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Proud Immortal Demon Way was a typical stallion webnovel: thousands of chapters, hundreds of beauties, and one overpowered protagonist. Having struggled through a tortuous childhood and adolescence, the protagonist, Luo Binghe, rose to the pinnacle of power, amassing a jaw-droppingly large harem, and meting out revenge for every slight he’d ever suffered. The sex scenes were plentiful, the villains were scum, the monsters were poorly named. And the power fulfillment fantasy gained a certain degree of success, touching a nerve with readers, especially a reader known online as Peerless Cucumber.
Shen Yuan, aka Peerless, claimed to read PIDW for the monsters, for the plants, for the worldbuilding, for the protagonist! He saw promise in the early chapters of author Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky’s work, and glimmers of plot kept him slogging through chapter after chapter of repetitive, aphrodisiac-laced sex scenes. But as the novel devolved into a dumpsterfire, Shen Yuan poured his most scathing critique onto the flames. And then he died.
Shen Yuan transmigrated to the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way. He lasted a few days before encountering a vampiric demon. Who attacked. And bit him. And turned him.
About that time his luck continued to be bad, as the immortal cultivator Shen Qingqiu appeared, ready to vanquish the vampire he’d been tracking. Mad with bloodlust as a fledgling vampire, Shen Yuan was sicced on the cultivator by his sire, only to be quickly yeeted into the wall of the underground cavern they were in. He regained his senses just in time to see Shen Qingqiu finish an epic fight with the demon. Still not in his right mind, bloodlust being a condition not improved by head trauma, Shen Yuan was somehow able to sneak up on the cultivator as he burned the vampire’s remains.
It’s no surprise that he tried to bite Shen Qingqiu. No, the surprise is that he managed it!
Now, to be fair, Shen Qingqiu was injured at the time, the place was saturated with demonic energy, he was busy using cultivation and talismans to destroy a powerful monster, and no one expected Shen Yuan to survive being blasted earlier. But the point is, he did.
Shen Yuan is a lot of things, and one of those things is stubborn. Combined with the ravenous thirst of a newly sired vampire, Shen Yuan latched on to the body before him, began to suck, and just refused to let go. Shen Qingqiu tried to throw him off, to bash him off, to blast him with energy, but all he managed to do was trigger a bizarre one-in-a-million synchronicity with the demonic qi within Shen Yuan. Blood and warmth and energy and flashes overwhelmed Shen Yuan, and when he next knew himself, he was sprawled atop a desiccated husk and some expensive robes. And understandably, he panicked. He had just, unintentionally but undeniably, eaten a person. Killed a man. An immortal cultivator. A Peak Lord. The wielder of the Xiu Ya sword. The scum villain of Proud Immortal Demon Way. Luo Binghe’s shizun.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Shen Yuan had landed in the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way with a voice in his head. This voice belonged to the System, which assured Shen Yuan of several things before buggering off. One: Luo Binghe was still a young teenager. Two: Shen Yuan had no bound role. And Three: the System was going to be of no further help whatsoever. Toodles!
Now, as he stood over the husk of Shen Qingqiu right next to the smoldering remains of the vampire sire he’d never know, Shen Yuan could almost hear the sound of crickets in the space the System had briefly occupied.
While forcefully repressing any and all thoughts about how he’d just devoured a man, Shen Yuan looked around. (Shackles. Knives. Bones. Don’t know. Looks sharp. That’s been used.) And Shen Yuan quickly decided it was a good idea to leave the cavern. He stumbled up the stairs into the home built to disguise the underground entrance. There, in a deliberately normal-looking home, Shen Yuan tried to take stock of his situation. He was dead. Okay, he’d already been dead, and then transmigrated but alive, and then dead again, but now he was undead. And he felt fine. In fact, he felt better than fine. The overpowering thirst for blood had subsided. He felt sated. Satisfied. And brimming with health.
A glint caught the corner of his eye and when he looked closer, contrary to western vampire traditions, he found a mirror. Taking a fortifying breath (and, hey, he still breathed. Did he need to breathe or was he doing it out of habit?) he looked into the reflective surface. And promptly stopped breathing. Oh, there was a reflection there, but he was looking into the face of Shen Qingqiu!
With mounting horror, Shen Yuan raced back down into the cavern and over to where Shen Qingqiu’s sword, Xiu Ya, lay on the ground. He needed to perform a test. If the Peak Lord were completely gone, then Xiu Ya, being a spiritual sword, should not respond to another wielder. And being a vampire, it should definitely not respond to the demonic qi inside Shen Yuan’s body. So, when he picked up the sword and imagined a channel of energy flowing from his arm and into the blade, Shen Yuan was reasonably alarmed as the blade started emitting light. Xiu Ya recognized him as Shen Qingqiu.
Several minutes of screaming followed.
In some weird mishap, Shen Yuan, fledgling vampire, had transformed or absorbed or otherwise become the immortal cultivator, Shen Qingqiu. He’d consumed the man’s blood, drained the man’s life, taken on the man’s appearance, and even been recognized by the man’s sword. Everything was wrong.
What ‘brimming with health’? Health would do him no good once Luo Binghe grew into the blackened protagonist of this excuse for a novel, coming back to take revenge on his scum shizun!
First instinct: run away. Shen Yuan would just ignore the vampire’s and cultivator’s remains downstairs, return Xiu Ya to the pile of Shen Qingqiu’s robes, and leave everything for concerned Cang Qiong searchers to find. After all, the moment Cang Qiong sect realized Shen Qingqiu was missing, they would send out a search party for the peak lord. Shen Qingqiu was well known, if not well liked. Allow them to draw their own conclusions. While Shen Yuan took off for parts unknown.
Sure, Shen Yuan looked like Shen Qingqiu, but he could just avoid all cultivators for the rest of his life. A humble little cottage somewhere remote, where he could admire the monsters of PIDW, and sample their blood as needed. You know, enjoy the quiet life. That didn’t sound too bad.
Until descending into the inevitable madness brought about by being a sire-less human-turned-vampire.
Because he was also a vampire! Ignoring that blood-drinking vampires had no place in a xianxia setting in the first place, Shen Yuan recalled that the demon community at large didn’t hold vampires to be “true” demons, largely because vampires were of two types: born and turned. Born vampires were superior. Turned vampires were humans sired by a born vampire. Infected with vampiric blood, they developed most of the symptoms of vampirism that mark western vampires, but with the addition of eventual mental instability that occasional blood from their sire warded against. Heavenly demon blood could, of course, replace the blood of a sire and cure the slide into madness, and heavenly demon papapa could cure the need for blood drinking at all. This one twist allowed Luo Binghe to cure wives #44, 92, and 111 of their vampirism and preserved their sanity. These wife plots also demonstrated how it was possible for vampires to suppress their natures with a diet of quality spiritual energy, and how they could limit their need for blood to once a month at the new moon.
Okay, yes, alright! He was also willfully ignoring that Shen Qingqiu was already Luo Binghe’s shizun. While Cang Qiong might be satisfied with Shen Qinqiu’s demise, would Shen Yuan really be able to avoid the blackened protagonist’s need for revenge? How would the plot of PIDW twist itself to bring about the true ending and Shen Qingqiu’s death by torture?
Second instinct: hug the protagonist’s golden thighs. The best way to avoid this fate was to go to Cang Qiong, meet Luo Binghe, and be the Best Shizun EverTM!
Shen Yuan cursed his options. He was going to have to be Shen Qingqiu. And a vampire.
It had nothing to do with him wanting to meet the protagonist.
So, all Shen Yuan had to do was make his way to Cang Qiong, trick everyone who knew him into thinking that he’s Shen Qingqiu, hide his vampiric nature, drain spiritual energy from spirit caves or spirit stones, and find a butcher once a month. All while being the Best Shiuzun EverTM to Luo Binghe and thereby avoiding death by torture.
No problem.
But, wait a minute, hadn’t there been memories? When he’d bitten Shen Qingqiu and he’d been overwhelmed with the feeling of it, of the blood coating his tongue, of desperately clinging to the thrashing man, hadn’t there been flashes of something else? Where had all of that gone?
Shen Yuan looked around in his mental space and noticed a blob of something that hadn’t been there before. As he looked closer, it seemed to be one messy ball of snippets. Vague ass memories. Faces. Places. Feelings. Emotional misgivings. Maybe if he still had a System (sound of crickets chirping) all these snippets would be tidy and sorted. Instead, they stayed being a messy ball of stuff that gave off a vaguely begrudging air. Shen Yuan decided to name it “S.Q.Q.” and prodded it into pointing the way back to Cang Qiong.