Chapter Text
Shen Jiu was floating in the darkness. His might was still ringing faintly after the last Qi-deviation. Strangely, this one snuck up on him unexpectedly, as opposed to his usual attacks. Shen Jiu tried to remember, navigating the hazy waters of his memories. He was working on something, something important. And boring. He could remember the boredom and having to push through it. Paperwork did tend to have this effect, he recalled. And then the pain came. Shen Jiu tried to focus on that. He could usually feel the beginning of a Qi-deviation, it wasn’t like him to be caught off guard like that. Something felt off.
“...Jiu? Are you alright, Xiao Jiu?”, a faint voice cut through the fog. Shen Jiu had to suppress an urge to groan. The annoying worrywart of a Sect Leader is here it seems. Misery truly loves company. Mastering all the cutting annoyance he could in this state. Shen Jiu opened his mouth to rip into Yue QingYuan.
“Where am I?”, came a reply. Shen Jiu froze, but his voice kept on talking “What is going on?”
He didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything, so what just happened? Shen Jiu started to fight against the dark. Trying to open his eyes proved to be a challenge, like they were glued shut and he had to fight the resistance of a sticky substance before being able to crack them open.
The world came slowly into focus. His vision was floaty, as if the area around him was covered in fog. He was able to make the details of his own room, but it seemed that he was only able to see the center clearly. The further away from the bed he looked, the darker his vision became. On the bed though…on the bed lay Shen QingQiu, the, well, him. Shen Jiu looked at himself.
“Is this what insanity is like?”, he thought faintly. The figure on the bed said something, but Shen Jiu couldn’t quite hear it over the rushing of his own thoughts. What was happening here? He tried to move, but his limbs felt heavy, like he was walking through the mass of water. Yue QingYuan kept talking to the person wearing Shen Jiu’s face. He reached out, trying to make his presence known, to pull the Sect Leader away from the impostor and watched in horror as his hand went through the older man’s figure.
“Qi-ge?”, - Shen Jiu asked pitifully. His mind reeled from shock trying to assess the situation, as his brother inquired about the impostor’s health as if the real Shen Jiu wasn’t standing right there. Their conversation floated around him, but he couldn’t make out the words. Shen Jiu looked at his hands. Or through them, more accurately. His hands were transparent. So were his legs, and his torso, and the rest of his body he noted. He tried to clutch his fingers together and felt faint relief as they seemed to stuck together instead of just floating through each other as they did through Yue QingYuan. Relief was soon clouded by anger. What use was it, if he couldn’t touch anything else?
“I’ll bring Mu-shidi”, Yue QingYuan said. Shen Jiu watched him stand and walk towards the exit. Right through Shen Jiu himself. “Way to dismiss someone, Qi-ge”, he thought in a surge of hysteria. Did he just die? Is he having some sort of a vision? Is he in hell? At this point, anything goes. Being turned randomly into an incorporeal entity and having to watch whatever it was that was going on right now seemed like just the thing that would happen to him.
“System greets the User”, his musings were interrupted by a voice. It sounded strange, pleasant at first but also foreign and warped, like it was too close and too far away at the same time. The words also didn;t make much sense. What’s a User? What’s a System?
Even in death, headache seemed to be unavoidable for Shen Jiu.