Chapter Text
Falling in love is kind of a weird feeling. You don't even realize how deep you're in the pit until that one moment chosen by fate – and it could be any moment, really. No one knows save for the one in charge of shooting heart arrows at people; the reason for your heart problems (because God knows how they seem to sense the emotional butterflies rallying inside your stomach whenever you're a five-meter radius close to them); and, lastly, you.
But nothing grows when something isn't planted, so this is where the first of three love points begins: when Cupid's new batch of handcrafted Love Arrows finally arrived on his doorstep, he was vibrating.
No, not literally.
Okay, sure. Maybe he actually did, but because this was a hypothetical scenario Shang Qinghua came up with in order to make sense of things (or, at least, to give some sort of process behind all the things that did not make much fucking sense so that he can have an easier time accepting it), it didn't really matter.
(As for what that one means, we'll get to that later.)
Excited, Cupid spontaneously decided that now would be the best time to test th effectiveness of his arrows.
That afternoon, the clouds in the sky had parted to give way for the descending god. There was a certain glow in the background that had made it hard for normal people to see what was in front of them. The light that bounced off the grey road was suddenly too bright it flashed the blind, and the temperature rose just a little bit.
By heaven's grace, however, descending to the human realm wasn't a troublesome process, so the mysterious glow from the sky and the heat that came with it immediately passed as quickly as it had appeared. And so, Cupid successfully stepped foot on mortal grounds (or as far as beings with wings, who refused to use their feet no matter what, were supposed to) without any anomalies.
The place he'd landed on was a random high school located on a mountain. This mountain was called Mount Tian Gong, while the school itself was called Cang Qiong Public High School.
Contrary to its upstanding name, Cang Qiong Public High had a bad reputation among the mountain locals. That's because it was home to a whole group of troublesome teenagers – the Qing Jing Gang. Shang Qinghua didn't know why they called themselves "Qing Jing" when there was literally nothing peaceful and quiet about them.
Now this was where it got really fucking weird.
When Cupid descended, he situated himself somewhere someone with acrophobia wouldn't want to be in. He waved his hand and a bow was magically conjured from thin air. Then he reached inside his qiankun pouch, taking out a long, almost transparent sharp object – this was precisely the newly-manifactured Love Arrow he just received from the mail.
As this was a simple troubleshooting, Cupid only brought one arrow with him, but he saw no problem with this. Why would he? He was a veteran in the bow-and-arrow industry. He specialized in wielding the bow. He's pro.
—"pro" his ass, that was!
Why do you think some people fall in love with bastards? Scums? Why do you think some people get so blinded by love that they lose all rationality to the point of killing themselves? Those were clearly the work of a matchmaker that was in dire need of glasses prescriptions!
Cupid lifted his arms and aimed in a certain direction, the sharp point of the heart-tipped arrow target-locked on his chosen guinea pig.
Around the same time, inside an abandoned school building that appeared spookier than necessary and gave off the impression that it was on the verge of collapse, two people stood by a gray pillar. One of them was being held by the collar of his uniform while the other one was holding the other by the collar of his uniform.
The one being held by the collar was Shang Qinghua.
At that moment, Shang Qinghua was being aggressively gripped over… Uhhh, what was it again? Money?
For reasons he could not fathom, the violent bunch in his school automatically narrowed in on him as Cang Qiong's number one punching bag.
Let him think. When he transferred in, he did his best to be unnoticeable – his presence acknowledged only when necessary, while the rest of the way, he should've been forgotten. It was a solid plan, really.
And if Shang Qinghua was asked directly, he'd say so himself that he did a pretty good job being inconspicuous. For a counter-reasoning, he'd say that it was just that luck wasn't always on his side which, optimistically speaking (and he really wasn't), happens to everybody – wait! In the first place, should it really be considered normal that it happens to everybody? No, wait. Does it really happen to everybody or was he saying all this to cope with his rather unfortunate life?
Before he could revert to internal monologuing about his unimpressive self, Bully A abruptly let go of his collar, causing Shang Qinghua to fall on his back with a pained grunt.
That was when it happened.
Shang Qinghua's vision was still muddled with black sparks when he heard something crash from not so far away. He blinked a couple of times until his sight cleared enough to see Bully A lying on the ground like a dirt sack, his face distorted and more asymmetrical than it normally was. He angrily pointed at a direction to Shang Qinghua's left, "Y...Y...You—!"
A third person languidly walked towards Bully A.
He crouched in front of the trembling sack of shit and asked with a voice as chilly as the Luo river in the winter: "I, what?"
"Bastard..." Bully A gritted his teeth. "SHEN, YOU FUCKING BASTARD!"
Shang Qinghua, who was about to silently crawl away as these two gangsters fight to the death, froze on his spot.
He knew only one person surnamed Shen in this school.
Shang Qinghua whipped his head around to the other two and almost pissed his pants when the person who'd just given Bully A a hard punch sent him flying once again with a kick to his stomach. This time, he landed a bit closer to Shang Qinghua, coughing out blood.
Shang Qinghua felt all the hair on his body stand on end. There's no mistaking it! That aforementioned "bastard" surnamed Shen was none other than Cang Qiong's Number One Baddie, the very heart of Qing Jing – the Jade Tiger, Shen Jiu!
While Shang Qinghua was unanimously deemed the object of everyone's violent reactions, he's never personally met Shen Jiu (lucky). He'd seen him around, yes, but those were his afterimages, if anything. What knowledge Shang Qinghua had of the Qing Jing Jade Tiger were only based on the rumors he'd picked up of him, and they were as colorful as the rainbow-colored bridges that connected the towering parts of Mount Tian Gong.
But to summarize: Shen Jiu's the generic high school bad boy whose fists were that of iron, had a temper belonging to an active volcano, and won't hesitate to give someone an immersive experience of his roundhouse kick if they asked him about his backstory.
Perhaps minutes had passed then, because the next thing he knew, there was a jade-like palm extended right in front of his face, and, oh what, Bully A had long left the building (that's fast). At that moment, Shang Qinghua swore he heard someone continuously beating drums because why else did everything in his torso feel heavy? You only get that when someone's playing sounds with low frequency in max volume – like, for example, drums.
"Hey."
Shang Qinghua, startled out of his philosophical contemplation about whether the badum badum badum he kept hearing was from an actual drum or another person's heartbeat (which could be his own, but that line of thought's dancing around highly dangerous territory so he's scratching that OUT), looked up at the person holding out a hand to him. Shang Qinghua's mouth was a bit agape, and he probably looked stupid like that, but…
"What the fuck do you keep looking at?"
"Hey! This is why you have enemies from all eight directions!"
...was what he would've said if he wasn't also scared and muddled at that pale hand extending towards him.
So instead, he shrieked.
"Nothing, nothing!"
Shen Jiu eyed him.
"Well aren't you a spineless rat," he started, and there was an obvious glint in his eyes that reminded Shang Qinghua a bit of the scarred cat his scary neighbor owned that brutally scratched his arms bloody when he made an attempt to give it a pat (and if he'd been a smidge slower, that would've been his face). "Letting yourself be kicked around by losers with turtle shit for brains."
Shang Qinghua stuttered an apology as he took that outstretched hand, letting himself be hauled up from the cold, concrete floor. Shen Jiu merely clicked his tongue.
Now, there was an awkwardness between them that Shen Jiu didn't want to be subjected to, so he turned on the soles of his neon green sneakers. But before he could coolly waltz away like some kind of main character, someone had dared lightly tug on his loose white uniform. Shang Qinghua was beyond terrified when those sharp eyes that had glared at Bully A earlier steadied on him with the same level of frostiness.
But even so, he tuned out the red warning alarm bells, ignored the bold, capitalized text of "FUCK"s appearing in his brain like a Windows XP malfunction. And with the air of a sputtering hamster about to face a big mighty tiger, opened his mouth to say:
"Thank you for sending him flying!"
Then it was for a moment that something had parted and the afternoon sun shone brightly over that old, abandoned building. The golden rays had hit them, and though it wouldn't be incorrect to say that Shang Qinghua's eyesight was deteriorating, he would nevertheless argue that he actually caught a glimpse of an archangel in real-time.
Shen Jiu had quietly stared at him but it was so brief that by the time Shang Qinghua regained his wits from being stunned by a metaphorical taser, he was already turning his head away and grumbling something Shang Qinghua, who was out of his right mind at that time, assumed was a soft whatever, don’t mention it.
And if he were to trace it all back, then that was the precise moment when Cupid's randomly-aimed Love Arrow shot through the heart of the notorious Qing Jing Gang's indomitable Jade Tiger.
It's a plausible explanation, really. Shang Qinghua had racked his brain thinking of a good reason why the things that normally wouldn't have happened on a regular Tuesday afternoon had happened on a seemingly regular Tuesday afternoon.
Sure, he'll admit that Cupid personally landing on Mount Tian Gong just to bind one and two together is a far-fetched idea taking into account how they had their own sets of gods not lacking one for fateful, destined, romantic cute meets here – and Shang Qinghua knows how terribly absurd it is in the same way Cupid bothers to have feet but only use his wings, or not getting rid of his feet despite only using his wings, when traveling around the metropolitan palaces above the clouds (which is all theoretical, by the way, theorized by yours truly) – but following this train of thought, alongside the likelihood that that bow-wielding angel baby had a severe case of astigmatism, him temporarily taking on Yue Lao's job of matchmaking the matchless because that old man's having his annual back problems was a fairly reasonable happening that managed to tie all of the seemingly questionable chains of events together. (Again, more on that later.)
What he's trying to say here is, it's exactly the absurdity of Cupid being in China that it made sense for the same absurdity of the Qing Jing Jade Tiger going as far as to tolerate his existence, let alone actively search for his existence, to actually fucking happen! Or come true!
Don't get him wrong, that follow up's not implying that Shang Qinghua had hoped for it – heavens forbid. He's not that crazy.
It was more so the result of him seeking answers in the middle of the night, rolling around his bed and all, and surmising that Shen Jiu may or may not have... caught feelings for him.