Chapter Text
Liu Qingge wakes to Shen Qingqiu lightly scolding him, saying “Here! Wipe yourself off.”
“What?” he says, and then abruptly, comes back to his body, all of it aching, throbbing between qi and heat, sore and abused. He pushes Shen Qingqiu away and then chokes on the blood in his throat.
Shen Qingqiu hits him on the back while the blood comes up- uselessly, not even hard enough to jar it past the lungs- and launches into a speech of absolute nonsense. What bonds? What relationship? He’s hated Shen Jiu ever since they met as senior disciples and the alpha had, deliberately and disdainfully, raised his fan to waft away no smell, because the son of the Liu family knew better than to spill it everywhere, when Shen Jiu had said to Yue Qi, the edge of contempt in his voice, “Must we?” with his own scent flaring in response to nothing, shamelessly! Shen Qingqiu had nothing to recommend him but his secondary gender, his boundless pretension and his sharp tongue, traits that he, his master and credulous imbeciles mistook for intelligence, wit and wisdom.
He has cunning, at least. He has cunning enough to wait for Liu Qingge to be at his lowest, his most helpless, his most foul and base, before striking.
Shen Qingqiu looks more serene than Liu Qingge had ever seen him. He’s overflowing with spiritual energy- it’s as though pulling through to the next level of his cultivation has finally tamed his secondary gender, bringing it under decorous, proper control. He’s perfectly composed. His scent is usually tamped down under layers of unguents and a brittle iron control; now it sits just on his skin as though he’s unaware of it. He says, “I’ll let you recover alone,” as though Liu Qingge isn’t covered in blood and wounds, as though he’s not still, still in his heat, impossible to miss or avoid, as though they’re taking leave at teatime. “Shidi, please think through my words. Since we’re so close, we should take care of each other.”
And he has had, apparently, a qi deviation that changed him into a completely different person.
.0.
Next Shen Qingqiu woke up with the injuries, which he takes remarkably well.
Incredibly well.
Suspiciously well.
“You shouldn’t be so narrow-minded, shidi,” says Shen Qingqiu, crowning incredulous pronouncement after incredulous pronouncement with a treatise on inclusive schooling, on a mountain that only opens to disciples once a generation. “My disciple will definitely be a success. There’s no reason to hold a secondary gender against anyone.”
Liu Qingge’s mouth fell open.
“Omegas,” lectured Shen Qingqiu smugly, “have just as much of potential to cultivate and succeed as anyone else. I think that your prejudices-”
Liu Qingge couldn’t take it anymore. He walked outside, met the eyes of Shen Qingqiu’s head disciple with the same glassy-eyed shock, and kept going.
A little way off, near Qing Jing’s storage sheds, down on his knees in the path: Shen Qingqiu’s least-favoured whipping boy, the notorious runt of the peak, broom clutched in his hands, face screwed up in misery, dripping tears into the dirt.
.0.
The An Ding Peak disciples plant row on row on row of the suppressant trees on the mountain, and even if he’ll never admit it, Liu Qingge’s shoulders can’t help but ease. It doesn’t- erase smell. It makes it easier to bear, without overpowering anyone. It’s hard to explain what it does to him, but it is clear what it does to others: Qing Jing Peak, which resolutely refuses to admit that there is any possible problem with their head disciple, is finally accessible again to anyone below Peak Lord levels of cultivation, and accept the stop-gap solution with a sigh.
Without the fuel of hormonal aggression, his disciples seem to flag: he stalks between them, one to another, disgusted that they’re allowing something like this to blight their martial spirit.
“They do bloom prettily,” says Shen Qingqiu, watching another Bai Zhan disciple soar off the edge of the ring, slam into a mess of saplings. “But tell me, Liu shidi, are they supposed to have no scent?”
Liu Qingge wants to retort, how should I know? but unfortunately, Shang Qinghua has a device he calls a loudspeaker and a directive from Yue Qingyuan to make sure everyone knows about the magic plants they live with and he’s not shy about using either.
“No,” he says instead, waits for his disciples to climb back onto the ring if they know what’s good for them. “It acts in opposition. It counters the scents, doesn’t erase.”
It can smell, for instance, if you’re Shang Qinghua reading from a scroll with unwonted passion, verve and different voices for purportedly different author sources, ‘As though you are smelling your fated partner, your perfect and yet complementary opposite, the one person who will forever smell like comfort, peace, your favourite food, snack and or drink and also home, but with a really good scented candle.’
“We should bottle it,” suggests Shen Qingqiu demurely. He turns his head into the breeze, stealing past him right into Liu Qingge’s face. “Mountain Spring? Spiritual Fresh? Natural Unscented?” and his eyes crinkle into a private, inaccessible laugh, that Liu Qingge can only stare at.
.0.
"Maybe the qi deviation turned off one of his senses," says Wei Qingwei, at one of the endless (not) secret meetings without Shen Qingqiu. They have less and less of these now. There's no gathering of the Peak Lords without Shen Qingqiu. "Like there was a lightning-strike in my village, that kid became left-handed from right-handed- he did everything backwards, all the time, but perfectly!"
Shang Qinghua is muttering to himself over the heap of paperwork he brings to every meeting, including breakfast, to remind everyone that he's so busy and put-upon and has no time to socialise. They're all tired of reminding him that these aren't working meetings.
"There are exceptions, recorded exceptions," says Mu Qingfang, "For-" he glances out the window at the waves of blossoms, "What the histories call fated partners."
Yue Qingyuan studies his tea, eyes thoughtful, and a little sad.
"Nonsense," says Liu Qingge. "He can still smell. He still puts out scent."
Qi Qingqi says, "You'd know better than all of us- you get the closest when you treat him for Without a Cure."
Liu Qingge nods. It's his appointed duty to check on Shen Qingqiu, to make sure he's probably not possessed, probably not maddened from his qi deviation, not fallen down helpless with Without a Cure, and never driven to the brink by lust for his omega pupil, ridiculous though that last one seems. Whenever anyone asks him about it he just says something vague about how Luo Binghe can't help being so handsome, lovely, polite, brave, talented, kind, powerful, heroic, aromatic, attractive, very attractive, and then peers at Liu Qingge as though he expects the other Peak Lord to lunge for Luo Binghe himself. As if!
Mu Qingfang says, "As long as he's progressing well with the treatment... Shen shixiong has always... as we know..." As they all know, been obsessed with controlling his alpha gender. With leashing it under his cultivation practice as the Xiu Ya sword. "Perhaps his scent is in accordance with that now."
When the meeting ends and the Peak Lords stroll out, they walk through the grove of trees, and everyone, Liu Qingge and Yue Qingyuan included, takes a big whiff.
"Really, really good cough sweets, the kind that are like chewing toothpaste ice..." mutters Shang Qinghua.
.0.
Roses and the smell of ink and tea, set in wet green air.
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“Wait,” says Liu Qingge, thunderstruck. “He can’t smell anything?”
Luo Binghe looks annoyed; he shifts his gaze to the horizon and back before he remembers that it’s beneath him to care what Liu Qingge thinks, and certainly beneath him to evade self-evident physical truths. “It certainly seems so,” says the demon.
Liu Qingge can’t breath with the enormity of this revelation. It would be like Shang Qinghua revealing that he betrayed the sect because he’s face-blind and has always thought Mobei Jun was actually the master of the questionable hallucinogenic substances peak, having a really bad trip. “Does he- does he even know I’m-”
Luo Binghe looks thoughtful. Well. He pretends to look thoughtful. His eyes widen with mock innocence and his mouth purses itself up as he hums disdainfully. “If you’re wondering,” he says, as primly as an An Ding paper-pusher, “I suggest perhaps you write him a letter of inquiry. Formally request this knowledge. Allow five to six working months for non-receipt of your reply? Liu-shishu, surely you have better things to waste my time on than these irrelevant questions.”
Liu Qingge says, “You don’t think he knows either?” and has to sit down so hard that Luo Binghe puts on a fresh pot of tea.
.0.
Liu Qingge wasn’t like Shen Qingqiu- he knew when to recuse himself, when to go into seclusion when he felt his cultivation was about to advance another level, when to hone himself and it in the service of his power. He heard about the other Peak Lord’s condition, and only scoffed: of course a pretender like Shen Qingqiu would damage himself over and over again, unable to keep from poking an open wound before it healed. Liu Qingge went for seclusion in the happy knowledge that Shen Qingqiu would be in no shape to follow him in any time soon.
His heat hit at the worst time.
Liu Qingge automatically reached for his qi to suppress the heat, redirect the energy, but found it lacking. He bore down even harder and then- his body, gasping for strength, his body, gasping for air, his body- gasping for control.
Get away from me, Liu Qingge thought hysterically, swinging his sword at the monster trying to hold him down. Let me go get off get OFF-
The monster was in his veins now, in his bones, cruel and mocking, racing his pulse just out of reach. Someone was shouting so that it echoed back a thousand times off the cold walls, Stop you fool STOP, impossible to make out, so magnified that it sounded like the voice was tearing apart with tears. Bai Zhan’s Peak Lord raised his sword, one last time.