Chapter Text
After checking his phone for the umpteenth time that day, Shen Yuan clicked his tongue and slid the device back in his pockets.
It wasn't like Shang QingHua to ghost him like this. Well, okay, it was - but never for this long! It'd been, at this point, nearly 2 weeks since the dumbass had last replied to his messages, and over one week since he had posted a new chapter online. People were going to rip him apart if he took much longer with a new update, not least of all Shen Yuan.
He, personally, would rather admit to being impatient for his friend's shitty webnovel to update than admit he was getting genuinely worried about the guy, even if his chaotic hermetic lifestyle merited concern on a regular basis.
Unlike his own, semi hermetic lifestyle which was only a little, ah, embarrassing, if one looked too closely at how he spent much of his free time. Or at his room. But how he decorated was nobody's business since he didn't have people that weren't his siblings over much anyway, and they weren't even invited most of the time. They often visited without much warning, constantly fussing over him since he moved out for university. He had hoped moving out would alleviate some of the hovering but, alas, no dice.
His oldest brother had been the last to visit, a few days ago, to drop off some food his little sister made for him. Shen Yuan was grateful for that - as much as he loved good food, he could never be bothered to cook actual meals. Not that he was lazy, it was just that he had better things to do with his time, and instant soup was just so much more convenient!
Like, now, he has time to review his papers on literature from the Warring States era and Mencius!
A very funny thought; he snorted and opened his laptop to the school website. Upload file, and submit! As if he was going to edit that again when it was worth such a small amount of his final grade. The headache wasn't worth it and he was suddenly feeling like a short walk. maybe to QingHua's apartment so he could harangue him in person?
It was worth a shot, he figured. QingHua wasn’t likely to be anywhere else and it had been a while since they had hung out properly, anyway. In part it was because both of them were homebodies, but it was mostly due to them both being tired university students. Shen Yuan spent his free time lurking online, too lazy to get out of bed half the time, while QingHua presumably spent most of his time writing. Given his unemployed status, he didn’t have much of a budget for hobbies like gaming so Shen Yuan really wasn’t sure what he did with his abundance of free time. He marveled at the low caliber of the stuff he posted online, the lack of effort was astonishing and sometimes tear-inducing for Shen Yuan. Making up his mind about visiting, he packed a few snacks into his oversized backpack as a potential peace offering and set off when his phone was fully recharged.
It was only a few train stops away, since he still lived fairly close to the district where they met, back in primary school. Shen Yuan had to move after only a year at his new school though, and he fell out of contact with any friends he had there for several years.
Including QingHua, who reentered his life a while back in the most ass-backwards way possible. Getting a DM from his least favourite amateur webnovel author after he connected his personal weibo to his Zhongdian account was nearly as surprising as finding out that said author was someone who once cried because Shen Yuan called his favourite cartoon ‘mindless garbage’. A wild way to reconnect with an old friend, to be sure - but the fact that both of their online monikers were boner euphemisms forced Shen Yuan to reevaluate the view from his high horse and helped level the field for them.
He had decently thick skin now, though - he only complained a bit when Shen Yuan's scathing critiques became less constructive and more, ah, vitriolic. Shen Yuan was somewhat pleased to know that he could now at least make sure some of Airplane's narrative decisions were not rooted solely in generating revenue from horny people online. University was expensive, sure, but he wished the man had a little more creative integrity. Just because he had started writing YY stallion novels for a living didn’t mean he had to toss away his sense of decency too, right?
After a few blocks that he navigated via google maps, he found his way to Shang QingHua's apartment. It was in a core district of the city built on a bit of an incline, surrounded by slightly older architecture that wasn’t particularly well maintained. He rarely hosted but Shen Yuan still had his address saved into his contact information. There wasn't much in the way of security so he made his way in and up with worrying ease. Then he had to actually walk up the stairs with some amount of unease, not quite heaving by the time he made it to the right floor. He wouldn’t be so egotistical as to begrudge his friend for being too low income to afford a place in a nicer building but really. At this point, elevators really should be required in the building bylaws for any place with more than, like, 3 floors.
He found the apartment near the end of the hall and knocked on the door.
After the gruelling trip upstairs, the silence that met him was more than a little annoying. He waited for a minute. Knocked again. Called out "Airplane bro!" in a raised voice that he immediately tempered down when an old woman turned into the hallway and gave him a look as she walked past him. The judgement emanating from this elder was palpable, and he winced.
"Ah, haha sorry, I'm waiting for my friend..." Shen Yuan started until the woman waved him off and entered what was presumably her own home, shutting the door behind her. What a friendly neighbor. He wondered if any of them might tell him if QingHua had been home recently. Or if they would even notice his absence in the first place. It had taken Shen Yuan long enough, he noted with some chagrin.
He turned back to the apartment and jiggled the doorknob in frustration. Huffing loudly when that solved nothing, he decided to give up on the apartment. Clearly, his friend was not home right now. Calling his number one more time while he stood in front of the door, hand on his hip, the voicemail he reached offered no consolation.
Stepping away and making his way down the stairs alone, Shen Yuan left the apartment building and stepped back onto the street with a sigh. It wasn’t yet late enough in the day for the sun to be fading from the sky, but the height of the buildings in this area meant that little enough direct sun reached the sidewalks.
He had been hoping that maybe Airplane bro had been avoiding him because he had continued the fourth wife subplot in the new chapter despite Shen Yuan's strong complaints about over-done harem stories. But at this point, it seemed rather far-fetched that he would ghost everyone like this just to avoid another tongue lashing. Cowardly and airheaded as he was, it was strange for QingHua to avoid him for so long. At least, these days it was.
Fiddling with his cucumber phone charm and reminiscing about their childhood, Shen Yuan soon found himself on a familiar sidestreet. Ah, that’s right - QingHua’s place was still pretty close to where he grew up, and where he and Shen Yuan first met.
Shen Yuan was never the most sociable kid growing up, preferring the company of his books to that of his loud, rambunctious peers. If he was being honest with himself, this may have been, in part, due to the fact that his sickly constitution never really afforded him many opportunities to actually play much with them. But there was no point dwelling on what he couldn’t do, so it was fairly easy to make his peace with that and see the world through the pages of his well illustrated animal encyclopedias. Besides, when he was young, his family moved around for the business quite a lot so it would have been kind of pointless to make friends at school, anyway.
The closest he ever came to having a childhood best friend was living in this district for a few years, where he met Shang QingHua. A fellow bookworm, who was content to chatter his ears off about this book or that and didn’t seem to mind young Shen Yuan’s sharp tongue. For the most part. They would have arguments from time to time but as long as A-Hua apologised first, Shen Yuan could get over himself and their friendship would resume.
Until one day, when they were playing in the park near a local shrine and Shen Yuan pushed Shang QingHua a little too hard. Literally, like, Shen Yuan pushed him into the shrine well in some stupid fit and QingHua fell down the open mouth of the well. As soon as he realized his friend was probably trapped, he panicked and ran to find an adult. He has to imagine he pushed him too hard figuratively as well, since Shang QingHua apparently decided he didn’t want to talk to him again for nearly another decade.
Shen Yuan’s family didn’t really let him contact the Shangs afterwards and they moved away shortly after the incident, to be fair. It was pure coincidence that would find him and QingHua reconnecting online, years later.
Feeling wistful, Shen Yuan detoured his walk back to the station to find the park where they had that final fight. It wasn’t particularly hard to find since it was one of the few remaining bamboo parks in the city and it was the only one with a shrine house. Also, it was about two blocks down the street and around the corner from the station so he was nearly there anyway. The light of the day was fading, barely reaching the path of the park through the dappled leaves of the canopy. Passing a jogging woman with her fluffy white dog, he took a few steps down the dirt path and stumbled on nothing, looking like an idiot. Nice!
Though he was fairly certain the woman wasn’t even turning to look at him, he straightened up and pushed his glasses back up his face, laughing awkwardly. Nothing to see here, just a cool dude on a walk through this lovely, cool park. He totally wasn’t already tired from the short walk here and desperate for a bench or something to take a breather.
His sweater vest and trouser combo was decidedly not jogging apparel but luckily the shade from the bamboo plants and the cool breeze that kept them at a slight sway kept him from sweating uncomfortably as he walked down the path. Still, he made a beeline towards the old well shrine he remembered so he could sit down and reconsider his decision to even come to this park.
It was pretty stupid, but there was something about this peaceful place that made him nostalgic in a funny way. It was a safe haven of sorts when they’d been younger, a park that was too small and boring for most of the neighbourhood kids. The well shrine sheltered in the center of the park was the object of a few local legends but as far as Shen Yuan could tell, any significance the well held was mostly forgotten. People didn’t visit the shrine enough for any regular maintenance or upkeep to be necessary, he was pretty sure the city had forgotten it existed. Honestly, he wasn’t even sure it was a shrine, that was just what folks called it despite the complete lack of reverence for the pitiful structure.
If the path didn’t inevitably lead to the shrine, it might have been easy to miss amongst the forest of bamboo shoots. The shrine was smaller than the pavilion at his family’s home, held up by the dilapidated wooden pillars with the paint long since stripped away by the elements. Even the roof looked a little shabbier than he remembered, with the sloped structure of the thing looking suspiciously saggy. But if it had held up this long (however long that was), it would be fine for now. Probably.
The well itself was a simple stone structure, square in shape and barely at a height with his knees. The aged surface of the well revealed little about its origin, design too plain to discern any clues by architectural clues. Though it was a shallow well, the mouth was boarded up with a sheet of wood to prevent accidents since there really weren’t any other precautions in the park to prevent someone from falling in. A shabby safety measure, but a measure nonetheless.
Setting his bag down on the scuffed ground of the shrine, Shen Yuan sat down on the broad lip of the well and let out a sigh. It was cold on his ass but otherwise perfectly serviceable. He took his phone out of his pocket and went through his notifications from the past hour, which were almost all from his little sister. She had taken to asking for novel recommendations lately and then hitting him with all her hot takes and thoughts on the novel after she finished.
It was sweet and honestly he appreciated the effort to bond with him but god, did it make him nervous. There was way too much porn out there that his baby sister could stumble across and he really had to vett the stuff he sent her way. He wasn’t about to expose A-Su to the depraved filth of the internet, even if he often found himself perusing these very same channels in the late hours of the night instead of studying.
He typed out a short sympathetic reply to her rant on the treatment of the female characters in the last novel and put his phone into his bag. Sorry to A-Su, but at least the fictional sisters in this novel weren’t brain-dead like so many in this genre usually are! Your Yuan-ge can only assure the quality of a novel in so many different aspects, not every part can be a winner!
His dramatic sigh into the empty park was interrupted by a strange rattling sound that echoed slightly, coming from behind him. No, that wasn’t quite right - it was coming from under him. The well?
Shen Yuan stood up from the lip of the well and squinted at the wooden panels covering the opening. Upon inspection, he noticed that it wasn’t entirely sealed and that there was a small crack between the panels where one of them was left ajar at a crooked angle. With a tentative pull, the panel came even further apart and fell off the top of the well entirely, landing next to his bag.
What the hell? Was even the point? Never mind being a safety measure, was this flimsy lid only there for the sake of aesthetic? It didn’t even look nice, this was pathetic - anyone, or thing, could fall down this damn thing again and injure themselves! Hello, city officials, please use our tax dollars on things like this instead of pointless police budget increases!
Realizing that maybe the earlier noise could be such a thing, like a wounded cat or some such, Shen Yuan quickly pulled the second panel off and leaned over the mouth of the well to get a better look.
This, however, would be something he immediately came to regret. Immensely.