Chapter Text
It was tortuous enough to have your own magnum opus burned into pieces. And it was another thing to have to pick up its corpse and desecrate it even further in order to appease the insatiable masses. The potential plot lines and complex themes Shang Qinghua had carefully crafted were put on the chopping block. It was for the sake of keeping subscribers. He needed their fucking money, pride be damned. He gave up on creative freedom and gave the people what they wanted of him. All the goddamn papapa in the world. He was proper martyr for all the starving artists out there. He put so much goddamn blood sweat and tears into it. And what did he get in the end for his sacrifice, nothing but a slap on the face! Only more fucking critique. Yet he still preserved update to update, taking on blows from those villainous critics like peerless cucumber.
One would think after all that he would’ve deserved a nice peaceful afterlife, surrounded by luxury and praise. He was wrong. Right after he died he had been transmigrated with a system into cannon fodder from his own novel. He didn’t even get lucky enough to have transmigrated into a canon fodder that died a cool heroic death. No he was just the coward spy Shang Qinghua that was killed by his own boss. He didn’t even get a cool peak to run, he had the great privilege of being In charge of the delivery service peak. He must’ve fucked up so badly in the past life to earn such bad karmic luck. And if he tried to run away or go off course from the script of his character that stupid system would start wailing its alarms in his head. He couldn’t even use the knowledge of being god anymore because for some reason the plot had already gone entirely off path. First it was just the weird thing of Liu Qingge survival of his qi divination. He started get a bit nervous there was the weird rumors surrounding She Qingqiu traveling around the borderlands. Then the protagonist of all people disappeared ! His all beautiful all powerful protagonist gone!
The demon world was on fire. Mobei Jun was trying to fill the power vacuum. Shang Qinghua was forced to manage even more bureaucratic paper work on top of running the demon world. His king was lucky he was so goddamn scary (those hulking biceps and chiseled abs)or else Shang Qinghua would’ve gone on strike.
The only good thing about being able to work with demons was that they seemed to have a great stock of items that were considered rare in the cultivation world. As much as it was dissuaded both humans and demons, both of them often had secret dealings with each other along the borderlands. The problem was that demons like to request very odd items.
Such as feet pictures.
It was one of those perversions that he had accidentally put into the lore for demon culture when he was trying to appeal to a certain audience of readers. Another thing to throw on to his growing pile of regrets.
For now, he had to put his pride behind him for the sake of his laziness. He had items that he needed to buy in bulk.
The feet picture business of Shang Qinghua started because of an off handed joke. He had been bartering with a obstinate demon merchant. The exhausted Shang Qinghua accidentally muttered he would at this point he would sell his own feet pics. He had not expected for the demon to overhear or even accept his offer. His knee-jerk reaction was to say no and to run away as fast as he could. Unfortunately for Shang Qinghua the enthusiastic merchant made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The demon even complimented his feet saying they were quite regal. It was a weird compliment, but it had been a while since anyone appreciated anything about Shang Qinghua.
Shang Qinghua was an entrepreneur and realized there was a large demand for a product he could supply. He had found his niche market, it just happened to involve feet photos. He got an entire weeks worth of supplies with 2 feet of pictures.
Yet even with business his luck started to wane. Which is how he found himself in this situation now yelling at his primary customer the demon merchant. The stupid man had the gall to complain about the quality of the photos and the callousness of the feet. The greedy bastard only offered him 3 moon fairy flowers for 4 photos.
Shang Qinghua knew that was absolute bullshit he worked hard to keep his feet in pristine condition. He wasn’t going to take this lying down, and he was going to fight for it. And it wasn’t like those stupid comments
affected him.
Oh shit, he was just shrieking in public. What the hell were all these other weirdos looking at, they had nothing to do with his business. There was one other nosy cultivator who definitely did not have a right to judge and was staring right at him. The coward was the type of person who went into a small borderlands town wearing a full veil cover his face, that’s how you knew someone was up to some weird shit. He had some small dog peaking out of a sack that he was carrying. And the dog looked just as judgmental and if not even more. It was creepy animal reminded him of those crusty white dogs that looked like they held the soul of some serial killer. The dog could’ve been almost been cute in the way that an ugly Pokémon was.
Both the dog and cultivator were just staring at him. That was not a good sign.
“ Excuse me, but how the fuck do you know what Pokémon is “.