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Peak Lord Shang is an old client of hers, one that San Xiu has worked with many times over the years — decades, actually.
One would not typically credit her to be among the population of immortal masters or long-lived practitioners of cultivation, simply because she isn’t actually a cultivator. And yet, San Xiu is going into her eighty-ninth year of life, still looking as if she’s only in her late twenties. Peak Lord Shang likes to comment dramatically on this, always telling her how she ages just like the finest of wines.
He always has been her favorite customer. And not just because of the flattery (Though, it does get him anywhere. And he knows it, too).
San Xiu is an artist, see. She knows what to look for to find the beauty in anything. Even in people. San Xiu knows a true masterpiece when she sees one. She knows what would make a perfect canvas for the most breathtaking paintings to ever grace the land, and she is unique about it, too.
San Xiu likes to be original. Her canvases come from what nature blesses her with, be it a full-scale landscape carved into the leftover healthy bark of a tree far past it’s lifetime, artful pastels glazed into ceramic baked from the clay straight out of the local riverbed, or even the soft and unblemished skin of one of the most powerful men this side of China.
That’s right. San Xiu considers Peak Lord Shang Qinghua to be her greatest masterpiece, of all the work of her entire career. He is exquisite, beautiful, miles and miles of soft and perfect canvas for her ink and her needles to paint all of her very best work into.
Peak Lord Shang Qinghua had come into San Xiu’s life when she was still only a teenager, just starting out in her chosen craft. Her parents had raised her correctly for a young miss, strictly tested on etiquette and drilled in the practices of the Six Arts. San Xiu had taken a liking to painting, when it had been shown to her as a little girl, and she had made it her own dream.
Her parents were proud of their daughter, a skilled artist. They might have been a little less proud and more scandalized, had they ever found out that San Xiu’s favorite canvas was the bare skin of a man.
Tattoos are a very contemporary art, viewed as lesser than painting and other mediums by some simply because they are only as long lived as the person they’re inked into, gone whenever the canvas dies. It’s one of the reasons why tattoo art isn’t taken as seriously. Another reason is because it is often very personal to the person whose skin bears it. In polite society, it’s not as if a person can take off their robes just to show off their tattoos. That would be such a scandal. Which is why, most of the time, paintings of the skin are not seen by anyone other than the artist and the canvas.
Not many artists tend to delve into tattooing for this very reason. Aside from the fact that it is far, far more difficult to master, mistakes cannot be discarded for a fresh canvas to try again. It is the medium of a perfectionist.
San Xiu had first encountered tattooing in an admittedly less-than savory establishment. An artist, she can’t remember the name of him now, had a parlour out of the back of a brothel. She honestly wouldn’t have been there in the first place, had she not heard the rumors and developed the gut feeling that she just had to track this artist down and see what exactly their work entailed.
She packed a few examples of her own work, rolled canvases slid into oiled tubes of leather that she strung over her back, and journeyed off into the night when her parents were occupied with some banquet or other that a lord a few towns over had been hosting.
That’s where she had first met Peak Lord Shang Qinghua.
He hadn’t been a peak lord then, not yet. He was, however, head disciple of a Cang Qiong Mountain Peak, which was already incredibly impressive. San Xiu can recall experiencing unfathomable awe and, even to this day, she had never really gotten over the feeling.
Truth to be told, Lord Shang’s power and standing wasn’t the only reason fifteen year old San Xiu had been so taken and impressed with him. It wasn’t even the biggest reason. No, the reason that Lord Shang had captured San Xiu’s attention, and had never lost it even in the decades after —
He's a masterpiece. Not even San Xiu’s, but a naturally occurring work of art. He’d been radiant and alluring even before San Xiu had ever dreamed of being allowed to put her hands on him.
She’d met him, head disciple Shang Fei, who would later become the much-lauded Master of Cang Qiong’s very own An Ding Peak, in an admittedly very shady tattoo artist’s workshop in the back of a brothel.
The artist had become jaded due to years of unappreciation for their art. It’s the biggest fear of any artist come to life. He had been on his last legs of his profession, all passion drained from him until he was sallow and indifferent to the world. He hadn’t even been interested in meeting with her, something that would have likely crushed a young San Xiu’s spirits by a significant amount if her fate hadn’t been written to lead someone else to her that night.
Shang Fei had held a faint look of disappointment on his face when she first saw him, stepping half into the door of the workshop. She had watched him as he surveyed the room and immediately seemed to realize that this wasn’t what he was looking for. She’d felt the same, herself, but had been struck speechless by the wave of sunset gold that tumbled down his back, shining a russet gold in the warm light of the fire lamps of the parlour. The top twirled neatly into a bun at the crown of his head, held together by two needles that gleamed their sharp danger when he tilted his face downward. The arch of his brow captivated her, the line of his jaw, the color of his eyes, the fold of his nondescript and yet obviously high-quality robes—
He’d looked like a painting of the most revered masters, come to life.
San Xiu knew instantly that she had to speak with him. He was a masterpiece , of the kind that an artist would spend their entire life in search of, and in that moment her most ardent wish was to show him her own. To have him gaze upon her paintings and give his verdict, one work of art judging his own kind.
It had been embarrassing in hindsight, but she’d stumbled up to him and asked if he’d go to a tea shop with her.
However mortifying her actions were, she is eternally glad that she had committed them.
Shang Fei had been so very taken with her paintings, perhaps just as taken as San Xiu was with his everything. He’d bought one off of her then and there, and they had spent three hours drinking tea in companionable conversation when he’d finally asked her what, exactly, she’d been doing in the back of the brothel.
Despite never having received the chance to interrogate the tattoo artist on his craft, San Xiu had still been able to catch a glimpse of his works, sitting sketched out and planned on his work table, and pinned to the walls of the shop. The gorgeous twists of the designs, the very real and tangible proof of a living art right in front of her — it had sparked a hunger in the center of San Xiu’s very being. So she told Shang Fei, she had approached the tattoo parlour because she wanted to join the practice herself.
Gods forbid her parents ever finding out.
Luckily, they never did.
Shang Fei had been even more interested in this bit of information than he had even over the painting he’d purchased. He’d told her she had a gift. That she had talent. That, if she learned the right methods and had the right materials and opportunities, he knew that she could become the best.
Such flattery, even back then. Lord Shang is a master of it. San Xiu still blushes, faintly, when she thinks of that night in the tea shop.
That might be, of course, because of the next thing that Shang Fei had said to her. He had reached across the table, taken her hand in his, looked her in the eye, and offered his body to her with all the seriousness of a man proposing marriage.
Oh, San Xiu had nearly died that night.
Shang Fei himself had seemed to immediately realize, as well, that his words could possibly be misconstrued. He’d turned a little pink in the face, a lovely color splashing lightly over his cheeks, and had quickly amended his offer, saying that he would make a good canvas for San Xiu to practice on until she masters the skills she yearns for.
Shang Fei, he said, was a cultivator well beyond his core formation. Any mistakes she made, he could remove himself and heal over so that it was like they’d never even existed.
And then, he said, “Wouldn’t it make it easier, if you knew some cultivation yourself?”
San Xiu had left for home again in the very early morning, a permanent correspondence address for An Ding peak tucked privately away into her robes, and head held high in excitement as the very first disciple of Peak Lord Shang Qinghua.
Of course, seeing as how he wasn’t actually Peak Lord yet, or even Qinghua , no one could ever know.
That was fine with San Xiu. She had no interest in joining a sect and training for a soulsword.
She is an artist.
Years have passed, rolling into decades. Shang Fei met her secretly, in the time between his duties as head disciple — and other obligations over which he was much more secretive about — as if it were some sort of affair, and San Xiu would work on his skin.
He’d been correct. He was the perfect canvas. Soft, supple, clear and pale. A pure expanse of unblemished emptiness for her to practice on. And, one day, she was promised the sole right to permanently leave her mark on that canvas, as soon as her skills met both of their standards.
By the time Shang Qinghua ascended into his position as Peak Lord, San Xiu met that standard. In celebration for both their achievements, Shang Fei (now Qinghua) and San Xiu had sat down together and planned out the first of San Xiu’s best works.
It winds gorgeously around his forearm, a beautiful Phoenix of gold and red pigments, of which she’d likely never have been able to acquire if not for Shang Qinghua’s benefaction. It’s wings bound to its body by a thorny vine, a rose clutched in its talons, tail feathers curled elegantly to end on the back of his hand. She has never been more proud of anything else in her life.
Decades followed, new masterpieces joining the phoenix on Peak Lord Shang’s flesh. Each and every one turns out breathtakingly gorgeous, almost as if they are made twice more beautiful than they would have otherwise, just for his skin being their canvas. As if Shang Qinghua blesses them, being a natural vision of true art himself, and makes it more .
San Xiu is an artist. And Shang Qinghua is her most beloved life’s work.