded, Liu Qingge hadn’t been able to fully enjoy himself out of worry it’d been taken in the wrong way. It bothered him that he couldn’t communicate it immediately, and now he had to wait even longer.

“Don’t ‘ah’ me! Don’t you know what this means???” Shang Qinghua protested, flinging his arms violently into the air before moving over to plop down on the cushion on the other side of the table, nearly sitting on Liu Qingge. 

He would have, if Liu Qingge hadn’t quickly moved. From the odd expression on Shen Qingqiu’s face, he was thinking that his friend was sitting in a ghost’s lap without realizing. 

It was almost funny.

“Bro!” Shang Qinghua whined, hands crawling towards his ears as if he’d be tugging at his hair if it wasn’t pinned up.

“Aiyah…” Shen Qingqiu rolled his eyes and tsked before he thought for a moment. His expression sobered. “The Demonic Invasion incident.”

“Exactly!” Shang Qinghua responded, arms thrusting into the air again (this time with relief) before his entire body crumpled in on itself with worry. “What do we do, Bro? Should we call him back? Put up wards or whatever to keep them out?”

“Of course not. This is important for Binghe’s growth. Just… maybe we can do our best to prevent people from getting hurt. Assuming the demons are actually going to show up.”

“Trust me — it’s happening. Maybe it’s even happening right now and we don’t even know it yet! It’s already been delayed by, what? More than a month by this point? Yue Qingyuan’s been hanging around because the novelty of a Shen Qingqiu who didn’t bite his head off for looking his way was too exciting.”

Shen Qingqiu made a face. “Don’t make it weird by saying it like that.” 

Liu Qingge could only agree with that request, even if Shang Qinghua was entirely correct.

“What do we do?” Shang Qinghua repeated, curling up in a nervous ball on the floor.

***

Apparently what they could do was review what they knew from the prophecy and extrapolate a new plan based on what had already changed from the events as they knew them. 

If the prophecy held true, the demons’ goal was to take the inscription hanging in Qiong Ding Hall to bring back as a war trophy… and if they could overwhelm the peak or at least injure or kill some disciples before retreating, all the better.

With that in mind, the two peak lords (three, really, as Liu Qingge voiced his opinions by tugging at Shen Qingqiu’s left or right sleeve to indicate agreement or disagreement — and judging by Shen Qingqiu’s hesitation or alteration of his words, he’d quickly understood which was which) arrived at something of a plan.

First they would limit the possible points of entry to a single winding path that would take the demons through disused corners of the mountain before they arrived at Qiong Ding Peak. Apparently it was important to the prophecy that Luo Binghe be recognized as a talented disciple, so they could not empty the peak of disciples as a large number should be there to witness his abilities. But there was no need to put the youngest and weakest members of the sect at risk of injuries, especially as there were very few peak lords currently in residence aside from the two (three) of them. 

Yue Qingyuan would leave the next day and the others were in seclusion if they were on the mountain at all. According to Shang Qinghua, Mu Qingfang seemed to be collecting ingredients in a nearby forest, but the prophecy indicated he wouldn’t return until it was too late to join the battle.

So they agreed that they should take advantage of the fact that there would be no peak lords around to interfere. 

Shang Qinghua would be responsible for organizing and setting the arrays that would dictate the ‘unintentional’ gap in their defenses and then he would lead a sort of training camp for the youngest disciples, assisted by most of the weakest of the rest. This camp would happen on the furthest peak from the direction the demons would arrive from and last until either after the invasion, or Yue Qingyuan returned, whichever happened first.

For his part, Shen Qingqiu would host a daily sparring session at Qiong Ding Peak for any who wished to participate. If challenged about his authority to do so, Shen Qingqiu would claim that Yue Qingyuan agreed to it — and the camp — and there was little chance of anyone bothering to press it further. 

Even other peak lords — if they actually returned to the mountain between now and when the expected events unfolded — would wait for the sect leader to return rather than interfere, knowing there was next to no possibility that Yue Qingyuan would say anything that would lead to Shen Qingqiu losing face. Especially if nothing he was doing seemed to be of any harm, which training events like that could hardly be classified as. Only Liu Qingge himself might have persisted in thwarting Shen Qingqiu, and for obvious reasons the current circumstances meant no one with enough authority would move themselves to do so.

According to the prophecy, the demons should arrive, make a bit of a ruckus, challenge the sect to a three-round sparring competition so each side could end hostilities while saving face, and the whole matter would be settled when the sect won and drove the demons off. Luo Binghe would earn his accolades and everything would go back to normal, albeit with improved security so something of the like wouldn’t happen again.

It was a good plan.

It was truly a shame that things went awry almost immediately.

***

As An Ding Peak studied arrays more extensively than most peaks due to the different ways it helped them in their tasks, it was a simple matter for Shang Qinghua to direct his senior disciples to place the agreed upon arrays exactly where he told them to.

The first step of their approach to the situation was, in fact, set into motion in only a few hours from when they’d had the idea. Shang Qinghua had sent instructions to his head disciple to begin work on placing the arrays in the designated spots while they were still finalizing the rest of their plans. By all reports, the disciples were excited to do as asked, begging to be on the array team their master organized. (Which was not surprising as they were rarely asked to do anything more interesting than create arrays for transporting items or protecting structural integrity.)

Based on their calculations, the arrays would be completely in place by the next afternoon.

Areas within the mountain’s boundaries therefore gained protections that they had likely not required in many generations — and why would they? Things had been peaceful for long enough that even the exterior protections hadn’t been maintained as well as they should have been. Not even during the last major demon uprising had the mountain’s individual peaks required protections guarding them from threats within the sect’s boundaries. But now it would be difficult for the invading demons to catch all twelve peaks unprepared.

It was really the only part of the plan that went the way they’d expected it to.

They spent the rest of the day sending messages about the arrays and the supplies necessary for the camp to An Ding and plotting together, going into details about the Demonic Invasion that Liu Qingge found himself tuning out after the second time hearing them. Especially since the two fairies seemed to argue over the particulars. (He still didn’t understand enough about fairy social hierarchy to understand why things were Shang Qinghua’s fault, but he figured it was best he didn’t question it. There were likely many things in the cultivation world the fairies found just as arbitrary or confusing.)

During the few hours the two fairies napped, sprawled over the table and the floor, Liu Qingge appreciated the silence that reigned. At least until Luo Binghe arrived with the morning tea and squawked with horror that they’d never gone properly to bed. The two peak lords sheepishly submitted to a scolding along with their breakfast and agreed to meet up a few hours later after a wash and dressing in a fresh set of clothes.

As the afternoon set in, Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua sent their younger disciples ahead to the proposed camp site and began going peak to peak together to collect more of the young and the weak for the ‘training camp’. Other disciples from their peaks joined them on their procession, to be used as guides to the camp or runners for messages if it proved necessary.

While they waited the arrival of the new training camp candidates, they took the time to inform the more senior and stronger disciples of each peak about the mock competitions that would be starting the next day. 

That was when they began running into resistance. 

Most of the peaks gave over their disciples to the custody of the two peak lords with no more question than a confused, “Shizun didn’t tell us about this…?” but bowed due to their combined confidence and the subtle pressure Shen Qingqiu exuded on those disciples with the stronger backbones. A few of the more suspicious of the older disciples insisted on participating in the camp, “To assist Shishu (or Shibo).” but as neither peak lord had an issue with that, this seemed to put any lingering wariness to rest.

Not so when they arrived at Xian Shu Peak.

Liu Mingyan was the head disciple of Xian Shu and had obviously been informed of their upcoming visit. She was already on her way to meet the peak lords at the gates at the foot of her master’s peak, flanked by several beautiful, but obviously equally strong-willed senior disciples, if their poised stances and confident gazes spoke to their true attitudes.

Liu Qingge watched his sister’s veil flutter as she took the last few steps and bowed gracefully to the two peak lords. She greeted them with demure words and cold, cold eyes that she pinned to Shen Qingqiu, clearly marking him as the mastermind behind the strange activities going on while the other peak lords were busy elsewhere.

Which was perfectly correct, of course.

While the two peak lords and Mingyan exchanged the expected pleasantries and then Shen Qingqiu indicated that Shang Qinghua explain about the training camp, Shen Qingqiu watched her closely. Liu Qingge watched as well.

He couldn’t decide if it shamed him — as opposed to disappointed or worried him — to realize he hadn’t considered visiting his own sister to see how she was coping with his death. She was now the only surviving member of their family, after all, and they’d grown close since she’d arrived at the sect. Especially recently, when they’d both had more time to spend together. But he’d thought of his disciples before he’d thought of his own blood, and he wasn’t sure it reflected well on him. 

In his defense, it was rather difficult to think of such things right now. 

He’d considered visiting his peak several times, but always lost interest quickly, worrying that he’d leave Shen Qingqiu unprotected if he went that far. Sometimes even leaving the same room as Shen Qingqiu filled him with unease, and he couldn’t explain why.

This… was something, perhaps, to bring up with Shen Qingqiu when they had the privacy to have another spirit board discussion, though it was beyond him to plan for how to get the topic to come up if he couldn’t speak or write. But he thought it was important. 

He might have bound himself to Shen Qingqiu somehow in his efforts to remain earthbound rather than passing beyond the veil of the living and the dead. That might excuse his neglect, though he still felt guilty for it. Especially without knowing if he was correct in his suspicions.

Watching his sister, he was sure she wasn’t doing well. She was pale and a little thinner, her posture stiff in spite of her attempts to feign a relaxed and welcoming attitude, and her eyes were like ice-covered irises. (Though it was fair to say her flower-colored eyes would likely not be warm for her shibo regardless.)

“No,” she said simply, when the request to fetch the young disciples was made.

She was polite but firm with Shang Qinghua. With Shen Qingqiu, she had the subtle menace of someone slowly sliding their hand into a sleeve both knew held a hidden dagger. There was no overt threat, or obvious rudeness, but she had made her decision and her peak sisters were ready to defend it if they had to.

“Shizun left very specific instructions as to our training while she is gone. She will return in a day or two — you may ask her then. If you will excuse us, Shen-Shibo; Shang-Shishu — we have many things to do to stay on schedule. In fact, we may be enough behind we should not leave our peak until Shizun returns,” Mingyan concluded with a coolness to her expression that made her seem even more unapproachable.

“Please consider attending the sparring sessions at Qiong Ding Peak, at least. It would be a shame for any peak to be absent from the rare opportunity to train with the others,” Shen Qingqiu persisted gently.

Liu Mingyan paused and lifted her eyes in a sharp movement like flung daggers. “Will you be there, Shen-Shibo?”

Liu Qingge sensed Shen Qingqiu tense a little, though it wouldn’t have been visible to anyone who wasn’t standing as close as Liu Qingge currently was. “I am. It is only correct that I attend when I am organizing it. Disciples may come any time from an hour after the morning bell to an hour before the evening bell. I will be there.”

“And will you be participating, or just watching?” she asked, her words crafted to sound mildly curious, but her gaze keen and unflinching over her veil.

Shen Qingqiu stalled for a moment, chuckling and unfurling his fan to waft it lazily in front of himself. “I might consider participating, but I don’t want to be accused of trying to usurp the place of anyone’s shizun by seeming to instruct anyone…”

“I’m sure my master would understand,” she said softly.

Her intent was clear to anyone who had enough information to know her current source of resentment. But ostensibly Shen Qingqiu didn’t, so he managed another light laugh and almost indulgently said, “Then I will look forward to seeing you there if your training schedule allows it, Shizhi.”

Mingyan’s expression relaxed into a sort of satisfaction before she bowed beautifully and made extremely polite goodbyes to the peak lords. The gates of Xian Shu shut and locked tightly behind the young women, silently underscoring their intentions to withdraw from the rest of the sect until their shizun returned. 

Shen Qingqiu waved a hand to urge the disciples with them to walk ahead towards the next peak.

Once the others were no longer in earshot, Shang Qinghua leaned in and hissed, “She’s going to freaking murder you, Bro!”

Shen Qingqiu laughed wryly, looking maybe a little less worried about it than he probably should have been. 

“Well, at least we don’t have to worry about them if they’re too paranoid about what I’m up to to leave the peak. And as long as I can interest Liu Mingyan in attending the Qiong Ding Peak event in hopes of sparring with me, she’ll be there to participate in moving the plot ahead. It’s fine, it’s fine.”

Liu Qingge placed a sympathetic hand on Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder. It wasn’t the fairy’s fault he’d died. It wasn’t even the original Shen Qingqiu’s fault.

Apparently the fairy felt the touch because his hand reflexively moved up as if to cover it before he disguised the motion as an attempt to settle his hair. In an off-hand way, he lightly said, “Don’t worry — I won’t hurt her.”

“Dude, I wasn’t worried about that! Of course not!” Shang Qinghua responded with an odd motion of his hand. Liu Qingge smiled, appreciating both the reassurance from the fairy and his friend’s immediate conviction in its truth, even if the words had clearly been intended for Liu Qingge’s ears. What Shang Qinghua followed it up with was far less reassuring. “I remember you saying she was your favorite wife.”

Liu Qingge frowned and gave Shen Qingqiu a hard poke in the shoulder — hard enough that he actually saw the indent in the fabric. Shen Qingqiu’s brows drew together in a slight wince before he cast an almost nervous smile in Liu Qingge’s general direction.

“I’ll explain later,” he muttered before hurrying forward to catch up to the others, his ears a bit pink. 

Liu Qingge followed with a scowl, knowing the fairy was trying to prevent anything else from being said that he wouldn’t appreciate and the fairy wouldn’t be able to explain to him. He still didn’t understand why Shen Qingqiu hadn’t shared his ghostly presence with the other fairy, but he must have had a reason. He’d have to try to get that out of him too.

He really needed to figure out how to speak.

***

The attack happened in the middle of the night — not during the daytime as the fairies had expected.

On the plus side, most of the more vulnerable were safely tucked away on the far side of the mountain, presumably laying in tents and regretting the loss of their more comfortable beds at their own peaks. 

But almost everything else about the situation was to their disadvantage.

The only reason Shen Qingqiu was able to leave his peak in anything other than just his sleeping attire was because the quick-witted Luo Binghe ran after him with a robe in his hands. If not for that, Shen Qingqiu’s single-minded determination to protect the sect might have meant he left Luo Binghe behind in his rush to ride his spirit sword over to the red glow that marked Qiong Ding Peak. Instead, Shen Qingqiu was reminded of his duties and was able to shout instructions to the other disciples who had woken when the alarm arrays went off. 

Once his orders were given, he grabbed Luo Binghe and pulled him in front of him on his sword. Liu Qingge gripped Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder and was pulled along with them.

Qiong Ding Peak was in flames, thick black smoke pouring off of most of the buildings and demons of all shapes and sizes swarming like hungry dungeon rats trying to break their way into a full pantry. 

Shen Qingqiu wasn’t the only one to arrive atop his spirit sword. Several of Qing Jing’s senior disciples had been able to follow their master, most just as under-dressed as he was. Representatives from most of the rest of the peaks arrived the same way, some sooner than others, either already awake at the time the alarm arrays had gone off or understanding immediately that was something was wrong and needed to be investigated. 

Only a few wearing Qiong Ding’s robes were in evidence, most of those guarding the doors of the buildings; presumably defending the rest of their peak-mates inside. If the protection arrays had been properly installed by An Ding, those inside should be safe from the flames, but smoke inhalation and exterior damage would still be an issue if no one did anything but huddle in place.

Less than a hundred disciples made it to Qiong Ding Peak before a shield went up around the top of it, blocking entry to anyone else and trapping both demons and cultivators inside of its faintly glowing dome. The shouts of questions and challenge died out immediately as the shield made an ominous hum when more cultivators tried to break their way inside.

“Ha!” a silvery laugh rang out into the silence, underscored by the crackling of the fires.

Shen Qingqiu had been the first to move, finally pulling the robe Luo Binghe had given him on to cover his arms and shoulders, but stilling his movements in response to the laugh before he could make himself more presentable than that. His eyes were pinned to the stairs of Qiong Ding Hall as a little demoness, hardly more than a girl, descended towards them wearing layers of dark, smoke-colored silks wrapped provocatively around her. 

Every step she took let loose a shimmer of bell chimes. They must have been magically assisted, because though they were soft, sweet sounds, Liu Qingge was sure everyone within the magical dome could hear them and was spellbound to silence.

The demoness reached the last step and posed almost coyly, using a finger to tuck one of her many braids behind her delicately pointed ear.

“Aiyah… was Ling-er’s visit ill-timed?” she called, her voice pitched to suggest an ingénue’s guilelessness. “Forgive us for waking you. Demons are prepared at all hours… how were we to know?”

Sword still gripped tightly in his hand, Shen Qingqiu strode forward until she turned her sly eyes his way. It appeared that she didn’t recognize him based on her mild confusion.

“We were not expecting guests,” Shen Qingqiu said, his voice cold and sharp.

His hair dark and unbound streaming around him, the hastily donned robes half falling from his shoulders billowing in the night air, bright blade in hand, feet bare, and body silhouetted against the flames? The picture was breath-taking, if Liu Qingge had breath to be stolen. 

The thought startled Liu Qingge and he quickly shrugged it off to move closer, ready to act if necessary.

Emboldened by the presence of a peak lord, the disciples that managed to arrive at the peak closed in too. 

Liu Qingge could see his sister nearby, her flower-colored gaze moving between Shen Qingqiu, the demoness, and some of the demons nearest to her, calmly assessing the situation and readying herself to move when the situation called for it. He was interested to note that she wore dark clothing, as if she’d not just been awake, but investigating in the shadows before the invasion. Before he could take note if she were alone, the demoness responded.

“Is that so?” she asked, her voice all but dripping with sarcasm. “It seemed that you must have been, or why else did you prepare for attack and lay fresh security precautions? If we hadn’t found a gap —” She cut herself off as if realizing she may have revealed too much.

Shen Qingqiu chuckled, reaching for a fan, but frowning as he realized he didn’t have one with him. Unable to use a prop to illustrate an unconcerned attitude, he instead settled his hair and relaxed his stance, though his grip on the sword hilt was still ready. “Surely a sect such as ours would have security measures as a matter of course? It’s strange that this offends you. ‘Guests’, after all, should be invited. Or at least come openly and request entry.”

“No!” she snapped and stalked forward, her bare feet slapping the stone courtyard that separated them, her pretty little bells jangling with none of the harmonious sounds from before. She stopped a few feet away, her glare burning as much as the flames behind her. “No, this is new. They were not there yesterday. Imagine our surprise when we came to visit and found the route we had selected barred! Our glorious entrance denied! And we instead had to sneak like thieves in the night.”

Shen Qingqiu huffed a mocking laugh behind his sleeve, ruining the intimidating and knowing mood the young demoness’s speech was evidently meant to create.

Her red lips thinned and her cheeks flushed with fury and embarrassment before she appeared to regain control over herself. She tossed her hair, the bells once more making a cascade of their pretty sounds. “I recognize you now, Xiu Ya Sword. How unimpressive you look when you haven’t had the time to hide yourself behind that prim and proper scholar mask you wear. How much of your reputation is a lie, I wonder?” she asked, her voice silky and suggestive.

The fairy only looked a little surprised before he smirked. “And you had all the time in the world to prepare for your glorious entrance, and you chose… this.” He waved a few fingers towards her, letting people fill in their own assessment, whether about how she presented herself or the demons’ arrival in general. From the flush on her face, her own insecurities had come up with something she found unflattering.

She was wise enough to abandon the petty taunts and return to the previous subject.

“How did you know to prepare for us? I know it must have been you, Xiu Ya Sword. You’re the only peak lord in residence.”

“Hmm. No wonder you’ve made a mess of this,” Shen Qingqiu said thoughtfully. “Your information is too poor. There are several peak lords here.”

“Two in seclusion and An Ding’s peak lord. Hardly worth mentioning,” she said dismissively. 

There was a strangled sound from one of the disciples — either someone from An Ding who was offended on their shizun’s behalf, or someone startled into a nervous laugh they had the sense to smother at the last moment. 

“And yet, he was vital to my plans to protect the sect,” Shen Qingqiu said, feigning boredom. “Really, little saintess, the fact that you attacked while I was resting was surprising, but do you really think we were entirely unprepared? Even after seeing changes to our defenses? You didn’t think for a moment that you might be walking into our trap? Aiyah…”

If he hadn’t been privy to all of the plans, Liu Qingge would have absolutely believed that the sect’s strategist had planned this all out to account for every eventuality. Certainly everyone else believed it. Luo Binghe, close on his master’s heels, sucked in a breath. Others gasped outright. Liu Mingyan gazed wide-eyed at him, her grudge momentarily set aside. 

The demons shifted nervously on their feet, their eyes darting around in search of an exit route. Their leader silently moved her lips a moment, briefly speechless. She recovered quickly, to her credit.

“This was never about an attack, Xiu Ya Sword,” she scoffed, buffing her blood red nails on her hip and then examining the way they glittered in the flames before glancing over at him. “Neighbors often test fences for each other. Strong fences make good neighbors, after all.”

It was a weak excuse, but Shen Qingqiu hummed thoughtfully before nodding, accepting her claim of more innocent intentions. 

“We appreciate your kind overtures. I’m sure you’ll point out the weakness in our fences that we overlooked on your way out.” He gave her a thin smile that was as sharp as the sword in his hand. He’d made no move to put it politely away, clearly wanting the threat to stand firm when the cultivators and the demons were nearly matched in number — at least if the Qiong Ding Peak disciples stayed safely inside the buildings.

“Perhaps…” the demoness said, floating the word gently on the night air as if entertaining a sudden afterthought. “Perhaps before we part ways, we could have a competition. Three rounds with a fighter from each side. Just to see what might have happened if we hadn’t come here to be neighborly,” she said lightly, once again feigning that she was just a young girl playing around.

Shen Qingqiu pretended to think again, turning the suggestion over in his mind as if the whole reason a gap had been left in the defenses wasn’t for precisely this reason.

“It would be rude not to accept,” he said finally.

***

While the majority of the disciples gathered around the courtyard to watch the matches — and provide back-up if the demons turned traitorous — others moved in the background, helping to put out the fires. Luo Binghe had been prepared to go help with that, but Shen Qingqiu kept him and told him to watch closely.

The competition began just as the prophecy had suggested it would.

Shen Qingqiu went first, showing far more grace and skill in battle than Liu Qingge could recall the original displaying before. He shadowed every movement the fairy made, prepared for underhanded tactics from the demons and wanting to be close enough to counter it. He did not have the assurance that he could react in time otherwise, the way full access to his qi would have given him. 

Moving like this together was like riding Cheng Luan in a thunderstorm — thrilling and a bit electric. He wished he could have done something similar while he was still alive. He wondered how it would have felt then. It was over too soon, though thankfully without any need to exert himself. Shen Qingqiu was ready for everything.

Liu Mingyan’s battle was far more fierce than the two fairies had described from their memories of the prophecy. They had discussed something graceful and beautiful, like an aerial dance — but both women had actually been nearly brutal in their straight-forward bids to win the fight. Liu Mingyan still lost, as they had predicted, but it was a very near thing between victory and defeat. The demoness was furious.

When it came time for the third match and Shen Qingqiu selected Luo Binghe to participate, the boy didn’t even seem surprised, much less nervous. He grimly gripped his sword and took his place. 

“He will win,” Shen Qingqiu said with calm confidence when the demons jeered and the disciples questioned.

And Luo Binghe did. 

Presumably the extra month the two fairies had mentioned between when the Demon Invasion should have happened and when it actually did gave Luo Binghe all the time he needed to become comfortable in the skills Shen Qingqiu had encouraged him to practice. The demons’ third champion barely put on a good show as all Luo Binghe really needed was a few passes to test whether the demon had anything more up his sleeve than his armor and his size before unleashing his own attacks.

Like the previous two battles, Luo Binghe left his opponent alive, but he otherwise left little room for the demon elder to save face — the contrast of the young, weak-looking boy being able to deliver such an overwhelming victory was psychologically crushing. The demon should have everything on his side:  size, weight, experience; even poison-coated armor — but he was still squashed like a bug in the courtyard when Luo Binghe was done with him.

That should have been the end of the matter. The demoness was even giving a bitter acknowledgment of their defeat when one of the demons in the background snarled and ran forward to the unconscious elder. The enraged demon pulled off one of the elder’s pieces of spiked armor to use as a shield and rushed at them, screaming.

It never made sense to Liu Qingge afterward — he’d heard the two fairies discuss for a quarter of an hour about how Luo Binghe’s position in the prophecy would provide him with the luck of a god’s favorite. He might be hurt, but it was unlikely to be serious and he’d miraculously find a solution to whatever troubled him and perhaps even make a significant gain from any temporary set-back.

So there should have been no reason for Shen Qingqiu to pull Luo Binghe behind him. And yet he did, with the protective air of a guardian ready to savage the threat. 

With a growl, Liu Qingge stepped between Shen Qingqiu and the rampaging demon, pushing him hard enough that the fairy was forced back a step and the demon’s crazed attack with the poisoned ‘shield’ went astray. Unlike before, with the exploding weiqi board, Liu Qingge was not able to achieve a degree of solidity that blocked an attack — his focus was entirely on moving Shen Qingqiu aside.

Because of this choice in his focus, he saw the spikes stab through his ghostly body, rather than Shen Qingqiu’s solid one. Some of the spikes were still slick with the poison and he watched as droplets of it slid off the metal and were flung at Shen Qingqiu. Neither of them were fast enough to prevent or avoid all of the poison and Liu Qingge was forced to gnash his teeth as several drops splattered over Shen Qingqiu’s bared skin and clothes. 

As Shen Qingqiu quickly used his sleeve to wipe away the poison on his skin, Luo Binghe lunged forward to take down the attacking demon. If the elder demon had been crushed like a bug, this one was nearly pulverized. Liu Qingge didn’t bother to keep track if the demon was likely to live — he was too focused on Shen Qingqiu.

“Shizun!” Luo Binghe called out once he’d finished, swinging from vicious guard dog to kicked puppy in a heartbeat. 

“Ara…!” the demoness said, feigning concern as she moved forward, her eyes speculative as they darted over Shen Qingqiu. 

When she launched into a description of Without-A-Cure, Liu Qingge was deeply relieved he’d moved in time to protect the fairy. By the end of her speech, it became clear that she would be attempting to use a test to discover whether or not Shen Qingqiu had been poisoned to determine if she had one last chance to turn this entire venture to her advantage. 

Though Luo Binghe was strong, it was obvious that his concern would be for his master over the sect. If Shen Qingqiu were poisoned and Luo Binghe guarded him, the demons would only really have to contend with the remaining disciples, and with relatively even numbers, it was unlikely many of the cultivators would be able to match up to the demons’ natural strength.

From the grim smile Shen Qingqiu flashed as he straightened his stained clothes and stared at the demoness, he had come to the same conclusion.

“If a spiritual blast is all it takes to send uninvited guests home who have outstayed their welcome, I’ll gladly expend the power,” he sniffed, tone and expression so disdainful that the demoness’s confidence wavered. 

But it was a bluff. Whether or not Shen Qingqiu was aware of it or not, Liu Qingge didn’t know, but he saw that the shimmer just underneath his skin that he associated with the fairy’s power was fading by the second. 

The next few events happened so quickly that there was really no time to think.

Shen Qingqiu raised his arms to deliver the spiritual blast, the threads of his power gathering around his arms and into his palms in a flashy display that made many of the demons begin their retreat and the demon saintess falter as she prepared her own. Then Shen Qingqiu’s qi was suddenly snuffed out and the power died. The saintess offered a feral smile, eagerly shifting her weight forward — and Liu Qingge moved to place his palms on Shen Qingqiu’s back and shove his own power through him so it was forced through Shen Qingiqu’s meridians and was propelled outward, catching the demoness and several of her braver lieutenants and knocking them off their feet.

The saintess’s dome collapsed, finally allowing the cultivators outside in to act as reinforcements. As Shen Qingqiu wonderingly stared at his palms, the demons scattered and the cultivators pursued them.

Liu Qingge was able to watch his sister pursue close on the heels of the saintess and Luo Binghe catch his master by the shoulders as his own vision blurred.

That is good, he thought. Luo Binghe will protect him for me.

Then all he knew was darkness.

Chapter Text

“Liu Qingge?”

Liu Qingge barely heard his name being spoken. It was more like the rasp of dry leaves on stone — a sort of gentle, broken sound. If he hadn’t recognized the voice, he might have ignored it in order to drift comfortably in the darkness again. But he did hear it, and the tone of Shen Qingqiu’s voice forced him to drag himself out of the darkness to respond.

The first thing he saw when his vision cleared was a simply dressed Shen Qingqiu half-huddled at his bedroom table over a cup of tea. The fairy stared unhappily down into it, his eyes rather lost in thought. The urge to reassure him was compelling enough that though he felt as if iron weights were pulling him back towards the earth, Liu Qingge gathered his determination and used it to move forward.

He knew he could manage enough strength to move the tassel that hung from the scroll painting.

Just enough strength.

At the moment he felt so weak that he couldn’t even visualize himself as having a proper form. He was more a thought with sight than a person, hovering invisibly at roughly shoulder-height and gliding where he wished to go. Once he started moving, it felt almost frictionless aside from the sense that if he no longer had the will to do something, he’d be dragged down again. 

As he watched the tassel move, he wondered how he was able to manipulate it at all since he certainly did not reach out to touch it with a ghostly hand as he usually would.

The bright red swing of the tassel seemed to be enough to pull Shen Qingqiu from his thoughts. The fairy stared blankly at it a moment before lighting up, his spine straightening as he quickly set the cup of tea down, nearly sloshing its contents over the side.

“Liu Qingge! That’s you, isn’t it?”

As they hadn’t really worked out a method of communicating via the tassel beyond identifying his presence, Liu Qingge was briefly at a loss of how to respond to the question. If he had more strength, he would have tried to abruptly still the tassel, but he instinctively knew that was beyond him at the moment. Instead, his gaze alighted on the rolled up piece of parchment that was likely the spirit board laying on the edge of the table.

He drifted closer and was able to force the tube of paper to roll awkwardly towards the tea cup — only by an inch or two, but at least it did move. By will alone, it seemed. 

Liu Qingge only had a fuzzy memory of the way his limbs felt, so moving something was difficult without being able to see them, sense them, or even quite remember how they worked. It was somewhat like the confusion one felt sometimes after waking up from a very deep sleep, only it had to do what having a physical form was like rather than the ability to recall one’s memories.

“Oh. Yes, this is a much better idea, of course!” Shen Qingqiu said brightly, a fine tremble of eagerness or relief running through his slender frame as he unrolled the scroll and held it flat with his paperweight ornaments again. 

It actually hadn’t been what Liu Qingge had meant by it — he’d just seen the first thing he thought he could easily manipulate and done so. But even if he’d somehow been able to correct him, he wouldn’t have. He’d try. The way the fairy looked right now, he couldn’t do anything less than push himself a little more.

As Shen Qingqiu searched for where he’d stored the heart-shaped wooden arrowhead, apologizing to him in a flustered tone, Liu Qingge tried to absorb more of what he could see. 

The room was kept clean, but it wasn’t quite as neat as it normally was. Stacks of heroic fantasy novels were openly displayed next to the bed, which was a little rumpled, as if Shen Qingqiu had been reading before someone brought him his current cup of tea. Normally Shen Qingqiu hid his hobby from others, so either he now trusted select people to know about it, or he didn’t let anyone stay long enough to notice that the books didn’t contain poetry or some other high-brow literature. 

Or maybe he just no longer cared at all.

Looking at Shen Qingqiu now, Liu Qingge could see where that might be the case. 

As he’d noticed before, the fairy had dressed and styled himself very simply. Rather than having his hair brushed to a silken shine and carefully arranged with one of his elaborate crowns, he’d instead merely brushed it out and pulled part of it into a top-knot. His clothes showed the same degree of attention — some effort was taken, but these were clearly the simplest of his robes and may even have been overlooked examples from the original Shen Qingqiu’s period as a disciple in training. He seemed tired, a little worn around the edges, and a worry line was visible between his brows, as if he’d spent a lot of time thinking of troublesome things recently.

Liu Qingge wondered just how bad things had got with the Demonic Invasion after he’d fallen into the darkness. He trusted that between Shen Qingqiu, Luo Binghe, and Mingyan there to organize and lead things were taken care of, but…

“Ah-ha! Found it!” Shen Qingqiu crowed, shedding his previous morose attitude like a snake’s old skin. He looked revitalized — cheerful, with life rushing back into his green, green eyes. It relieved Liu Qingge to see. 

As Shen Qingqiu dramatically held the wooden arrow aloft between two fingers, his sleeve naturally obeyed gravity, sliding down to reveal bandages wrapped tightly around his forearm.

Attention caught, Liu Qingge moved across the table to see better, burning with the need to know why the area had been bandaged. His attempts to halt Shen Qingqiu’s arm so he could investigate must have translated itself into something the fairy could feel or at least sense, because he startled slightly, almost dropping the wooden arrow.

“Was that you?”

Perhaps realizing that Liu Qingge wouldn’t be able to respond otherwise, a click followed as the object was quickly placed on the paper spirit board. Liu Qingge turned his attention towards it and after a few moments of thought, judged it was light enough that he’d still be able to move it in spite of his current exhaustion. 

Slowly, like the sluggish way people moved in dreams, he managed to push the object to ‘YES’ and was rewarded by seeing Shen Qingqiu immediately relax.

Encouraged by being able to do something to reassure the fairy, he decided not to wait for a question. “HELLO” Liu Qingge indicated after what felt like great effort to move the sliver of (now polished) wood up the page again.

To his mild horror, Shen Qingqiu immediately teared up and he gave a watery little chuckle before whispering, “Hello, Liu Qingge.”

Distressed by the unexpected tears, Liu Qingge examined his options on the spirit board — a new topic was clearly in order. The last thing he’d intended was to make the fairy cry.

None of the things written on the parchment paper allowed him to initiate a question of his own. The first time they’d spoken, he’d had the energy that allowed him to draw simple pictures, but even if there had been ink prepared, he was pretty certain he couldn’t manipulate it to stick to his fingers long enough to transfer to paper. 

That was assuming he could remember what it felt like to have fingers.

After a few horrible moments, before Liu Qingge could come up with a way to banish the tears, Shen Qingqiu wiped at his eyes himself and sighed. “Sorry, I was just so worried about you. It’s been almost five days since the Demonic Invasion… I thought you’d given me too much of your power and I’d lost you…”

In his need to reassure the fairy, Liu Qingge managed to push the wooden arrow to “NO” much more quickly this time. Shen Qingqiu laughed a little, the sound still a little strained, as if he were still too emotional.

“I’m glad. Even Shang Qinghua didn’t know what might have happened to you. You were supposed to have…” He hesitated before using the gentle tone of someone breaking unfortunate news, “Well, you weren’t supposed to linger as a ghost, according to how the story was supposed to go. He really doesn’t understand how you’ve managed to remain this long — but I’m glad you have. And I’m very happy you were able to recover. …Thank you for helping me that time. You saved me.”

“PERHAPS” Liu Qingge somewhat reluctantly acknowledged. 

It wouldn’t have really been something Liu Qingge would have responded to with more than a simple nod or shrug normally, but without a body the fairy could see, that would have left Shen Qingqiu without a response. That would have likely upset him and might have even made him cry again, which was absolutely unacceptable. 

Even so, the response he gave still made Liu Qingge feel a little uncomfortable — ‘perhaps’ was still going too far in taking credit. Liu Qingge wasn’t entirely certain that Shen Qingqiu couldn’t have managed on his own. Luo Binghe wasn’t the only person capable of attracting luck in this world, and Shen Qingqiu had skill and cleverness on his side too.

“I think you must have, though,” Shen Qingqiu insisted, extending his arm and pulling back his sleeve again to show the bandage. “Mu Qingfang was thankfully near enough that his head disciple was able to quickly call him back during the attack. He was one of the first through the barrier as it collapsed and examined me almost immediately. Mu-Shidi said that if it’d got into my bloodstream, Without-A-Cure would have managed to do severe damage — at the very least, blocking my qi, if not the blood in my body as well. Even so, it did manage to stain my skin and in time, even being a cultivator wouldn’t have kept it from sinking deeper. That’s why the bandage. The poison is being drawn into a herb paste so it doesn’t taint my blood. My qi is sometimes blocked for hours at a time. But Mu-Shidi said I should be fine in a week or so, as long as I don’t forget to change my bandages…” He offered a wry smile. “Binghe is extremely punctual about it, so there’s no worry about that.”

Liu Qingge looked again at the options on the spirit board and was frustrated with the lack of nuance available. How did one express frustration, relief, and mild amusement? “COMPLICATED” was perhaps the closest available option, but it gave off a very different feel to what he wanted to convey. 

Resigned, he moved the arrow towards the drawing he’d made of the smiling face, but didn’t quite overlap the arrow with it, not wanting to come across as smiling at the fairy’s misfortune.

Shen Qingqiu laughed. The sound was more natural now, which was good to hear. 

“I suppose that long pause was because you couldn’t figure out how to respond to such a long speech. I apologize. I should probably add options for you… but I’m not sure what you’d need…” Shen Qingqiu hummed to himself as he took out his calligraphy box and set his inkstone on the table, absentmindedly preparing the ink as he stared off in thought.

When he was satisfied with the amount of ink he’d prepared, Shen Qingqiu took up his brush and added, “TELL ME MORE” and to the side of it added “ABOUT” and underneath added “THAT”, “PERSON”, and “THOUGHTS”. Then, apart from that, wrote new words:  “TRYING”, “WILL TRY”, and “CANNOT”. And lastly he wrote the words “WEAK” and “STRONG” and separated the two with several dots.

“There,” Shen Qingqiu said, apparently satisfied. “I’m sure you’ve probably a thousand things you’d like me to add, but we’re starting to run out of space on this sheet of paper and I’m not sure all what you’d need. So these are what I’ve thought of. You can use this set here to ask me to elaborate on something. If you put the planchette between ‘TELL ME MORE’ and one of these words here and point it at them, then I can ‘tell you more about’ a person, or something you move, or something I’m thinking. But the words can also be used on their own if you’d like to. And these words right here will hopefully let me ask you some questions without you having to use a lot of ambiguous responses…”

The fairy stared at the spirit board for a moment, eying the somewhat haphazard sprawl of options as he absently set aside his brush.

“Aiyah… I might have to remake the board after we try this for a bit.”

Shen Qingqiu took out a fan and gently waved it to help the ink dry. Liu Qingge carefully urged the arrow close to “WILL TRY” without actually touching the ink. He didn’t want to smear it. 

There was a puff of a laugh that seemed to send the fairy’s breath through him like a touch. It was almost intimate — like fingers weaving through his hair. If he had a physical form, he would have shivered. As it was, he felt himself drawing closer to Shen Qingqiu without consciously moving.

He had a brief moment where he imagined this happening while he was still alive. Liu Qingge could picture himself closing his eyes, leaning into the touch, and — 

Well, those thoughts were both unacceptable and impossible. He firmly shoved them aside to be forgotten and was grateful when Shen Qingqiu spoke again, saving him from the rising bubble of something like either panic or regret.

“That’s good then,” Shen Qingqiu said warmly. “Is using the spirit board too tiring? You can say ‘good-bye’ if you need to rest.”

Liu Qingge thought about it before moving the arrow to “PERHAPS” again. He’d heard a certain wistful note in the fairy’s voice that said he hoped the conversation wouldn’t end, which Liu Qingge was happy to oblige him by providing it for as long as he could. Even so, he didn’t want to mislead Shen Qingqiu entirely by pretending he wasn’t already nearing the limit of what he could manage. 

“Mmn. I will take it as you are getting tired, but not quite ready to end the conversation. Am I correct?”

“YES”

“All right. Just please rest when you’re getting too tired and take your time with your answers. Here. I’ll save you some effort on my next question.” Shen Qingqiu picked up the arrow and set it at the middle-most dot between ‘WEAK’ and ‘STRONG’. “I thought of this specifically for this question, but we can use it for other questions too… You can point the arrow at the dot closest to how you feel. If you feel fine other than being tired, you can leave it where it is now and just move it a little so I can see you’re agreeing with that.”

Liu Qingge reluctantly moved the arrow down a few dots closer to ‘WEAK’, even though he knew the honest answer would trouble the fairy. 

“Do you think you might disappear again?” Shen Qingqiu asked immediately, his voice a bit tight.

“NO”

Shen Qingqiu sighed with relief, his shoulders relaxing from the sudden tension. “Good. Then… then I think it’s only fair to give you permission to use my energy if you need it. Ghosts feed off of the energy of the living, right?”

Liu Qingge didn’t know, but he also didn’t want to try. 

He shoved the wooden arrow across the paper to the angry face he’d drawn, almost making the object flip over in his agitation. He was deeply disapproving of the offer, no matter how kindly meant. What if he’d tried it and hurt Shen Qingqiu? Or what if he’d been some other ghost merely pretending to be Liu Qingge and had been waiting for an offer like that? And where were the limits to the offer! Leaving the offer open-ended like that was just asking to be taken advantage of!

The rather gentle chuckle of response almost annoyed him further. It even seemed indulgent, like Shen Qingqiu found the reply cute. Liu Qingge pulled the wooden arrow back a little before pushing it back again. 

(angry face)

“All right, all right. Don’t tire yourself — I understand. I suppose the offer wasn’t good to make. Don’t answer that, I meant it rhetorically. No need to waste energy replying,” Shen Qingqiu said with a smile, a hand reaching out like he wanted to reassure him with a touch, but of course he had nowhere to touch. 

Liu Qingge was suddenly reminded by the last time the fairy had tried to touch him. He moved the arrow.

“TELL ME MORE ABOUT” “PERSON” he asked.

“Who?” Shen Qingqiu asked, blinking. “Mu-Shidi?” (NO) “Sha Hualing? The demon saintess, I mean?” (NO)

A flush crept up the fairy’s neck as he seemed to understand who he was asking about. But instead of saying Mingyan’s name, he seemed to ask about every other person on the mountain. After the third “NO” Liu Qingge didn’t even bother to touch the wooden arrow. He felt as if his gaze must be burning a hole in Shen Qingqiu, who began to look obviously hotter in the face the longer he tried to feign ignorance.

Finally the fairy’s shoulders slumped as he wearily asked, “Liu Mingyan…?”

“YES” 

And after a second, added, (angry face).

“…She is well, last I saw. She did not catch Sha Hualing during the demons’ retreat from the mountain, but she returned safely after dealing with the stragglers. To be fair, if she had caught the saintess, I’d be a bit nervous about how things would play out with the story, but it seems to be on track!” 

Shen Qingqiu tried to sound more and more enthusiastic, rambling on about Luo Binghe and the prophecy and the boy having hopefully met his demon mentor in his dreams or something like that. Liu Qingge watched the fairy’s color settle as he seemed to think he’d successfully avoided the topic. 

The fairy was still rambling cheerfully, when he moved the wooden arrow again.

“NO” And then when he saw the fairy had stopped speaking and was paying attention, he moved the arrow back to “TELL ME MORE ABOUT” “PERSON”.

There was an almost trembling pause before Shen Qingqiu widened his eyes and asked, “…the demon?”

Liu Qingge thought it was very lucky that he couldn’t punt the arrow at the fairy’s head like he wanted to. He stared for a long, hard moment without touching the arrow before very deliberately, very slowly, moving the arrow to “NO”.

The fairy’s ears turned pink again and he lowered his lashes, glancing guiltily to the side, clearly considering what his chances were of getting away with dissembling any longer.

“TELL ME MORE ABOUT” “PERSON”

Shen Qingqiu sighed, pressing his palms to his face to cover his flush. His voice muffled by his hands he asked, “You mean what Shang Qinghua said about your sister being a wife?”

“YES”

“Aiyah…” the fairy sighed. “He made it sound more suspicious than it was! Your sister gains an advantageous marriage, as she should — she has many charms!”

(angry face)

Shen Qingqiu blushed. “No, that’s… I just thought she was the most interesting of the wives in the story! That’s all!”

That was not all. Liu Qingge could read it off of the fairy’s guilty body language like it was written over his face in red. 

“TELL ME MORE ABOUT” “THOUGHTS”

Shen Qingqiu let out a little whimper. Liu Qingge would almost feel bad about bullying the fairy if he hadn’t done all he could to avoid the discussion. He had picked up bad habits from his more hapless fairy friend.

“No!”

No? That was his answer!

(angry face) (angry face)

“I-it’s-! I!” 

(angry face)

“Ah — f-fine! She was one of the most intelligent and honorable of the wives described — absolutely competent and reliable. Competence is very — a-admirable. …and being peerlessly beautiful is a nice bonus. Your sister is a crane among chickens in every way. If I were to have picked anyone as a wife, it would be —”

(angry face) (angry face)

“Aiyah! I am not the husband! I don’t want to be murdered for even thinking of such a thing! Ah! I’m not looking for a wife, don’t use up all of your energy being angry at me! She is — I’m not thinking of courting your sister! It’s not an option! Ah!”

A rush of relief filled him. Without thinking about it, Liu Qingge started moving the arrow towards the smiling face before he realized what he was doing. Flustered, he knocked the arrow away. What was he — 

Careening wildly, the arrow nearly toppled the brush from where it rested. The fairy hastily caught it before it could land in the ink on the inkstone and set it on the table with a clack, hand resting over it to prevent it from further movement.

Blushing, the two of them sat in silence for a few long moments, each likely embarrassed for entirely different reasons. This wasn’t really like him. People often remarked on how calm and even cold he usually appeared, yet here he was squabbling over nothing.

In the silence, Liu Qingge reflected that for someone who had felt absolutely exhausted earlier, he never felt too tired to respond if his emotions were particularly charged. This seemed to reflect previous incidents too. 

If his emotions were high enough — 

“…Is that… all you wanted to know, Liu Qingge?” the fairy asked tentatively, lifting his hand.

“YES”

“Good. Rest a moment and let me put away the ink while I think of my next question.”

Shen Qingqiu began packing things away again, either out of a desire to be orderly while he thought or just a transparent excuse to stall so that Liu Qingge had more time to recover after their previous (vehement) conversation. The scholar seemed to more than take his time, his movements graceful as he tended properly to his brush and tidied things into their rightful places.

It was almost soothing, watching the bookish fairy do such a domestic task; listening to him move in soft whispers of silk. There was a serenity to him now that was missing before — he saw more of ‘the fairy’ again, which was reassuring to Liu Qingge. All that it would take to complete the image of a normal day would be to have the fairy’s eyes gleam with interest as they caught the light.

As if he’d heard him, Shen Qingqiu looked over in his direction — well, towards the place Liu Qingge usually sat, even if he was actually hovering much lower and more over the table than the cushion he usually thought of as ‘his’ — and smiled warmly as he resettled himself at the table.

Before Shen Qingqiu could resume his questions, there was a tap at the door and Luo Binghe stuck his dark, fluffy head into the room. 

“Excuse me, Shizun,” he said, seeming to be a little bemused to find his master sitting at the table looking more energetic than before. Certainly his posture was much better now than it had been when Liu Qingge had first become aware of the world again, and he could only assume the contrast must have been even more apparent to the young disciple.

“Ah — is it time for my bandages to be changed already?” Shen Qingqiu asked with a wry tilt of his lips, swiftly rolling up the paper spirit board to set it aside again.

“En. And I brought you fresh tea as well. I’ll get the windows open first and then pour for you,” Luo Binghe said, entering the room and carefully setting down the tray on the table before crossing to the windows to open them wide. As if the peak had been holding its breath until then, a breeze rushed into the room, stirring its contents.

Luo Binghe picked up a medicine box from a side table and returned to join his master at the lower one. After pouring the tea and setting it at Shen Qingqiu’s elbow, Luo Binghe opened the medicine box and began to unwrap Shen Qingqiu’s bandage. 

As the pungent scent of herbs filled the room — strong enough for even Liu Qingge’s invisible, ghostly eyes to water — Liu Qingge understood why the windows were opened. He floated away from the table to explore and keep watch from a somewhat safer distance. 

Disciple and master chatted pleasantly as the old bandage was removed, the bared skin was cleaned, the fresh herbal poultice applied over blotchy purple stains on Shen Qingqiu’s fair skin, and the new bandages carefully wrapped. 

Time spent together over the last few days had progressed the two’s relationship to an even closer one. The two were obviously quite fond of each other now; Luo Binghe’s trust having been completely won over judging from his behavior and the looks he tossed his shizun. There was an even more distinct air of confidence to the boy’s attitude too — perhaps from his overwhelming success dealing with the demons, or maybe it was just that being trusted with his master’s health helped him feel sure of his place with Shen Qingqiu. 

Either way, both seemed very content with each other’s company and Liu Qingge felt his own ghostly heart warm a little from just being near it.

It was such a harmonious atmosphere that it almost seemed poetically appropriate when the wind blew in a handful of flower petals and one fell into the gently steaming cup of tea. It spun lazily in the golden brew, the pale petal with its ruffled edges making one think of a graceful dancer. Such a thing could be considered lucky, really, and people with romantic hearts — or artists and poets in desperate need of inspiration — often intentionally lurked under blooming trees for precisely this experience.

One of the petals on the table fluttered and turned over, revealing a stripe of deep pink that pointed like a sword along the center towards the ruffled end and spots of the same deep pink gathered at its other, tapered point. Together, it gave the impression of a bloodied sword pointing victoriously in the air after slashing an enemy — which was the only reason he recognized what it was.

Not a harmless flower petal at all, but Lady’s Grace, a flower even more deadly than oleander. 

Even one of its ruffled petals left brewing in a cup of tea could kill a strong immortal. And with Shen Qingqiu’s power currently being unreliable, even Mu Qingfang being sent for immediately might not be quick enough to save him.

If the spirit board hadn’t been put away, Liu Qingge would have tried warning Shen Qingqiu by using it, even though Luo Binghe would certainly have noticed. Since it wasn’t, all he could think to do was knock over the tea cup.

And he tried.

He tried with all his might.

The best that Liu Qingge managed was to make the tea cup rattle slightly in its saucer. The lid that — had it been properly covering the top would have prevented the Lady’s Grace from being an issue — slid from where it had been propped up on the edge of the saucer to clatter on the tabletop. 

That was all he had the strength for.

Rather than this somehow making Shen Qingqiu pause to see if Liu Qingge was trying to get his attention, all it succeeded in doing was to draw the fairy’s eyes to his cup of tea and pick it up with his free hand, as if he’d just been reminded he should drink it before it got cold.

Alarmed, Liu Qingge rushed towards Shen Qingqiu. Without questioning how he knew he could, Liu Qingge managed to breathe one word into the fairy’s ear:  

“Poisoned.”

Strength spilled out of him again the same way the tea now spilled out of the cup. Shen Qingqiu was so startled, he’d dropped it, flinging the poisoned tea over himself and the table. Severely weakened now, Liu Qingge floated helplessly around the room, watching with an almost detached interest as the two hurried to clean up the spilled tea before it soaked the scattered books and documents piled on the table.

“It’s good it wasn’t one of your nice robes this time, Shizun,” Luo Binghe gently scolded, with the fond-but-stern tone of an affectionate sibling scolding another.

Shen Qingqiu gave his disciple an absent-minded acknowledgment, one hand gently cupping at his own ear and eyes scanning the area, presumably looking for evidence of Liu Qingge’s warning. Finally his gaze ran across one of the frilly petals on the table and he stiffened.

“Lady’s Grace,” he said.

Luo Binghe jerked his head up, all traces of good humor gone. His gaze followed his shizun’s and he frowned. “How did they get here?” he asked aloud. “Usually you would find them in the valley between our Qing Jing and Xian Shu, if anywhere at all.”

Liu Qingge could have reminded the boy that the air currents that flowed between the twelve peaks weren’t well understood. It was not strange for things normally only found on a single peak to be blown around and dropped anywhere on the mountain on a windy day like this one. Sometimes they would even be dropped out of season, as fresh as if they’d only been snagged moments ago. 

“Not always,” Shen Qingqiu said faintly, echoing Liu Qingge’s thoughts before he shook his head. “I will send a message to Qi-Shimei to let her know to check her garden’s net.”

Lady’s Grace was something that should be found in only one place on Cang Qiong Mountain. Though, of course, anything that came out of Xian Shu’s deadly poison garden was troublesome, which is the entire reason behind the fine mesh net that covered it and attempted to prevent such a terrible thing from happening. Someone must have been careless again. Inevitably new disciples allowed into the garden would forget to check that the gate was properly closed or for signs of the mesh being battered by the elements and needed replacing.

Accidents happen.

Shen Qingqiu continued, “Please pass word for the other disciples to check the pools and streams of our peak to make sure they aren’t poisoned. Ming Fan can organize it. I’d rather you took the message to Xian Shu once it’s finished.”

Luo Binghe quickly agreed, leaving everything behind to clean up after the more time-imperative message was delivered to Ming Fan.

Once they were alone again, Shen Qingqiu murmured, “I’m glad you were paying attention, Shidi.”

Liu Qingge was almost startled by the honorific. He’d never been addressed that way by the fairy before. Perhaps it was only meant to disguise Liu Qingge’s presence in case someone had overheard Shen Qingqiu speak, but it felt almost like a more affectionate way of calling him than by his name. 

The thought distracted him.

Almost enough that when word came back some hours later that Xian Shu could find no gaps in the netting and that no one had been in the garden recently that he almost dismissed it as unimportant. Some evidence of some past transgression or even nature itself having planted a seed somewhere on the mountain only for the wind to steal its petals today.

Yes, it almost distracted him from that. 

Almost.

Chapter Text

Shen Qingqiu didn’t attempt to start a conversation with Liu Qingge until the next day. 

Certainly, he spoke to Liu Qingge when they were alone in the room, updating him on the responses from other peak lords when their notes came back to him, making comments about Luo Binghe being a “bossy child” (while clearly glowing with pride over the attention the boy paid to him like one of those foolish family members excited to dote over a ‘precocious’ child — only worse, as Luo Binghe actually was precocious), and eventually saying good night — things such as those. 

But he didn’t ask Liu Qingge play with the tassel to reassure him he was there, listening. Either he was confident Liu Qingge was still around, or he didn’t want to know for sure otherwise.

So it wasn’t until in the morning, after the bandages were changed and Luo Binghe was sent out to sword practice, that Shen Qingqiu unrolled the spirit board and pinned it down with his paperweights.

Liu Qingge moved toward the table to take ‘his’ seat across from Shen Qingqiu, surprised to realize his body was reforming — like smoke even to himself still, but a relief to see regardless. Apparently enough of his strength had returned that whatever controlled his incorporeal form remembered what having a body was like.

As soon as Shen Qingqiu placed down the wooden arrow, Liu Qingge assertively moved it to ‘HELLO’.

Shen Qingqiu smiled, looking up to approximately where Liu Qingge’s eyes were. “Hello, Shidi. Using the weak-to-strong scale, how do you feel today?”

“STRONG” he confidently indicated, not even bothering with the dots. 

In fact, after taking stock of himself Liu Qingge felt stronger than he had before the Demonic Invasion. Not quite the way he felt while still alive, of course, but the best he’d felt since he’d died. He began to suspect that fulfilling his purpose of defending Shen Qingqiu or the sect from harm was strengthening him, even if the gestures might drain him in the short term. Practice helped too, but it was apparent it worked more slowly.

“I’m glad to hear it!” Shen Qingqiu said and then smiled with a rather playful slyness. “Speaking of… I heard your voice yesterday. I suppose I really do have to take back what I said about you being an old man.”

Liu Qingge rolled his eyes. But since that was difficult to convey with the selections, he just answered with “YES”

“Can you do it again?”

‘En’ he tried to say, but nothing came out. After a brief pause of dismay he tried again, this time with, “Hello?” which he barely heard himself. He saw Shen Qingqiu lean forward eagerly, but he didn’t say anything.

“TRYING” Liu Qingge said with the arrow.

“En. I heard something, but I couldn’t make it out. Maybe try closer to my ear, like last time?”

Liu Qingge sighed a little, almost hearing himself do so, but he obligingly moved around the table (he could have walked through it, but that seemed rude not to respect the furniture — disrespecting walls and doors was just practical) and knelt down beside Shen Qingqiu. Leaning forward, he tried again.

“Shen-Shixiong,” he said, knowing his tone to be dry as a bone. 

This time he could hear himself. And apparently Shen Qingqiu could hear too because he saw him shiver, as if he’d not expected him to sound so close.

“Ah! I — I heard you that time!” Shen Qingqiu said breathlessly, sitting very still and facing resolutely forward, the tips of his ears going pink. He was probably unnerved by having a ghost whisper in his ear, even though he’d suggested it himself. “You called me Shen-Shixiong…”

Liu Qingge rolled his eyes again and reached around to push the wooden arrow to “YES”

“Except you know I’m not… well, I’m not the Shen Qingqiu you knew.”

Realizing there was no way to indicate what he wanted to say with the spirit board, he could only move his lips closer to Shen Qingqiu’s ear again to say, “Yours now.”

Once again, Shen Qingqiu visibly shivered, his shoulders inching towards his ears this time.

“Scary?” Liu Qingge asked gently.

“N-no. It just… tickles, I guess. Because you’re so close. And I suppose you’re right, it is my name now.” The fairy gave a questioning glance in his direction as if waiting to be corrected on something. As there was no need to correct anything, there was an awkward pause before Shen Qingqiu faced forward again and hastily continued. “Well — ‘Shen’ always was. I was called ‘Shen Yuan’ before.”

He added the last almost tentatively, glancing in his direction again without turning, as if he might see Liu Qingge if he was sneaky about it.

“Shen Yuan,” Liu Qingge repeated obediently and watched, almost fascinated, as the fairy blushed. 

“E-en. …it’s been awhile since I was called that. It feels different now,” he said quietly.

Liu Qingge thought about it for a few moments before moving the wooden arrow to “HELLO”

As he’d hoped, Shen Qingqiu laughed, visibly relaxing. “En, hello.”

Since it seemed to unnerve Shen Qingqiu, Liu Qingge decided against speaking again. Instead, he moved the wooden arrow, resting the base on “TELL ME MORE ABOUT” and pointing the arrow point towards “PERSON”.

Shen Qingqiu caught on immediately with a little laugh. “You mean ‘Shen Yuan’.”

“YES”

“Well, there’s both not much to say and too much. I’m not sure what’s okay to tell you. System has reluctantly relaxed its rules regarding you, since you knowing doesn’t interrupt the story. I’d still get in trouble if I say too much. But I wasn’t really much different then than I am from what you know. I just did less, I suppose. If I wasn’t at risk of joining you as a ghost if I don’t keep track on the story, I’d say it’s better here.”

Liu Qingge thought about what the fairy said and nodded slowly to himself, figuring that it made sense that talking about the prophecy to non-fairies would be frowned upon. 

As he didn’t want Shen Qingqiu to be put into an awkward position, he leaned in to ask, “Did you teach?”

“En… sort of. I mostly tutored others until… well, until I couldn’t anymore. I liked it. Being able to teach more freely here is something that makes me happy.” Shen Qingqiu trailed off a moment, lost in thought. Then he shook his head slightly and asked, “Do you like to teach?”

Liu Qingge examined his options before moving the wooden arrow up to the weak-to-strong meter and leaving the point on the middle-most dot.

“Let me guess — you like some things and not so much others?”

“YES”

Shen Qingqiu laughed. “Well, I think that’s normal. Or, at least, it’s honest. I haven’t really asked a lot of teachers. But from what I’ve observed, that’s probably true for most people who teach.”

They talked like that for awhile, with Liu Qingge conserving his strength to use one to three spoken words at most when the spirit board’s options wouldn’t do. When the Fairy System complained about them talking too much about things meant to be kept secret, they instead talked about their interests.

He had to sit close so that Shen Qingqiu could hear him — his ghostly voice wouldn’t carry far, even with an immortal’s senses — so it felt far more intimate than any conversation he remembered having before with anyone. It was nice. It was also somewhat strange, as he couldn’t imagine doing this with anyone if not for the circumstances. But he was glad he got to share it with Shen Qingqiu even if it would have felt too much while he was alive.

It was something he hoped they would now be able to do more of. And hopefully with practice the conversations could be more natural, with less use of the spirit board and more use of his voice.

And — come to think of it — if his voice got stronger, maybe he could move further away and not disturb Shen Qingqiu as much as he clearly was now. They spoke for several incense sticks of time and Shen Qingqiu obviously still hadn’t got used to hearing his voice. Nearly every word provoked a shiver or a blush. Sometimes the ‘ticklish’ sensation was too much and the fairy made a little sound or drew his shoulders up towards his ears. 

“Should I stop?” Liu Qingge asked after another of those squeaks and shivers that brought visible goosebumps to the fairy’s arms.

“No!” Shen Qingqiu protested immediately. “I’ll get used to it, so… feel free anytime. …Maybe just not when I’m holding something sharp or breakable. Or, you know, any other time where a reaction like that would be a bad idea.”

“In bed,” Liu Qingge suggested teasingly.

Shen Qingqiu turned red. “Aiyah… Don’t whisper such calamitous things in my ear, Shidi.”

Something about the shy way he said it made Liu Qingge think he didn’t mean trying to talk to him while he was waking up or drifting off to sleep. But Shen Qingqiu quickly changed the topic, so he didn’t bother clarifying. He just made note that it was probably better to wait until Shen Qingqiu was fully awake to try talking to him unless it were an emergency.

When they eventually heard the sounds of gently rattling dishes as Luo Binghe carried a tray down the hall, Liu Qingge hurriedly moved the wooden arrow to “GOOD-BYE”.

Because of classes only Shen Qingqiu could teach and a few visits from other peak lords, they didn’t have an opportunity to talk properly again the rest of the day. They managed not much more than an exchange of, “Good night.” before Liu Qingge left the room so Shen Qingqiu could change for bed. 

When he returned, the fairy was already asleep.

***

They fell into a routine, of sorts.

In the mornings, after breakfast and the bandage changing (both officiated by Luo Binghe), Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge would sit together at the table in his bedroom, the spirit board unrolled in front of them and Liu Qingge speaking almost directly next to Shen Qingqiu’s ear when the options provided by the spirit board weren’t sufficient. 

It never seemed to be a priority for either of them that they ever need revise the board, especially as practice meant Liu Qingge could manage more and more words at a time. 

Well — actually, there were some additions made:  both had made little drawings in the margins and biggest open spaces between words to indicate expressions or body language that Liu Qingge could use to express himself more. 

Shen Qingqiu’s drawings were, unsurprisingly, much better than his own, which he could still only really manage to create by dipping his finger into ink and quickly scrawling them on the parchment. But the fairy’s pictures were also the ones least used, since Shen Qingqiu amused himself by drawing fanciful imaginings of what Liu Qingge looked like in poses he surely must know were out of character even before Liu Qingge growled at him over them. 

If it wouldn’t have made him feel like a monster for it, Liu Qingge would destroy the one that had a ridiculously pretty-looking man blushing like a concubine and striking an embarrassingly bashful pose. Shen Qingqiu had even broken out his watercolors to give the figure a deep pink flush across his cheeks. Liu Qingge preferred the ridiculous strong-man pose drawing, even if the man’s face was still excessively pretty and he couldn’t think of any reason Shen Qingqiu pretended to think he’d want to use the picture to illustrate his mood. The drawings made the fairy giggle, and that made Liu Qingge happy… even if he wished it weren’t at his expense.

In the afternoons, Shen Qingqiu taught a few classes. Liu Qingge really had nothing to say about most of them, so he kept his mouth shut and gathered his energy while he watched over the fairy or tested how far he could move away from Shen Qingqiu without issue. 

It turned out that if he couldn’t see or hear Shen Qingqiu, he started to feel uncomfortable. It helped a little if he were following one of the disciples — Luo Binghe appeared to be best for that, perhaps because of his familiarity with the boy — but once they left whichever peak Shen Qingqiu was currently at, it became like trying to push his way through snow. The further away he got, the deeper the snow became and the more anxiety started to gnaw at him. 

Eventually Liu Qingge could only conclude that he would only see his own peak if Shen Qingqiu visited it, and his sister if their paths intersected. In the abstract, he was fine with both of these things, but when he thought about it he felt as if he were being neglectful of two of the most important things to him in life. 

This was made no better by Shang Qinghua’s visits. Before the other fairy left, he always made a particular point of warning that Liu Mingyan would blame Shen Qingqiu for her brother’s death and to be wary of her. 

Apparently the prophecy indicated that she would unite with several other women to denounce Shen Qingqiu, which would lead to Shen Qingqiu’s death. Shen Qingqiu always cut off this discussion as soon as it was brought up and never mentioned it to Liu Qingge, so Liu Qingge let the topic rest as well. 

He began to consider whether he could contact his sister, either by practicing writing until he could send her a letter or, more practically, by speaking to her the way he did Shen Qingqiu. He didn’t know if he could do that yet, though, and it never seemed to be the right time to mention it to Shen Qingqiu. 

Shang Qinghua would be the obvious person to talk to about this, but even though Shen Qingqiu had apparently told him about his ghostly companion, Shang Qinghua didn’t seem to take it into account that he was around to listen to them speak. Either he’d forgotten or he’d assumed Liu Qingge hadn’t returned yet because he’d never once mentioned it and neither had Shen Qingqiu. At least not aloud. If he’d written it down in a letter, Liu Qingge wouldn’t know any differently. He generally gave the fairy his privacy when he wrote letters unless invited to read it over before he sent it.

Luo Binghe would have been another good candidate to be let in on the secret. The boy was now as loyal as they came and would likely hide a much darker secret without a second thought. Luo Binghe already shamelessly used his cleverness to chase away those he felt wasted his shizun’s precious time or spoiled his mood, to requisition supplies that Qing Jing was not technically due, and swindle shady merchants out of the huge profit margins they seemed to think they could get away with because of Shen Qingqiu’s more easy-going attitude (and the bookish fairy’s lack of knowledge of appropriate prices). 

Of the two, Liu Qingge thought Luo Binghe was the better option. But he was willing to admit that his thoughts were guided by a fondness he’d developed for the boy of his own.

The first time Liu Qingge had commented during one of his classes was because of Luo Binghe, in fact. It was during a lesson on sword forms and he’d noticed the young disciple leave himself open. He didn’t blame Shen Qingqiu for missing it — the boy recovered so devilishly quickly that it was difficult to notice even for him. But it was a flaw that someone else might see too, so it needed to be corrected. Shen Qingqiu had startled at the whispered observation, but had acted on the suggestion without a second thought. The boy had been able to correct the flaw and his satisfaction with the smoother result had pleased all three of them. 

Shen Qingqiu had been very enthusiastic about welcoming tips during the lessons in the future, though Liu Qingge tried to restrain himself to correcting flaws rather than offering unasked for opinions on techniques. 

It made him miss his own peak a little less… or a little more, depending on how he thought of it.

“Do you mind?” he’d asked once when the subject of his commentary came up. In spite of the fairy’s immediate approval before, when he’d got into a habit of it, he thought it better to verify he wasn’t overstepping.

“Mind? Do I mind having the Undefeatable War God of Bai Zhan whispering tips in my ear?” Shen Qingqiu asked, his voice rising incredulously. 

Liu Qingge elected not to answer as he was sure whatever he said would probably receive a very over-dramatic response, regardless if he were correct or not. The fairy hadn’t seemed to actually been expecting a response because he threw his hands wildly into the air, making gestures that presumably were meant to convey a lot more than they actually did. 

“Of course I don’t mind! It’s like having the Konami Code tenderly delivered by an angel. My students think I have eyes on the back of my head now.”

Liu Qingge was intrigued. “Konami Code?”

“Ah! Right. Hmm. How to explain…” Shen Qingqiu gnawed at his bottom lip in a distracting way before he shrugged. “I suppose it’s something like literature from my world.”

“…something like…” Liu Qingge repeated, wondering what that could possibly mean.

“Oh — well, there’s also the physical aspect. So I guess maybe it’s like… Martial training manuals?”

“…training manuals.” …what on earth was like a combination of literature and martial training manuals? Very tentatively he asked, “Like theatre?”

“Not… really. I guess a little? It’s hard to explain because System won’t let me go into detail but — OH!” Shen Qingqiu slammed his palms down on the table, making his tea dishes rattle. His eyes lit up in a way that had Liu Qingge’s danger sense screaming. “I wonder if I could translate the Konami Code into a real thing here?”

Apparently from the one-sided conversation between the fairy and his System, the answer was a very firm and (presumably) threatening ‘no’ even after Shen Qingqiu protested that of course he would not blow up the mountain. 

The fairy then proceeded to ask, “What about the Kamehameha then?” and after hearing his disquieting response of, “Well, if it would kill me, then never mind. I’ll save experiments if it’s dire, I guess.” Liu Qingge decided to never discuss the fairy world’s frightening arts ever again.

The afternoons that Shen Qingqiu didn’t teach or had free hours were usually taken up by visits from peak lords, including Mu Qingfang, who showed up every few days (generally with one or two of his disciples in tow, which had deeply frustrated Liu Qingge — he would have advised a peak lord’s weakness be kept secret, even if they were only temporary) and always ended his examination of the Without-A-Cure stains with a confident, “Just another few days will do it.” 

Liu Qingge was likely not the only one to notice that the poultice mixture’s composition changed at least once a week. But he also noted that the color and size of the stain had been reduced, so he tried not to scoff every time the doctor said his usual line. The Qian Cao disciples always nodded as if it were the first time.

Evenings together varied too much to have a true routine. 

Sometimes a peak lord stayed over to be hosted for dinner. 

Sometimes Shen Qingqiu had letters to write or texts to study.

Sometimes there were peak lord meetings that ranged anywhere from tedious, to amusing, to frustrating, to oddly social (perhaps all during the same meeting).

Sometimes the disciples got up to mischief — both within Qing Jing Peak and also between peaks. 

The most recent issue was over how to handle a Qian Cao disciple who regularly lingered on the peak after Mu Qingfang came for treatments. Some of the male disciples had noticed and were determined to chase him off for getting ideas about one of their shimei. No one seemed to treat Shen Qingqiu’s suggestion at all seriously, even if it seemed only logical that the girl in question be allowed the choice. Since no one seemed to know which girl he was interested in, her opinion could not be sought privately.

Occasionally Shen Qingqiu sorted out issues himself, but as the disciples were getting older (and, as evidenced, more opinionated), he was trying to train his three favorites to become leaders on his peak, which should lessen the amount of time he spent on such things in the future. So it was his job to listen to the thoughts of one or more of the trio as they worked their way through the issue, each in their own way. 

The girl, Ning Yingying, fretted over the lack of harmony or common sense. 

When she’d resolved how to deal with whatever had brought her to consult with her shizun, she would generally approach with a soft opener and then go for sudden sharp strikes if the soft approach wasn’t working. Her approach was very feminine, taking advantage of playing any number of roles to get the results she wanted:  the little sister, the elder sister, the mother, even on occasion The Girl You Wanted To Impress. She was really the most effective of the three at diffusing situations and mending fences between people.

Ming Fan, the head disciple, tried to play little peak lord and figure out how to resolve issues mostly on his own. 

Though he never said so in words, the slow way he thought things through showed he was none-too-subtly stressing over whether he could possibly measure up to Shen Qingqiu’s expectations and over the dismaying comparisons to Luo Binghe. Liu Qingge preferred his occasional (surprisingly) brutal verdicts that the disciples in question were idiots. His approach, when he finally went to the disciples in question, attempted for mediation first, doing his best to hear out each side before meeting them in the middle. It had more mixed results than his shimei’s, either completely resolving the conflict or giving them a new grudge on top of the old one. His most effective results came from when he told them bluntly they were being idiots, though he only ever used it when they’d completely exhausted his limited supply of patience. Shockingly, it never earned him ire, so Liu Qingge wondered why he didn’t just try the blunt route from the start. …Though perhaps it was more effective that he didn’t.

And Luo Binghe was an entirely different matter from the other two. 

He didn’t usually talk things out with Shen Qingqiu at all. Their time alone was spent with him amusing or doting on his master instead. With the troublemakers, he used every trick in the book if he was the one dealing with it. Since he was clearly attempting to have a certain white as snow; pure as jade image in the eyes of his shizun, his first approaches were generally soft or reasonable, meant to coax the disciples into better behavior. Every form of manipulation came next, tailored to each person like he kept a running list in his head of everyone’s weak points and how to get what he wanted out of them. Occasionally there was a fight — which he always, always won — usually so handily it was humiliating for those who found themselves at the wrong end of it. He smoothly charmed his way into Shen Qingqiu’s good graces if he heard about it, guiding him into looking at him as his Little White Sheep and staying blind to the smug wolf beneath the woolly coat.

It was honestly a little terrifying to see beneath the mask and realize he might be the only one in the position to truly see the full scope of Luo Binghe’s power and skills. Perhaps even better than Luo Binghe himself did. 

The fairies were in agreement that according to the prophecy Luo Binghe ought to have learned about his demonic heritage by now, but as the only outward sign (that they’d noticed) was his rapid skill advancement, they weren’t sure. Liu Qingge was sure the boy knew, but he also didn’t think he should let on about it to Shen Qingqiu. Luo Binghe adored his shizun and the reverse was just as true. Outing him might spoil the balance, so he’d keep an eye on it. For now it wasn’t a concern.

He was far more focused on taking advantage of those few nights where Shen Qingqiu was free. 

On nights the weather was poor or Shen Qingqiu was tired, they stayed in and chatted until Shen Qingqiu started to get sleepy and Liu Qingge sent him to bed. 

On the good nights, they took walks together. Sometimes they just wandered around the peak, discovering hidden grottos and stone gardens next to ancient pavilions lost and forgotten by most. Other times, Liu Qingge suggested taking Shen Qingqiu’s spirit sword and flying to a place on the mountain he knew that he thought Shen Qingqiu might enjoy. Sometimes Shen Qingqiu would make a request of some location he’d heard of from the prophecy. If Liu Qingge knew of it, he’d direct him there. If he didn’t, they hunted for it together based on what clues the fairy remembered and Liu Qingge was able to conclude from what he knew of the mountain.

It was quite possibly the most alive Liu Qingge had ever felt off of the battlefield.

The irony of that was not lost on him.

***

“Shidi? What do you think about a sunset walk at Bai Zhan?” Shen Qingqiu asked one autumn afternoon as he read the letter that had arrived sometime earlier.

The too-casual tone of his voice and the way he tried to subtly angle the letter away from the side Liu Qingge favored sitting at suggested he was hiding something, so Liu Qingge moved to pluck the letter from his hand. He was getting better at being able to manipulate objects, but unfortunately for him, being a person made of solid material still gave Shen Qingqiu the advantage. He was also expecting this trick, so he managed to hold firm.

They squabbled over the letter for a bit before Shen Qingqiu finally sighed and spread it out over the table. “You could have just said ‘yes’, Shidi!” he complained half-heartedly.

“And you could have just read it to me,” he replied softly against his ear. Even after months of practice he still hadn’t managed to significantly increase the volume he spoke with, only the number of words.

The letter read:

I have something I must discuss with you. 
Could you come to Master Liu Qingge’s house at sunset? 
Wait by the stone bench. 
The disciples should be busy with evening practice, 
so we may speak privately.

It could be life or death.

It was written in a painfully plain style, on even plainer paper, and left unsigned.

“Suspicious,” Liu Qingge said.

“Well… yes. But I think I should go regardless.”

“Anyone who wished to speak with you could do so privately on your own peak. There are a million ways to approach you without attracting attention,” Liu Qingge persisted. “This person is clearly up to no good.”

“En. But ignoring the issue does not make it go away,” Shen Qingqiu replied in that gentle but stubborn way he had sometimes. “At least this way, we are prepared.”

Liu Qingge sighed — he’d finally learned the trick to doing it as a ghost about a month ago and, really, nothing else could quite express his long-suffering attitude. Eye rolls weren’t enough and it wasn’t like Shen Qingqiu could see those anyway. 

Expressing himself might make the fairy slightly less likely to do foolish things.

Being a ghost and thus apparently made entirely of qi himself, Liu Qingge had been able to attune himself to the fluctuations in Shen Qingqiu’s qi. He began to notice when one of Shen Qingqiu’s meridians became blocked by the traces of Without-A-Cure, first by watching those subtle shimmers in his skin and then just by feel alone. He’d learned to warn him in advance since Shen Qingqiu wasn’t able to feel it coming on himself. Often as not, Shen Qingqiu would be busy at the time and seemed to think that with the forewarning, he would manage to time it so he stopped relying on his qi before it was cut off.

Shen Qingqiu had not learned to do such a thing. 

At all.

Several times this had lead to him plummeting to the ground while out flying on his sword. Thankfully for his ego, these had all happened while they were out exploring at night and no one but Liu Qingge knew. And thankfully for his bones, he’d always managed to crash into a tree or fall into a pond. 

The last time he’d crashed he’d had to take a detour to Qian Cao Peak and be treated for a wrist sprain. Since Mu Qingfang was out, one of the senior disciples assisted, asking all of the nosy questions about what “Shen-Shibo” had been doing at this hour to be injured that his master would have probably asked if he’d been there. Lately the doctor always seemed to be hard to find whenever he wasn’t treating Shen Qingqiu’s Without-A-Cure.

After spraining his wrist Shen Qingqiu heard him out when Liu Qingge voiced his warnings. This did not mean he immediately disengaged from whatever he was doing, but at least if he were on his sword he’d fly closer to the ground and was able to land more gracefully when his qi cut off.

It was progress.

Sort of.

“Tell Luo Binghe,” Liu Qingge said, infusing as much firmness into his whisper as he thought he could get away with. Maybe Shen Qingqiu would think of what happened when he didn’t listen to him, and agree. 

Thankfully, he didn’t put any hope into the thought.

Shen Qingqiu smiled, but shook his head. “If I do, the sticky child will want to come with me. Then whoever wants to talk to me won’t.”

Though the gesture was pointless, Liu Qingge rolled his eyes. “I’m coming.”

“Yes, of course! Good! They won’t know that, so it’ll be safe. And I’ll be perfectly safe with you.” There was a coaxing tone in Shen Qingqiu’s voice, as if attempting to mollify Liu Qingge.

“Fine,” Liu Qingge conceded, and then in retaliation for not being listened to, he pettishly tugged at a dangling lock of Shen Qingqiu’s hair, which just made the fairy laugh.

It was annoying how much of his ire the laugh instantly soothed.

***

Shen Qingqiu asked Luo Binghe to serve him dinner early. 

“I’d like to take a walk and see the sunset from another peak,” he said by way of explanation, as if it were just a poet’s fancy. As if he were a fanciful poet and it should be expected. Just one of his regular artist’s whimsies.

Luo Binghe’s attention was immediately caught by this, but he agreed easily and began dinner at once. 

The disciple knew very well that his shizun was no fanciful poet. It would have been far less suspicious if he’d just asked for the early dinner and left without comment. But Liu Qingge wasn’t going to give lessons to Shen Qingqiu, of all people, on being sly. The fairy that had replaced the original was slippery in his own right, but Luo Binghe was proving to be even better at it.

“Which peak?” Luo Binghe asked as he served dinner later.

“Mmn? Oh — the sunset? I haven’t decided,” Shen Qingqiu said breezily and quickly took up his chopsticks to snag a bite of food before drowning his beloved disciple in (apparently) well-deserved praise.

Luo Binghe lapped it up, happily accepting the compliments and sweetly urging his shizun to try this or that. The boy smiled and teased and let himself be distracted from the topic. But his dark eyes were sharp and he wasn’t the least bit fooled. He happily joined his shizun at the table for dinner when invited and lulled him into complacency.

Liu Qingge didn’t warn Shen Qingqiu during the meal that his Little White Sheep was on to his tricks. Nor did he mention he’d gained a second shadow on his way out of the house. 

At least this way they’d both get their way:  Shen Qingqiu would have someone watching over him who could actually do something if the letter’s writer were up to no good (which of course they must be) and Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t have to worry about his disciple’s presence frightening them away. 

Luo Binghe was far too clever to let himself be detected.

***

They took a rather meandering route to Bai Zhan, presumably in case someone from Qing Jing took notice of their shizun’s earlier than usual walk.

Shen Qingqiu was quiet, hands tucked at the small of his back as if having a casual stroll. He was cautious enough not to speak much, saying only what anyone might say aloud when by themselves. That meant it was one of the few walks they’d taken together where they weren’t having some form of conversation. Instead, they both were more focused on trying to detect anyone else. Liu Qingge knew roughly where Luo Binghe was, but that was mostly because he’d been painstakingly tracking the boy’s movements as he made his way from cover to cover. Shen Qingqiu didn’t seem aware there was anyone around at all.

They arrived on Bai Zhan shortly after its disciples would have gone to evening practice and proceeded, unchallenged, to his wooden house on the cliffside. The house had been built specifically to have the best views of the sunset any time of the year, which must have been why it was selected as the time and location for the conversation.

The first time Liu Qingge spoke was to direct Shen Qingqiu to the stone bench mentioned in the letter. 

Saying that it was ‘by’ the house was a little misleading. It could certainly be seen from one side of the house’s porch, but it was a tucked away little place, almost completely hidden from anywhere else. There was an amphitheater-shaped rock shelf likely left behind by some long-fallen boulder; the open valley below its stage. The stairs down into it could only be found if you made your way behind mossy rock formations and fern-covered mounds on what looked like a game trail between them. 

You had to know it was there to easily find it. 

The area was almost never used. Though it was private, the one place its visitors could be seen was the peak lord’s own porch, which made it unpopular for courting couples. To have a good view of the sunsets over the valley, there were easily a dozen better places on the peak, but without a peak lord in residence, it was one of the more secluded. 

It was almost fitting that Shen Qingqiu loved it on sight, descending into the crescent-shaped space and exclaiming over the beauty of the valley.

“What a wonderful place to watch the sunset!” he said breathlessly, turning in place to admire the way the ivy draped in heavy curtains over the sides of the space and continued along the edges of it to climb more carefully down the cliff face itself. 

The wind picked up, blowing its way up the cliff to playfully tug at Shen Qingqiu’s hair and robes. He laughed and just turned to face the wind. Liu Qingge was distracted from his attempt to figure out how Luo Binghe was going to keep an eye on his shizun without being detected — he was too busy watching Shen Qingqiu laugh at the wind making his hair into ribbons and clothes into banners. The sunset blazed in front of him, adding an extra flush to his skin.

Liu Qingge imagined the fairy had no idea how beautiful he was to mere humans.

There was the faint clatter of stone on stone that pulled the mesmerized Liu Qingge’s attention away from the fairy and towards the stairs, assuming it was most likely the letter writer arriving that direction. Then he felt the sympathetic pull at his qi that told him Without-A-Cure was about to cut off Shen Qingqiu’s qi.

“The poison!” he hissed in Shen Qingqiu’s ear before trying to get a read on where he’d heard the rocks. Anyone coming openly would have been visible by now had they come via the stairs. But no one was in sight. 

His instincts were screaming danger, but he didn’t have access to the kind of senses he did while alive.

Liu Qingge heard a soft sound from above them and turned to see purple robes and a pale veil flutter from the porch of his house before the slender figure retreated from view.

Behind him, Shen Qingqiu staggered as his qi was blocked completely. Liu Qingge looked away from the house to catch Shen Qingqiu’s arm and steady him. 

A moment later, a burst of qi-flavored wind hit them from behind, shoving the already off-balance Shen Qingqiu over the edge of the cliff with a sharp sound of pain. Liu Qingge was pulled along with him, towards the falling sun. 

There was a brief moment where he thought they’d have to rely on Shen Qingqiu’s extraordinary luck and hope that Shen Qingqiu would fall into the branches of one of the trees that clung to the cliffside and stay there until Luo Binghe could find a way to stage his rescue. Then in a flash of horror he remembered that this part of the cliff didn’t have trees.

Liu Qingge poured every ounce of his strength into his ghostly form, gripping hard at Shen Qingqiu’s arm with one hand and digging his fingers into a crevice in the ground with the other. 

It was enough. 

He hit the ground hard, the impact throwing dust and gravel, and then felt Shen Qingqiu’s weight jar them both as the fairy’s fall abruptly halted. Shen Qingqiu uttered a faint whimper, the muscles in his arm spasming in reaction to a thousand stimuli before he turned his wrist so he could grip Liu Qingge’s arm in return.

Liu Qingge could feel his own sword-calloused hand gripping at flesh and bone covered by skin-warmed silk, and long, elegant fingers wrapping in turn around his own arm, nails lightly scratching at the edges of his wrist-guards. He could feel the thrum of a heartbeat that could have been either of theirs, or perhaps their combined pulse, unified by their heightened emotions.

His body lay over the edge of the cliff, almost bending at the waist as he watched Shen Qingqiu swing below him by one arm, buffeted by the wind. The shape of the cliff’s face didn’t allow Shen Qingqiu to brace his feet on it and use it to climb, and his blocked qi meant he wasn’t strong enough to use Liu Qingge like a ladder. He could only dangle, his free hand lifting to shield himself from the dust and debris that rained down on him; his robes and hair disturbed by the churning air. 

Almost the entire height of the peak separated Shen Qingqiu from the ground — which he couldn’t even see now for the clouds obscuring the bottom of the valley. If Shen Qingqiu fell, even if his qi returned in time, there was little hope of him being able to survive the fall unless the clouds were actually Flying Nimbuses, and he refused to bet on that sort of improbable coincidence.

Liu Qingge was staring down at him, furiously trying to think of how to get out of this without having to wait for Luo Binghe’s assistance, when Shen Qingqiu looked up. 

He was able to see the precise moment Shen Qingqiu’s eyes widened in shock and recognition. 

It took him another heartbeat to realize the fairy could see him as well as feel him.

In fact, Liu Qingge could see a difference in himself as well. His hair was moving in the air that rushed up the side of the peak as if it were real too, rather than hanging untouched by the material world as it should have been. Strands of it were whipping around his face and getting into his eyes. 

It was the only reason he knew he wasn’t imagining it.

“Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu said quietly, pained and wonder-struck eyes fixed on his face and meeting his eyes properly for the first time. 

“En,” he responded automatically. Apparently this more solid form meant Shen Qingqiu could hear him, even if he wasn’t speaking directly next to his ear, because he saw a sort of teary fondness in the fairy’s expression.

“Shidi, you can’t—” His words strained to escape his lips. “—Can’t hold me like this.”

“It’s fine,” Liu Qingge said through gritted teeth. But he could already feel his qi being recklessly expended and a burning in his stomach as if he’d been stabbed by stone splinters.

Shen Qingqiu shook his head. “You’ll… wear yourself out… again.”

The fairy’s warning wasn’t wrong. He could already not sense his ghostly body’s legs. There was an unsettling feeling of being unraveled like a knitted sock — he could feel each loop of the threads of his power being pulled one by one, creeping up his body. He didn’t think he had to worry about body weight and leverage being thrown off by this, but he knew that once the unraveling reached his hands, he’d no longer be able to hold Shen Qingqiu.

Liu Qingge understood two things at almost the same moment that he wished he’d allowed himself to acknowledge sooner:  First, that he’d fallen irrevocably in love with the bookish fairy. Second, that someone was definitely trying to kill Shen Qingqiu.

“What if you can’t… come back this time, Shidi?” the fairy asked tightly, his eyes showing both pain and fear as his free hand inched up to try to cover Liu Qingge’s. 

He could feel the soft, trembling touch of Shen Qingqiu’s hand.

“…if that’s what it takes,” Liu Qingge said grimly. 

All he had to do was hold on long enough for Luo Binghe to arrive.

Chapter Text

The unraveling had reached Liu Qingge’s shoulder blades by the time a slender arm darted down to grab Shen Qingqiu’s extended hand. 

It was not the arm he’d expected.

Instead of Luo Binghe, it was Mingyan who’d flung herself hard on her stomach beside him on the sunset-painted ledge. Her face was pinched with alarm and she looked uncharacteristically disheveled, suggesting a heedless sprint from the house down into the stone amphitheater. 

It became immediately obvious that she couldn’t see Liu Qingge, even though the startled flick of Shen Qingqiu’s eyes from Liu Qingge’s fading form to his sister’s solid one said that he still could. 

Once the puff of dust cleared, his sister stared fiercely down at Shen Qingqiu, her brows drawn tightly together. Liu Qingge was horrified when he saw the split second she considered letting go. It passed just as quickly, like a predator’s shadow, but he’d felt the flex of Shen Qingqiu’s fingers as he registered it himself. 

Until this he had not seriously considered that the fairies had any merit to their suspicions that she might be a danger.

“I’d… understand,” Shen Qingqiu said quietly. Mingyan flinched and her icy eyes questioned his meaning. “Letting go,” the fairy clarified, his voice so inflectionless aside from his obvious pain that it was as if he were speaking about something else entirely.

Liu Qingge hissed, but didn’t have the energy to further protest Shen Qingqiu’s words. The fairy didn’t react at all, so he wasn’t even sure if he’d heard.

Mingyan paled and shuddered, but to Liu Qingge’s intense relief, the ice finally left her eyes. She closed them, took a deep breath, and replied. “No. No, that would be murder and I would want justice. It is what my brother would want.” 

She took another deep breath and tried hauling Shen Qingqiu up.

Mingyan was strong and her qi wasn’t blocked, but at her level of cultivation it was no easy task to pull the dead weight of someone who weighed more than you when you didn’t have the leverage or a safe position to create it. Keeping Shen Qingqiu from falling was easy, even without her brother assisting, but though she scrambled for purchase, she couldn’t quite find a way to manage anything more than simply that. 

Though he was still weakening steadily, Liu Qingge kept hold of Shen Qingqiu, taking on the role of safety rope in the unlikely event that his sister’s grip slipped. He believed her sense of justice would not allow her to do anything less than her utmost.

Frustrated by her veil being blown into her eyes by the wind, Mingyan tore it away and shoved it into the collar of her robes.

“Arrays, arrays… Is there one that…?” she muttered to herself under her breath.

That was roughly when Liu Qingge felt the last dregs of his solidity give way. No longer could he feel Shen Qingqiu’s warmth through a thin layer of silk, the hard flex of his muscle over bone, and the distant pulse of his qi trying to break free of the blockage in his meridians. He didn’t even feel the grit of sand and rock on his skin or whatever was sending distressing needle-like shots of pain through his belly.

He couldn’t feel anything at all. 

Though his vision darkened for several concerning minutes, Liu Qingge still remained behind and aware. By the dismayed sound the straining Shen Qingqiu made in the back of his throat, the fairy could no longer be certain of that.

“Shen-Shibo — wha—?” Mingyan began, but was immediately cut off by a strong, black-clad arm shooting past her.

Luo Binghe grabbed his shizun by the forearm and hauled him up effortlessly to the ledge before pulling the dazed fairy to his chest.

“Shizun!” he breathed, face paper white and anguished. 

Liu Mingyan stared at Luo Binghe a moment — first surprised; then speculative — before she seemed to remember her face was unprotected. Watching the pair closely, she quietly retrieved her veil and tied it back on. Only then did she risk interrupting by gently guiding them further away from the edge of the cliff and to the stone bench.

They sat at her direction, each too wrung out to consider resisting.

In fact, neither gave her a second look — Luo Binghe didn’t appear to have even noticed she was there, simply clutching Shen Qingqiu to his chest and trying to catch his breath. Shen Qingqiu couldn’t have noticed if he’d wanted to. He buried his face against his disciple’s shoulder and let the boy’s shaking hands establish that he was there and whole. The fairy visibly trembled, his breathing coming in short and shallow gasps as he held a hand to his side.

Liu Qingge was only able to drift and watch hazily over them, though his attention was barely able to encompass his sister and Luo Binghe — too much of him was focused on Shen Qingqiu. 

Dispassionately, he recognized that he was too weak to do anything else; it may have been lucky that he hadn’t instantly fallen into the darkness again. He absently felt that if he weren’t bound to the fairy, the wind that gusted over the cliffs would have carried him away, perhaps far away to the desert at the distant end of the mountain range.

He could no longer see himself at all. 

Once again, he struggled to remember what ‘Liu Qingge’ was. 

If he imagined himself as looking like anything, it was a small cloud, no bigger than a kitten, that occasionally tried to form limbs. It was as if his soul knew he should have them, but couldn’t decide whether he was a white tiger, had the feathers and wings of a luan, or was a scaled and tufted dragon. 

It was frustrating to note that at no point did his cloud-self consider he might be human.

While Liu Qingge had a crisis of form, the others used their time more fruitfully. It took a few minutes for Luo Binghe to calm down enough to allow for conversation and for Shen Qingqiu to have recovered enough to listen. By then, the sun had decidedly set and the moon had yet to rise enough to bathe them in its silvery glow. The shadow-draped sitting area had an almost ominous atmosphere now, like the lull before a storm or the moment where the wildlife went still and quiet.

“Perhaps we should go into the house,” Liu Mingyan suggested.

Luo Binghe turned his head and gave her a cold, suspicious stare.

“Why?” he asked bluntly. Now that he was recovering from his shock, it appeared that the boy’s hackles were rising.

Mingyan didn’t flinch or falter and knew better than to lower her eyes from the challenge in Luo Binghe’s. “I feel like we’re being watched,” she said, very, very quietly. 

The two from Qing Jing went still, almost holding their breath. 

Liu Qingge could feel it too. That ominous atmosphere he’d registered hadn’t just been Luo Binghe’s impending response to what had happened, then. He could see Luo Binghe do quick calculations in his head, his dark eyes questing for a source of the tension everyone was now aware of.

“Where?” he asked in a low tone that carried underneath the sounds of the wind and the rustling greenery to those by the bench, and no further.

“I cannot tell,” she said, finally reassured that taking her eyes away from Luo Binghe wouldn’t result in him launching a surprise attack against her. His sister’s instincts were good. “Perhaps by magic. I cannot sense a presence just… the watching.”

The two young disciples looked at each other for a long moment before Luo Binghe nodded and helped his master to his feet, apparently deciding that Mingyan was not currently a threat. 

She lead the way, a dagger subtly held in the palm of each hand and a second pair tucked snugly in their sheaths at her wrists, their presence disguised by her fluttering layers of diaphanous silk. 

Shen Qingqiu was silent and visibly drained, simply allowing Luo Binghe to half-carry him up the stairs as he curled his fist in his sleeve and held it against his lower ribs.

Liu Qingge followed behind, pulled in Shen Qingqiu’s wake as if tied to him by a string.

His sister brought them into the house, which was clearly still being tended to in his absence, and activated the luminous pearls she passed after she’d neatly stowed her daggers away.

“I come here some nights to sit and think,” she said quietly once they were all inside and she’d shut the door behind them. “No one will think it’s unusual that I’m here. They know better than to pry. Anyone who comes should be regarded as suspicious.”

“How do we know that you’re not suspicious?” Luo Binghe asked with a cool tone and cold black eyes.

Mingyan looked thoughtful for a few moments before bowing her head slightly in acknowledgment. “By all rights I should be. I would be wary of myself. I mean you no harm, but it is safer to not take my word for it. Especially after what’s happened.”

“And what’s happened, Liu-Shizhi?” Shen Qingqiu asked in a soft rasp, a hand still subtly pressed against his ribs. He was looking at her almost as if seeing through her, which seemed to unnerve Mingyan.

“We should sit. I have the feeling the discussion may take awhile.” She paused for a moment before adding, “I would offer tea, but I imagine you would not trust anything here.”

“Point it out to me and I will make it. I trust my eyes and my nose,” Luo Binghe said, tone just shy of warning. 

His dark gaze was still as wary as his voice, but he no longer looked ready to bite anything that moved too quickly for his liking. Luo Binghe’s judgment of character was too sharp for him to maintain aggression against someone clearly making great pains to show herself to be an honest ally, but his suspicious nature would not allow him to fully relax either. Not without more proof of what his instincts told him.

After Shen Qingqiu was carefully settled at the low table, the two disciples moved on to the kitchen. They could be heard in the distance, their words muffled but were very clearly the back and forth of two teenagers cautiously feeling each other out from underneath a layer of polite words and a careful distance.

His attention was drawn from monitoring them by a soft intake of breath closer by.

“Liu Qingge…” Shen Qingqiu whispered, fingers of the other hand slipping along the edge of the table before moving to pull a folded paper crane from where it rested against a book on sword forms. Mingyan had folded it for him the last time they’d had a meal together. Shen Qingqiu moved it towards himself and stared at it intently, hands slipping into his lap to clench one over the other under the cover of his sleeves.

It was clear what he hoped for. It wouldn’t even take much to move the paper crane — perhaps less than disturbing the red tassel that hung in Shen Qingqiu’s room. But Liu Qingge couldn’t so much as control where he floated. He tried, though, formlessly writhing with the attempt to grasp the air and pull himself closer.

After a few minutes of silence punctuated by the rise and fall of the teenagers’ voices and Shen Qingqiu’s shallow breaths, he’d managed to drift close enough — likely through sheer coincidence — to Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder that he thought he could try reaching towards him.

One thing that all of Liu Qingge’s cloud-forms agreed upon was that they had claws or talons, so he tried to reach out with one to hook onto the waiting fairy and let him know he was there. But without being able to see or feel any limbs, he had no idea how far his reach was or if they were even obeying his instructions.

He thought for a moment that he’d managed to grasp onto strands of Shen Qingqiu’s hair, but it was only that it slid forward when the fairy finally slumped in defeat after waiting too long without results.

Liu Qingge helplessly watched as Shen Qingqiu tried to pack away his fears and prepare himself to focus on the matter at hand. There were a few minutes of agony as he watched the fairy’s shoulders shake and heard his breath hitch as he resisted the urge to show any signs of upset or even express his evident physical pain. 

That he could do nothing to comfort him made somewhere within Liu Qingge itch and burn, like splinters let to fester. He churned uselessly around that fire-hot sensation — it was the only part of him he could feel.

When Shen Qingqiu raised his head again, it was with the same look he’d had when he’d seemed to stare through Mingyan earlier — almost a gaze that looked to another world. To Liu Qingge’s relief, there was a bit more awareness to it when the teenagers reentered the room a short time later and took their seats at the table.

Luo Binghe had evidently tested everything he was serving thoroughly, because he handed his shizun a cup of tea without hesitation, even if he still cast his shimei a wary side-eye every so often.

Tea served and a first sip taken by everyone, Mingyan finally broke the silence.

“Shen-Shibo, may I ask… what happened to you?”

“You didn’t see?” Shen Qingqiu asked calmly, taking another sip of his tea and watching her through the veil of the steam.

“No. I came out onto the porch and, hearing a voice, walked over to see who was there. When I noticed it was you, I turned to leave, but I heard a shout moments later. I saw you go over the edge, but I didn’t see what caused you to fall. I ran to help you.”

“If you were on the porch, why didn’t you leap down from there?” Luo Binghe cut in, his voice hard under the polite layer he’d pulled over it.

“It wouldn’t be safe,” she said, shaking her head. “The winds that blow against this side of the mountain are powerful. Even on the back of a spirit sword, it is difficult not to be knocked around by the wind. My brother could do it, but I could not dare risk it.”

This was perfectly true, though the hazardous nature of the winds of Bai Zhan might not be common knowledge among the other peaks. It was one of the effects of a great protection array that shielded the mountain from open invasion. Every peak probably had it manifest in its own way. It was not something people spoke of much, even between peak lords, perhaps to obfuscate potential points of attack — you would need to know Cang Qiong Mountain very well to learn enough of its secrets to be a serious threat.

“And why were you here, Binghe?” Shen Qingqiu asked, his soft voice brushing aside Liu Qingge’s musings.

Luo Binghe widened his eyes with an innocence that almost convinced Liu Qingge, who knew perfectly well the boy wasn’t. “This one apologizes, Shizun.” He bowed with a display of great humility and hunched slightly with contrition. “After you left on your walk, I was cleaning away the dishes when the open window let in a breeze that scattered the papers on your table. I found the letter when I was picking them up. I was concerned, so I hurried after you.”

If anything, Liu Qingge bet that the boy had been curious about the letter since it was delivered and his shizun’s suspicious behavior only provoked him to investigate. In fact, it was him who had opened the window at the start of the meal to let the fresh air in. He must have known exactly which paper to look for and was clever enough to set up a plausible way he could explain seeing its contents in advance. It was good that he did.

“En, I see…” Shen Qingqiu replied softly, lowering his eyes to his tea. Almost to himself he added, “It seems I should have brought you with me to begin with.” 

He sounded so lost that it wasn’t just Liu Qingge and Luo Binghe whose hearts bled for him. Even Mingyan leaned forward, hand twitching on her lap as if she wanted to console her shibo.

Liu Qingge managed to drift close enough to the fairy now that he couldn’t miss his chance. He vividly imagined four clawed limbs and pictured using them all to anchor himself to Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder. Amazingly, he stopped drifting, though he could tell the fairy had no idea he had an invisible passenger. Still, this progress was enough for Liu Qingge to relax. Even if Shen Qingqiu couldn’t detect him yet, he could now gather his energy and focus on his presence again rather than fretting over not being able to reach Shen Qingqiu.

“Shen-Shibo… I received a letter too,” Mingyan said, pulling a folded paper out of her robes and presenting it to the man with a bow. 

Shen Qingqiu set his cup of tea aside to take the piece of paper. He carefully unfolded it and read it aloud in that faint rasp he’d developed after falling over the cliff. 

The letter read:

Beautiful One, 
I have noticed that you visit your brother’s home often now.
I can only presume this is to reflect on your loss.
How it must burden you!
How unjust that its cause shares none of this burden!
You are not alone in finding this unbearable.
They say that watching sunsets can begin to heal the soul.
Tonight, as is only correct, the sun will set.
Perhaps you will be unburdened as well.
I hope to see your heart set free once more.

Ever devoted.

Like the other letter, it was written in the plainest of styles, on the plainest of papers, and left unsigned.

“Suspicious,” Liu Mingyan said with a bone-dry snideness, and was immediately horrified when Shen Qingqiu visibly flinched and turned away to hide his expression, dropping the letter on the table almost in his cup of tea. “M-my apologies, Shen-Shibo…” she whispered, though she couldn’t possibly know what she was apologizing for.

Whether it was purely to comfort his shizun or if he was prompted by some fledgling sympathy for Mingyan’s awkward position, Luo Binghe moved over to tug his shizun down into a hug. 

“I’m fine!” Shen Qingqiu said breathlessly, though he didn’t lift his head from his disciple’s shoulder and used his curled position to mask the clutch at his ribs.

“En,” Luo Binghe agreed gently. “Please indulge this disciple. He is still trembling from realizing his shizun was nearly taken from him.” Shen Qingqiu made a strange not-laugh, but submitted, relaxing at the comforting rub Luo Binghe gave his back. 

While Liu Mingyan tried to show her silent support by pretending to be invisible so as not to make things more embarrassing for her shibo, her actually-invisible brother had the baffling need to move like an annoyed and stubborn kitten trying to stake its claim on Shen Qingqiu’s shoulders, lifting limbs to avoid the hand that occasionally passed where he was ‘sitting’.

Liu Qingge thought this was a good sign as it implied he had something to displace and that he might perhaps be recovering more quickly than last time this happened. On the other hand, it also implied that his cloud-form might be how he re-entered the part of reality that could communicate with Shen Qingqiu. 

He’d take it over nothingness, though. Without hesitation. Even if it meant he now eyed Luo Binghe’s hand and considered batting at it with his clawed paw or whatever a cloud-tiger-luan-dragon used to protect its territory.

How ridiculous.

After a few minutes, Shen Qingqiu sat up with a faint laugh and resettled his hair and clothes, a pleasant mask now settled in place. “My apologies. Liu-Shizhi… I wonder if you realize how much you resembled your brother just then. He said the same thing in much the same way to me before. It startled me.”

It wasn’t just Mingyan whose eyes widened as she straightened with surprise — Luo Binghe did as well.

“Shen-Shibo… you… remember such a thing?” she asked, her voice a little strangled as mistrust and gratification fought in her eyes.

“En.”

“But you lost your memories…” Luo Binghe breathed, apparently unaware he’d spoken. He surely wouldn’t have said such a thing if he had been. Shen Qingqiu’s ‘memory loss’ was supposed to be a secret, after all. Not that those who paid attention wouldn’t have noticed that he didn’t seem to be aware of everything he should be, but everyone was still trying to pretend they didn’t know.

Shen Qingqiu chuckled, lowering his eyes as he spoke. “I remember some things. I remembered that just now. I wonder when I will be able to apologize to him?” he asked faintly, his mask slipping.

The teenagers stared at Shen Qingqiu, not in disbelief, but with something closer to wonder. And no question, if he did not know what he did about Shen Qingqiu, Liu Qingge would have stared the same way. Perhaps he would have even suspected the truth:  that the man’s soul had been replaced by another. Surely the original had never thought of doing such a thing, must less would he be likely to admit to to consider doing it to young disciples.

He wondered if Luo Binghe might have ever entertained the idea that this was a different Shen Qingqiu. It would not surprise him.

“I suppose this means that there is no question that it was an attempted murder,” Shen Qingqiu said pleasantly, raising his eyes as he slipped back into the guise of someone faintly amused by the world. “I must be the burden they mentioned.”

“They certainly thought so,” Mingyan murmured, her flower-colored gaze troubled over the top of her veil. “I am no longer certain. If Shibo allows it, I will make inquiries into the identity of the writer.”

“It seems as if you have your suspicions already,” Shen Qingqiu pointed out, his eyes shrewd.

“I’m not sure. I apologize, but I don’t want to accuse someone without cause. There are a few people who…” she paused, searching for more precise words as her brows drew together and her expression took on a look of contempt, “…have absurd ideas of how I would like to be treated. Or, perhaps more specifically, are mistaken that they have any right to make decisions for me.” This time she sounded cold and flat, a simmering anger underneath her response.

For the first time, Luo Binghe actually seemed curious about Mingyan. Not necessarily in the finding-her-attractive way (which was a relief as he was more and more certain that Luo Binghe was meant to be his sister’s prophesied husband and Liu Qingge still didn’t know that he’d approve of such a thing if she would be just one of an implied multitude), but more that she might be worth paying attention to for reasons other than being a potential threat or source of information.

As if they were thinking similar things, Shen Qingqiu brushed his eyes over his disciple, almost as if in passing, but turned a mild gaze to Mingyan. “How long do you need to investigate?”

She hesitated, perhaps biting at her bottom lip as she did when pensive. “It depends on how subtly you wish for it to be done, Shen-Shibo. And whether you wished to keep your survival a secret to see if that flushed out the guilty party.”

“I thought I overheard you discussing a spell to watch us? Wouldn’t they already know?” Shen Qingqiu asked, his brow furrowing.

“Not necessarily, Shizun. I was attempting to hide my presence using magic. That would have interfered with most scrying spells,” Luo Binghe said with the slightly evasive air of someone who hoped no one would inquire too deeply into precisely what spells he was using.

Mingyan nodded. “The, er, ‘candidates’ in question… None of them have ever shown much interest in magic. They would not be practiced at scrying spells. And what we sensed seemed to be fighting to get stronger, as if they couldn’t see. There is a good chance they aren’t sure what happened tonight.”

Shen Qingqiu hummed softly, clearly thinking over everything he knew. Animation was back in his eyes and some color had returned to his face. He was still not happy and was likely still in pain from whatever damage he’d taken from the fall, but he no longer looked lost and frail. 

“Let us go with that,” he said after a few minutes. “I’ll write a letter to explain things to Zhangmen-Shixiong and stay here. It’s the last place most people would think to look for me, even if it was the last place they knew me to be. No one but you, Liu-Shizhi, has reason to come here. I should be fine on my own for a few days, but you should rely on Luo Binghe for assistance in your investigations. However they might profess their regard for you, they attempted to kill a peak lord, which shows they feel they have the ability to get away with anything. I don’t want you meeting with anyone without very talented back-up.”

Mingyan agreed without hesitation, but Luo Binghe looked immediately mutinous. 

“Shizun!” the boy said almost sharply. “You cannot live here on your own! If they did think to check here, you might be vulnerable. What is more, it is unsuitable for you to tend to your own bandages and meals for days! You do not even have the poultice here!”

“I have taken care of myself for years. There is no need to be concerned. It would be worse if people noticed someone coming here other than Liu Mingyan, and asking her to look after me would be very inappropriate. If she would be kind enough to deliver the poultice, that would be enough.”

Shen Qingqiu waved a negligent hand, but Liu Qingge was on Luo Binghe’s side in this. Even with his disciples looking after his needs, they sometimes had to bully Shen Qingqiu into taking the time for even food and sleep if he were distracted. Mingyan also seemed to have her misgivings, even if they were probably based heavily on the apparent needs of the original Shen Qingqiu. Wisely, she said nothing. She clearly recognized it as a family issue.

“Then I just need to make sure no one sees me, Shizun. And as I’ve already managed that, there should be no issue,” Luo Binghe said firmly, his black eyes glinting with rebellion.

“Aiyah…” Shen Qingqiu sighed and let his lips lift in a small, indulgent smile. “When did I let you get so spoiled?” he asked with rhetorical absurdity, reaching out to give the boy’s fluffy hair a pat. “I will get along alone just fine. I have almost never made myself anything to eat that was capable of killing anyone.” 

He said this with the air of someone joking, but Liu Qingge had the disconcerting feeling it wasn’t far enough from the truth based on the look in his eyes. Luo Binghe blanched, so he must have noticed the same thing.

“Y-you don’t even have anything to read!” the boy said desperately. “How will you pass time?”

Mingyan immediately averted her eyes, flushing slightly. The claim there was nothing in the house to read was far from the truth, actually. But she knew that volunteering the information was unlikely to endear her to either party. Well, any of the three parties, if she but knew her brother was monitoring the conversation too. 

“Surely Liu-Shidi left behind more like this, at least!” Shen Qingqiu protested, tapping the cover of the sword forms book. “And I seem to remember your brother mentioning you write fiction, Liu-Shizhi? Perhaps you have left something here.” He shot his disciple a ‘so there’ glance, nearly smug.

Liu Qingge did not have the energy (or ability) to sigh, but he still felt the sense of impending dread and wished he could.

His sister sat up so straight she nearly began rising to her feet. “My brother told you that?” Her eyes were so wide over her veil that he thought she would look less shocked if Shen Qingqiu had explained that he was a fairy from another world.

In his innocence, Shen Qingqiu blinked at her with confusion. “Ah? Yes? Should he not have? I’m sorry if that was a secret. He didn’t tell me much, if that makes you feel better…”

Her lashes fluttered as if she were completely re-ordering her preconceptions. Then there was a gleam in her eyes that reminded Liu Qingge of the daggers she had hidden on her person.

“No. Not a ‘secret’, exactly, just… I had not realized you were so close. It’s not so much that my brother disapproves of my writing, but… He would not tell anyone about my stories unless he at least considered you close friends. Please stay. I’m sure my dear brother would insist on it.” 

Liu Qingge had not seen his sister move, but suddenly she seemed much closer to Shen Qingqiu, who was starting to lean away as if his danger sense had finally told him to be wary.

But Liu Qingge was already aware that the fairy’s sense of danger was worryingly faulty. He should have had this reaction from the gleam in her eyes alone.

“I- E-en,” Shen Qingqiu agreed uncertainly. 

Luo Binghe looked like he wanted to protest, but couldn’t come up with any reason beyond, ‘Strange girl, please stop being strange and scaring my shizun.’ Mingyan didn’t look like she was wishing any harm on him, after all — she was just being aggressively welcoming now, like the mother of a hopeless daughter she thought she’d never get rid of scenting a potential suitor.

Which… was nearly exactly what was on his sister’s mind.

“…Shizun,” Luo Binghe tried, tone tentative.

“All right!” Shen Qingqiu said quickly. “You can visit if you are careful not to be seen, Binghe!” The flustered fairy now couldn’t agree fast enough to the idea of someone other than Liu Mingyan being allowed to drop by. “Just make sure than Zhangmen-Shixiong does not attempt to follow your example and sneak over here to check on me. I don’t recall if he even knows how to sneak. Aiyah…” he clutched at the side of his head in dismay, muttering under his breath. “Shang-Shidi should probably be told something too, or else he might freak ou— er, be distressed… ah…”

The teenagers watched him stress for a moment before giving him eerily identical looks of endearment. Liu Qingge didn’t know whether to be pleased or embarrassed that all it took to win his sister over was the idea that he might have a soft spot for Shen Qingqiu.

It was mortifying to know that she was right and she’d known much quicker than he did off of such a small clue, when he’d had months and… well, no, he’d absolutely been in denial over it for awhile now. He’d had plenty of time to come to terms with it if he hadn’t kept putting off acknowledging his feelings until now.

This was intolerable.

The two disciples took over before Shen Qingqiu was able to over-think everything and tie himself in knots. 

While Luo Binghe sorted out the bedroom situation, Mingyan plied Shen Qingqiu with tea and books she’d squirreled around her brother’s house, stacking them into two different piles. Once Shen Qingqiu saw the plot teasers written on their covers, he shed his stress response and started to get as excited as he did when browsing bookstores. 

His sister’s veil hid her wicked smile and Liu Qingge wondered just how many books it would take before the fairy caught on to the ‘hidden themes’ in these novels she was plying him with. They had likely been highly curated by his sister to test the waters before risking scaring him off of others based on the sweet way she’d advised him, “Start with these first.”

Moreover, he wondered what her purpose was in enlightening him to begin with. She could hardly matchmake for the dead, after all. 

Then again, he knew well her preference for Master/Disciple romances… That would probably be it. It would certainly mean he didn’t have to worry as much about his sister becoming Luo Binghe’s bride, but the alternative made his gut burn with the same helpless itch from earlier.

And… he wondered just what assumptions Shen Qingqiu would make about him based on the fact that the books were tucked away out of sight in his own house and in such quantity that they must outnumber his books on martial arts and battle strategy. 

He curled up on Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder and speculated over whether it were possible to die of mortification when one was already a ghost.

***

The last thing Shen Qingqiu did before he climbed into Liu Qingge’s bed was to hang two calligraphy scrolls he’d found. The first went into the common room and the second in the bedroom. Each, of course, had tassels hanging from them. The hopefulness of the act helped soothe Liu Qingge’s unhappy feelings.

Shen Qingqiu was not ready to sleep, and with no Luo Binghe or Liu Qingge to act as his minders, he stayed up reading long into the night.

Liu Qingge settled his cloud-like form on Shen Qingqiu’s chest, silently (and invisibly) disapproving as he waited for sleep to catch up with the fairy.

Sleep did catch up, but for the first time since his death it came for Liu Qingge.

Chapter Text

“Hello, darling…” Shen Qingqiu murmured in a soft and almost cooing tone. “What are you doing here?”

Heart flooding with a melting warmth at the tone, Liu Qingge cracked open an eye and saw Shen Qingqiu staring down at him with something like wonder. 

Confused, Liu Qingge looked around and realized… well, he was some sort of kitten-sized cloud-tiger-luan-dragon beast rather like he’d pictured in his head:  a jumble of feathered and furred and scaled parts in white and blue and black, with a fluffy mane and feathery tufts that ended in a ghostly trail of cloud mist when he moved and — really — did his afterlife have to be quite so strange? Certainly most people had the luxury of a more predictable existence than this?

He had wings.

He felt gravity pulling him, the texture of silk against the pads of his little feet, the catch of his claw tips in fabric, the shift of individual hairs and feathers shifting as he breathed, whiskers registering Shen Qingqiu’s breath as air currents, the beat of something like a heart in his chest — a thousand things all at once. It was somewhat overwhelming.

Liu Qingge heaved a sigh, rolled his eyes, and considered flicking the tip of his long tail over his nose and going back to sleep to deal with whatever this was later.

The warm body underneath him flinched slightly, calling into attention that it was a body he was laying on. Then he almost rolled like an unsecured barrel on the deck of a ship as Shen Qingqiu took a deep, shaky breath and quietly asked, “…Liu Qingge?”

“En,” he agreed, not expecting it to come out as an actual word — only it did. Both he and Shen Qingqiu twitched with surprise to hear such a deep human voice come out of such a small four-legged creature.

“…what?” Shen Qingqiu asked, bewildered.

“Oh,” Liu Qingge said, blinking a little. “I talk.”

After a moment, Shen Qingqiu laughed quietly, his body relaxing, before he teasingly said, “Liu-Shidi… You need to stop scaring me by vanishing like that. I finally get to see and touch you in one of the more terrifying moments of my life and then you disappear. And when you come back again, you’re like this. How did this happen?”

“I… truly am not sure I can explain,” Liu Qingge replied weakly, forcing himself to sit up and look properly at the fairy. It was the most effortless sentence he’d managed since his death and it felt somewhat strange to hear his own voice at an almost normal volume and feel it rumbling within. Especially considering what shape he was currently wearing.

“We can save it, then,” the fairy allowed generously, sitting up in bed as a hand went to support Liu Qingge’s little body so he didn’t stumble again. “Speaking of unexpected… You weren’t the buff old geezer I imagined from the story and you weren’t the waifish pretty boy either. Instead, you’re… somewhere in-between.”

Liu Qingge stared at him a long moment, genuinely unsure of how to interpret that, but he felt himself bristling. Thankfully Shen Qingqiu noticed.

“Oh! No, I… Er…” The fairy paused and blushed before shyly tucking hair behind his ear. “You looked extremely cool, like a protagonist hero. It surprised me. You’re… …Ah.” There was a brief pause as Shen Qingqiu glanced away a moment. When he looked back, he reached out and brushed a thumb over Liu Qingge’s left cheek, affecting a more confident tone as he continued. “Your eyes are a darker purple than your sister’s. That’s how I knew for sure it was you — your eyes. Did you know the beauty mark under your eye is on this form too?”

Now it was Liu Qingge who would have been blushing, but thankfully he didn’t think cloud-tiger-luan-dragon beasts blushed. “I did not.”

The fairy’s expression turned bemused as he said, “You know, I think somewhere back home there is a school notebook with a drawing I made of a creature that looked very much like how you look right now. This makes you rather literally something out of my daydreams.”

Liu Qingge was quite certain he was the most offended looking thing weighing under three pounds that had ever walked the earth. 

Shen Qingqiu looked nearly besotted.

“The only thing you could possibly do to make this the best dream I’ve ever had in my life is if you transformed into something big enough to ride around like a horse and we went on adventures together,” the fairy said with an almost breathless sincerity that kept Liu Qingge from immediately growling. “And if you could breathe fire or shoot laser beams from your eyes, that’d be really cool too.”

“I don’t know what a laser beam is,” Liu Qingge muttered in as dignified a sulk as he could manage before stretching out one of his forelegs to test the dexterity of his toes before he attempted to stalk off.

He was not successful, toppling almost immediately from Shen Qingqiu’s chest and onto the bed beside him in a flurry of feathers and fur as he scrambled to figure out how walking on four legs worked and how one operated wings (it was very disconcerting to effectively wake up with an extra set of limbs). 

Shen Qingqiu made one of those wounded sounds people made around small animals when they’d done something revoltingly cute. 

Liu Qingge realized he may have finally passed into the afterlife and arrived in his own personal hell.

***

Liu Qingge quickly learned several things about being a cloud-beast (a name he had insisted on after hearing Shen Qingqiu’s increasingly ludicrous suggestions).

Firstly — Being carried was the worst and most insulting thing in the world.

He would rather stagger awkwardly around and listen to Shen Qingqiu make those strange human-with-small-animal noises than be carried. It was frustrating that he couldn’t figure out how to float like a cloud as he had when he started becoming the cloud-beast, but maybe that would come with practice. 

Like walking.

After he’d made several efforts to become airborne by hopping on the bed and flapping his wings like a fledgling bird, and then determinedly climbed up on a stack of pillows and plunged (rather than glided, as intended) off of them, Liu Qingge eyed the edge of the bed and planned a more ambitious third attempt. Rather than allowing Liu Qingge to leap off his bed to the floor to see if the greater height allowed him to manage to achieve flight, Shen Qingqiu (probably wisely) anticipated the inevitable result and saved him from breaking his neck. Instead, he scooped him up in his arms to carry him into the living area.

Liu Qingge had been horrified when he’d accidentally scratched the fairy in his instinctive panic to get away, but more worryingly, Shen Qingqiu didn’t seem to mind in the least, happily examining his bleeding wounds and estimating what sort of damage Liu Qingge could do if he were in an adult size and attacking intentionally.

The fairy seemed excited by this.

Concerning.

Secondly — Being cuddled while lounging was the best thing in the world. 

At least next to the idea of being alive and in his own body while cuddling, perhaps. 

(Not that he was imagining that.)

((Obviously he was very much imagining that and trying not to. Though maybe he wasn’t trying as hard as he’d like to say he was.))

Shen Qingqiu explained that when he’d been attacked at the cliff by the unknown assailant he’d been injured by whatever had been used to shove him over the edge. Dangling by his arm for several long minutes had made it worse. The pain had eased as soon as his qi blockage had cleared itself, but from the ginger way he still moved, Liu Qingge could tell there continued to be pain that was significant enough that he couldn’t completely hide it, so Liu Qingge claimed tiredness from his attempts to learn how to move in his cloud-beast form to get Shen Qingqiu to rest on the couch with him and read.

Being placed in Shen Qingqiu’s lap or settled on his chest so he could lay his head over the fairy’s heart as he dozed did not trigger his panic response as long as the periods of being lifted lasted only a few seconds. It was warm and relaxing, in fact.

This immediately lead to the next discovery:

Cloud-beasts could purr.

Shen Qingqiu’s delight in this knowledge was eclipsed only by Liu Qingge’s eternal mortification from the same. He flatly refused to cuddle for another ten minutes to avoid the risk that he could have a qi deviation out of sheer embarrassment. Then he held out for another ten because of the knowing smile on Shen Qingqiu’s lips and the soft amusement in his eyes as he watched him over the top of his book.

He’d had to learn how to purr as stealthily as possible because he’d soon learned the next thing:

Having Shen Qingqiu’s full and adoring attention was worth all of his suffering.

Liu Qingge knew this already, in the abstract. 

His favorite days since becoming a ghost, after all, had always been those that included alone time with Shen Qingqiu where they could speak, or at least be in each other’s company, for hours without distraction. But it was a different thing entirely to have Shen Qingqiu stare into his eyes as he did it, as if Liu Qingge were the most precious thing he’d ever encountered in his entire life in either world.

Liu Qingge knew it was not the same feeling that he held for Shen Qingqiu, but this form gave him every excuse he needed to permit himself to stare back until his heart was too full and he had to go bite something.

Because, you see, that was the next thing he’d realized:

Cloud-beasts were destructive when overstimulated. 

If he was happy, he wanted to bite. If he were frustrated, he wanted to bite. If he were tired, he wanted to bite. If Shen Qingqiu pet him for longer than a few seconds, he absolutely must bite.

It took several misjudged nips, one of which drew blood again, for Liu Qingge to refuse to let Shen Qingqiu touch him in anything like a pet, which seemed to disappoint the fairy far more than the shed blood did. 

It disappointed Liu Qingge too, of course. Shen Qingqiu’s fingers were quick to discover how and where to pet to immediately turn his bones to jelly (not literally, he’d had to explain to an alarmed Shen Qingqiu when he’d explained — figurative jelly). But the moment that he re-solidified — which could come in an instant due to a slight variation in petting technique — he’d be far too overstimulated and it was tooth or claw or a clumsy attempt to bolt around the room until he’d vented the energy that flooded his body. But tooth and claw were his first instinct and he was painfully aware that even as tiny as he was he could do serious damage to the fairy if he got carried away.

Shen Qingqiu tried to argue that he loved “the zoomies” (whatever those were) and he trusted Liu Qingge to control himself.

But Liu Qingge didn’t trust himself. Not yet and perhaps not ever as a cloud-beast. 

Liu Qingge informed him that he would not be changing his mind any time soon and to stop using The Sad Eyes on him and Shen Qingqiu retorted that he was being a big baby about a little blood and he was sure Liu Qingge lost more blood sparring with the children every day than he had being bitten. Liu Qingge in turn told him he hadn’t lost blood to ‘the children’ in years and then sulked under the couch until Shen Qingqiu relented and apologized, promising not to pet without permission.

There were more cuddles and then nap time because even though it was only just after breakfast (Liu Qingge had conveniently still been sulking underneath the furniture when Luo Binghe had arrived to tend to his master’s bandages and breakfast), Liu Qingge was already genuinely exhausted and Shen Qingqiu had barely slept at all the night before.

Though ghosts did not seem to require sleep, it seemed that little cloud-beasts certainly did. More sleep than he had needed while alive, in fact. It might have been the cat in the cloud-beast’s make up. (Or maybe it was just that he knew he was welcome to curl up with Shen Qingqiu as much as he liked, and he felt very little embarrassment about allowing himself to do so. What else could be expected from a tiny creature?)

And, really, when he woke up from the nap draped over Shen Qingqiu’s chest, purring with a near-silent, broken vibration that made his bones hum pleasantly, he made the most unsettling realization of them all:

Being a cloud-beast was seductive.

Not in the usual sense of the word, of course. But in the sense that he felt he could very easily slip into living like this and forget he’d ever had a human form. He could become Shen Qingqiu’s beloved animal companion, indulge in the adoring looks and bone-melting pets and heart-filling cuddles, and still keep the long, intimate conversations part from before. Maybe he’d even figure out how to become the ‘adult’ version of the cloud-beast, big enough to ride and go on adventures together, just as Shen Qingqiu had wished.

He could do that so easily.

***

When Shen Qingqiu put him in the bedroom at around dinner time when they expected Luo Binghe to arrive for the second daily visit, Liu Qingge was relieved for the opportunity to think without the distraction of the fairy’s presence.

In the time before the disciple arrived, he determinedly dragged around his things into a stack to make a makeshift staircase up to the bed. He always thought more clearly while doing physical tasks, and having a specific goal would help him towards learning what his cloud-beast body could and couldn’t do.

He reviewed what he knew about being a ghost, what he suspected was true, and what he feared, and then made plans for how he’d approach resolving these things.

Evidently, the form Liu Qingge took and the skills he could use depended on some combination of his energy level, whether or not his emotions were heightened, his self-control, how he saw himself, and perhaps the needs of Shen Qingqiu. 

If he were able to master this malleability and learn to control his shape at will and embrace all of his skills, then that would be fine. If he let it control him, he would most likely be lost. He might even regress, becoming more ‘beast’ than ‘human’, or even ‘ghost’.

On reflection, this was really nothing new to him.

It was just a different form of cultivation. If a cultivator lost sight of who they were and let fear limit and control them, it ended in roughly the same way.

Liu Qingge had already reached lofty heights with one form of cultivation. Learning what he could do in ghostly form should not be much more difficult, even if he had to learn it all on his own. Bai Zhan encouraged its disciples towards self-study rather than relying on being instructed, so it wasn’t something that daunted him. 

Ironically, perhaps, consulting with the Beastmaster might have been the most useful thing he could do. In the higher levels of the cultivation techniques the Nameless Peak used, they could undergo animal transformations. Perhaps after the person who attacked Shen Qingqiu was caught he could ask the fairy to borrow cultivation texts from the beast-tamers.

Liu Qingge already planned to involve Shen Qingqiu in helping him research and test his limits once he began to have an idea of what they currently were. It would be easier to research if they knew what to look for. But he wanted to have something impressive to show him first.

He nodded to himself as he looked up at his (in his eye) impressive collection of objects gathered at the foot of the bed. He’d finished just in time:  Luo Binghe had just let himself into the house and was bustling about in the kitchen. 

Liu Qingge climbed his makeshift staircase, settled himself behind a pile of pillows on the bed (where Luo Binghe had found them all, he had no idea — he’d only had one on his bed when he’d last left his room all those months ago and had no idea that he had ever possessed any others), and began immediately training. 

He focused his attention on one of his feathers and tried to learn how to do something as simple (and as difficult) as changing its color.

***

On day two Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge had lost track of time and Liu Qingge had needed to dash underneath the table to hide when Luo Binghe arrived with lunch. As master and disciple talked of peak matters, Shen Qingqiu sneaked bits that could be easily delivered to him with the absent-minded stealth of someone who had probably once had a pet they did the same thing for. Even sharp-eyed Luo Binghe didn’t seem to notice his slight of hand.

Part of him wanted to scold the fairy for teaching his pets bad behaviors, but there was an equal sized portion of him that felt stupidly warm at the show of affection, both directed towards him and also for the pet or pets who had known Shen Qingqiu’s love in the past. Liu Qingge could not resist what his nose and his heart both told him to accept, so he submitted to being hand-fed by the fairy. 

He did his best to show excellent table manners.

Liu Qingge quickly learned that not only could he eat food if he wished to, but if Luo Binghe made it for his shizun, the food was as good as anything prepared on Zui Xian Peak, even if it didn’t seem to have cultivation properties. 

He was now curious not just to one day test the boy’s martial skills himself, but he would also enjoy seeing his shimei’s reaction to such culinary talent that had no relation to her peak’s training. He imagined her reaction would be similar to his own. (Though she tended to be more intense than he was when she felt challenged.)

In the face of a parade of perfectly prepared delicacies and Shen Qingqiu’s (too) generous offers of more, Liu Qingge ended up eating far more than a creature of his size probably should have. Full, he dozed off underneath one of Shen Qingqiu’s draping sleeves to the familiar sounds of their voices. 

When he woke up after Luo Binghe returned to Qing Jing Peak, Shen Qingqiu relayed that Luo Binghe had pretended to be surprised to wake up and discover that Shen Qingqiu was not at home and left no note to explain his absence, so he’d informed the head disciple. When by afternoon there was no word and no sign of him, the boy had tagged along to Qiong Ding Peak with Ming Fan to report their master’s disappearance to the sect master. 

Luo Binghe managed to stay behind after Ming Fan returned to the peak so he could deliver the letter Shen Qingqiu had written. He’d further successfully obtained Yue Qingyuan’s promise not to blow Shen Qingqiu’s cover. The peak master had agreed with Shen Qingqiu’s suggestion to have conflicting rumors of his disappearance be spread and see what happened before making the next move. For now, the official stance was for Qing Jing Peak to “Wait and see if your master turns up soon.”

Shang Qinghua was only let in on the secret insofar as being sent a letter reassuring him that he was alive, but the other fairy was to show whatever amount of concern he thought was appropriate and not let on he knew anything except for what he managed to overhear. He was also asked if he remembered anything from the prophecy about the original Shen Qingqiu being attacked, but Shang Qinghua had no immediate recollection about such an event and replied that he would have to consult the notes he’d written soon after arriving in this world to see if they jogged his memory. 

While Shen Qingqiu selected a new book from the first stack Mingyan had prepared for him, perusing the summaries with increasingly dubious expressions on his face, Liu Qingge decided to meditate. He’d discovered no need to do so as a ghost before as he could not sense his meridians, only some sort of nebulous, ghostly core. But now he needed to understand his new form with all the awareness he’d had of his living body and that meant doing a thorough self-examination. 

Not that he got far to start as he was happy to break off for a bit to give Shen Qingqiu attention once he’d selected a book, but throughout the day he spent a few minutes or hours at a time distinguishing what his ghostly core consisted of and where the ghostly qi flowed through what made ‘him’.

The rest of their time that day was otherwise nearly a repeat of the first, only with a nap in the afternoon rather than the morning and Liu Qingge was better at moving around and figuring out how to flap his wings without tangling himself up in them.

The stack of books Mingyan had recommended her shibo start with steadily moved from one pile to another.

***

Day three was the day Liu Qingge successfully turned a feather from white to blue.

First step completed, while Shen Qingqiu spent time with his disciple over breakfast, Liu Qingge quickly learned how to change his feathers to any color at all — with ‘his natural colors’ being the easiest, and vivid colors requiring more effort. Patterns quickly followed, with tiger-stripes and speckles being the easiest and everything else requiring intense concentration.

Shen Qingqiu came into the room without Liu Qingge noticing and laughed to see him looking (in the fairy’s words) like a child’s embroidered hat, with a snarling animal face and all sorts of colors and patterns thrown together to scare away bad luck. 

“All you need now is a belled collar!” the fairy teased.

This would have provoked another majestic sulk if Shen Qingqiu hadn’t scooped him up for a quick cuddle and a kiss on the head before setting him on the bed and excitedly asking him to show how he’d done it.

Liu Qingge was happy to display his new skill, though when he was done he was quick to return his feathers to their usual monotone color schemes, much to Shen Qingqiu’s disappointment. 

But Liu Qingge used this demonstration as a reason to explain what he was doing and enlisted the scholar’s help in researching more about ghosts and beast-tamer cultivation techniques. The fairy was clearly excited to help, agreeing with Liu Qingge’s speculations into how his ghostly powers worked and providing more insights into what he knew about ghosts and their abilities. 

They scoured his house, unearthing not just useful books on cultivation and a previous Bai Zhan peak lord’s diary containing her experiences hunting down and defeating a wicked ghost king, but also another four of his sister’s novel collection.

Though Liu Qingge valiantly pretended he hadn’t even noticed the novels, it was clearly on Shen Qingqiu’s mind as he added them to his pile of unread books.

“Shidi…”

“…en?”

“Shidi, you have a lot of novels in your house.”

“…en.”

“I didn’t know you read novels…” the fairy said in a leading tone, setting up a cultivation manual (which seemed to have something to do with transformations) in a way that would make it easy for Liu Qingge to read on his own. Shen Qingqiu was intending on studying the master’s diary, which they’d agreed would be more easily handled by human hands.

Liu Qingge sighed. “Novels are my sister’s interest. She stores her favorites here for me to keep safe. I have read a few that she suggested to me. It is good to show interest in the things those you care about love.” After a moment, he quietly added, “We are all the family each other has.”

Shen Qingqiu stared at him so fiercely that Liu Qingge wondered if he’d said something wrong, but apparently cloud-beasts weren’t the only ones who got overstimulated. He was snatched up and given a hug, an almost aggressive nuzzle, and a kiss on the head before being set back down before his panic reflex could set in. 

“You are a good brother, Liu Qingge.”

His fur and feathers ruffled and tail lashing, Liu Qingge just hummed a thoughtful response, recognizing that in that moment he had brushed against a realization that might help him understand his own powers. But as the idea did not reveal itself to him after a few moments, he instead turned his mind towards figuring out how to manipulate the pages of the book without damaging them. 

He noticed that his clawed toes became more dexterous the more he needed them to be. 

***

Luo Binghe and Mingyan came by before dinner with news about their investigation progress. 

It was another close call towards him being discovered. Liu Qingge happened to have been in his bedroom looking for a spirit tool he remembered being gifted when they suddenly arrived. The door was open, but freezing in place and using his feathers to mimic the color and grain of the wooden floor helped him go undetected as the two teenagers passed by. 

The longer he remained still and focused on being unseen, the more his memories of being invisible as a ghost surfaced. Minutes after their arrival, Liu Qingge could see no part of himself and decided to risk testing his success by slinking into the room while the other three spoke.

“We came to report our findings, Shizun,” Luo Binghe said after he’d served them all tea.

The mood between the two teenagers was companionable. Apparently working together had made them something close to friends, though Liu Qingge was willing to bet his sister’s new good feelings towards his master had made Luo Binghe more open to that than anything else. On his sister’s side, he suspected the sentiment was based on her eye towards Shen Qingqiu’s romantic prospects, and if Luo Binghe was her target, all the better reason to make friends with the boy.

He mentally prepared himself to do a good deal of apologizing in the future for his sister’s matchmaking aspirations.

“No one I suspected as possibly being the letter’s sender has approached me and no new letters have come,” Mingyan said. “However, we were able to eliminate two of my three suspects rather quickly. One of them said they had been training with their master for three days surrounding that night — and others on their peak confirmed their master had been gone those same days and they thought he must have been with him. So unless you believe another peak lord might be involved, we felt it was safe to rule him out.”

“No,” Shen Qingqiu replied. “A peak lord would have other, surer means than this. I know of none with a grudge either.”

Mingyan nodded, as if that was what she had expected. “The other seems to have become your fan after your… striking display during the Demonic Invasion,” she said, a quick flick of a smile in her eyes and an undertone of amusement in her voice. “They really just like to paint people they find interesting. It’s mostly harmless, they just… have concerning notions of privacy.”

Luo Binghe looked deeply offended on his shizun’s behalf, but nodded in support of Mingyan’s words. From Shen Qingqiu’s expression, he’d picked up that he would probably regret asking about the suspect’s paintings. 

“We’ve been watching the third,” Luo Binghe said, picking up the topic. “She has no alibi for the night in question, saying she was meditating in her room. She has more experience with arrays than Liu-Shimei thought, which could be what was used instead of a scrying spell, and she seems to have a personal grudge with you…”

“You called her incompetent when she brought the wrong documents for her master to a peak lord meeting,” Mingyan helpfully explained.

Shen Qingqiu looked confused a moment before he wryly said, “That was not kind of this master to say.”

Mingyan seemed intrigued by his response, but left it there. 

“We’ll continue to keep an eye on her as much as we can, Shizun. I’ve made it clear that I am searching for you on the mountain in my free time since I can’t leave without your or the sect master’s permission, so it is not so strange that people see me in strange places… if they see me.” Luo Binghe looked a little smug as if he were very certain no one had.

“Mmn. It may be time to ask Zhangmen-Shixiong if he thinks it’s an appropriate time for him to be concerned. He may have thoughts on how to proceed.”

“En, I will visit him tomorrow,” Luo Binghe volunteered. 

By this time Liu Qingge had made his way to them. Not wanting to startle Shen Qingqiu, he stood near his knee, eyes just able to watch the teenagers over the edge of the table, but did not touch him. He was sure that he could not be seen or heard, but something about him must have caught the attention of the demon-blooded boy. He saw him perk and draw a deeper breath as he became very alert.

“Binghe?” Shen Qingqiu prompted gently, noticing the same thing Liu Qingge had.

It seemed like a good idea to let Shen Qingqiu in on his presence, so he nuzzled his face into the hand the fairy had left on his knee. Shen Qingqiu flinched and glanced down before carefully reaching out blindly to feel the familiar ears and mane, clearly identifying him by touch.

“There’s something… A strange power,” Luo Binghe murmured, turning his head this way and that and then narrowing his eyes as he focused in the generally correct area.

“Mmn,” Shen Qingqiu hummed, keeping his tone and body language relaxed. “Is it like a spirit beast?” Both teenagers looked surprised, so Shen Qingqiu smiled and continued, blithely misleading them. “One has been sniffing around the area lately. I think it sometimes likes to sleep under the house. If it concerns you, you can look for it on your way out, but don’t scare it. It seems benign.”

Luo Binghe looked a little confused and conflicted, but nodded with a faintly dubious expression on his face. He must not have been able to sense enough to contradict his shizun.

After dinner and some inquiries into how the two were doing with their studies — which, judging from the way her eyes smiled over her veil, Mingyan felt pleased to be included in — Shen Qingqiu sent the two off to their peaks. When they were gone and Liu Qingge had removed his invisibility, Shen Qingqiu scooped Liu Qingge up and touched their noses together.

“How do you feel about spending the rest of tonight learning how to feign being a spirit beast?”

It seemed like an increasingly good idea, so Liu Qingge agreed.

Chapter Text

The morning of the fourth day, Liu Qingge woke up to the sight of Shen Qingqiu’s body curled protectively around him on the bed, his eyes soft and sleepy and affectionate and fingers delicately brushing over the ghostly, floating parts of him as if trying to tell where his tangible and intangible self started and stopped. 

He understood immediately that the fairy desperately wanted to pet him properly, but was honoring his word that he wouldn’t without permission.

Liu Qingge no longer saw any reason to deny him. 

Working on regaining control over his body had reduced his cloud-beast’s aggressive instincts enough that he thought it unlikely he’d accidentally savage Shen Qingqiu. And… truly, he desperately wanted to be touched. 

“En,” he murmured without bothering to move. “Touch if you like.”

There was a flinch of surprise and then a somewhat flustered and confused expression. “Shidi?”

“I’ll say if it is becoming too much,” Liu Qingge clarified. 

Looking rather like he’d been caught sneaking treats without permission, only to suddenly be granted it, Shen Qingqiu sheepishly lowered his hand and buried it in his mane, seemingly fascinated by the way it acted like clouds and fur and soft downy feathers all at once; half tangible and half intangible and occasionally shedding bits of fluff that seemed to melt away the further away from his body they got. 

After indulging his tactile senses for awhile, Shen Qinqqiu’s curiosity seemed to take over. The fairy’s fingers went to all the nice or itchy spots on Liu Qingge’s head and face and underneath his chin, made careful exploratory strokes to his ears, and eventually, when Liu Qingge was nearly liquid with his melted bones and nearly falling asleep again, he moved down to touch his legs.

Once he’d made it that far, Shen Qingqiu began commenting to himself over how the feathery tufts at his elbows and ankles (were those the correct words? Liu Qingge defeated monsters, he didn’t study them) were like his mane, though he kept comparing them to cool, ghostly flames rather than clouds. Perhaps this description was actually more accurate, but the cloud image was stuck in Liu Qingge’s mind. 

The fairy’s voice washed over him like sunlight, warming him. The longer he commented on the different textures, colors, and patterns that made his cloud-beast form, picked over which part came from which creature, and speculated on whether Liu Qingge would be able to further transform into the individual creatures, the deeper the warmth seemed to sink into him. The touches just hastened the effect.

By this point Liu Qingge was pliant and relaxed enough to not care he was purring. It was the most content he’d ever felt in his life and as far as he was concerned it could go on forever.

It was that seductive quality of being a cloud-beast again. 

There wasn’t much that could be more tempting to him than the idea of Shen Qingqiu lavishing him with attention, affection, and gentle touches like these. Even though he knew it was a path that could trap him merely at this level of ghostly cultivation — perhaps for as long as Shen Qingqiu lived — he let himself imagine for a moment being able to trick the entire mountain into accepting him as Shen Qingqiu’s spirit beast pet.

Then Shen Qingqiu gave in to his own temptations and took Liu Qingge’s paw gently between two fingers, pressing a little into the pad with his fingertips and grinning stupidly as Liu Qingge’s claws reflexively extended, toes flexing to dig their sharp little points into his skin. 

Liu Qingge cracked open an eye and gave Shen Qingqiu a warning glare. 

The suddenly annoying fairy gave him the most ridiculously happy smile he’d ever seen and, with a mischievous glitter in his eyes and wickedness to the curve of his lips, tickled his paw by wriggling his caught finger. 

A frisson of energy overwhelmed his senses, jerking Liu Qingge out of his relaxed state and into a nearly wild one as he instinctively lashed out, curling his body and bringing his fangs to bite at Shen Qingqiu’s wrist — though he thankfully stopped himself before he broke the skin. He froze. All four sets of claws had also wrapped themselves around the peak lord’s arm, poised to eviscerate the offender.

He growled long and low, annoyed and a little frightened with how close he’d once again come to hurting the fairy. Only his decades spent enforcing self-control, and the more recent practice he’d had in regaining his more human mind, kept Liu Qingge from rending the fairy’s sleeves to tatters and bloodying him. 

Or worse.

Shen Qingqiu had the audacity to laugh about it, which earned him an hour of being ignored, even after the fairy made sincere apologies.

Liu Qingge did his best dignified stalk away to hide under the bed and think. (Not sulk, as Shen Qingqiu teased him that he was doing.) Something was nagging at him that he was on the verge of understanding something very important.

Once he realized he couldn’t coax Liu Qingge out of his sulk, Shen Qingqiu noticed that it was nearly time for breakfast with Luo Binghe, apologized yet again, and left the room to await his disciple. Liu Qingge only paid attention insomuch as registering that the fairy didn’t seem stressed over it yet and it would be fine to focus inward. He placed his head on his paws and flicked his tail restlessly as he stared blindly at the wall and thought.

In that hour he was left alone, Liu Qingge was able to reflect on his desires and come to the conclusion that he was probably more than a little touch-starved. 

This was something his sister had once explained to him when he’d expressed bafflement over a scene in a novel she’d encouraged him to read. In it, two men previously committed to platonic (specifically heterosexual) brotherhood fell upon each other like starving animals the first time they touched — realizing that they wanted each other in the same moment, and acting on it without hesitation to consummate a sexual (and then romantic) relationship after weighing it for a mere fragment of time. 

The relationship itself did not bother Liu Qingge, especially as it soon developed into a dynamic that was one of the most comfortable of the books his sister had suggested he read, but he found the suddenness of the transition from brotherhood to lovers more than a little alarming.

Mingyan explained that of course it was mostly a trope of fiction, but also spoke to the greater, very real, concept called “touch-starvation”.

She had then proceeded to drop a lot of broad hints about people, men in particular, who spent nearly their entire lifetimes knowing touch only as connected to violence. She posited that this lack of affectionate touch in their lives was how corruption or isolation had room to grow. Those affected by this were people who would be especially vulnerable to those with bad intentions who used nice touches to seduce and deceive. Other people might become so much more comfortable with violent touches, because that was what they knew, that it was the only way they understood how to express their feelings to those they should love. And still others might become afraid of being touched at all because they only associated it with being hurt. 

There was a lot more, including that touch doesn’t have to be romantic to be valuable (and, in fact, if touch is only sexual then similar things could go awry), but at that point Liu Qingge had got his sister’s implications and decided to change the subject rather than examine and reflect on her warnings, so the topic was forgotten. (Especially because he’d tried to change the topic by innocently asking why there was so much symbolic focus put on a particular flower in the bedroom scenes of not just that particular novel, but many others in her collection. That turned into a lecture that he wished he could have entirely wiped from his mind because now any time he saw the accursed flower, he blushed.)

There were sometimes drawbacks to overindulging a loved one’s interests and encouraging open communication.

He brooded over it (being touch-starved, not flowers) the rest of the day, only rousing from it after Luo Binghe left the house. He made a point to reassure Shen Qingqiu that he wasn’t mad or upset with him, but rather that he was thinking and was still working on sorting through his thoughts. 

Liu Qingge allowed more pets under promises from Shen Qingqiu not to tease him. When he returned to his musing curled up in Shen Qingqiu’s lap while the fairy read, he was barely aware that his purring was rather broken-sounding, starting and stopping in a flux that harmonized with how dark or soft his thoughts became.

In the late afternoon hours he’d come to the conclusion that the several months of being a ghost and barely having any physical sensations had left him vulnerable to being easily overstimulated once he’d regained a physical body to feel with. And his tender feelings for Shen Qingqiu made those touches all the more intense. 

Perhaps because his small beast form made Shen Qingqiu more likely to touch him and his animal instincts had converted his overwhelmed responses to reflexive violence, it had just forced him to see it sooner than he would have if he’d gained a physical human form instead. 

He would have been more likely to resist his responses to being touched, leaving him in a restless state of constant yearning and trying to repress it as ‘inappropriate’. Assuming Shen Qingqiu would have ventured to touch him at all, which didn’t seem especially likely. His interactions with his disciples notwithstanding, the fairy did not needlessly touch anyone. So there was every chance Liu Qingge would have had the yearning to be touched without understanding it or having any reason to register how out of balance it made him. So he would have had a heart demon slowly, stealthily lurking within him, growing unnoticed until it was too late.

Liu Qingge understood that not only would he risk qi deviation, but he would also not likely make it very far in his ghost cultivation training until he came to terms with fears he hadn’t even realized he had. Namely, he feared that if he was able to take human form, he might become intangible again. Or, if he stayed tangible, Shen Qingqiu might no longer find it appropriate to touch him, which was close enough to the other concern as to be nearly the same. 

He didn’t want to lose this if he could possibly keep it.

Being able to master transforming from one form to the other could be a work-around… 

If he kept his human-ghost form secret, he could indulge in all the petting while growing stronger overall without risking the gift of open affection coming to a halt in response to the change. But that would just create a new fear of discovery and new problems stemming from keeping things from Shen Qingqiu. He would have to accept that Shen Qingqiu’s boundaries might not include even platonic touches directed towards him — even in cloud-beast form — once he could change at will. 

And romance might never have been on the table at all, under any circumstances. 

No — what would be better would be to do as he’d always done with his fears:  confront them directly. He would need to be open with what he hoped for with Shen Qingqiu and accept whatever his answer to that was. 

Even if… it lead to his company being rejected entirely.

The thought stopped him entirely and he stiffened as his breath stopped. He distantly heard Shen Qingqiu murmur his name in question, but he was too deep in his own mind to pay it heed.

What would the results of that be? What would happen if Shen Qingqiu wanted nothing to do with him?

Would whatever connected Liu Qingge to the fairy break? Would he no longer be bound and become free to roam wherever he wished? Or without a tether to Shen Qinqqiu, would he finally fade away as he’d been expected to do in the original prophecy? Perhaps before that happened he could figure out how to bind himself elsewhere, choosing to protect Mingyan or his peak. He should at least try that, so he could remain earthbound and do what he could to continue protecting the fairy from afar. 

Though with how much his heart tore and bled at the idea of being separated, Liu Qingge didn’t think he’d last much longer in this world than Shen Qingqiu. If he were rejected too soundly, he wasn’t sure there would be enough of him left to cling to this world at all.

Liu Qingge was still resolved, however. 

If he had another qi deviation because of heart demons connected to his fears, he didn’t want the fairy to suffer from it the way the original Shen Qingqiu had. Best to lay them to rest early, one way or another, before he became any stronger than he was now.

He stuck like a burr to Shen Qingqiu for the rest of the afternoon, less brooding now than he was simply sad. He was not up for testing his ability to pretend to be a spirit beast in front of Luo Binghe and said so when Shen Qingqiu asked, so he went to his room in the time they began to expect his young disciple to arrive for dinner. Instead he meditated, trying to calm himself and prepare for them to talk when they were alone again.

Liu Qingge had a reprieve, of sorts, by way of Shen Qingqiu feeling unwell after Luo Binghe’s visit. He judged it would be unfair to have the conversation when the fairy might not be up for it, so he said nothing. 

Instead of directly addressing his fears and relaying the results of his day’s introspection, Liu Qingge repeated that he wasn’t mad about the morning’s teasing, and explained that he’d only been scared because of the violent impulse when he’d been overstimulated. He renewed his invitation to pet if Shen Qingqiu liked and he was rewarded with not just the pets he enjoyed, but succeeded in his true goal of cheering Shen Qingqiu up a little, as his mood seemed to have dipped along with whatever had made him feel unwell.

For the first night since they’d arrived at his house, Shen Qingqiu didn’t stay up late reading novels. 

They prepared for bed early and then cuddled together, the fairy’s clever fingers toying with Liu Qingge’s mane of tangible-intangible fluff; his eyes closed more often than open, and discussed the former peak lord’s diary and what she had mentioned about the ghost king she’d defeated. It gave them ideas for techniques that Liu Qingge might try himself. 

When Shen Qingqiu eventually started to drift off into sleep, his pets slowing until his hand came to rest on the back of his neck for a bit until it dropped away, Liu Qingge curled up next to Shen Qingqiu’s head on the pillow, nuzzling into his hair and purring until he finally sank into his dreams. 

He continued his attempts to soothe the fairy long into the night, brooding and purring, until he eventually fell asleep as well.

***

Day five had them caught out. 

Shen Qingqiu was still asleep and Liu Qingge had stayed up too late to be particularly alert, so the naturally (and unnaturally) stealthy Luo Binghe had no problems entering the house without disturbing either of them, even when he peeked into the room to check on his shizun.

It was only the combination of his cloud-beast instincts and his decades of martial training that allowed him to escape the boy’s attempt to capture him. He went in moment from in the deepest of sleep to leaping off the pillow beside Shen Qingqiu, twisting in the air to avoid Luo Binghe’s grab, and landing with a hiss and arched back on the bed, facing his would-be captor.

This might have lead to a rather nasty battle between the two if Shen Qingqiu hadn’t likewise come awake all at once and put himself between Liu Qingge and Luo Binghe, grasping his disciple’s wrist in a firm, but not punishing hold.

“Binghe…” the fairy said, with gentle censure in his voice and probably Disappointed Dad eyes if the flinch from the boy was any indication.

“S-shizun…!” Luo Binghe protested. “There’s—”

“En. The spirit beast, I know. He’s invited,” Shen Qingqiu said placidly, not releasing his student yet.

“Spirit beast? Shizun! I don’t think—”

“I’m thinking of calling him ‘Pidan’, what do you think?” the fairy interrupted with a smile and an almost playful tilt of his head as he regarded his disciple with a steady, unflinching gaze.

Luo Binghe choked slightly, looking almost comically confused. He just stared at his shizun as he apparently tried to process the ridiculous name being given to a creature he must have been certain was dangerous.

For his part, Liu Qingge hissed at the name and considered biting Shen Qingqiu intentionally for once. 

“Mmn! En, I’ll take that opinion under advisement, Pidan, but I’m already rather attached to the name! I don’t know if I could possibly be compelled to call you anything else!” the fairy said, his voice almost sing-song as he teased Liu Qingge. 

When his disciple just blinked at him, the fairy finally pulled his gaze away from Luo Binghe to look down at Liu Qingge, a little smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth and making his green eyes sparkle.

Provoked, Liu Qingge pounced on Shen Qingqiu’s arm and bit him just at the elbow where the soft and vulnerable skin was, revealed by the way the sleeve of his thin sleep robe had ridden up during the night. Liu Qingge was careful not to actually break the skin, but he gave the greatest growl he could manage as he felt his feathers and fur puff up around him. 

It was loud enough that Luo Binghe looked incredibly concerned at the deep sound coming out of such a small creature and flinched. He made a slight movement, which caused his shizun to tighten his grip, forcing the young man to subside again.

“As you can see, the name suits him so well I suppose it must stick,” Shen Qingqiu continued with a soft laugh, as if neither incident had occurred. 

Even though his lips had gone from a slight smirk to an impish curve, making him look even more playful, his eyes held a firm resolution in them as he looked from one to the other. 

Liu Qingge sighed, releasing the fairy as he submitted to the inevitable indignity of being called ‘Pidan’. Luo Binghe likewise gave in, knowing that in spite of all of the tricks and techniques he knew, his master would not be reasoned with on this no matter how he tried to cajole or convince him. Even rocks and stones might nod to him, but there were limits to every skill and the fairy was uniquely positioned to resist his persuasive talent.

The defeated pair exchanged wary sidelong looks while Shen Qingqiu gave them each pats on the head and slid out of bed. Without a backwards glance at the other two, the fairy went to gather the clothes he wanted to wear for the day, humming to himself under his breath. 

While his master’s back was turned, Luo Binghe gave Liu Qingge a threatening glare that could have set the bed on fire, his eyes saying, ‘I know quite well what you are and it is not a spirit beast.’ Meanwhile, Liu Qingge’s eyes said, ‘If you refer to me as Pidan we will become mortal enemies.’ 

They pretended to ignore each other after their messages were exchanged, though each knew the other was just waiting for one wrong move to be made.

Granted, Liu Qingge at least had no intentions of harming Shen Qingqiu’s beloved disciple (and his own favorite shizhi, if you didn’t include his sister) and Luo Binghe was probably just intending to restrain the questionably-safe beast until such time as his master signed off on destroying or confining the interloper. Things could have been worse.

Liu Qingge flapped his way down to the floor (it wasn’t flight yet, but he was sure in time he would master it) and exited the room in a dignified stalk so the fairy could get dressed in private. Luo Binghe followed shortly after, not leaving the room until he’d made a point of assisting his shizun by making the bed for him.

Once Shen Qingqiu was dressed, the three reconvened at the table in the living area, each rival taking a seat on opposite sides of Shen Qingqiu and pressing as close to him as they dared. Shen Qingqiu pretended to be oblivious to their competition for his attention, though his air of faint amusement was almost as infuriating to Liu Qingge as his sticky disciple was.

At least because he was allowed to be this close, when Luo Binghe removed his master’s bandages, Liu Qingge could tell that the stain from Without-A-Cure was gone. However, without Mu Qingfang to sign off on it, the Qing Jing master and disciple agreed it was best to continue using the poultice until the doctor declared it safe to stop. And as they were still pretending Shen Qingqiu was missing, ending that part of their daily routine would have to wait a little longer.

Since it would have been more difficult for him to carry multiple cooked dishes from one peak to another without a spirit sword’s assistance or access to a Qiankun pouch, Luo Binghe had been cooking his master’s meals in the wooden house’s small kitchen instead, bringing a basket with ingredients whenever he needed to add to the house’s food storage. Now that he’d tended to Shen Qingqiu’s bandages, there was no excuse not to leave the room to go make breakfast. 

Though forced to spend time in the kitchen, Luo Binghe made up for it by checking on his master far more frequently than he normally would have. Every few minutes their peace was interrupted by Luo Binghe asking Shen Qingqiu questions about what he wanted to eat, how he wanted it prepared, how he was feeling, and telling him stories about the peak and the investigation in a quite transparent attempt to make sure the Not-a-Spirit-Beast wasn’t devouring his shizun while his back was turned.

After awhile of this Liu Qingge felt unusually provoking, so he draped himself over Shen Qingqiu’s lap and basked in the pets he received from the indulgent fairy, staring Luo Binghe down with smug, smug eyes any time he poked his fluffy head out of the kitchen. 

He paid for it later by Luo Binghe insisting that Shen Qingqiu not feed him ‘human food’ since it might make him sick and insisted that he should wait for the Beastmaster to return to the mountain first to consult him on the matter since he was sure only the Beastmaster would know what this unusual spirit beast was and how to properly tend to his needs. 

“But don’t worry, Shizun. Spirit beasts are fine to live off of ambient natural qi, after all. He won’t be hungry.”

Shen Qingqiu laughed at them both with his eyes, but solemnly agreed that until they knew for sure what sort of beast ‘Pidan’ was it might be best to be careful about his diet.

As a result, no treats were filched from his plate and sneakily fed to him by hand. Which was just as well as the boy was watching him vigilantly anyway and would have interfered if Shen Qingqiu had tried.

In fact, Luo Binghe refused to leave the house at all until well after dinner. They spent most of the day with Liu Qingge lounging in the fairy’s lap as he read and Luo Binghe slow-cooking dinner as he tidied the house.

He would have stayed overnight if Shen Qingqiu had allowed it, but with the both of his unruly ‘pets’ being unusually sticky all day, and evening bringing with it another bout of him feeling unwell, Liu Qingge assumed that Shen Qingqiu needed space more than he needed to reassure Luo Binghe that he wouldn’t be gobbled up in the night without his disciple’s protection and had put his foot down. Not long after dinner, the fairy gently sent the boy home to his own bed. 

Liu Qingge was quite prepared to give Shen Qingqiu space so the peak lord could decompress from his day, but Shen Qingqiu scooped him up — after asking permission — and carried him off to the bedroom with him.

So for the second night in a row, they spent the night talking softly together and cuddling.

It was wonderful, though Liu Qingge wondered if he shouldn’t have at least asked if Shen Qingqiu were up for the talk this time. But from the strange fluctuations in Shen Qingqiu’s qi an hour into cuddle time, he decided it was best that he hadn’t. The fairy was obviously quite miserable without adding to his burdens by discussing his unsolicited feelings for him. 

Instead he now worried over whether he might be living up to Luo Binghe’s concerns and was the one responsible for making Shen Qingqiu ill.

***

It was day six when the investigation that Luo Binghe and Mingyan were conducting together finally bore fruit.

Or, perhaps it was better to say that it bore results.

Luo Binghe had come early for his morning visit, delivering a basket of prepared food from the Qing Jing kitchens and waking them so that he could render medical assistance, changing the bandages as he explained the interruption of the usual routine. 

After only a single glare at Liu Qingge, he’d left quickly in order to go and act as support for Mingyan who was investigating one of their suspects. The person they were watching had made some sort of move the previous day that had concerned Mingyan and she had sought out Luo Binghe’s help as he’d left the house the previous night. Since he didn’t want to leave Mingyan alone for long, Luo Binghe didn’t linger in spite of “Pidan’s” ongoing threat.

Shen Qingqiu had begun feeling unwell not long after his disciple had left, so he didn’t bother changing out of his sleeping robes, though he did move to sit in the main room instead of laying in bed. The fairy did his best to hide how he was feeling, but after putting off breakfast for as long as he could, he only managed to eat a few pieces of fruit before he gave up and admitted to not feeling up to it. He likely would have eaten better if it were Luo Binghe’s home-cooked meal, but probably not by much judging from the pallor of his skin.

Now that the illness was no longer happening only at night, Liu Qingge suggested they bring Mu Qingfang in on their secrets — including his being a ghost. Liu Qingge explained his fears that his ghostly presence was somehow responsible for Shen Qingqiu’s symptoms. Didn’t ghosts drain a living person’s yang energy?

“I don’t think you’re making me sick, Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu protested with a huff and a roll of his eyes, turning back to the newly arranged bookshelf as he looked at the row of unread books and tried to decide which to spend the afternoon with. “I would have been displaying signs of being sick earlier if that were the case.”

“But I didn’t have a physical form earlier,” Liu Qingge began.

But before the discussion could progress, the fairy was afflicted with a qi blockage so sudden and so severe that Liu Qingge didn’t even have time to warn him in advance before the shimmer in his skin went out. Shen Qingqiu staggered to the couch under the force of his disorientation when his qi was cut off all at once, collapsing half-on it as he panted and shivered. 

Liu Qingge hurriedly scrambled up onto the couch and curled around the fairy’s shoulders to offer Shen Qingqiu comfort by nuzzling at his ear and purring, guilt nearly eating him alive. He was so wrapped up in this he didn’t sense anyone approaching the house until it was too late.

A mad-eyed young man in torn and bloody robes kicked open the door and gave the stunned peak lords — well, gave Shen Qingqiu — a twisted smile as the door swung to the side and shattered against the wall, the pieces of it scattering at his feet.

“There you are, Shen-Shibo. It looks like I arrived just in time,” he said with a calmness to his slow, sickly sweet voice that was in unnerving contrast to his wild appearance. He reached for a medicine bag at his hip and only then did Liu Qingge recognize the robes and the young man’s haggard face. 

He was one of Mu Qingfang’s senior disciples — one of those that had assisted the doctor with Shen Qingqiu’s treatments, and the one that had been seen hanging around Qing Jing Peak.

“My, my… do you know how many appointments you’ve missed?”

Chapter Text

Even though he was shocked and brought to his knees with qi-drain, Shen Qingqiu was still quick-witted. He blinked once at the nearly deranged looking young healer who’d burst into the house and quipped, “Aiyah… I knew I was forgetting something, Shizhi. And I didn’t even send an apology note! Ah! I hope that did not make things too troublesome for you and your shizun.”

Shen Qingqiu’s hand moved up as if he was casually pushing hair behind his shoulder. In truth he was pushing Liu Qingge back so he wouldn’t be seen. Liu Qingge withdrew and patted his paw on Shen Qingqiu’s hand to reassure him. He had already used his chameleon skill to blend in; what little of him that might be visible was now hidden as long as no one looked too closely. True invisibility took too long still and he wanted to be ready for anything.

There was a flicker of emotion across the young man’s expression that was halfway a laugh and half pure rage, but he smiled with all the beatific grace of a Sichuan monkey, baring his teeth and looking a little blue in the face, presumably in anger at himself for finding the peak lord funny. 

“Ah, Shen-Shibo, are you capable of being anything less than the most troublesome thing?” the healer asked, shaking his head slightly and advancing a few steps into the house.

“Well… I would like to say ‘yes’, but…” 

“Ha! No — you are nothing but pain and suffering and frivolous waste. And it is a doctor’s job to remove such things from their patients.”

“Aiyah…” Shen Qingqiu sat up properly, moving slowly as to not spook the unwelcome guest, his hands sliding carefully along the polished wood of the couch so that his weaponless state could be seen clearly. “And who is your patient? Liu Mingyan, I assume?”

The young man was clearly cunning, but didn’t seem to be especially clever. Shen Qingqiu was stalling — most likely to give Luo Binghe and Mingyan time to come to his aid. With how long it took for Shen Qingqiu’s meridians to clear on their own, he would have to keep the murderous intruder occupied for hours to have a chance of overpowering him himself. 

Even an incompetent cultivator would be stronger and faster than he was at the moment.

“My shimei, yes. But everyone in the sect has suffered from your spite and selfishness. When you murdered Liu-Shibo, there could be no ignoring it any longer. My shimei was suffering. If no one else would do something about you, I knew that I must. It was my duty, not just as a doctor, but Mingyan’s future husband.” The young man drew himself up and put on an expression of pious nobility.

Liu Qingge felt his lip curl. He would happily destroy this idiot for the insult to his sister alone, much less his many offenses against Shen Qingqiu. Someone of his ilk? He was not worthy enough to tend to Mingyan’s horse, clearly. How dare he look higher than that? Liu Qingge managed not to growl only through a desire not to draw attention to himself. If the fool’s cultivation level was too low to sense him even now that he was within a few feet, he would use the opportunity to wait until the right moment to reveal his presence.

“I see. When you put it that way, it’s difficult not to see it from your perspective,” Shen Qingqiu said with a wide-eyed innocence that made the sarcasm fly well over the healer’s head. “But you must know I didn’t kill my shidi.”

The healer made a scoffing noise and rolled his eyes in an exaggerated manner, almost putting his whole body into the effort. “Everyone knows you are only pretending to have forgotten what you did so that no one can punish you for your crimes.”

“How many times must I say it, Shizhi? I did not kill Liu Qingge.”

“And how many times must you be poisoned before you catch the hint and die? Do not bother with lies!” he barked in reply.

Liu Qingge had to almost admire the boy’s commitment to being an over-dramatic pain in the neck.

“The Lady’s Grace,” Shen Qingqiu said suddenly. “I must admit — that was a sly move. I’m sure most people would have written it off entirely as an accident. Even I put the matter aside for awhile, thinking it must have been nothing but a mystery of the mountain winds. At least at first.”

Shen Qingqiu had been suspicious of it too? He’d never mentioned it. Liu Qingge felt guilty that he’d never brought it up. There had just always seemed like more important things for them to talk about. But if they had discussed it, perhaps the incident at the cliff wouldn’t have happened. Then again, Shen Qingqiu had been suspicious and had still gone. There was a good chance Liu Qingge would have let Shen Qingqiu persuade him to go no matter what.

Some guardian he was…

“En!” the young man said, puffing up with pride at the compliment. “My first poisoning attempt. And with the way you had everyone scour the mountain for wherever it had come from, I thought it was best to be more subtle from there.”

“My, my — even more subtle? So you poisoned me again?”

The fairy received an arrogant sneer. “I said already it was only my first attempt.”

“My apologies, Shizhi. You are correct — you did say that.” Liu Qingge could practically hear Shen Qingqiu’s lashes fluttering in faux contrition. “Please continue. You managed to do it twice? That’s very accomplished of you.”

“Twice!” There was a mocking laugh. “You would be so lucky that it was twice. No — I have been adding poison to your poultice nearly from the start. Shizun is distracted lately, so it was easy to make sure a bit was added each time I prepared it. Why else would the stain go away, but your symptoms worsen? Why do you think you are at my mercy now?”

“But you didn’t prepare this poultice…” Shen Qingqiu said stiffly, perhaps thinking over recent events under this light.

“No — your little guard dog did. He’d watched us all so closely whenever he was in the room when we made it — more-so than our own shizun did! It was hard slipping it past him before. I managed, of course. But he thought if he made it himself it’d be safe, so he didn’t even think to check what he took from our stores. How I laughed when he walked away with the poisoned ingredients, so very pleased with himself.” 

The young man laughed again. Shen Qingqiu waited almost politely for him to finish before he spoke.

“It must not have been very effective. I never felt sick until the last few days. Are you sure you mixed it correctly, Shizhi?”

The laughter stopped abruptly and he looked up with hard, cold eyes. “En. Oh yes, I mixed it perfectly. It was really only my timing that was off. Your qi usually only became blocked in the evenings, correct? During your walks. When you began flying to other peaks, I thought for sure you would fall to your death between them, but the worst you managed to do was sprain your wrist. Your wrist! Ah! If only we’d been alone when I treated you that night, I would have taken care of the entire issue then, but my shidi were regrettably underfoot… I could never quite catch you both weakened and alone — and that was assuming I could find you at all! So I created an opportunity instead.”

“The cliff, you mean.”

“Of course the cliff! I thought you were supposed to be the clever peak lord!”

If he could have afforded to, Liu Qingge would have laughed. The idiot.

“Aiyah…” Shen Qingqiu said in a slightly wounded tone. “I just read books and play weiqi… It’s not my fault people think I’m clever. Real clever is someone like you, isn’t it? You have to mix all of those things yourself and remember all the parts of the body and how one treats thousands of different things…” Like the fairy was surely doing, Liu Qingge watched as the young man’s guard lowered as he preened. Seeing the correct opening, Shen Qingqiu pressed. “Oh… Was… was the weiqi board your doing too?”

“Naturally. I started working on the goban as soon as I decided to kill you. When I overheard your disciple telling the mail hall to keep watch for one, all I had to do was finish the last touches and bring it to her. It was easy. It should have worked.”

“Oh, well… It almost did. And if it weren’t for the Lady’s Grace, I wouldn’t have considered it being anything but an accident. How clever you are for thinking of so many ways to kill me!”

Unfortunately, that quip seemed to have put the young man back on the original topic. His expression hardened and his voice went cold.

“That’s right. I am.” His eyes narrowed and his hand went again to the pouch at his hip. “And this time, I’ll succeed.”

“Are you sure, Shizhi?” Shen Qingqiu asked quickly. “You haven’t really done much yet… Nothing you can’t take back. If you confessed now, things would go better for you. I’m sure people would understand when you explain to them why you had to do what you did. But if you actually hurt me, there is no coming back from it. And you know that the other peak lords are all quite intelligent.”

“Intelligent, yes. But for the most part, quite moral. They would agree with my conclusions if they ever suspected me and likely not bother to pursue it. They are very used to not seeing what they don’t wish to deal with — I do not worry myself.”

“But you can’t take this back once you go too far, Shizhi. You don’t believe in redemption? Perhaps I can be reformed with proper guidance.”

“Redemption?” the young man scoffed. “If all you’re good for is teaching the Four Arts, anyone on your peak can do that much. Is there anything you have ever provided this sect that could not be provided by any of your disciples?”

Liu Qingge could think of hundreds of things to say, but this question seemed to throw the fairy off as he presumably tried to balance his guise as a well-read idiot with coming up with a proof of worth that would satisfy the young man. Really, it was his sense of humor that had gone awry.

“Well… I hear I can be quite nice to talk to. Sometimes I’m told, ‘There is no one who can quite go on a rant the way you can!’ — I suppose you could say it is something that I have found to have been both my saving grace and my mortal failing.” 

Unfortunately, his reply — or perhaps the slight hint of self-mockery in his voice — had apparently made the healer realize that the peak lord had been stalling. The young man’s eyebrows flew up and his expression had more of the bared teeth rage of the monkey again as he nearly spat his response.

“Enough talk,” the healer snarled. 

Liu Qingge flexed his claws into Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder in warning.

The healer’s fingers had slipped into his pouch and with an impatient flick, he whipped his hand from it to fling silver needles towards Shen Qingqiu. The fairy tried to roll away, but he would not have been quick enough without access to his cultivation skills.

Liu Qingge, however, was fully capable of moving. 

He snaked out from behind Shen Qingqiu’s neck and leapt in front of him, shedding his chameleon illusion as his wings spread and his mouth opened in a loud roar. To his surprise — and the shock of the other two — fire poured out of his throat, melting the needles.

His leap took him across the room until his paws hit the young man’s shoulders and bore them both down to the ground with a heavy thud that made everything in the house rattle. 

Liu Qingge was no longer the size of a small kitten — instead, at some point during his leap his size had changed to that of a very large tiger. His spread wings nearly knocked over furniture with their span, so he adjusted them, though he still left them open for balance and to be ready for any more of the disciple’s tricks.

Tricks, however, seemed unlikely. 

The healer was almost frightened out of his mind, shrieking and cringing as he tried to retreat from the beast that had sprung from nowhere and pinned him down. Not one of Mu Qingfang’s fearless or cool-headed healers then. He must have been being trained to assist more capable healers or sent to treat sicknesses in far-flung villages rather than intended to deal with anything that needed someone cool under pressure. 

This was good.

“Get his bag,” Liu Qingge rumbled, deliberately disguising his voice even though he didn’t think the disciple would have recognized it.

Shen Qingqiu had recovered enough to move, ignoring the gibbering protests from their captive in order to not just remove the medical pouch, but also search him for any other weapons. 

There were none, but his offense at the search being conducted by his enemy seemed to have settled some of the young man’s fears. His expression cleared and he tried to lunge for Shen Qingqiu. Liu Qingge stepped hard on his chest, pressing the air out of his lungs until he had the wheezing young man’s full attention.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t just eat you,” Liu Qingge almost purred, flexing his claws into the healer’s shoulders and intentionally ripping his clothes further. The tearing sound so close to the young man’s ears seemed to puncture his momentary bravado and provoked a full-body tremble.

“I — I didn’t…!” he stammered.

“Not an answer.” Liu Qingge cut him off and smiled, showing his fangs. “Who are you that you think you have any right to murder a peak lord?”

“I—”

“Shizun!”
“Shen-Shibo!”

There was a clatter at the porch as Luo Binghe and Mingyan raced to the house, their own clothes disheveled and flecked with splatters of blood. Though they’d evidently taken small wounds, the teenagers had clearly been the ones that came off better in whatever altercation they’d had with the healer. 

They briefly took stock of the situation before continuing inside. Luo Binghe went immediately to Shen Qingqiu and gave him a quick inspection and Mingyan carefully approached the other two, looking between the large beast and the would-be murderer and trying to decide how best to approach without risking attack from either.

“He’s the spirit beast I mentioned, Liu-Shizhi. He would never hurt you,” Shen Qingqiu was quick to reassure her. 

“If that is so, how may I help Beast-Gongzhi?” she asked. She made the decision to put away her knives before offering a small bow of respect in Liu Qingge’s direction.

“Shimei! Protect me from this monster!” the healer begged.

Mingyan made a scoffing sound, cold contempt rolling off of her in waves. “How could you possibly ask me for this when you have so many crimes at your feet?”

“Crimes?” he protested.

Through the open door, Liu Qingge saw others racing towards the house, including several peak lords, what looked like a dozen Bai Zhan disciples, and even the head disciple and pigtailed disciple from Qing Jing. 

What, precisely, had happened earlier?

“You tried to frame me for Shen-Shibo’s murder!” Mingyan cried, evidently for the sake of the other arrivals.

“No, I—”

“You sent us those letters so I would be there when you pushed him over the cliff!”

“It was so you could see justice done, Shimei! That is all! It was a gift!” the young man protested.

“That isn’t all,” Luo Binghe spoke up quietly. “The Lady’s Grace. It was you who tried to poison my shizun’s tea with a flower from Xian Shu’s poison garden, wasn’t it?”

“W-well…” 

Liu Qingge flexed his claws again, making the healer shriek softly. He got the hint and began babbling.

“They wouldn’t have believed it was you! Of course they would have tried to investigate you, but your beauty and purity would have easily cleared the matter. It was only to muddy the water. By the time they investigated elsewhere, it would be impossible for them to discover it was me. You would not have been blamed for murder!”

“How can I believe such a thing when you tried to kill me only minutes ago?” Mingyan asked, staring down at him, holding his eyes so he didn’t notice those gathering in the doorway.

“No — I didn’t! I didn’t try to kill you! I swear!” The healer was almost shouting his words. “I only tried to incapacitate you! I would have returned for you after dealing with Shen Qingqiu and found a safe place to take care of you until you were ready for the antidote! In a year, perhaps less, you could even have returned to your peak as long as you properly understood how to behave. We would have been very happy together! Please!”

Mu Qingfang and Qi Qingqi had pushed through the crowd, worried about their disciples. Both stopped dead in their tracks, turning similar shades of green, though for very different reasons to be sure. Yue Qingyuan and Shang Qinghua appeared behind their sect brother and sister, trying to catch up to the current situation — though from their expressions, they had probably overheard enough.

Liu Qingge growled, trying to keep the young man’s focus on him as the more visceral threat rather than their audience. He wanted to make him keep talking and not be too careful with his words. The more he incriminated himself now, the better.

The growl seemed to have worked because the young man cringed and cried out, “Don’t eat me! I have done nothing wrong! There is nothing wrong with ridding the world of a cancer!”

“A cancer?” Mingyan prompted, her voice cold and her body language receptive. As she’d no doubt anticipated, the healer was eager to attempt to explain himself in hopes of winning over her withheld approval.

“Peak Lord Shen Qingqiu!” he said, trying to squirm out from underneath Liu Qingge’s heavy paws, absolutely fixated on Mingyan to the point of forgetting the threat of an angry beast. “He is a blight on our sect! For years his crimes have been hidden and ignored. And then they were going to do the same when he murdered your brother! Someone had to mete justice!” She stared at him, her lips thin as if evaluating if he’d said everything she could get him to. He took it as another prompt. “I did it for you!”

“I did not ask you to do such a thing.” If her voice was cold before, it was pure ice now.

“I offered to marry you so you would not be alone in this world!” he protested, almost reproachful now. “You said, ‘not until my brother’ — I understood what you meant.”

Mingyan looked genuinely confused. “What did I mean?”

“You couldn’t think of marriage unless your brother was avenged, of course! What else could you have meant?”

She shook her head, flicking her eyes to the gathered peak lords in the doorway. The disciples had evidently been asked to retreat, as Liu Qingge could not sense them. Whatever she saw in their expressions seemed to reassure her, because her body language eased before she returned her attention to the healer.

“That is impossible. I do not remember this conversation, but I would not have asked you to avenge my brother — my brother is not dead.”

Shang Qinghua and Qi Qingqi flinched in surprise, but their surprise did not hold a candle to the surprise of Shen Qingqiu or Liu Qingge himself.

“What?” Shen Qingqiu asked for everyone.

“Liu Qingge is in stasis in a cave on Qiong Ding. I have been treating him,” a grave voice explained. Mu Qingfang stepped into the house, which seemed to startle his disciple more than even the revelation of Liu Qingge being alive had. 

“Master…” the young man breathed.

“So this is how you follow my teachings?” Mu Qingfang asked. While Mingyan was icy cold, the doctor was incandescent with anger. “You attempt to murder a patient?”

“He murdered a peak lord!” the disciple protested, in spite of just having been told otherwise.

“It is not your duty to judge!” Mu Qingfang roared. “Your duty is to your patients! Listening only to what you want to hear… You could not have become a good doctor that way. You would have failed everyone who did not say what you thought they should. I am ashamed to call you my disciple — and will do so no longer. I submit you to Zhangmen-Shixiong’s judgment and wash my hands of you.”

The young man’s eyes bulged in fear and presumably perceived injustice. “Him! But he is the one who allowed Shen Qingqiu to do acts of evil!” he struggled again, trying to break free. “I will not be judged fairly! Shen Qingqiu need only frown and get his way!”

There was a look on Shen Qingqiu’s face that was of an exasperation and contempt so severe that the very lack of viciousness to it should have made it more mortifying to its source. “I will ask nothing. Though you should inform your master that you poisoned me. He will want to know what you did for treatment.”

“He what?” Mu Qingfang asked, so angry that a flaming aura more frightening than Liu Qingge’s fire breath engulfed him. 

Terrified of his normally mellow master, the young man babbled about having dosed the poultice with a specific poison and taken advantage of his master’s distraction with his ‘secret project’ — evidently the treatment of Liu Qingge’s body — to not double check his work as he made it.

“And you said you did something different that affected me these last few days?” Shen Qingqiu prodded.

“En!” The idiot actually looked a little proud of that. “Luo Binghe kept coming to our peak to obtain medicine ingredients. Of course, he could not ask for what Master prescribed if his master was missing, so he was making the poultice himself. When I realized, I added the poison into the supply he was using. Three or four times as much as before. It was easy.”

Luo Binghe, who had been hovering protectively over his shizun until then, clenched his fists and would have probably gone for the young man if someone else hadn’t beaten him to it. Startled, he fell back to watch.

“You!” Mu Qingfang shouted, lunging towards his disciple. He had to be restrained by Qi Qingqi on one side and Yue Qingyuan on his other. “How many people did you poison!?”

The young main quailed, now almost hiding between Liu Qingge’s dangerous paws. “None! He was taking from the storage! I made sure the supply in common use was always kept stocked! No one would have had a need to take more from the supply!”

“But you cannot know that! You—!” Mu Qingfang had to break off to halt his angry words. His eyes blazed. 

“Enough,” Yue Qingyuan said in a gentle, but firm tone that ended the discussion. “We will imprison him. We can investigate precisely what he has done and if any other medicines were contaminated by his poisoning attempts.” After Mu Qingfang nodded his permission, the sect leader turned to the open doorway and gestured, signaling some of the Bai Zhan disciples to rush forward. 

“Go with them, Binghe,” he heard Shen Qingqiu whisper. “At least until they have him safe.”

“Shizun…” the boy protested.

“I know I can trust you to see he is secured,” Shen Qingqiu said, landing a decisive blow. 

Luo Binghe nodded and took a grim guarding position as the disciples cautiously approached in order to take the healer into custody. Liu Qingge retreated. Once they’d obtained the prisoner, Luo Binghe followed, eyes locked on his target as if daring him to make a move to escape.

After Liu Qingge surrendered his captive to his disciples, he moved towards Shen Qingqiu who put his arms around his shoulders and leaned into him, murmuring teasingly into his ear. “You can breathe flames, mmm? Very impressive. I wonder where you thought to learn that? Whoever came up with that idea must be very creative and clever.”

Liu Qingge huffed a laugh, butting his head gently against the softly laughing fairy. They earned strange looks from the others, but as no one wanted to draw the ire of a clearly powerful creature of his size, none dared approach. 

Shang Qinghua looked particularly awestruck. Or horror-struck, it was difficult to tell the difference with him. Shen Qingqiu motioned to him and after giving Liu Qingge the look a small rodent would give a large predator, Shang Qinghua inched close enough for the fairy to grab him and drag him close enough to hiss words.

“I literally have no one else who can appreciate this but you, so listen:  Can you believe I got him to do a villain monologue for a good ten or fifteen minutes?”

“Wha? Really? Cool!” Shang Qinghua said approvingly, looking just as delighted as his friend did. “No capes!” he barked, flinging his hand rather petulantly as he sneered, almost in Shen Qingqiu’s face.

“No capes!” Shen Qingqiu agreed, his giddy smile indicating there was more to it than a mutual disapproval of fashion choices.

Thankfully almost everyone remaining in the area was too busy containing the chaos to pay much attention to the fairies’ strange conversation.

“So…” Shang Qinghua began, side-eying Liu Qingge.

But they were interrupted.

“Shang-Shixiong,” Mu Qingfang called across the room, a Bai Zhan disciple practically cornered in front of him. “Could you please begin the investigation into the matter of the medicines made over the last several days? I know you must have records of where they have been distributed. We have to know if any have been sent off the mountain.”

“Oh — sure.” Shang Qinghua looked back at them thoughtfully. Then he made a strange motion, using two fingers in a V formation to point at his own eyes, then pointed them at the two of them before making a strange fluid motion of his body as he turned and walked away, whispering, “Water tribe!”

Liu Qingge gave them a hard stare as Shen Qingqiu tried to stifle a laugh behind his fan. 

Ridiculous fairies.

Mingyan had been subtly watching them nearly the entire time, so when Shang Qinghua left, she finally edged close enough to speak. She bowed to them and softly asked, “…Brother dear? Is that you?”

Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu flinched and exchanged glances before he responded. 

“En.”

She took a shaky breath behind her veil and blinked away a sudden rush of tears. “I wondered. Eyes like ours… and you felt the same. We have been looking for you, Brother.”

“What did you mean that he wasn’t dead?” Shen Qingqiu asked while he warily eyed Mu Qingfang, who was digging through his Qiankun Pouch and shooting them severe doctor-y looks as he kept adding supplies he’d need to treat Shen Qingqiu to the list of things that he wanted brought from his peak. The poor disciple selected to act as courier kept trying to run to relay the message only to be called back to add something new to it before he’d got more than a step or two away.

“En.” She acknowledged Shen Qingqiu before turning to Liu Qingge. “Your body and your spirit were separated during whatever happened between the two of you in the cave. Mu-Shibo has been caring for your body until your spirit could be located and reunited with it.”

“It may be too late, Liu-Shixiong,” Mu Qingfang said as he walked over. He must have been listening in because he looked gravely into Liu Qingge’s eyes as he addressed him. “I do not know your reasons for not informing us and it is not my place to pry into them, but at this point, your fate may be up to heaven’s will. An hour or two won’t make much of a difference for you, but it might for Shen-Shixiong. So, Shixiong, kindly take a seat so I may see what my former disciple has done to you.”

Having recently seen what could happen if you pushed Mu Qingfang too far, everyone was quick to submit to his orders. 

Liu Qingge stayed close to Shen Qingqiu and when the doctor permitted it, Shen Qingqiu reached up to run his fingers through his mane. Which one of them was meant to be the most soothed by the petting, Liu Qingge could not guess, but he allowed it without a murmur of protest.

***

The cave where Liu Qingge’s body was being kept radiated with a pure energy that made his ghost feel simultaneously at peace and out of place. It was clearly designed to usher a spirit to wherever it belonged. Perhaps it would just as easily expel a possessing spirit from a body — that sort of feeling hummed in its dark blue rock walls.

It made his skin itch.

Once he walked inside, his edges felt less solid, more of him turning into that ghostly cloud-flame than just the ends of his mane and fur. Going deeper into the cave, he’d been forcibly shifted back into his kitten-size. He floated — he hadn’t realized he remembered how to do that until then, when almost half of him was intangible — so he could tuck against Shen Qingqiu’s collar. The fairy held him there, his touch gentle and protective. 

There was a tension to Shen Qingqiu’s frame that made Liu Qingge wonder if he too felt a sense of not-belonging in his body.

Deep in the cave system, in the center of a large dome-shaped cavern, was a bier made of red wood. Upon the bier lay his body — not yet a corpse, yet still pale and lifeless. He was thin, as seemed appropriate for someone who had been without their spirit for months, but there was a translucence to him that suggested the same thing Mu Qingfang had said:  it might already be too late for him to return to his body.

There weren’t many who had come into the cave with them. 

Liu Qingge, for the obvious reason. Mu Qingfang and Shen Qingqiu were equally obvious. 

The peak lords of Wan Jian and Ku Xing came as well — precisely the two Liu Qingge had been most wary about knowing of his ghostly state. But they had given him scathing looks and firmly agreed that the sect looked after their own. “Especially when you are of your own mind and heart.” Then they’d quickly soothed away his apologies for doubting their reception to him, only repeating that they would help.

Surprisingly, Mingyan elected not to go into the cave. 

“As long as you promise you will leave it again, I do not care what form that takes, Brother Dear. But I do not think my heart could bear watching it happen.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly, fighting to keep her voice even. He’d leaned back against her, tucking his head over hers, his large tiger form purring like thunder until she moved away, quickly wiping at a rogue tear. “Luo Binghe will keep me company and we will guard the entrance to the cave together.”

The boy, who’d returned at the end of Mu Qingfang’s examination, had nodded firmly. He still looked a bit confused about what to think about his shishu having been the ‘spirit beast’ he’d spent an entire day engaging in a childish feud with. From the worried glances Luo Binghe had sent his shizun’s way, he’d come to some other conclusions on his own which drove him to bow deeply to Liu Qingge and say, “Please come back in a physical form, Liu-Shishu. I would be honored to learn something from you of the sword arts, if you would consider sparing me a bit of your time.”

“En.” Liu Qingge considered leaving it at that, but thought both of the teenagers would want him to elaborate a bit more than simple agreement. “I will return and I will teach you, with your shizun’s approval.”

“I’m not so jealous of my disciples to refuse them learning more, Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu teased, but there had been a touch of anxiety in his eyes that had made Liu Qingge lean against him in reply, tucking his great cloud-beast head under his hand and rumbling more soft thunder purrs at him until Shen Qingqiu had relaxed and pet him.

The teenagers had exchanged glances then that said quite a lot. He knew enough of his sister’s body language to read, ‘I told you so’ and the resigned slope of the boy’s shoulders seemed to be his submission to her greater knowledge of whatever they’d discussed. Liu Qingge knew better to ask and instead they’d parted ways to enter the cave.

He hadn’t said any further words of farewell to them. There was no need.

Now Liu Qingge stood — well, he was held; Shen Qingqiu stood — to the side as the other three peak lords surrounded his body and began whatever it was to unite his spirit with it, if such a thing could be done.

He realized now that he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to bother. But that depended entirely on Shen Qingqiu.

“Shixiong—”
“Shidi—”

They spoke at the same moment, each in a hushed voice as they stared across the room of the cave at the bier. They looked at each other and waited politely for the other to go first. Liu Qingge could feel the fairy’s heart racing underneath his ghostly kitten paw.

“Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu said when it was clear Liu Qingge was deferring to his seniority. “They said the risk of you dying and leaving us behind in the realm of the living was very small. Selfishly, I would repeat your sister’s request that you either live or remain a ghost. I don’t mind either. There is… too much left unsaid and undone for this to be good-bye between us.”

“En.” A ridiculously easy thing to agree with.

Shen Qingqiu waited and an incredulous expression passed over his face. “Just ‘en’?”

“…en.” Since Shen Qingqiu looked like he might tug on his ear to annoy him, he quickly added, “Those are my only choices. Any other is unacceptable.” 

Liu Qingge took a breath and placed his paws on Shen Qingqiu’s supporting hands before shifting fluidly — as if he had practiced this a thousand times rather than it being the first — into his human ghost form. His hands were now holding the fairy’s as he stood close to Shen Qingqiu, their eyes on a level. 

He felt like a ghost here, most of him translucent and intangible and his colors washed out. Because of his focus on feeling Shen Qingqiu’s warmth, his hands were the most solid part of him, with the rest of him in varying degrees of mutable solidity. His hair and clothes had an almost weightless quality to them, floating more than Shen Qingqiu’s on the breezes that brushed against them in the cavern. 

With a light squeeze of Shen Qingqiu’s hands, Liu Qingge drew them to his chest and held them gently over his heart. He heard the fairy’s slight intake of breath as he went still, but allowed the now very intimate closeness. Liu Qingge leaned closer, dropping his voice so the words he said would only be for himself and Shen Qingqiu to hear, even if the peak lords tried to eavesdrop. 

“I could not bear to be parted from you, Shen Yuan. If you would like it, I would never be so far away that you could not reach out and touch me, if you wished. And you would always be allowed.”

They were the words he had decided on days ago, but did not have the right opportunity to say. The sentiment had been quietly living in his heart for a very long time. For too long it had been left unnoticed, even by himself. Now it was free — and vulnerable like any soft thing without its shell.

He trusted Shen Qingqiu to be gentle.

“S-shidi…” the fairy breathed, his voice shaky and his eyes bright when Liu Qingge pulled back enough to see his face.

“You do not have to say anything. It would not be fair to ask you to. But I needed you to know that all of me, as much or as little of me as you like, is yours. Perhaps it has been since it was you I saw.”

“Shidi… To be clear…?” Shen Qingqiu was flushed, biting his lip after he spoke.

Liu Qingge chuckled softly. “Isn’t it already?” He leaned in again and enunciated each syllable clearly. “I love you, Shen Yuan. I will not leave you yet.”

He stepped back, moving to cup Shen Qingqiu’s hands rather than hold them, so he could pull away if he wished. The fairy didn’t move, staring at him as if he’d imparted a secret that could level mountains and turn the seas to wine.

From the corner of his eyes, Liu Qingge could see the other three peak lords pretending they were unaware of their conversation. The atmosphere must have made it all too clear what was going on, but they were at least polite enough to feign they were still too busy with whatever they were doing to notice. Even had time been of the essence, he did not think they would have dared to say a thing. 

Liu Qingge must have made some movement that made Shen Qingqiu think he was going to move away, because the fairy stepped suddenly forward, gripping at his robes to regain his full attention. “Shidi!”

“Mn?”

“Shidi…” Shen Qingqiu was almost trembling as he seemed to fight to find the words. Liu Qingge waited patiently, knowing that if Shen Qingqiu could not easily express himself then it would be very important. “…do you mean it like the books?” His face flamed.

This was not at all what he expected, so Liu Qingge paused, flustered and turning roughly the same color as Shen Qingqiu. “I… Sh-shixiong… It can be whatever we like…” Hopefully that was the correct answer.

“Oh,” Shen Qingqiu said in reply, looking now as if his words had once again revealed a truth that provided enlightenment. Then he smiled rather blindingly. “Then I accept.”

“…Shixiong… I… am now very concerned about the contents of the books.”

The fairy laughed and reached up to pat his cheeks with both hands. “I would be more concerned about the contents of my mind, if I were you, surely? Don’t look so unnerved — as you said, it can be whatever we like.”

“…en.” He paused before saying. “Shixiong… to be clear?”

Shen Qingqiu smiled with an amusement whose warmth rivaled the sun. “Isn’t it obvious? I love you too.”

The three peak lords lost their ability to pretend they weren’t paying attention. They all turned abruptly to look away and give them privacy as Shen Qingqiu dragged Liu Qingge close and kissed him until he was breathless. 

And then longer, since Liu Qingge remembered that he didn’t need to breathe at all. 

Any part of him that did not have the pleasure of being able to touch Shen Qingqiu faded, utterly forgotten.

***

The other peak lords gratefully got down to business the moment the other two came out of their pink and fluffy clouds of romance and acknowledged they existed.

“Why didn’t you just step back into your body to begin with?” one of them asked with a hint of exasperation. 

“I was pushed out.” Liu Qingge did his best to ignore that they seemed to think he’d overlooked the obvious — something that was taught to all cultivators of the sect in case of accidental astral projection.

“Pushed out?”

“En. I tried many times until you entered Ling Xi Caves and took us away.”

“Then you should have said something!”

This time Liu Qingge pinned his shixiong with a cool stare. From the way the man stiffened, it must have been particularly intimidating in his ghostly form.

“I could not at first. It seemed inadvisable later, the longer it had gone on. I had other concerns.”

“Protecting Shen-Shixiong.”

“En.”

The others exchanged glances before shrugging and letting it go. As well they should — second-guessing his instincts would be rude at this point.

“If we had known more quickly you would have had more options. Burning you on a bier of Phoenix Wood is for the best now,” Mu Qingfang said.

“I’m not familiar with this, what does it do?” Shen Qingqiu asked, hand slipping into Liu Qingge’s as they stood side by side next to the bier. A thin silk cloth had been politely placed over the body’s face to be less disconcerting.

The others went on pretending they did not notice the intimacy, while Liu Qingge’s heart soared over the simple way Shen Qingqiu laced their fingers together under the cover of his long sleeves.

“Phoenix Wood does more than catch flame easily. It can also help a rebirth, burning away the old and making it new again as long as spirit and body are united and not too corrupted. If your cultivation level were not so high… But of course it is… If you do your best to align your spirit with your body like you were returning after an astral projection, we will set the wood alight (which should merge body and spirit), and then pour the ashes into the metal basin along with pure water and clay. With the five elements and an infusion of qi…” 

The Ku Xing peak lord continued in this manner for a bit, with occasional input from the other two and questions from Shen Qingqiu. 

Liu Qingge tuned out, far too occupied trying to soothe the tension he saw in the fairy’s shoulders by using the pad of his thumb to gently stroke over his knuckles. This earned him a side-eye from Shen Qingqiu that seemed to say he was being distracting, but no ire. If anything, the pink tips of the fairy’s ears and the way he swayed a little closer said he liked it as much as Liu Qingge did.

He could have said he trusted his sect brothers to do their best for him, sure that they were confident in the ritual’s success and that Shen Qingqiu would look out for him too, making sure they remembered every part of it and left nothing to chance. And that would be true, but mostly he was making sure that if something did happen, he had made certain to treasure every last second he had with Shen Qingqiu, rather than taking it for granted that he could do it all later. 

This was why when he was prompted to step onto the bier, he tugged Shen Qingqiu aside to push his fingers into his hair and just hold his face between his hands, memorizing it and the exact shade of his eyes. Shen Qingqiu allowed it, blushing from the intense look and the presence of the others (who, once again, hastily pretended to be deaf and blind to the other side of the room, talking among themselves to increase their privacy — he would need to send them gifts for their thoughtfulness). 

“Don’t, Shidi… You’ll make me worry if we part like this,” Shen Qingqiu said in a soft, wobbly voice, his eyes too-bright now. 

Liu Qingge smiled. “No need. Even if it is not possible, I will come back to you.” He leaned in to kiss him, tasting the bitterness of the medicines Mu Qingfang had made him take and the fairy’s own sweetness. 

This time it was Shen Qingqiu who was breathless first — which only made sense, of course. They held each other when they finally broke, the fairy clutching at his conveniently tangible robes and Liu Qingge stroking over his hair and down his back for long enough for Shen Qingqiu to catch his breath again.

“You had better try to return quickly. The longer you are gone, the more time I will have to read those books and get ideas,” Shen Qingqiu threatened quietly.

Liu Qingge chuckled and dropped a kiss on the top of his head. “En. Get many ideas. We will try them all.”

“You would not say such things if you had read the scandalous things I have…” Shen Qingqiu muttered against his shoulder, almost bruising as he wrapped his arms around Liu Qingge’s ribs. His form seemed to naturally accommodate Shen Qingqiu’s needs, becoming tangible at his touch.

“I have read enough to be interested in which ‘ideas’ you are curious about… Shixiong,” Liu Qingge teased, whispering the words next to his ear as if it were just the two of them in Shen Qingqiu’s room with the spirit board next to them. 

He felt Shen Qingqiu shiver.

When Shen Qingqiu had recovered from his flustered state, they exchanged one final kiss on the lips. Another was left on the fairy’s hand, “To hold.” 

His softness sliding away until he returned to his usual dispassionate expression, Liu Qingge moved to the bier.

Chapter Text

【Your fate was sealed from the beginning, you see…】 

Liu Qingge knew that things were going wrong straight away. 

From the alarmed faces surrounding him, they knew it too. Their mouths formed unheard words as the flames from the Phoenix Wood surrounded him, trapping him on the bier and turning blue as his mortal body was consumed.

The noise of things burning — the soft thumps of ignition; the crackling and popping of things being transmuted by fire; the sharp sounds of objects shattering — that was all he could hear.

【You were Fated, Liu Qingge. Fated to die, unless Shen Qingqiu — Shen Yuan — was able to save you.】 

There was no pain. Not until he saw the others restraining Shen Qingqiu, who soundlessly cried out to him; reached for him.

He never wanted to see fear like that in those green eyes ever again. It took all three of the other peak lords to take Shen Qingqiu away. He fought every step; perhaps even viciously if the shocked expressions were anything to go by. Even with the combined power of the three men, Shen Qingqiu broke free a few times. The others succeeded, in the end, but it wasn’t easy.

Good, he thought. Keep him safe.

Liu Qingge saw feathers in the flames, burning away one by one, just like his mortal shell beneath him.

【You could not return to your body, because Shen Yuan was not sent soon enough to rescue you from your deviation. So you died, just as you were Fated to.】 

The flames spread beyond the bier, burning away the stand that held the metal basin and then melting the basin and its contents for good measure. Even the dark blue marble of the cave floors and ceilings showed signs that the hungry flames were considering if they were able to consume them too.

【That was a mistake on our side, of course. A scheduling error. But we could not interfere — things were already set into motion. You were originally, in this thing you call ‘the prophecy’, meant to fade away after a few days, passing beyond the veil in a way befitting a cultivator of your status.】 

The lights of the luminous pearls that lit the cavern were snuffed out, one by one, as the blue flames greedily swallowed them too. There were screams that echoed through the cavern, but they did not belong to the peak lords — they did not belong to Liu Qingge either. Later, he wouldn’t be certain whose screams they were, only that they were probably not human.

At the time, he was barely paying attention to them.

He was straining to listen to the odd, dispassionate voice that spoke to him inside of his mind.

【Shen Yuan was meant to be the one to affect change. A catalyst to correct ‘the prophecy’. Shang Qinghua could not be this. He was the prophecy’s originator. Big changes are impossible for him without first being changed himself. So it was meant to be Shen Yuan who longed, more than anyone, to affect the prophecy. But you have become a catalyst too, Liu Qingge, perhaps on-par with The Protag— …with Luo Binghe in terms of how your presence could affect The Plo— prophecy.】 

The cavern was all darkness now.

The blue flames had even consumed themselves — or perhaps, his ability to see had been burned away with everything else. 

How could he know the difference?

【You chose to follow Shen Qingqiu out of the cave. You were the one to decide to watch him, to safeguard the sect and amuse yourself. You were the one to decide to protect him. You at every turn decided to remain behind as a guardian, a friend, a lover, a brother… were willing to stare unflinching at yourself and move forward to be better not for personal gain, but for those you give your loyalty to.】

“Who are you?” Liu Qingge found himself asking in the darkness.

There was no echo. He might not have been in the cavern any longer.

【You may call me ‘System’, like theirs… Shen Yuan and Shang Qinghua.】 

“En. Then, ‘System’, it seems you want something of me, so that I can return to him.”

【Direct. You are correct.】

“And?”

【Returning to your living body was not possible once you chose to protect Shen Yuan from the explosion of the Phoenix Wood. Those fragments that you thought had done nothing left little splinters behind, too small and fine for you to feel unless they activated. A change of rebirth began from there. It is why your experiences as a ghost were so strange and you could not sense your ghostly qi the way you should have been able to.】 

Liu Qingge hummed to show he was still paying attention. For some…one? something? who seemed to respect his directness, they seemed to circle around topics themselves. It reminded him a bit of Shen Qingqiu, so he banked any sense of irritation and waited for System to get to the point.

【Thank you. But you are correct — I have not given you an answer. You are an agent of change, of chaos, if you will. Shen Yuan — Qingqiu, if you prefer — has been set a task to correct the events outlined in ‘the prophecy’. If you are willing to help him, then returning you to that world will be easy.】 

“You know I would help him. You are asking something else. Speak clearly.”

【…】 

【It is disconcerting how you and Shen Qingqiu speak with the System. He is very tricky and you are very direct.】 

Within the encompassing darkness there was a glint of light that seemed somehow to be a display of pique from System. 

Liu Qingge reached out and could feel a cool, glassy texture in front of him. It had some give, as if it were made of a window-pane shaped sugar painting, perhaps, rather than actual glass. If it weren’t his imagination, he could see a blue glow and strange writing running over it like ants in a row.

【…This is not for your eyes, Liu Qingge. You know too much already about the fabric of reality. If you see too much, we cannot send you back.】 

He believed the voice and closed his eyes, withdrawing his hand. But now he was reminded of his body and was able to cross his arms over his chest and signal his impatience through body language alone.

And after a pause, the voice resumed.

【You are a special case. You are from this world, so we cannot tie you in the way we do the others. Ah — do not worry. Because of our mistake, we have relaxed many of the rules. Shen Qingqiu is now free to solve the issues in whatever way he likes. Only a few events must happen now. They are the most simple and the most difficult. Luo Binghe must become strong, without becoming heartless, and the world must not be torn asunder.】 

“And you will send me back to help with this. But you think I will not agree?”

【Your agreement is a foregone conclusion. The only question is what form you take. Any choice will affect the events of ‘the prophecy’ — creating ripples of effect no one can predict…】

‘System’ seemed to sense that Liu Qingge recognized the signs of another meandering topic and hurriedly continued rather than risk his impatience.

【For further information, ask the other two about ‘chaos theory’ or ‘the butterfly effect’ — ah!】 

Liu Qingge grunted his acknowledgment and made a motion for System to continue.

【The ritual the other peak lords performed was a success in at least one way:  Your physical form and your spirit form were reunited. You could not be reborn as you were — as said earlier, that was not an option — but you will not be a common ghost. With the cultivation level you had attained, and with the completed ritual besides, you are too ‘OP’ for that. So you have options, which will be described to you, if you wish.】

“Then tell me.”

And System did, meticulously going through his options of what flavor of ghost he could become and what the likely outcomes of his choice might be, including how likely it was that groups who made it their duty to destroy ghosts might mount an attack against the sect for ‘harboring evil’ as he grew even more powerful. 

Choosing to become a Guardian was a foregone conclusion.

System ‘casually’ commented that this would make him the first peak lord that wasn’t fully human. It did not stress any of the words — its voice was as monotone as it usually was — but Liu Qingge thought that the word ‘first’ had the slightest of pauses around it. It was not difficult for him to put that together with what he knew of Luo Binghe and the prophecy that centered over him like the eye of a hurricane. 

No wonder it would be important to make sure the boy did not grow up to be heartless. 

No wonder it was the original Shen Qingqiu who was replaced.

With another of those flashes he wasn’t supposed to notice, System hurriedly told him to close his eyes so he could be ‘added as Shen Qingqiu’s linked account’, whatever that meant.

In the darkness, he felt himself fall — 

***

Liu Qingge came awake curled against a soft surface. He could just hear a steady and familiar heartbeat underneath the clatter of hooves and the rumble of carriage wheels.

After he recovered from the reintroduction to the affects of gravity on his body, he moved, stretching a little. 

He was quick to discover that, once again, he had four paws, a long tail, and wings. Without opening his eyes, he assumed he also had a mane and tufts of fur liable to float away on a strong breeze. Back in his cloud-beast form, then. Kitten-sized version, specifically.

“Hello, darling… Did you enjoy your nap?” 

Shen Qingqiu’s voice was warm, amused, and extremely relieved, though he was trying to play it off with the amusement.

Not wanting to speak if it might be inconvenient, Liu Qingge lifted his head and looked around, recognizing they were alone inside of a carriage. Turning, he saw through the open window that Luo Binghe was on horseback, currently speaking courteously with his sister. 

Luo Binghe and Mingyan were both distinctly older than the last time he’d seen them.

“En,” Shen Qingqiu said, feeling him flinch with shock and evidently having anticipated the reaction. The fairy’s hand stroked down his back to soothe him. “It has been a little over two years now since the Phoenix Wood consumed the cavern. It took most of those two years for the fires to die down enough that we could investigate. I found you in the ashes. I’m glad you woke up.”

That seemed to be an understatement. There was a haunted look in his eyes and a tension in his fingers that suggested the time since they last saw each other was harder on him than he wanted to let on.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” Liu Qingge said. 

It had felt like minutes — an hour or two at most.

“You promised you’d come back, and you did. That’s enough. How do you feel?” 

Shen Qingqiu waved it away as if it were nothing worth mentioning. It was obviously nothing of the sort, but from the tightness around his eyes, the fairy wasn’t quite ready to discuss it yet. So Liu Qingge obliged.

“En… Stronger now. Where are we going?” he asked, his voice was raspy with disuse, but otherwise the same.

Shen Qingqiu smiled down at him, a somewhat sardonic slant to his lips. “We are on our way to the Immortal Alliance Conference. With your assistance, we’re going to prevent a massacre. And then, perhaps, throw my Little White Sheep into a great big nasty hole. If he wants to go.”

The fairy’s mask of blithe spirits and whimsical humor would probably be impenetrable to most, but Luo Qingge could see the hair-line cracks in it. He didn’t quite understand what was going on yet, but now that he was there, Shen Qingqiu wouldn’t have to deal with so much on his own anymore. He wouldn’t be another thing for the fairy to worry about while he was dealing with everything else.

“What do you mean by that?”

With a faux-frivolous attitude, Shen Qingqiu explained about how the prophesy dictated that Luo Binghe’s master betray him and throw him into the Endless Abyss, the boundary between the Demon and Human realms, in order to grow stronger and retrieve a powerful sword. Shen Qingqiu’s relief that he didn’t have to bother with the betraying part was palpable, even though it clearly distressed him that it existed at all.

“…And you’re going to ask Luo Binghe to go into the Endless Abyss to retrieve the sword?”

“Of course not! That’s a terrible idea! I’m going to offer him a chance to fulfill that destiny, mostly because I think something weird would happen if I didn’t (even if System says it’s fine), but I’m definitely going to talk him out of it. Even if I have to get on my knees and beg and cry and cling to his robes! I have no shame.”

Liu Qingge tried not to smile. “He won’t go. Not if it means leaving you behind for years.”

“Mn?” Shen Qingqiu asked, tilting his head and looking genuinely puzzled, his fingers pausing, no longer restlessly petting him for comfort. “But you’re awake now? There’s no reason for him to worry as much over this master now.”

“Look at what happened to you when both he and I were watching over you. I’m scared to ask what near-death incidents occurred these years I’ve been asleep and you had only one of us ready to protect you.”

A suspiciously guilty expression crossed the fairy’s face. “…nothing we couldn’t handle, Shidi! See? All of my limbs intact — all of my fingers and toes too. Do I need to take off my boots to prove it? Ah!”

He would get a more truthful answer later, whether it was from the fairy or from Luo Binghe, so he let it pass for now and ignored the rhetorical question. Liu Qingge slowly stretched out a leg to test his strength and flexibility. It seemed satisfactory. 

“How many days until we arrive?”

“The Conference starts in nine days. We are taking a route that I hope will put us in the way of some people it would be good to befriend early. System allowed me to… well, that’s difficult to explain — but let’s say I was able to ask for information I will have no way to explain if anyone asks how I learned of it.”

“Then with nine days we have some time for this,” Liu Qingge said.

With an ease that would have been unthinkable not so long ago, he transformed to his human form so he could wrap his arms around Shen Qingqiu and pull him against his chest, dropping a kiss into his hair. He was completely solid this time; perhaps as warm as his cloud-beast body, though he couldn’t quite tell. He might always have to concentrate now to register temperatures between the ghostly chill and the raging Phoenix Wood flames that seemed likely to forever swirl deep within him.

“Let me hold you for awhile.”

Shen Qingqiu made a small sound as his calm facade shattered. After a moment of stiff indecision, he wrapped his arms tight around Liu Qingge and tucked against his chest, shivering violently. 

Abandoning all pretense, Liu Qingge gathered the fairy into his lap, petting his hair and murmuring endearments and reassurances into his ear. When he inadvertently met the shocked Luo Binghe’s gaze through the open window, he flicked his own eyes to the curtains with an imperious silent order. 

Luo Binghe was still very perceptive — he looked at his very upset shizun for just a moment before reaching into the carriage to close the blinds and give them privacy. The set of his shoulders and the slight curve of his lips before the blinds swung closed suggested both relief and a certain amount of contentment. He must have been very worried about his shizun these last two years.

The entire exchange took place in mere seconds. Liu Qingge turned his attention back to the trembling fairy in his arms, ready to wipe away the tears as they fell.

Shen Qingqiu didn’t cry. 

For more than an hour, he shuddered like he was in danger of falling apart in his arms, but he didn’t cry. Liu Qingge almost wished he would, sensing that the catharsis of more than two years of tension would have helped, but he wasn’t going to push him into it.

Instead, Liu Qingge ran his fingers through the fairy’s hair, stroked along his back, and when the trembling slowed and his hands stopped clutching at him, Liu Qingge gently ran his fingertips along the outer curve of his ears, down his arms, and onto the palms of his hand, all the way until it ended with their fingertips sliding against each other, and he began again.

“…Shidi…” the fairy nearly croaked, exhausted now as he watched Liu Qingge’s fingers explore his hands. “…are you… Are you petting me the way I did to you when you were a little cloud-beast?”

Liu Qingge smiled. “En.”

“I… I don’t have paws!” Shen Qingqiu protested with a sputter, though he was almost laughing as he tried to portray outrage. 

He didn’t stiffen or pull his hand away, so Liu Qingge continued, pressing their fingertips together and playfully wiggling his fingers the fairy’s palm in a move that would have made him reflexively extend his claws at the very least if he’d been in cloud-beast form. He probably would have wanted to bite.

“This is somehow three times as annoying when you do it to me. I protest that it is not fair.” 

The fairy didn’t sound the least bit annoyed. A smile kept turning up the corners of his mouth.

“Mmn. I see — should I stop?”

There were a few moments of silence as Liu Qingge patiently waited the fairy out. After a breath, Shen Qingqiu shyly tucked his face against Liu Qingge’s chest and murmured, “…You don’t have to stop.” And after a pause, he rebelliously muttered, “Don’t think I won’t remember this the next time you have toe beans.”

“En. I understand. As I said before… you can always touch. You don’t have to ask.” 

Liu Qingge leaned in to place a chaste kiss at Shen Qingqiu’s hairline and was rewarded by a soft, pleased sound as the fairy relaxed more against him. Delighted, Liu Qingge drew Shen Qingqiu’s hand up so he could kiss his fingertips with a smile, watching as Shen Qingqiu’s green, green eyes seemed to melt.

Beautiful.

“Is that really okay?” Shen Qingqiu asked softly. “I know you don’t like to be touched much… I don’t mind asking so you’re prepared…?”

“Mn. It’s the other way. I liked it too much.”

Shen Qingqiu seemed to think the response over before shaking his head. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

Liu Qingge hummed softly to himself, lightly tracing his fingertips over the side of the fairy’s neck with one hand and slipping his fingers underneath Shen Qingqiu’s sleeve to do the same at his wrist and forearm with the other. He felt the fairy go nearly as boneless at the touch — as he did whenever the roles were reversed. 

“Whenever you would touch me and I’d get overstimulated, it was… disquieting at best. I am used to my body obeying me. I was horrified of the idea of hurting you. So I put a lot of thought into understanding how I could control that reflex.”

“I know you weren’t trying to hurt me, though… Plus, I like teasing you,” Shen Qingqiu said quietly, though he seemed to understand already that it wasn’t the point.

Liu Qingge still shook his head and rested his forehead against the fairy’s. “There is no good reason to hurt you. And less reason to allow myself to lash out for no reason. Once I recognized why it was happening, I realized that if I did not address the root cause, I would not be able to safely progress through my cultivation. Have you heard of the concept of ‘touch-starved’?”

Shen Qingqiu had, but asked him to tell him in his own words anyway, so Liu Qingge went through it, adding that he’d been prepared to explain it all and confess his feelings if not for the disgraced healer’s poisoning and final attack disrupting his intentions. 

Realizing that Liu Qingge had been sitting on his realization of love and intentions to confess only to be prevented seemed to dismay Shen Qingqiu, who immediately fell to complaining that he’d taken the high road with the ‘trash’ healer. The fairy claimed that in hindsight, he wished he’d “curb-stomped” him instead. 

He was probably being dramatic, but since Liu Qingge wasn’t entirely certain what ‘curb-stomped’ meant other than it seemed violent, he thought it best to soothe the fairy with sweet words whispered in his ear and more gentle touches until he relaxed again.

“I missed this,” Shen Qingqiu sighed. “Having you at my side; your voice close. …it’s better with the touches and kisses, though,” he added with a tilt of his head and a sly, sidelong smile as he almost coyly toyed with the collar of Liu Qingge’s robe.

“En. I probably wanted to do this from the start. Maybe that is why I spent months only being able to whisper to you,” Liu Qingge responded with a slight smirk of his own.

“It’s probably better to whisper right now anyway. Too many nosy cultivators around, and I should explain about the Immortal Alliance Conference…” Shen Qingqiu sighed.

And so he did, mentioning the events he expected and hoped to prevent from occurring, about the people he hoped to meet, and a promise to explain more later about Luo Binghe’s part in this when there wasn’t such a great risk of him overhearing things he shouldn’t and taking action on his own. 

By that point, there were kisses between the words and touches that were maybe a little too intimate, and they’d begun to realize that to let it continue any further was inadvisable with their lack of proper privacy. 

That didn’t stop Liu Qingge from leaning in to murmur roguishly against his ear.

“It seems likely to be at least another hour before we stop for the night, Shixiong… Did you want to tell me about what has happened these last two years? Or would you rather tell me about what you read while I was sleeping?”

Shen Qingqiu sputtered a laugh before pushing him down to the floor of the carriage so he could lay half over him and play with his hair. Then, surprising neither of them, the bookish fairy leaned in to whisper into his ear, telling him all of the interesting things he’d found between the pages of those novels.

Liu Qingge now knew vividly that words could be just as stimulating as touch.

***

It would be quite awhile — weeks, really — before either could bear to be any further apart than one long stride that would close the distance. More often, they were much closer than that.

Mingyan and Luo Binghe teased them over it — just a little, in the way people do when they think it’s sweet and actually want to encourage it. Their approval was soft and unspoken, but clear none the less. 

Shang Qinghua only commented that he’d never before considered that it might be okay to have feelings for someone in the prophecy. He said it multiple times, as if it were some earth-shattering revelation he was still trying to process.

No one else dared say a word, regardless of what they thought. But at least no one seemed to actually disapprove — not that their opinions were sought. To be fair, everyone else in their party was a simple disciple and seemed far too awestruck (or intimidated) by them to consider for a moment that they had any right to have an opinion on it to begin with.

Whenever they arrived at one of the way-points along the way, Shen Qingqiu’s personal disciples (sometimes with Mingyan’s assistance, if necessary) made certain that their master and their shishu were properly taken care of immediately. Once the two had settled in for the night, no one would dream of disturbing them for anything less than a full-scale demon attack. (Even then, when it wasn’t hyperbole and it actually had happened, it was taken care of and they only heard about it in the morning from a very smug looking Luo Binghe. Liu Qingge was disquieted about how disappointed he didn’t feel for missing it.)

This routine began from the very first night after Liu Qingge woke up, as if it had been discussed among the trio of Qing Jing disciples since the trip was planned. Or even earlier than that. Considering what good friends the three had become with Mingyan, he was willing to bet it was established between them all from nearly the moment his kitten-shaped body was pulled from the ashes and brought out of the cave.

Everyone’s indulgence made the lead-up to the Conference far easier to bear than if they’d had to tip-toe around their mutual desire to remain close enough to touch.

***

Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge began their exploration of what ideas they liked from the novels from behind the comfortingly thick walls of a very good inn. 

Not one of the toe-curling ideas that made their faces flush and their hearts pound — but something to test the waters and let them learn at their own pace, not feeling bound by the bruising rushes into becoming lovers used in many of the stories. 

It was simply this:  sharing an intimate dinner together, feeding each other and lacing their fingers as they talked. Then they helped each other brush out their hair before undressing for bed. 

They held each other, whispering in each other’s ears, exploring exposed skin and covered planes and curves with fingertips; smiling when they found each others’ ticklish spots. When Shen Qingqiu began to fall asleep, they exchanged more kisses until the fairy’s eyes finally closed and his breathing slowed.

Liu Qingge remained awake, simply running feather-soft touches along his lover’s hair and body. He could sleep if he wished, but he didn’t really need to and at the moment. This was too new and important for him to sacrifice in return for sleep. He felt like more than two years was plenty enough for now.

Some time later, he was pulled from his thoughts by the fairy shifting in his sleep and opening his eyes again. There was a flash of surprise in his eyes before they glistened with unshed tears and he moved closer.

“You’re here,” the fairy whispered, moving forward to press a kiss to Liu Qingge’s throat in a sleepy little move that made Liu Qingge’s heart flutter.

“En.”

The clench of Shen Qingqiu’s hand and the shivery intake of breath told him there were things the fairy needed to say before he could sleep easily, so he waited patiently.

“I was worried it was a dream. Ever since the first time, with the exploding goban… I’ve… always been worried you might not come back.”

Rather than speak, Liu Qingge took his hand and pressed a kiss into the palm before drawing it to his face for Shen Qingqiu to touch — to let him verify his presence himself. Shen Qingqiu’s fingers cupped his cheek, curling underneath his jaw, before his fingers began exploring his face, eventually coming to cup it again. His thumb brushed over the beauty mark under his eye for a few moments before slipping into his hair to hold.

“I am here,” Liu Qingge confirmed gently. “If I am not already, then I will become so powerful I will never have to leave you again.”

“Good.”

Their lips met in a kiss that was gentle on one side and fierce on the other — one demanding and the other reassuring. When it ended, Shen Qingqiu settled back on his side again, his forehead resting gently on Liu Qingge’s collarbone as his fingers ran along the lapel of his night clothes to toy with the tie at his waist.

“System wouldn’t let me do anything to help you,” Shen Qingqiu said after a few moments, tucking closer and tangling his fingers in the fabric. “I had all of these… ‘merits’ …that I had earned. They were supposed to be something I could spend to make things easier for me. But System wouldn’t let me spend them on you. I was told to just wait. ‘Just wait’ while Qiong Ding Peak burned inside and leaked steam through its cracks for two years. The villagers all thought the mountain had become a volcano… Many fled rather than risk it. Especially when the mountain began to shriek at night.”

“Mmn… I remember the screaming. It was the only thing I could hear other than System and the flames from the time the ritual began.”

Shen Qingqiu froze, gripping at him. “System?”

“En. I was not told much — there are still things about the fairy world I’m not meant to know. I am tasked to help you. But I would have done that anyway.”

“The… fairy world…” Shen Qingqiu said slowly, looking up at him through his lashes. His expression was stunned enough to be almost blank.

“En. I don’t know what you call yourselves. But I like the idea of having a fairy lover without having to have stolen their celestial raiment so they couldn’t fly home again.” Liu Qingge smiled wryly down at Shen Qingqiu. “I would want you to choose me, as I chose you.”

Shen Qingqiu’s face went through several odd expressions before settling on a blush and a laugh before he shook his head. “I… Of course I chose you. From before I knew I had. Even before I saw your face, which, really, was completely unfair.”

“Unfair?”

“If I’d known someone who looked like you was watching me get undressed at night—” Shen Qingqiu said, with faux bashfulness.

“I did not watch you get undressed,” Liu Qingge said firmly, scowling a little. He knew he was being teased, but some things needed to be defended.

“You did tonight.”

Liu Qingge blushed before primly saying, “Because you watched me first.”

“Aiyah… I must be a wicked fairy then, to corrupt my sweet, innocent Shidi,” Shen Qingqiu teased, playfully patting his cheek.

Liu Qingge rolled his eyes but still smiled. After Shen Qingqiu’s giggles at his expense calmed, Liu Qingge asked, “What should I call you if not ‘fairy’?”

Shen Qingqiu looked shy and flustered again. The teasing had probably been a way to deflect. But Liu Qingge wanted to know so that he wasn’t inadvertently disrespectful to whatever Shen Qingqiu’s wishes were.

“…You can call me ‘fairy’. Maybe it’s easier to explain that way… though it’s embarrassing. We’re not fairies — especially not Shang Qinghua!”

Liu Qingge chuckled and kissed his brow. “You only say that because you can’t see yourself through my eyes, my fairy.”

Shen Qingqiu’s skin went even more red before he covered his face with both of his hands and made a little near-whimpering sound. 

“…In my world you would be able to slay hundreds if you just looked at them like that. You’re so beautiful — I thought my heart was going to stop. Too powerful, Liu-Juju, ah! OP! OP!”

Amused at his fairy’s adorable nonsense, Liu Qingge just ran his fingers through his hair until Shen Qingqiu’s embarrassment subsided and he curled against him again. Liu Qingge thought that he was going to watch him drift off asleep once more when Shen Qingqiu spoke.

“I love you,” Shen Qingqiu murmured. “I realized… after… that I had felt that way for a long time. I just couldn’t… wouldn’t let myself join the dots until you said it first — how could I think you might be interested in me in that way? And… after… I kept finding things that made me think, ‘ah… I felt it even then’. Like perhaps I always had. Maybe somehow even before I knew for sure you were around protecting me.”

“En, and teasing you.”

“Mmn,” Shen Qingqiu chuckled. “And now new types of teasing, too.”

“En.”

Shen Qingqiu laughed at his tone before rolling him underneath and kissing him senseless (a much more useful term than ‘breathless’ for a ghost).

***

A few nights later, after a long day of travel and an encounter with a surprisingly persistent group of mountain bandits who didn’t know how to admit when they were outmatched, Shen Qingqiu asked Liu Qingge to fall asleep together with him. It was an easy request to grant, especially when Shen Qingqiu confessed that seeing the bandit leader’s axe try to chop Liu Qingge in half, only for him to shift to a more ghostly body so it could pass harmlessly through him had greatly stressed his fairy lover, who hadn’t realized he had that ability. 

Liu Qingge was happy to chase away any potential bad dreams by spending the evening first allowing Shen Qingqiu to verify all of him was whole, and then “be the big spoon” as they drifted off to sleep together.

As far as he was aware, they both slept through the night peacefully, though Shen Qingqiu woke him up in the early hours with a nibble to his neck.

The pleased sound Liu Qingge apparently made at that was described by Shen Qingqiu as, “A purr.” After they’d playfully squabbled over whether or not he purred when he wasn’t a cloud-beast (and Liu Qingge pretended that cloud-beasts couldn’t purr, so he had no idea what he meant by it anyway), they settled together to just enjoy some time doing nothing but holding each other.

The sound-of-questionable-nature prompted Shen Qingqiu to interrupt the cozy quiet after awhile to confess to being greatly affected by Liu Qingge’s voice. It, more than anything, had been what made him become more aware of Liu Qingge, it seemed. 

“And since I didn’t consider myself as someone who was attracted to men, I really didn’t know what to do when the conversations made me so flustered… I just knew that not having them was unacceptable,” Shen Qingqiu admitted. “Maybe it was a bit like you described before, about getting overstimulated. Of liking it, but being half driven mad by it too.”

“So… if I lay like this with you, and whispered like I used to into your ear…?” Liu Qingge asked as they lounged together in the early morning light that filtered in through the shutters.

Shen Qingqiu squirmed, his skin flushing. “…I’d… I’d get flustered, yes.”

“En… I like you ‘flustered’,” Liu Qingge said, dropping his voice a little into nearly a purr as he teased. “What sort of things could I say to make you overstimulated, then, I wonder?”

His fairy made a faint sound of pleased frustration before twisting around to tuck his face against Liu Qingge’s chest, pouting. “Teasing Shidi…”

“En. But Shixiong has already confessed to liking that.” He moved so he could ever-so-carefully bite at Shen Qingqiu’s ear before murmuring, “So I will tease my fairy until he asks me to stop…”

“Uhn… Liu-Juju, please…” Shen Qingqiu said in a way that pretended to be a complaint. But he didn’t actually ask him to stop.

Liu Qingge chuckled and took it as invitation instead, happily ‘pleasing’ as requested until his fairy was wrecked. 

Breakfast had to be delayed.

***

The two of them had checked off a dozen or so of the things from the novels that Shen Qingqiu had been most curious about by the time they reached the Immortal Alliance Conference. Each of these was explored thoroughly, some with great enthusiasm. Others were crossed off the list entirely, and the rest put on hold for when they weren’t also trying to plan to reroute Fate into more agreeable lines.

These sinfully delicious items on their list started with scandalous, self-indulgent handholding in public and continued on to a somewhat more complicated, “upside down kiss” (which was easily accomplished considering Liu Qingge was both a powerful ghost and an accomplished immortal cultivator, but provoked more laughter than toe-curling and resulted in two other items being crossed off the list without being tried at all). They’d agreed to attempt “kissing in the rain” when they returned home and could afford to enjoy both the kissing (when they wouldn’t be chased inside by well-meaning disciples) and the undressing each other so they could warm up after.

And as they added more people to their ‘party’ (as the fairies called their group which by this point included the three of them, Luo Binghe, Mingyan, a snake demon, and an ice demon Shang Qinghua only referred to as ‘My King’ in a way and with such frequency that almost made him want to throttle the hapless little fairy until he realized why the fairy had been so struck by the idea of being allowed to love someone from the prophecy), it was looking as if they would have all the time in the world for each other.

All they needed for that was to raise Luo Binghe properly and keep him from destroying the world — which he thought should be relatively simple. 

Liu Qingge and Luo Binghe quickly learned they got along quite well, especially as he was quite willing to conspire with the young man to protect Shen Qingqiu. After seeing how useful Binghe’s sneaky nature was to safeguard his fairy, it did not bother him to turn a blind eye to it provided the behavior continued to be used in a positive manner.

He just didn’t understand why his System seemed anxious.

In a few days, Liu Qingge would find himself in adult cloud-beast form, breathing jets of blue fire at monsters, Shen Qingqiu on his back and the rest of the group moving to flank them, with dozens of rescued disciples from all of the participating sects of the Immortal Alliance Conference trailing behind in their wake. 

But for tonight, their last night before they arrived at the Conference, he was content to spend the evening in bed, turning pages of a book for his fairy until Shen Qingqiu fell asleep in his arms.

He had no way of knowing that somewhere else in the inn, his sister was quietly penning the first draft of a tale of their love that would in time pass down into folklore. It would grow to reflect the local colors where the story was retold, and be known under many different names. 

For now, it was simply titled, The Guardian Ghost and the Bookish Fairy.

[END]