Proud Axolotl Demon Way

Shen Qingqiu was not, exactly, happy to have joined the party of Cang Qiong Mountain Peak Lords that had gone out to investigate the plague in Jinlan City—he just hadn’t really had a choice.

Mu Qingfang was the number-one medical genius of the cultivation world. It would have been absurd, not to mention cruel, to send anyone but him to such a disaster. As for Liu Qingge, the War God of Bai Zhan Peak? Just try to hold him back from the chance of a brawl against demons! You had a better chance of growing peonies in the Northern Desert.

Unfortunately for Shen Qingqiu, one of these two shidis of his was also in charge of clearing his meridians from the toxin Without a Cure, and the other one was the only doctor who could mix up the medicine that prevented it flaring up again. If they both got themselves heroically killed, what would happen to him? He wouldn’t even last long enough to see the protagonist’s return from the Endless Abyss! No, Shen Qingqiu had to tag along to keep an eye on them both. At least he could pay his way somewhat with his boundless knowledge of demons and monsters.

Just his luck that, even in this cursed universe, he got hit with an incurable poison. The one advantage of being transmigrated into a weird AU of his favourite least favourite web novel—quick ‘n’ easy regeneration of missing body parts, from a toe to a whole limb, as soon as a cultivator achieved the very basics of qi condensation—and it was no help to Shen Qingqiu at all. In fact, it had only caused him more sleepless nights, thinking about the fate of the original goods.

He’d been so pleased with himself, six years ago, when he woke up in a strange bed in a little bamboo house, with Yue Qingyuan sitting alongside him and doling out older-brotherly concern. Hadn’t he spent his whole life as Shen Yuan preparing for transmigration into a xianxia world? (Or xuanhuan, or old-school wuxia at least… he watched palace dramas with his little sister when he wanted to humour her, but hadn’t wasted any time preparing to wake up in one of those stories, with no monsters and no special techniques to memorise. Too boring!) That smug satisfaction had lasted exactly as long as the System had taken to boot up and greet him.

【The System was successfully activated! Role bound: Luo Binghe’s master, ‘Shen Qingqiu.’ Special challenge mode enabled: Alternate Universe #517, ‘Eternal Youth’!】

Special challenge mode? Alternate Universe? That was when Shen Qingqiu had given up on lying back in an elegant, information-gathering swoon and really focused on his new shixiong.

Yue Qingyuan didn’t look exactly as Shen Yuan had imagined him, reading Proud Immortal Demon Way. The strong brow and kind gaze were as expected. So was the intricate guan, and the bright hilt of Xuan Su, propped against the bed frame. But Shen Yuan had never added gills to his mental picture of Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky’s characters, and yet there they were: three layers of delicate pink fronds, standing out from either side of Yue Qingyuan’s neck.

Fifteen minutes later, when it occurred to him to check himself for gills, Shen Qingqiu found just the same thing on his own body, too.

Ning Yingying and Ming Fan were distressed at how many days their beloved shizun remained in his rooms, recovering from his suspected qi deviation, but come on, Shen Qingqiu was suffering from a big shock! He really couldn’t have got up any sooner!

Once he’d got all the information he could from frantically quizzing the System, skimming through the books in his bamboo house, and making the most oblique inquiries possible of his sect-siblings on their visits to his sickbed, Shen Qingqiu came to the following conclusions.

This was not the Proud Immortal Demon Way he’d read hundreds of chapters of (and spent mumble-mumble yuan on), but it wasn’t totally different, either. People here were strangely… aquatic, their skin soft and moist even up in this mountain air. That was at least partly due to the cool, weedy ponds that were ubiquitous in all the buildings of Qing Jing Peak, and presumably elsewhere too. (Once Shen Qingqiu was considered out of immediate danger, Mu Qingfang prescribed at least six hours a day to be spent underwater, to re-balance his meridians.) They also tended to be rather weedy themselves, tall but lacking in muscle—except for the disciples of Bai Zhan Peak, of course—with petite jaws, weak little teeth that favoured a soft diet, and huge, limpid, babyish eyes.

In short, everyone looked like they had just walked out of a donghua.

Oh yes, and even baby disciples could regrow any parts of their bodies that happened to be damaged or cut off. Shen Yuan would have found this fascinating, but to Shen Qingqiu, it was a horror beyond measure.

At least the original scum villain had only been turned into a human stick once. The triumphant emperor of three realms might have taken his time, whittling away each limb chunk by chunk, but once they were gone, they were gone. He couldn’t watch as Shen Qingqiu painfully regenerated all that flesh, blood and bone, only to begin his torment all over again! Special challenge? Hah! This was nothing less than pure sadism, System!

Like the logical human being he was, Shen Qingqiu instantly vowed to hug the protagonist’s thighs in whatever way he could, and really, it wasn’t hard. Gills or no gills, fourteen-year-old Luo Binghe was the kind of little sheep anyone would dote on. He brought him out of the woodshed, gave him a proper cultivation manual of his own, made sure he started getting enough to eat for a growing boy, and if he patted him on his fluffy little head now and then, it was surely understandable. Right up until the demonic attack on Qiong Ding Peak, he’d almost fooled himself into believing he could rescue himself from his pre-written fate.

Shen Qingqiu had got complacent, having defeated the wretched Skinner demon only weeks after his entrance into this world. When an army of Heavenly Demons in full health descended on his sect, it was the most frightening thing he’d seen in either of his lifetimes. Had he been looking for muscles? Vigour? Strong jaws packed with teeth? Well, here they all were, as much as any YY fan could ask for. Heavenly Demons in this world were as broad and powerful as regular mortals were dainty and attenuated. Despite lacking the feathery gills that had so shocked him at first, they didn’t look any more human: their skins were patterned all over with gemlike colours, seemingly natural, not tattooed, and many of them had sharp fangs that protruded from their mouths.

(The Heavenly Demon Saintess, Sha Hualing, was instantly recognisable, for all that Shen Yuan had assumed she’d take a less… pointy form. The crimson fractals across her shoulders and legs were almost cute, when combined with her braided hair and the little bells on her jewellery. Good for you, Binghe—but not for another five years, or even ten, please!)

Suffice it to say that Shen Qingqiu couldn’t stand to watch his adorable white lotus disciple, his serious little sheep with the bottom lip that wobbled when he couldn’t quite manage a difficult passage on the qin, fight such OP monsters, and that’s how he ended up afflicted by Without a Cure.

And then the Immortal Alliance Conference happened, and Luo Binghe fell down—was pushed down—into the Endless Abyss, after all. Shen Qingqiu was well aware that he had been on borrowed time since then. Every day he spent up here in the light, writing monographs on the distribution of different species of spiritual grasses, while Luo Binghe battled his way through the Abyss, was another day of torture added to his account for the future. There was one good thing about spending half the day submerged in muddy pond water, at least: it stopped his face getting red and swollen from all the tears—of terror, naturally—that he shed whenever he thought about poor Binghe and his blackening arc.

Now he was here, in Jinlan City, at the epicentre of a plague so revolting even Mu-shidi hadn’t yet found a way to treat it. Of course, Shen Qingqiu didn’t want to dissolve away into a skeleton, but perhaps, considering everything, it wouldn’t be the worst end. Great Master Wu Chen certainly seemed to be quite calm about his legs having rotted to the thigh.

He was jolted out of his self-pitying thoughts by the scene in front of him on the main street. Since everyone in Jinlan City who had a home to go into had shut themselves up tightly within it, the beggars and drifters who didn’t have anywhere to shelter had begun to take up more space outside. A group of them had organised a communal kitchen out here in the open, boiling chicken soup for anyone who could bring over an empty bowl.

Even in the midst of a disaster like this, people with almost nothing were helping each other out. Wouldn’t it be too embarrassingly selfish if a Peak Lord like him just gave up and died?

No sooner had he come to this resolution than a frail old woman tottered over and crashed straight into him. He helped her up, but hesitated. There was something here that didn’t quite add up… Shen Qingqiu spun around, only to see her hunched-over figure speeding like an athlete into a narrow alleyway.

It was while chasing the not-actually-an-old-woman that he ran into some more of the cultivators that had poured into the city to fight the plague—or try to, at least. Shen Qingqiu couldn’t have guessed what a pleasant surprise it would be to see Gongyi Xiao again! He’d grown nearly as tall as Shen Qingqiu himself, and filled out as much as any cultivator did in this ‘Eternal Youth’ AU. With his pointed chin and tawny-tinted gill fronds, skilled in combat and graceful in pursuit, he’d really become a fine young man, and he was gratifyingly pleased to meet Shen Qingqiu again.

“Huan Hua Palace asked you to lead a group here to investigate?” Shen Qingqiu asked.

“Yes. The rest of the group should be nearby; this junior went out to scout alone, and left them in safety. I hope—” Gongyi Xiao broke off, his brow furrowed. “Never mind.”

Shen Qingqiu raised an eyebrow, but they didn’t really have time to stand around making conversation. “Let’s chase that thing together!” he suggested, and the two of them set off.

Running with accomplished lightness skill through the streets, combing through abandoned rooms full of richly-dressed skeletons, and teaming up to hunt down a demonic threat: it might have been ghoulish, but Shen Qingqiu was actually having fun. Turns out living was still worthwhile, even when your death was a certainty. Who knew? He could even feel the faintest smile at the corners of his mouth, when suddenly they heard the sound of people on the floor above them.

Of course, he pushed in front of Gongyi Xiao to take the lead up the staircase. And then he nearly crashed back down on top of him, because one pop-up notification after another slammed into his vision, and he heard a voice he’d hoped never to hear again:

【Hello. System has successfully activated.】

【Activation password: Luo Binghe.】

【Self-check: Energy source operating as usual, status is normal.】

【Hibernation mode discontinued. Standard mode launched.】

【Updates downloaded and installation complete.】

Binghe was here? He’d left the Endless Abyss after only three years, and even joined up with Huan Hua Palace already? Shen Qingqiu’s first conscious thought, once his panic had subsided, was to worry about the effects on Binghe’s cultivation of levelling up that quickly. Then the panic surged again: it was the effects on his health that should worry him!

Behind him, Gongyi Xiao was shuffling impatiently from foot to foot. “Elder Shen, those are my shidi and shimei,” he said in a low voice. “There should be no enemies with them.”

“Very well.” Once again, Shen Qingqiu had no choice but to head straight into danger as though it was his own idea.

The Huan Hua junior disciples rushed up to them, their yellow robes giving the impression of being swarmed by a flock of goslings. “Shixiong!” they chirped at Gongyi Xiao, and those who recognised Shen Qingqiu from the Immortal Alliance Conference back then greeted him with politely cupped fists.

It was all he could do to nod vaguely at them in return. All his attention had been captured by the tall youth in black clothes, who hung back from the rest of the group, in the shadowy depths of the room. Luo Binghe had truly grown up during his time in the Abyss. His sweet little disciple had vanished, but Shen Qingqiu would have recognised the pair of wolf’s eyes that had caught him in their gaze absolutely anywhere.

“So, it really is Shizun,” he murmured, walking forwards with the tenderest, most gently pleased smile imaginable. Despite the chill that spread down Shen Qingqqiu’s spine, it was still somehow satisfying to finally see this Luo Binghe, the cruelly handsome, blackened protagonist. There was the smile that had got six hundred wives into bed (or luscious meadow grass, conveniently empty coffin, suspiciously comfortable hoard of demonic treasure…). It had also been directed at Luo Binghe’s most craven foes, just before he had destroyed them.

Hold on. If you’re here, why is young master Gongyi still at the head of this investigative party? And why is no one else looking at you? Shen Qingqiu didn’t see the Little Palace Mistress in the group, but Qin Wanyue was there, moving closer to Gongyi Xiao as if she was surreptitiously about to grab onto his hand.

Things became suddenly clear when Binghe stepped out of the shadows, into the golden light that slanted in through a torn window-paper. His eyes glinted. Shen Qingqiu’s throat dried up, to the point where he could feel his gills fluttering helplessly.

Luo Binghe had grown far taller than any of the Huan Hua juniors around them, a head taller even than Shen Qingqiu. His shoulders were broad and his chest dense with muscle beneath his robes, finely embroidered with black thread on black silk. The loose waves of his hair obscured the sides of his neck—but not enough to hide that he had somehow lost the cute, pink frills that had once been there. From a distance, he had seemed like a youth carved from jade. Up close like this, it was impossible to miss the intricate lines of dark red and blue that curved around his hairline, the hollow of his throat… and, presumably, further down?

Ahem. What kind of inappropriate thought was that? Just because the protagonist was giving him that look, there was no reason to get quite so confused.

Anyway: Luo Binghe didn’t fully resemble a demon, and of course he was still perfectly handsome, but it was clear that in this AU, he could no longer hide the fact that he wasn’t fully, ah, human. (In the six years he’d been here, Shen Qingqiu still hadn’t come up with a better word for it than that.) No wonder his companions were all so awkward around him.

“Shizun hasn’t said anything,” Luo Binghe purred. “Is he really so surprised to see this disciple again?”

Fortunately for Shen Qingqiu, he was saved from having to reply by Qin Wanyue, who apparently could stand the tension no longer. “Gongyi-shixiong!” she gulped out at the top of her voice, “We caught this strange creature! No one knows what it is! Perhaps you or Elder Shen can help identify it!!”

With a collective sigh of relief, the entire room shifted its attention to the ‘old woman’, swathed in black fabric, who had seemingly run into this upper chamber and been dispatched by the swords of half a generation of Huan Hua Palace disciples. It didn’t take long for Shen Qingqiu to recognise it for what it was: a sower, a lowly but essential form of demon that could inflict decomposition on living flesh until it appealed perfectly to the palate of the sower’s demonic employers.

The young cultivators listened attentively as he warmed to his subject, even raising their hands to ask sensible questions, and if anyone else heard Luo Binghe say plaintively from the back of the crowd, “This is exactly what I was trying to say earlier,” they didn’t show any sign of it.

Gongyi Xiao accompanied him down to the street, a guilty expression on his face. “Elder Shen, this junior apologises sincerely,” he said, before they’d even moved out from under the awning of the house. “I wish I could have told you earlier about Luo-shixiong, but Master ordered that anyone giving away the secret would be expelled from the sect.”

“Your master thinks well of him, then.” He tried his hardest not to sound like a jealous concubine, really he did! It wasn’t his fault how the words came out.

“Yes…” Better than the rest of the sect do, Gongyi Xiao didn’t say, but Shen Qingqiu could hear it regardless.

Terrified of his erstwhile student he might be, but it still stung, to think that Luo Binghe preferred to stay in a place where he was shunned, however much he exercised his powerful charisma, than come home to Qing Jing Peak. The worst part of all was: wasn’t he correct to do so? This good-for-nothing master stabbed you and pushed you into a bottomless pit—of course you’ll steer clear of him until you have the power to reward him in kind.

After so long following his regimen of medicine, meridian-clearing, and resting in cool water, Shen Qingqiu had lost the habit of assuming that another attack of Without a Cure was just around the corner. Clearly, this laxity was the reason why it flared up on exactly this evening, as he and his shidis sat in the cellar of the Jin Zi Weapons Shop, making plans. (It might have been the shock he’d suffered earlier. But that would mean Shen Qingqiu’s body and spiritual power were at the mercy of any little turn of fate, and that was too oppressive to contemplate.)

Mu Qingfang was adamant in the face of his protests: Shen-shixiong was not to go patrolling with Liu Qingge, nor help him with his medical examination of the citizen ‘volunteers’ they’d rounded up earlier in the day. He was to go upstairs to the very nice guest room he’d been allotted and meditate in the pool there until it was time to sleep. Shen Qingqiu grumbled about meddling doctors as he climbed the stairs. It was a weak attempt to cover up just how much he was aching to follow Mu Qingfang’s instructions and, from the way Mu Qingfang snorted in response, was utterly ineffective.

A pool in an upstairs room was all but unheard of. The Jin Zi Weapons Shop must really have been doing well—until Yang-xiansheng’s untimely skeletonisation, that was. Would that scrappy little Yang Yixuan take up the business, once the plague had been dealt with? It was with idle thoughts like this that Shen Qingqiu occupied himself as he settled on the faintly gritty pondbed, wearing only his inner clothing. He felt more comfortable almost immediately. When the poison in his meridians flared up, this strange amphibious body of his seemed to long for its home in the water.

Shen Qingqiu’s gills wafted in a lazy rhythm. Duckweed waved gently above him, silhouetted against the dim lamplight. He could feel himself falling asleep, and decided not to fight it.

The crash of the room door being slammed back against the wall was muffled by the water, though not nearly enough for him to be able to sleep through it.

Instead, Shen Qingqiu found himself lurching instinctively out of the pond, only half-awake, streamers of sopping-wet hair blinding him and tangling in his gill fronds. His spiritual power was down to nil, he was barely dressed, and he was streaked with algae. Surely the perfect state to confront an enraged protagonist—because who else would burst in like this?

“Oh, Shizun is indisposed?” he heard Luo Binghe say. That is, he heard what he recognised as Luo Binghe’s new, deeper voice, and guessed which words he might be saying based on their tone, while shaking his head to drain his ears of water. “If this disciple had only known, he would never have intruded.”

The voice was coming closer, accompanied by a panther’s tread across the floorboards. Shen Qingqiu desperately scraped the hair out of his face and scrubbed his eyes.

“Although… since Shizun was waiting so intimately for Liu-shishu to arrive, perhaps not all interruptions are unwelcome?”

Excuse me! Who’s intimate with whom, exactly? Hadn’t he only asked Liu Qingge to come here tonight to protect him from you, Luo Binghe?

At long last, he could both see and hear. Still dripping all over the floor, Shen Qingqiu straightened up and prepared to defend himself or, even better, to escape. He found himself looking directly into Luo Binghe’s deep, black eyes and froze, hypnotised by their predatory gleam.

Luo Binghe gave a sharp, private kind of smile. Then, too fast for Shen Qingqiu to react, Binghe’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the throat, propelling him backwards into the wall. Pain blossomed across the back of Shen Qingqiu’s skull, and then retreated, though not all the way.

It wasn’t much of a comfort. Shen Qingqiu quickly realised that Luo Binghe was holding him so tightly by the neck that he could barely breath. Some air still scraped in and out, making an embarrassing whistling noise. He watched Luo Binghe’s eyes narrow, no doubt irritated that his shizun couldn’t even be choked with dignity.

“It’s been so long, and you still have nothing to say to me?”

Even if I did, don’t you think it’s a little unfair to ask me that now? Shen Qingqiu grunted indignantly. His face felt hot. To his surprise, Luo Binghe actually relaxed his grasp somewhat, enough that he might just be able to whisper out a plea for forgiveness or understanding. Of course, to do that, he’d first have to come up with some appropriate words to say, and that was going to take a while longer.

Luo Binghe was still looking down at him, a cold, assessing gaze from half an arm’s length away. They’d never been this close except when Shen Qingqiu was still playing at being the kindly teacher, adjusting the angle Binghe drew his brush across the page or relaxing his fingers to better pluck at the strings of Shen Qingqiu’s own qin. Not to mention patting him on the head out of a momentary swell of affection. How uncomfortable it was to have their positions reversed this way! And how odd that, although Luo Binghe clearly found him wanting, Shen Qingqiu couldn’t help feeling an echo of that warmth for the boy he had been.

“Shizun, I’ve often wondered,” Luo Binghe said slowly, “why did you tell me, back then, that good and evil aren’t divided strictly between humans and demons? Why bother fooling a little child like that, when in truth, Shizun detests demons so much that he’d try to kill that child just for the matter of a little demon blood?”

“Binghe,” Shen Qingqiu gasped out. His head was still held back against the wall, and he could hear the click of his throat as he spoke. How to say, ‘this master acted wrongly, he regretted his actions the moment they were carried out,’ without sounding like a through-and-through scum villain who just happened to be grovelling for his life?

His lips were moving, beginning to form an answer that he was sincerely curious to hear himself, when something unsettling happened. The doll-like image of himself in each of Luo Binghe’s eyes was washed away by a miniature high tide. Luo Binghe was crying.

The protagonist was crying?

In a way, of course, this was nothing new. The child Binghe had closely hidden all his worst hurts, whether from slips while training, from Ming Fan and the others’ bullying, or from the original goods’ beating him and stringing him up in the woodshed. Shen Qingqiu had still seen him in tears plenty of times, because that was his inevitable response to a happy surprise. Any such triviality as Shen Qingqiu granting him his own bedroom, or a jar of medicine, inevitably caused a torrent of tears and a cry of, “Shizun!!!”

Right now, though, there was no way Binghe should be crying. He’d made it through the Endless Abyss in half his scheduled time, and swept in to destroy his old tormentor in all his newfound might. What did the protagonist have to be upset about?

Had he hurt himself by rushing to level up too quickly? Shen Qingqiu made a mental note to check on Binghe’s meridians whenever he was let down from this wall. After all, if the protagonist’s coolness points dropped too far, that wouldn’t be any good for him either.

Luo Binghe’s eyes were red, and his cheeks rapidly getting wetter than Shen Qingqiu’s had been. With a sudden snarl, he pulled back his hand from Shen Qingqiu’s neck. Whirling around into the centre of the room—and narrowly avoiding the slippery edge of the pool—he slumped at the shoulders and began to tug at his own hair.

“Why didn’t you warn me,” he growled, stopping to take first one harsh breath in, and then several more. “Shizun, why did you make me think it could ever be safe for me, to be half a demon?”

Safe? Well, no one with a stake in this eternal division between the human and demon realms, regurgitated in who knows how many thousands of wuxia and xianxia novels, could ever be really safe. He got the feeling, though, that Luo Binghe was talking about something more specific.

“What does Binghe mean?” he asked. Unintentionally, he’d taken up the voice he kept in reserve for tutoring the brightest but most sensitive Qing Jing Peak disciples, the ones who perhaps shouldn’t have left their families for a cultivation sect quite so early.

“You saw them today, those pathetic Huan Hua Palace children,” Binghe said. The scorn in his tone was marred somewhat by snot. “I could slaughter all of them in one sword stroke, if I wanted to. And their Palace Master keeps telling them I’m an ‘honoured guest’ and to make me feel at home, but they won’t even look me in the eye. They hate me, Shizun.” A sob ripped its way out of his chest.

Ah, poor protagonist. None of Luo Binghe’s well-honed, “white lotus silently endures suffering” act would work on those orthodox cultivators when he looked like this. It was really too superficial of them!

Shen Qingqiu felt a distant sense of mortification. It was dreadful to be witnessing this topsy-turvy state of affairs—the lord-to-be of three realms, blubbing like a toddler in a guest bedroom—but that didn’t seem to be so important, somehow. He noted with surprise that he’d drifted so close to Binghe that he could lay a firm hand on his quivering shoulder.

“They hate me just like you do,” said Binghe, and Shen Qingqiu, without thinking, stepped around in front of him, and pulled him down so that his head was resting on Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder—uncomfortably close, in fact, so that it pushed up against the sensitive filaments that grew from Shen Qingqiu’s neck. He ran his other hand over the back of Luo Binghe’s head and as far down his thick, wavy hair as he could reach, over and over again.

“Binghe, listen to me,” he said. Oh, this was already easier than when he’d been looking him in the face. “This master does not hate you. This master could never hate you, not for being a demon and not for any other reason.”

Luo Binghe moaned, miserably and rather too loud for comfort. “But then why?” he wailed, directly into Shen Qingqiu’s ear.

“This master acted wrongly,” Shen Qingqiu forced out, before he could stop himself. “I regretted hurting Binghe the moment I did so. This master does not deserve—” no, no, he’d already said enough. Better not to over-egg it.

Luo Binghe sobbed sharply, and then squeezed him so tightly that Shen Qingqiu could feel his ribcage compressing his lungs. He was mumbling something with a great deal of emotion behind it, Shen Qingqiu could tell, but it was all rather incoherent. Come on, now! At your great age, you’re this sentimental?

Ah. On second thoughts, perhaps the problem wasn’t with Binghe’s enunciation, but on Shen Qingqiu’s side. He was suddenly quite weak, and dizzy too…

“Shizun!” Binghe sounded more anguished than he had all evening.

Shen Qingqiu blinked up at him from the floor. He hadn’t exactly passed out, he didn’t think. There were just some parts of his recent memory that didn’t all fit together.

“Don’t worry, Binghe,” he said. “You didn’t do anything. It’s only… Without a Cure. Tonight, it seems to be causing me some extra difficulties.”

His words didn’t seem to provide the reassurance he’d hoped for. Luo Binghe’s implausibly attractive face, with its newly impressive bone structure and those fascinating curlicues of blue and red around the edges, had fully recovered from his crying fit. To Shen Qingqiu’s dismay, though, there were more tears welling up already.

“After so many years, Shizun is still suffering for my sake?”

“Now, Binghe, I thought we’d cleared this nonsense up long ago. As your teacher, it was my duty to protect you.”

He must still not have been in his right mind, because where Shen Qingqiu, the serene and dignified scholar of Qing Jing Peak, would have left off there, he suddenly found that Shen Yuan was going to keep talking.

“And I’d do it over and again, for—for you, Binghe.” (At least he hadn’t called him ‘protagonist’ out loud!) “Of course I would.”

This was simply too much! Inexcusable, to slip this far out of his role! Didn’t he realise that as soon as this sweet little interval was over, Luo Binghe was definitely going to turn him into a human stick, the kind that just kept producing more leaves and twigs year in and year out?!

In the future, when he looked back on what happened next—which was often, with both humiliation and happiness—it was clear exactly where the misunderstanding lay. Right at this second, it was baffling.

Shen Qingqiu, having embarrassed himself with sincerity to the point of not being able to keep his eyes open, was in dire need of his fan, or indeed anything else that would cover up his poor thin face. He sat up abruptly to find it.

Luo Binghe, having just been told that the beloved master who’d exiled him for his ancestry did not, in fact, abhor him, and was ready to sacrifice his body and health for him—for him, Luo Binghe!—as many times as necessary, found that same master rising up towards him, mouth first and eyes screwed shut.

Of course, he kissed him back.

And of course, Shen Qingqiu, kissed by this famed stallion protagonist, swooned just a little bit more into his arms to more comfortably accept it. (It was not particularly comfortable, that first time. Luo Binghe might have speedrun his sojourn in the Endless Abyss, but there were still some practical skills he’d missed out on, and manoeuvring those newly grown fangs of his next to another person’s mouth was one of them.)

Eventually they separated, both breathing heavily.

“Binghe,” Shen Qingqiu said, simply. He could feel his pulse hammering in his throat, in the torn and bloody lip that was already knitting itself back together, in his gill fronds and in various other parts of his body that he tended not to think much about.

“Shizun,” Binghe replied, predictably. He had duckweed stuck to his cheek, which diminished his protagonist aura not a bit.

Looking at him, Shen Qingqiu could almost feel the stars twinkling in his own eyes. Still more notably, he could almost ignore the subprocess in his brain that was calculating exactly which wife plot he’d somehow fallen into. He reached out to draw Binghe back to him for another kiss.

【Congratulations! Protagonist’s happiness points +1000!】

And naturally, that was the moment when Liu Qingge walked into the room.

They were in the pond in the guest room again, after spending too long to think about chasing down, fighting with, and trying to explain everything to Shen Qingqiu’s two shidis. Mu Qingfang was incredulous; Liu Qingge was outraged; Grand Master Wu Chen, at least, was still asleep. Tomorrow, they’d probably have to repeat the process with Gongyi Xiao and the rest of the party from Huan Hua Palace, although he was hoping that Luo Binghe could simply pretend to have been welcomed back to Cang Qiong Mountain Sect and wave them off with no further words spent.

For now, at least, Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe could enjoy some privacy and relative calm. The little pond was not quite deep or broad enough to accommodate two tall men in comfort, especially given how much of its water they’d splashed across the floor and furniture of the room in their earlier confrontation. Still, it was soothing, and Shen Qingqiu found that he didn’t really mind being practically in Binghe’s lap, limbs entwined as they lazily nibbled at each other’s mouths.

The most plausible scenario for tomorrow was that he’d wake up and find that this had all been a dream brought on by undercooked travel rations, so he might as well enjoy it while he could.

“I still don’t understand,” Shen Qingqiu said, during a break in the kissing. “Binghe has changed so much, while he was—away. You didn’t transform into this new appearance when the seal on your demon powers was removed, back at the Immortal Alliance Conference, so what happened?”

Binghe had gone still and tense underneath him while he was speaking. “… Shizun doesn’t like the way my body has changed?” he asked in a small voice, and Shen Qingqiu had to take some time—quite a lot of time—to reassure him that that was not what he’d meant.

Strangely enough, this majestically muscular version of Luo Binghe was far closer to the way he’d imagined him, when he’d first read Proud Immortal Demon Way and spend so much time critiquing it, than he’d ever expected to see in the ‘Eternal Youth’ AU. It made him more familiar, and thus much more appealing. Shen Qingqiu didn’t much rate his chances of getting that across to Binghe in words, though, so actions would have to do.

“If Shizun really wants to know,” Binghe said, at length, “it was really quite a long time before I started to change into—this. The Endless Abyss is…” He looked into the middle distance, considering. “A vile place. A kind of hell. But I remember, there was one particular valley I spent a good while in.”

“Mmhmm?” prompted Shen Qingqiu, hugging him a little tighter.

“The ground there was all black, a glossy, greenish black like the carapace of the lesser Bat-Faced Scarab Beetle. Shards and flakes of this black material covered the rocks, the trees, even stuck to the fur and feet of the demonic animals that passed through the valley. I don’t know what had happened, how far into the distant past, to make it this way. I just remember that it was after I travelled through that valley that everything inside me started to hurt.”

“Oh no,” Shen Qingqiu said, aghast. He hadn’t even considered how painful it must have been, to rebuild Binghe’s body from the inside out, for all that he was half Heavenly Demon. Even growing back a cut-off ear or foot hurt badly enough, from what Mu Qingfang had related to him.

“I think the worst part was my bones,” Binghe continued. “It felt as though every one of them was cracking apart, over and over again. When it got to my face, I—”

“You don’t have to go on.”

“But I want to.” He turned bright, honest eyes on Shen Qingqiu, and it was almost too much to look into them. “I want to tell Shizun everything that he’s interested in.”

Shen Qingqiu had to dip his whole head into the water, to get over the emotions that provoked in him. Silly, silly boy! Too sincere, too generous!

“You know, I didn’t even realise for ages that my gills had gone,” Binghe said once he was above the surface again. “I think they must have been reabsorbed overnight, or over a couple of days at the most. It’s very hot and dry in the Abyss, you know, Shizun. One day I woke up and the most amazing thing had happened: I could just breathe, all the time, without choking and fainting if I ran too hard and forgot to compensate with demonic cultivation!”

Binghe! That was how you lived, down there? Oh, this master is truly beyond all forgiveness.

“I think I could have grown up and become a half-demon, half-human cultivator without ever turning into—this kind of thing, if I hadn’t stumbled upon that valley.” Despite the awful story he was telling, he sounded quite calm.

“Luo Binghe, you are not a ‘thing’,” Shen Qingqiu remonstrated under his breath.

“But it’s really for the best, Shizun, don’t you see? Even though it has caused me some… confusion, until I realised that. Look at us now. You have to spend half the day soaking in muddy water just to feel well, Shizun, and even if it weren’t for Without a Cure”—he paused, at that, and Shen Qingqiu pretended he didn’t see his lower lip wobble—“you’d still always want to be nearby a river or a pond, just in case. I don’t need that, now.”

“Don’t Heavenly Demons bathe, then?” Shen Qingqiu asked, trying to turn the conversation somewhere lighter.

“Mmm, well, we do bathe,” Luo Binghe acknowledged. There was a sly gleam in his eye, all of a sudden. “But apart from that, did you know the only time Heavenly Demons really need to go into the water?”

The arms that were holding Shen Qingqiu gripped him harder. Luo Binghe leaned in so close to his ear that Shen Qingqiu could hear his breath moving the fine hairs on its shell. “It’s to mate, Shizun,” he whispered, before rolling them both down onto the dim and private bottom of the pond.