Chapter Text
So, the bad guy is dead, all the villains have been apprehended and the two happy couples overcame all obstacles and finally got together, celebrating with a double wedding like straight out of a fairytale.
Later on, Shen Jiu became the Emperor of Cang Qiong, taking on the name of Shen Qingqiu and becoming renowned for his just ways and love for his people, while the master-disciple couple lived happily ever after in their quaint house with their numerous students. This sounds like the perfect ending for our main character. Everything's settled and the story ended on a good note for everyone, right?
Well, wrong! There's one essential part of the story that isn't resolved yet!
Doesn't it feel like there's still one loose end left to tie up? A detail that everyone overlooked?
Well, that's because there is! And of course it's Shang Qinghua's responsibility to take care of these things, as the author of the original story. Both because he's the only one who has the full picture in mind, but especially because his King would kill him if he missed anything that might be important! Mobei-Jun is not known for being magnanimous, and Shang Qinghua has no intention on testing his patience, so of course he's gonna stress to make sure that every little thing fell into place! He cares about his life!
So how could he forget about something so big? Something so crucial?
Obviously he noticed that Tianlang-Jun isn't really dead!
After the epic fight between the two Heavenly Demons, in the midst of everything that was happening, no one really paid much attention to Tianlang-Jun's corpse. Once he lost and was declared dead, no one had the time to think about what to do with the body, to be completely honest; does it even need to be said that after Bing-ge got back his master he didn't really care about anything else? And of course there was the matter of saving Shen Jiu, so everyone left the cave in a hurry and didn't notice when, twenty-some minutes later, the older demon regained consciousness and opened his eyes again.
Of course nothing like this had happened in the original story, where Luo Binghe had years after discovering his demonic heritage to train and learn to use his powers. In this story, however, he only had a few days – which apparently were enough to incapacitate his father in the battle, but not enough to kill him for good. No one is that OP, okay?? not even Luo Binghe!
If it weren't for his job as a spy, that requires continuous and meticulous research, coupled with the fact that a few months after his imprisonment Zhuzhi-Lang completely vanished, Shang Qinghua himself would have never realized that something was wrong. Luckily for everyone, he well remembered Zhuzhi-Lang's ability to change into his snake form, and from this he inferred that the demon must have escaped this way, just to later reunite with his master and mend his injuries. Of course he knows his characters well, and so when he sent someone to check, he found that he had been right.
As of now, the demon duo is living in a little village in the countryside (not one close to our happy couple, luckily) and they have decided to leave all demonic pursuits in the past, dedicating instead their time to the noble art of human literature. Seems like our character Shen Yuan is not the only one who's passionate about trashy romance novels.
Of course Shang Qinghua immediately reported this information to his King, but they decided of common accord (aka – Mobei-Jun decided, and Qinghua heaved a relieved sigh about it) not to mention this detail to Luo Binghe, lest he get it into his head to get revenge for his husband. And truly, how unfair that his super-cool protagonist became something of a glorified housemaid for that bastard Shen Yuan!
Oh, what? You wanted to know about Shen Yuan??
Ah, of course there's also that mystery left to explain!
Well, in regards to that, the truth is that Qinghua had an epiphany right in the middle of the wedding ceremony. He, along with Mobei-Jun, had been invited to both of the weddings – the private and the public one – as a reward for getting the darling former-Crown Prince back to safety. During the private celebration, the one where only the people aware of the switch between Shens participated, Shang Qinghua spent the time glaring at Shen Yuan from across the room, seething at the thought that the person who had subverted every major plot point of his novel was still brazenly getting his happy ending.
As he stared at him hard enough that it was a wonder he hadn't triggered Bing-ge's protective-husband mode yet, he thought that this guy was truly no better than the real villain, Shen Jiu.
Gaze ping-ponging between the two, he mentally catalogued all the ways in which the two were similar. Their personalities, for starters, weren't all that different; the thin face, the ability to lie without remorse if the situation called for it; the tendency to be melodramatic; and then their obvious attraction for OP characters with a single-track mind and unmistakable anger problems. Curiously, they also both had a very weak golden core. Then, of course, was the point of their appearance. As he looked at Shen Jiu – uncharacteristically smiling with obvious affection at Liu Qingge – he thought that, like this, they were nearly indistinguishable – almost like twins-
Wait.
Twins?!
Shit, now he remembered! In the first draft of his novel, he had meant for the Princes of Cang Qiong to be twins – a classic trope of good-twin bad-twin, that later on he scrapped for being too banal. In the end though, he felt too bad at simply erasing one of his beloved characters, especially considering that he was one of the few good guys in the story. So in the end he thought up this solution: the Shen parents would suffer a grave accident just a few days before the mother – Yue Qingyuan's sister – was due to give birth; said accident being an assassination attempt, as the couple were the current Emperor and Empress of Cang Qiong. The two were forced to go on the run until Yue Qingyuan managed to regain control of the Imperial Guards back at the Palace, only then he could come to their aid. What exactly happened between this and that wasn't important in his mind, as it occurred before the story was set anyway, the relevant fact was that the two royals died tragically, but not before the Empress managed to give birth to the two twins thanks to the help of a common woman who had offered them shelter.
The parents, just before dying, had hid the newborns inside the woman's house, but hadn't managed to escape before the traitors of the Crown found them and killed them, along with the woman who had helped them. The assassins were just about to search the woman's house, knowing that the Empress was pregnant with her heir, when Yue Qingyuan very heroically burst into the room with the guards in tow and slayed them, taking revenge for his sister and her husband. Just in that moment, hearing a muffled cry coming from one of the nearby cupboards, he found the little Shen Jiu, bundled in cloths and screaming as if conscious of his mother's death. What a shame, however, that the parents had hid the babies in two different places – hoping that at least one of them wouldn't be found by the assassins. No one knew, after all, that the Empress was pregnant with twins. No one, not even Yue Qingyuan himself.
As a result, Yue Qingyuan became the Emperor (unaware of the existence of his other nephew), taking with him little Shen Jiu and swearing that he would have no other heir beside him, wanting desperately his sister's son to lead Cang Qiong in the distant future. Now, we're all familiar with Shen Jiu's side of the story.
As for the other kid – apparently Shen Yuan – he was found just a short amount of time later by a band of street boys, who had heard of the royal assassination and went to ransack the house where the accident happened, in the hope that something of value belonging to the late rulers had been left behind. They expected precious rings or inestimable jewels that had escaped the guards' notice when they retrieved the corpses; anything that they could later resell to make some money, really. But instead they found something much more precious: a baby, sleeping soundly in the bedroom, that they wrongly assumed was the son of the common woman.
No matter that they could hardly take care of themselves, these kids still had a conscience! They couldn't leave such a small child to die out there. So they took it with them, making him part of their band of beggars and helping him how they could. What irony that later in life, that same kid was kidnapped by an unscrupulous man that went by the name of Wu Yanzi.
Wasn't it so ingenious? Maybe a bit unrealistic, but this hadn't even made the cut into his original novel, so he didn't care too much about what his readers might have thought of it. And sure, it was a bit too dramatic, but, sue him! He's a sucker for tragic stories, and this added so much more depth to Yue Qingyuan's character. More importantly, this way Shang Qinghua didn't have to erase the good twin character, because no one alive even knew that he existed! He did have a bit of a guilty conscience for giving such a difficult childhood to the innocent baby, and that's why he never thought to name this character. This way it felt way less real and he wouldn't feel too bad about it! And his story wouldn't suffer from it, he naively thought at the time. But of course fate has it out for him, and nothing can ever go according to his plans. Now it feels way too real!
But thanks to this insight he was also able to understand why he transmigrated into his own fictional universe, and specifically this iteration of the story: he was meant to fix it! Switch up the twins and let the plot proceed according to his novel! And it would have worked perfectly hadn't he forgot his own character... Hehe, guess he can't remember every single insignificant detail, right? It was an honest mistake, surely no one would be able to keep in mind every minor plot point! So no one can really blame him, okay?? It was not his fault, he just wants to make that clear. And well, in the end it still worked, no? The two twins are back in their original place, and everyone got their happy ending! Even Qinghua; but that's a story for another day.