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Chapter Text

ONE

Shen Yuan started the day like he had started every day for the past two years: by getting into a deathmatch with the coffee machine.

The cogs rattled and shrieked like a revenant; the square metal frame shuddered hard enough to make all the cutlery shake in his drawers.

What came out at the other end of the machine wasn't exactly coffee. That wouldn't become available until Year Two, when the player could unlock and grow their own coffee beans.

Unfortunately, there was no player character at the moment, which meant that Shen Yuan and the other inhabitants of Heaven’s Valley were stuck firmly in Year Zero for however long it took for a protagonist to show themselves.

Shen Yuan wasn't holding his breath.

So! Dandelion coffee! He'd picked the flowers and dried the roots, and then trialed and errored his way into something that might , on the surface, pass as coffee, or at least something coffee-ish.

It tasted like shit, obviously. Long gone were the good times, when he couldn't take two steps without walking face-first into a Starbucks or a Luckin Coffee. Those days had ended when he died in front of his computer and transmigrated into Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way, a Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley knockoff of truly mediocre quality.

And not into the main character, either! He had woken up and found himself in the body of the game's reclusive wizard character, who mostly skulked at the edges of the map and sent the player on quests for weird plants in return for potions and spells. In the original game, he didn't even have a name - he was just Wizard.

Shen Yuan had spent about a week trying to stay in character (in other words, isolated and bored nearly to death for a second time) before realizing that even if time was definitely passing, none of the plot events seemed to be triggering.

You needed a protagonist for that, apparently. After some careful exploration (he refused to think of it as "skulking"), he had found that there just … wasn't one.

There kept not being one. Shen Yuan tried to keep up the reclusive wizard act for a few more days, but it was boring him to tears.

Something had to break, and the thing, it turned out, was Shen Yuan’s patience.

So maybe he took a couple of walks closer to town! And maybe on those walks he ended up talking to some people! It was just a couple of conversations! And sometimes you had to go to the store for supplies! And he really was no good at cooking, so getting a proper meal at the local pub just made sense!

As he took his first sip of coffee for the day, there was a knock on the door.

It was Ning Yingying.

So maybe one thing led to another! But really none of this was Shen Yuan's fault.

"Mister Wizard," Ning Yingying said, bursting with her usual sunny, youthful energy, "good morning!"

"Hello, Yingying," Shen Yuan said, channeling Wise Old Man to the best of his abilities. "Would you like some," he briefly considered the dark liquid in his cup, "coffee?"

"I'm alright," Ning Yingying said. "How are you today?"

"I'm alright," Shen Yuan echoed. "I was just about to check on the garden."

Ning Yingying's eyes lit up, but her voice stayed admirably calm. "Would you mind if I come with?"

Such a polite child. Shen Yuan led her into the garden behind his tower. It was coming along nicely - the fanged strawberries were growing redder and sharper with every day, and the moist silver leapvine was beginning to sprout some decent foliage. Other plants were starting to bloom in earnest, too, in neat, bright rows. They were set up to maximise efficiency and profit, of course, even if none of the plants he had access to really utilized the cross-pollination mechanic. At this rate, he never would be able to make use of it.

"Mister Wizard?" Ning Yingying asked.

Shen Yuan startled back into his body.

"How are your studies coming along?" he asked smoothly.

Ning Yingying's role in the game was that of a wide-eyed, sweet little sister type. She lived in an expensive-looking beachfront house and was taking a university degree in architecture online. In addition to being one of the game's romance options (obviously), she also functioned as a vendor for furniture and farm upgrades, as well as the gold-rated flowers that she grew in her backyard.

"It's fine," Ning Yingying said. "We're doing a unit on hostile architecture right now."

"I see," Shen Yuan lied.

"Mister Wizard," Ning Yingying said, frowning thoughtfully at the leapwine. "Do you happen to have any purple stinkvine growing this season?"

The villagers of Heaven’s Valley often had weird requests, randomly generated to encourage the protagonist to go exploring. Still, wasn't this a bit weird?

“What do you need it for?” Shen Yuan couldn’t help but ask. The purple stinkvine could be used in paints or dyes, sure, but nothing could really take away from the smell.

Ning Yingying glanced at him and then away.

"It's for an experiment," she said. "But if it's too much trouble…"

"No, no," Shen Yuan said. He didn't have any stinkvine stocked, but there were plenty growing in the green zone of the mines, and he was due a visit there anyway to replenish his bone meal stores. "I should have some ready for you tomorrow."

"Thank you!" Ning Yingying hugged him. Shen Yuan patted her head reflexively.

"It's no trouble," he said.

-

It was, admittedly, some trouble.

The mines weren't used for mining, of course. They served as the hundred level dungeon where the protagonist could farm monsters and rare gems. Shen Yuan didn't go down there much - the Wizard wasn't made for combat, and he didn't have much in terms of active spellcasting that could help, so it always made him feel uncomfortably squishy.

Even if the monsters were cool.

Whenever he went down there, he did so prepared. The Liu siblings and their adventurer store helped, though it was unclear how they managed to stay in business with Shen Yuan as their only and infrequent customer. Shen Yuan's own potions and temporary buff scrolls also came in handy.

Now he was down on level fifteen, pack clinking with potion flasks and sword held at the ready. It was deep in the green zone - the mine walls were wound through with strange, twisting vegetation, and the stone beneath was beaded over in turns by thick, gem-green moss and droplets of water. The rocky ground was slick with moisture. Shen Yuan nearly fell on his ass a few times trying to navigate it.

He didn't like to go further down than this. Usually, he wouldn't even go this far down - some of the plants and monsters were interesting, but they weren't really worth the hassle. The plants he normally needed for potions tended to grow higher up, and the more interesting stuff wasn't worth passing out and waking up outside of his tower with a note of concern from Liu Qingge (brusque and judgy) or Yue Qingyuan (kindly concerned, which was somehow worse). But the purple stinkvine didn’t start spawning until level fifteen, so here he was.

At least the ero elements of the dungeon didn't really kick in until level twenty.

He shuddered at the thought, and busied himself with cutting some leaves off a nearby grasping heartstopper. You might wonder how a bush-like plant could grow so lushly while it was so far away from the sun, and the answer was, for the most part, the blood and viscera of its enemies. Luckily for Shen Yuan, it moved pretty slowly.

A few turns down, he finally found a knot of purple stinkvine. He whooped quietly and then gathered a moderate amount, trying not to gag at the smell as he double bagged it.

As the vines shifted, he spotted a small, egg-shaped rock on the ground beneath them.

A geode? They usually had to be mined from the ground, but -

Shen Yuan reached out to pick it up.

The second his fingers touched it, the stone broke apart in a perfect, even split.

He yelped and fell backwards, but nothing else seemed to happen. The cave stayed quiet. Nothing horrible emerged.

Still: Shen Yuan's breath was ragged in his throat.

His heartbeat was so loud it threatened to drown out the drip drip drip of the water sliding down the cave walls.

It felt as though someone was standing right behind him. As though he had been possessed by some horrific premonition.

"WTF," he muttered, skin prickling. "That's really -"

Cursed.

He didn’t say it out loud.

It still felt uncomfortably as though something might be listening.

Very carefully, he got to his feet.

The cave was just as empty as it had been before he fell.

The geode was empty, too. The sharp crystals inside the shell were red, sometimes shading into something so dark it was almost black, like congealing blood. Looking at it made his head spin.

Definitely cursed.

With a sigh, he pulled out a Scroll of Containment and cast it on the geode. Then he put the shielded rock into a plastic ziplock bag and stored it in his pack.

Maybe he should have left it. It would probably have been smarter, but … someone should take a look at it.

He just hoped it wouldn't have to be him.

-

"So you got scared by a rock," Qi Qingqi said.

"No," Shen Yuan said, with dignity. "I have concerns."

"Over a rock."

"It was a geode."

Qi Qingqi took a long, pointed sip of her wine. "Mn."

They were at the Heaven’s Harvest Saloon, sitting at their usual table in the back corner. The room was a weird mix of “stereotypical old school British pub” and “stereotypical old school Chinese teahouse”, because the devs were nothing if not unable to commit to an aesthetic.

"If you're really worried, I'm sure Wei Qingwei will be able to give you a second opinion," Yue Qingyuan said. He smiled gently at Shen Yuan in his usual big brotherly way.

"I thought I might ask him about it tomorrow," Shen Yuan said. Wei Qingwei was, after all, the guy who usually dealt with geodes, on top of all the smithing of tools a player could need.

"Hm," Qi Qingqi said. She was about to say more - something cutting, probably - when Liu Qingge came back from the arcade game in the corner, gleaming with sweat.

"Did you beat the high score?" Shen Yuan asked him.

"Getting there," Liu Qingge said. The top score had been set forever ago by some character who had never actually made it into the game itself, but Shen Yuan didn't doubt that Liu Qingge could unseat them eventually - though it might take him a decade or two.

"Ever heard of anyone finding haunted geodes in the mines, Qingge?" Qi Qingqi asked.

"Hm." Liu Qingge frowned thoughtfully into the middle distance. "No."

"What about cursed?" Shen Yuan asked.

Liu Qingge turned his frown on him now, his beautiful eyes sharpening.

Liu Qingge, have mercy!

"... No," he said. "Is that a concern?"

"Just being careful," Shen Yuan said.

"Hm." Liu Qingge did not look away from him.

"Qingqi, how are the horses doing?" Shen Yuan asked sweatily.

It was the right question to ask. Qi Qingqi immediately began to do a rundown of each animal, at turns disdainful and pleased, but always entertaining. More importantly, it distracted Liu Qingge, even if it did eventually (and inexplicably) lead them to arm wrestle.

"I think I'm going to turn in," Shen Yuan said, watching them.

"Sensible," Yue Qingyuan said from his side, mildly amused. "If there is any trouble with the geode, let me know. And…" He hesitated for a moment before continuing. "Xiao - Shen Qingqiu might know if there is historical precedent."

Ughhhhh.

"Sure," Shen Yuan said. "Thank you, Mayor Yue."

Then he slipped out the door.

It was dark outside, and quiet in the way that countryside towns were quiet - which was to say, quiet except for the sounds of insects and nearby animals and the wind blowing mournfully through the tall grass that bracketed the road that led out of town.

At this time of night, the place was deserted. Shen Yuan didn't usually mind it, but he felt suddenly like he was being watched.

"No thank you," he muttered, and sped up, power walking out toward the woods he needed to get through to get home.

The trees seemed larger in the dark. They swayed slightly in the wind, leaves and needles rustling, and cast the forest path into deep shadow.

One part of the shadows were deeper than the rest.

It looked like pure void expanding. Like the darkness was oozing, somehow - like it was bleeding, like the blood was congealing into an even purer absence of light. The trees on either side popped in and out of shape around it, pixels warped and flickering.

Absolutely the fuck not!

Shen Yuan turned to run

but it was already too late.

The darkness overtook him.

Chapter Text

TWO

Day 1 of Spring, Year 1

He woke up gasping on the forest floor.

The sky above was forget-me-not blue and bright enough that looking at it for too long was like a paper cut to the eye. Somewhere, a bird was singing.

Shakily, he pushed himself up. A pebble dug into the skin of his palm.

What happened last night?

There were leaves and pine needles in his hair, and the side of his neck ached from the way he had been laying. He didn’t have a hangover, but there was a sense of unease stuck like shrapnel under his ribs.

 He checked his bag. None of his potions had broken, which was good. All his things were accounted for, except one: No matter how deep he dug, he couldn’t find the geode. A quick search of his surroundings didn’t turn it up, either, though he kept finding pine needles in new and awkward places.

He took a deep breath.

He released it, slow and even.

Well! This was a bit too ominous to deal with right now, actually!

He turned tail and hurried back toward the tower.

It wasn’t running away. It was just - sensible to wait until later, when the pub was open. Maybe the geode had rolled out of his bag at some point and gotten lost under the table. Maybe Liu Qingge could help him look for it. Maybe he could even bother Yue Qingyuan about it.

(As long as Qi Qingqi never, ever found out, or he’d be hearing it until he was on his deathbed.)

Anyway, this whole “waking up in the woods” thing was really -

Weird.

Had he accidentally stayed out past the time when a player character would pass out? Of course, when he'd done that in the past, he had woken up back at the tower with a note from Yue Qingyuan or Liu Qingge, but…

Weird.

Unsettled, Shen Yuan made his way back to the tower. The calendar by the door read SPRING 1.

That was wrong. He knew that was wrong, because it had just been Spring 22.

"What the fuck," he muttered.

The flowers in the garden looked like they had yesterday, more or less. Some were a bit farther along - the fanged strawberries were starting to look snappy enough that he would probably need to harvest them soon.

So whatever glitch this was, it probably hadn't lost him anything. Hopefully it was just something to do with the calendar.

Carefully, he began unloading the travel bag. He was almost at the bottom of it when there was a knock at the door.

"Mister Wizard?" Ning Yingying called. She sounded a little out of breath.

Purple stinkvine. Right.

Shen Yuan curled one of the vines he had picked up into a plastic box and then went to open the door.

"Hello, Yingying," he said.

"How were the mines?" she asked.

"Oh, they were fine -"

"Someone's moving into the old farmhouse," Ning Yingying said, cutting him off before she could catch herself. "Sorry, it's just so exciting?"

What!

In Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way, the old farmhouse had belonged to the protagonist's grandfather. It had been given to them after his death, and they had moved to Heaven’s Valley from the city shortly afterwards. So if someone was moving in…

A protagonist? Now? What did that even mean?

Was there a person playing this version of the game now? Did that mean Shen Yuan would have to go back to playing the sage, reclusive wizard again?

Suddenly he had two sources of unease battling it out inside of him.

Have mercy on this old man, he only has so much room in him!

Anyway, he was probably being silly about it, getting this nervous about a person he hadn’t even met yet.

It would be fine.

It was probably going to be fine.

It was just -

If there was a protagonist, suddenly every action had a strange weight to it. Like if he could be observed by someone who was, by definition, not an npc, then - he could fuck up the game, somehow, by not behaving like he should.

The thought was terrifying! What if he corrupted the code somehow!

But - 

(He slapped his cheeks and blew out a hard breath)

hadn't he already had this conversation with himself, back when he decided to stop hanging out alone in the tower all the time? Wasn't that line of thought kind of stale?

And it wasn't as though the protagonist didn't develop a social link with the Wizard eventually! Who cared if their paths might cross a little early?

And! Anyway! Thinking about it, wasn't this kind of exciting?

The thing was, he already knew everything about everyone here. He had memorized every page of the wiki and updated most of them with extra information. But a protagonist - that was something new . A true blank slate! And there were so many ways to play Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way, which meant that, really, this new character had a lot of potential! It might even be fun, paying attention to their exploits.

A protagonist … and the narrative implications alone were <s>terrifying</s> fascinating enough, if you stopped to think about it, but the game mechanical ones … holy shit. He might get to drink real coffee soon. If the protagonist was properly motivated, Shen Yuan might not even have to go down in the mines again - or at least he would have the choice of getting someone else to fetch fancy herbs and spices from the lower levels of pixelated ecchi hell. Just a total game changer.

Of course, there was also the question of the person playing the game, if there was one. If someone outside of this world had made their way through character creation - if they had been isekaied like Shen Yuan had been - if they were watching all this from the other side of a computer screen, and Shen Yuan was in a game that was being played -

Thinking about it made his head hurt.

"Right?" Ning Yingying said. She seemed like she had been talking for a while.

… Whoops.

"Right," Shen Yuan said.

"Great!" Ning Yingying grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the tower. "Let's go!"

-

A small crowd of people were standing by the entrance to the old farm.

And in the middle -

The guy looked like a model.

He was slightly taller than Shen Yuan - and Shen Yuan, in this body, was tall - and his posture was immaculate. He was wearing a dark t-shirt and black jeans that looked as though they had been painted onto him, and a black bomber jacket with red and gold details. His hair was artfully tousled, the edges curling around his ears.

There was no other word for it: The protagonist was cool . Just looking at him made Shen Yuan feel like a garbage disposal full of forks. Like a malfunctioning robot; like an alien trying to parse human behaviour for the first time.

The protagonist was mid-conversation with Yue Qingyuan, but as Shen Yuan and Ning Yingying came closer, he looked up, eyes locking with Shen Yuan’s.

The sound dropped out of the world.

The protagonist had been smiling warmly at Yue Qingyuan, but now the expression slipped, leaving something flat and disdainful behind. His pupils were ragged pinpricks; his irises the colour of blood congealing.

Sometimes, down in the mines, Shen Yuan would find himself being stalked by something larger and deadlier than him. There was a feeling to it - the conspicuous silence, the chase, the confrontation. He knew what it felt like by now, being looked at by something that saw only prey.

Well, he was looking at it now, in the sunlight, feet frozen on the gravel path.

Then he blinked, and it was as though nothing had happened.

The protagonist’s eyes looked normal, in the sense that you could ever tell what someone’s eyes looked like at a distance.

Just a trick of the light.

Probably.

Probably.

Probably.

Shen Yuan swallowed, mouth dry.

"Sorry, Yingying," he said, "I have to go. I just remembered a potion I need to see to.”

-

He almost made it home.

He was climbing the hill up to the tower when a voice called out behind him.

"Excuse me," the protagonist said. Of course! Who else!

"Ah," Shen Yuan said. He turned around, willing his expression to not give away the epic freakout he was on the verge of having. "Hello. You must be the new farmer."

"I'm not much of a farmer," the protagonist said, with a rueful smile. He really was shockingly beautiful. The girls of Heaven’s Valley would be all over him in no time at all. "But yes. Luo Binghe."

He reached out a hand. It was broad, with long, elegant fingers.

Shen Yuan forced himself to stop staring and took it. Luo Binghe's skin felt at once too hot and too cold to the touch.

"Shen Yuan," Shen Yuan said. "Town wizard."

Luo Binghe glanced behind him, and his smile grew a little sharper. Amused. His eyes looked perfectly normal.

"And this is the wizard's tower?" he asked.

"Yes," Shen Yuan said. "Now, if you'll excuse me, this wizard has some urgent business he must attend to."

"Well," said Luo Binghe, still smiling. "Don't let me keep you. But maybe you want some company inside?"

"Mmm, it's not really fit for company, I'm afraid," Shen Yuan said. Luo Binghe looked as though he might argue, so (only mildly panicking) he shoved the stinkvine box into his hands. "Here - a housewarming gift."

"What -?"

"Don't worry about it!" Shen Yuan said, and fucked off at maximum speed.

-

It was possible he'd overreacted.

He kept turning it over in his mind. Maybe he had only imagined it! Maybe everything was just fine, and he had just been rude to the extremely handsome protagonist who was making a polite effort to seek him out. Because, what, he had some leftover anxiety from this morning? Like a reactive dog after a beating, lashing out without understanding the source of the pain?

Maybe -

In the end, there were two options - either something was wrong about Luo Binghe, or Shen Yuan had just made an ass of himself in front of him.

Really, none of those were ideal!

Anyway, there were things he needed to do. He was running a bit low on mushrooms. It was maybe not acute, but if he didn’t deal with it soon, he might risk running out of something!

That was the life of a Heaven’s Valley wizard: Stores were somehow always running low on something , so you were always a couple of days away from some kind of gathering quest.

So: Shen Yuan packed a bag and went foraging in the mushroom fields of the Shadowcrest Mountains.

The mushroom fields were part of a dlc pack that allowed players to visit a handful of different areas outside of the main map. It also unlocked camping, but only in those specific areas, and only for players who had previously bought a tent.

Shen Yuan had one, obviously.

Spring wasn't exactly high season for mushroom foraging, but he was still able to find a good crop of starry death caps, their bioluminescent gills glowing beneath their dark, jelly-like caps, as well as some morels . In spring, the mountain was host to a number of other plants, too. He was able to harvest enough lockleaf to fill his stores for a very long time, for one. A cluster of banshee's breath bloomed right next to his tent, their white starburst heads swaying when he walked past them.

He stayed there for a week. That should be enough time to let the protagonist forget about him, right? The tower was out of the way, after all, and Shen Yuan really didn't have a lot of things to offer lower level players. And he couldn’t have made that much of an impression, right? All he’d done was be antisocial and give the guy a weird housewarming gift. With all hope, the protagonist had slotted him into the role of “reclusive eccentric” in his mind.

Besides, there were so many other npcs around! Several of them had involved storylines and cute date events! Sure, the events were emotionally flat and poorly written, but that didn't mean a player couldn't enjoy them! Surely the protagonist would have gotten caught up in it with someone by now!

Anyway, there was a limit to how much stuff he could take home with him, and walking around with nothing to talk to but the same four mushroom spawning spots all day was getting repetitive.

Not to put too fine a point on it: He woke up one morning and thought that if he had to go root around in the mushrooms again, he would erode away into a fine ash and be carried away on the northern winds. He was bored to tears.

And (he realised with a stab of guilt) he’d completely forgotten to ask around about the geode, which meant that that was another part of his to do-list, too, on top of anything the villagers might be needing of potions and sundries.

And …

He didn’t want to admit it. He really didn’t want to, but there was a thought that kept wriggling its way out into the open whenever he was about to fall asleep. It hung around past its bedtime, radiating a feeling that oscillated somewhere between queasy, uneasy, and (increasingly, horrifyingly) excitement: What’s the protagonist up to?

Day 8 of Spring, Year 1

Shen Yuan came back to town late in the day. The setting sun painted the cobbled streets of Heaven’s Valley in shades of pale orange, sparking off street signs and windows like the glint off the edge of a knife. After the mushroom fields, everything looked weirdly desaturated, like some of the colour had been leached out of the environment. Even though it was already well into Spring, there was a cold wind blowing.

Shen Yuan tugged at the collar of his coat. He didn't want to have come all this way just to spend more time sitting alone in the tower, which meant there was only one thing to do. 

He went to the Heaven's Harvest Saloon.

Inside, the place was as crammed with people as it always was, though the mood seemed somewhat subdued. Shen Yuan ordered a plate of fiddlehead fern salad and sat down next to Qi Qingqi, who was half-falling asleep in the corner.

"What did I miss?" he asked.

She blinked sleepily at him a couple of times before sitting up a little straighter.

"Shen Qingqiu was looking for you the other day," she said, stifling a yawn with her hand. The motion caused the sleeve of her jacket to slip a little, revealing the edge of a livid bruise on the inside of her wrist. "Something about archival supplies?"

Fuck.

"Ah," Shen Yuan said. Shen Qingqiu was the town's librarian and record keeper, an artist, and generally kind of an asshole. On the third day of every season, Shen Yuan stopped by the library with a delivery of archival glue (well. Three jars of wheat paste and three jars of a potion made from the sap of the everstick tree) along with a couple of rare finds from the mines (made up of weird bullshit Shen Yuan had found there and had no use for) that went to the library museum.

Technically, Shen Yuan had already done it this Spring. He just hadn't factored in the calendar glitch - it must have messed things up somehow.

Qi Qingqi smirked at him.

"Don't worry," she said, "I'm sure he won't hold it against you."

Shen Yuan rolled his eyes. "We both know that's a lie."

"Yeah, he's been fuming for days," Qi Qingqi said. "Where did you run off to, anyway?"

"Shadowcrest," Shen Yuan said. He stabbed at a fern. "Not very exciting."

"Hope you found some nice plants, at least," Qi Qingqi said, and then sighed long-sufferingly. "The only exciting thing going on here is whatever the new guy is up to, apparently."

This would have been an excellent excuse to fish for more information. It would have been, but of course that was the exact moment when the protagonist stepped inside the saloon.

He looked just as handsome as he had the last time Shen Yuan had seen him. His skin was like fine jade; there was a gentle smile on his lips. He wore a dark red sweater with a neckline that exposed the sharp lines of his collar bones.

Surely all the girls in town were already throwing themselves at him?? Standing there by the door, he seemed lit from within. Everything surrounding him was just a little more grey in comparison. Looking at him like this, it was easy to forget how his face had looked back when Shen Yuan first saw him.

The protagonist's eyes slid across the room.

Inevitably, they fell on Shen Yuan.

Shen Yuan turned casually back to his plate. He nonchalantly ate some rice.

A hand landed on the table next to him.

"Shen Yuan," Luo Binghe said, voice velvet soft. The line of his body brushed against Shen Yuan's side as he sat down in the chair next to him. "Where have you been hiding?"

He was smiling, technically. Physically, that was definitely what his mouth was doing.

His eyes, though …

Scary!

Who was he kidding, “he probably imagined it”? Luo Binghe was obviously some kind of serial killer!

"The mountains here have much worth foraging," Shen Yuan said vaguely, projecting all the mysterious serenity of a wise old sage npc to the best of his ability. "How are you settling in, Luo Binghe?"

"It's been a challenge," Luo Binghe said, casting his eyes modestly downward, "but the first spring harvest was good. If you need any potatoes, gege, let me know."

Then he looked up, all doe eyes and long lashes, and gave another smile - charming and warm, now, but somehow his teeth were -

"I'll let you know," Shen Yuan said. "And of course, if you need any help -"

"Ah," Luo Binghe said, still soft in a way that only brought more attention to his mouth, the way it wasn't, "I do, actually. My strawberries seem to be drooping more than they should. I'm wondering if it's a soil issue. If you wouldn't mind, maybe you could take a quick look at it for me tonight?"

Shen Yuan's life (well, lives,) passed briefly in front of his eyes, and then slithered icily down his back. On the other side of him, Qi Qingqi was choking on her wine.

"Wouldn't daytime be better?" he asked.

"I wouldn't want to impose," Luo Binghe said.

I'm sorry, what do you think it is you're doing right now??

"Besides," Luo Binghe continued, "it's on your way, isn't it?"

-

Regrettably, it was.

Despite only having been around for eight days, Luo Binghe had already done a lot of work at the farm. The house looked fully renovated. Even in the dark, the fresh paint seemed to shine. Slightly past the house, vegetables and berries had been planted in neat, even rows.

It was all impossibly well done for the time he’d had to do it in! There was no way Luo Binghe could afford getting this far along into the gameplay already!

Was he using cheat codes somehow??

"Do you like it, gege?" Luo Binghe asked from behind him.

Who's your gege?!

"Just Shen Yuan is fine," Shen Yuan said, and then winced at how curt it sounded. "You've done a lot of good work in a short amount of time. It's very impressive."

"Thank you, Shen Yuan," Luo Binghe said. His voice was as dark as the night around them, and closer than Shen Yuan had expected it to be. He could feel Luo Binghe’s breath hot at the base of his neck.

"It's the truth," Shen Yuan said, shifting awkwardly on his feet. "Now where are the strawberries you were talking about?"

"I'll show you," Luo Binghe said, leading him farther into the garden. Now that the protagonist was no longer actively breathing on him, the back of Shen Yuan's neck felt staticky with the air of the cool spring night with the absence.

There was a small bed of strawberries behind Luo Binghe's house, framed by a couple of young loquat trees.

… Young, but too far along the growth cycle for Spring 8. The branches were weighed down by clusters of fruit that looked sunshine yellow even in the dark.

"Do you like them?" Luo Binghe asked.

"They're very impressive," Shen Yuan said.

Luo Binghe turned back toward him and smiled. The moonlight really worked to his advantage, bouncing off his flawless skin and perfectly sculpted cheekbones like an overpowered instagram filter. The smile was good, too - not too proud, but not too shy, either. Handsome. 

Shen Yuan was increasingly and hopefully irrationally sure he was about to get American Psychoed.

He choked it down. "So the strawberries?"

Luo Binghe … pouted, just a little.

"Yes," he said. "I'm not sure what's wrong with them."

Shen Yuan bent down by the bed, carefully running a hand along the underside of a leaf.

Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way did not have a particularly intricate pest system, but it did have one. Mostly players had to deal with one of two plant diseases at some point: white leaf rot or soilchoke. The leaves of the protagonist's strawberry plants seemed fine, which ruled out the first. Then: The soil around the roots, when he touched it, was clumped and tacky, clinging to the pads of his fingers even as he pulled away.

"You're dealing with soilchoke," he said, getting to his feet. "It's a fungus that messes with soil composition, makes it clump and stick together. You're lucky to have caught it early - if you give it time, it starves out the roots and kills the plant."

"How do I fix it?" Luo Binghe asked.

"Bonemeal," Shen Yuan said, "if you want to grind skeletons in the mines. If not, evaporated milk will do in a pinch."

Luo Binghe thanked him. Shen Yuan told him it was no trouble and turned to leave.

The protagonist's hand landed on his shoulder. His fingers dug into the skin beneath Shen Yuan's collarbone.

Then he turned him back around and slammed him up against the wall of his house with a force that left Shen Yuan gasping.

Fuck! He really was going to get murdered!

"Now," said Luo Binghe, soft like snow and twice as cold, "I just need you to do me one more favour-"

Then he leaned in and put his mouth on the side of Shen Yuan's neck.

WTF???

"???" Shen Yuan said eloquently. Luo Binghe's mouth was warm and wet and shockingly soft against his skin and then -

There was a sharp, stinging pain that turned searing, turned freezing, turned -

Blooming strange and vivid into something else, like he was melting, like he was dying, like he was coming alive -

Above the moon was bright like a floodlight, and he was caught in it and he was caught in the jaws of some - one, his vision was tunneling and breaking up into the black and white fuzz of an old tv with poor reception, the light narrowing to a coin, a fingernail, a pinprick, and somehow in the middle of it all he found it in himself to think:

What kind of Twilight shit is this?!

Then the thought smeared back into nothing, along with everything else

Chapter Text

THREE

Day 9 of Spring, Year 1

He jolted awake, gasping violently on his own doorstep. A quick search of himself and his surroundings revealed:

• No note from Liu Qingge or Yue Qingyuan
• No memory of anything after talking to Qi Qingqi at the bar
• The fingers on one of his hands were crusted with dirt
• His neck ached
• A monster headache

Normally he might have chalked it up to an unfortunate meeting with a magic plant or something, but if he'd woken up like this twice in less than two weeks -

What the fuck!! Was this going to be a thing now?

Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way didn't have any health conditions baked in beyond the extremely direct (for example, being on fire), so it was unlikely to be a disease, anyway. Unless someone had patched in "sleepwalking" or "wizard amnesia", but that didn't seem super likely, just from a "player value" point of view. This wasn’t Heavy Rain. Half-baked amnesia-based mystery wasn’t a selling point in a farming sim!

So what was going on? Was this another glitch? He couldn’t remember encountering any up until the thing with the calendar, so if this was a glitch - maybe even a related one somehow? - that was not ideal. But what were the odds? Really, thinking about it, it seemed more likely that some kind of plant or mushroom with memory inhibiting properties had taken root somewhere on the way between the town and the tower.

Right? He must have passed through the same way at around the same time both times, so it seemed at least within the realms of possibility.

At the very least it was worth investigating.

He shook himself and shoved his suspicions to the back of his mind. Then he got up. Despite having slept on the ground, he didn't feel too achy, which was at least a relief. Everything looked just fine when he checked on the garden, and both the outside and inside of his house was, as far as he could tell, thankfully untouched.

Anyway, he had things to do!

Shen Qingqiu would no doubt come up and harangue him if he found out that Shen Yuan had come back without dealing with his order, anyway. He sighed (deeply, aggrieved, put upon,) and got out the flour to make some wheat paste.

Everstick was more straightforward - you put a spigot in an everstick tree for the sap or wrung out the roots, depending on what qualities you wanted, and then boiled the shit out of the liquid you ended up with for the next eight hours. It was tedious, but you couldn't really fuck it up unless you tried really, really hard, and once the glue was done it stayed good until the end of time as long as the container you put it in was sealed.

Wheat paste wasn't difficult, but it was more finicky, and it spoiled pretty quickly. Shen Yuan made it fresh before every delivery, which mostly consisted of a lot of carefully watching a pot full of slurry and then furious whisking and straining when the time was right. Shen Qingqiu used it for repairing old books that needed more careful handling, and he never seemed to be running out of those.

So. Boiling, whisking, adding a couple of drops of sandalwood oil to keep any nearby silverfish away, letting it cool down, bottling the finished product.

It took him a while to get it all together. He wasn't sure when he'd woken up, but it was past noon by the time he got out of the door. It was even later when he finally made it to the library.

The building looked fairly unassuming on the outside - a grey brick rectangle with tall, narrow windows - but somehow going inside always made him feel like he was going to fight a dragon under a mountain in a fantasy story.

It just felt cavernous . The ceiling was unexpectedly high, and the main room was unexpectedly dark, and Shen Qingqiu was sitting by his giant mahogany desk in the middle of it all and scowling.

"Shen Yuan," he said, voice dripping with poison. He looked a bit paler than usual.

"Shen Qingqiu," Shen Yuan said, smooth and even despite the fact that he was definitely about to be murdered for dereliction of duty. "I brought your order."

"Several days late," Shen Qingqiu said.

"My apologies," Shen Yuan said, because "I was literally just here before the world glitched out" was probably not going to fly.

"I had an emergency shortage of ingredients," he said instead.

Shen Qingqiu fixed him with a flat, unimpressed stare.

Shen Yuan met it with mysterious inscrutability, channeling his best Gandalf impression.

…

…

…

Shen Qingqiu broke first, proving once again that wizard bullshit really was the stuff of miracles.

"Put the order on the usual shelf," he grumbled.

Sure.

When Shen Yuan came back, Shen Qingqiu handed him a cup of tea and sat down expectantly.

The thing about Shen Qingqiu was -

Well, one thing about Shen Qingqiu was that he really, really strongly resembled the Wizard. Their hair styles were different, sure, and they dressed differently, and the Wizard wore glasses, but their portraits in player dialogue sections were clearly based on the same template, like any two 3D animated Disney princesses. Sure, nothing was ever made explicit, but the fan theories were clear: those guys had to be related, right?

In his current life, Shen Yuan had been too afraid to ask.

Shen Qingqiu always seemed to treat him just a hair more kindly than the other villagers, though.

Which led to the second thing: While Shen Qingqiu generally came off as anything between "aloof" and "stone cold bastard", the truth was that he also loved to complain, if only under a few very specific circumstances.

In other words: It was time for Petty Bitch Gossip Hour.

They passed some pleasantries between each other and sipped their tea.

Then, after he seemed to feel they'd gotten warmed up enough, Shen Qingqiu pursed his mouth.

"The new farmer seems to be keeping busy," he said, and then sipped judgmentally.

The memory of those ragged starburst pupils rose in Shen Yuan's mind. He rubbed at his neck, suppressing a shiver.

"Is that so?" he asked. "I haven't had the time to stop by since the day he moved in."

"Did you speak with him?" Shen Qingqiu asked.

"Only a little bit," Shen Yuan said. "I'm sure he won't want much to do with an old man like me."

"For your own sake," Shen Qingqiu said primly, "I hope you're right."

"Really?"

"Trust me," Shen Qingqiu said, his face a kaleidoscope of disgust, "I know a beast when I see one. That man will be nothing but trouble."

Shen Yuan could not make himself disagree. He hmmed noncommittally. “Did you speak with him?”

“Only in passing,” Shen Qingqiu said. “It was a trying experience.”

“Mn,” Shen Yuan said. He took another sip of tea. It was, of course, high quality and immaculately brewed. Shen Yuan could never tell how Shen Qingqiu had gotten his hands on a tea stash like that, but he refused to share outside of their meetings, so Shen Yuan was exploiting it for what it was worth.

“You know,” he said, gently changing the subject, “I found a red geode in the green zone of the mines the other day.”

“Do I look like Wei Qingwei to you?” Shen Qingqiu asked pleasantly.

Why don’t you just tell me to fuck off straight out, Shen-ge??

“Something was wrong with it,” Shen Yuan pressed. “I suspect it may have been cursed, and the next morning, it was missing. Have you read any stories about anything like that?”

“Hardly,” Shen Qingqiu said, and then paused before speaking again: “But as it happens, I will be doing some related research this week. If you would deign to come by the library again so soon, perhaps there may be some relevant information for you.”

“I’ll make time,” Shen Yuan said. “Thank you.”

Shen Qingqiu bristled. “It’s not for you.”

“Of course,” Shen Yuan said.

The topic of their conversation changed soon enough, running like a river, dipping in eddies around the other inhabitants of the town. (Whenever Yue Qingyuan came up, Shen Qingqiu would stonewall him before hurriedly complaining about something else, so Shen Yuan made sure he came up a couple of times.)

Before he knew it, they were out of tea and Shen Qingqiu was packing away the cups. They said goodbye (this part was always a little awkward, their arms stiffly at their sides and no acknowledgement of any next time, like this only happened by chance) and Shen Yuan turned to go home.

But first: a little investigation.

He stopped by the Heaven’s Harvest Saloon to ask if anyone had seen the geode, which was still missing, but no-one there had seen it.

He found that he’d almost been expecting it.

Anyway: It seemed like another thing that could probably be marked up to a glitch. Why else would it disappear into thin air?

With a sigh, he set off toward the tower.

The woods were darker than he would like already. Insects buzzed and hummed between the trees, all woken up after the winter. As he walked, he squinted at the foliage along the side of the forest path.

None of them seemed new or unfamiliar.

There were no unusual animal tracks, either; everything looked exactly the same as it usually did in spring.

The trees were whispering in the wind, their branches stretching out like fingers.

Above, the moon was a cold white coin.

He got home. He fell asleep in his own bed. He dreamed about -

Day 10 of Spring, Year 1

Anyway: he was running out of amber filigree slime. It wasn't something he needed too often, but it was the key ingredient in a couple of the gentler acid potions he liked to keep in stock. Wei Qingwei asked for them pretty frequently, too. His stores were still decently stocked when Shen Yuan checked in with him, but you never knew - suddenly there was some kind of sword emergency, and Wei Qingwei might need a lot of it all at once.

He had never heard of any cursed geodes being found in the mines before, but promised to take a look at it if it turned back up.

Shen Yuan was warming up to the idea of chalking it up to another glitch.

But there was still the filigree acid to deal with.

Thankfully, it wasn't too much effort to badger Qi Qingqi into letting him catch a ride in her beat up van into the desert.

(The bottle of golden starberry wine he gave her in return definitely helped.)

Qi Qingqi drove, and picked the music, which turned out not to be music at all, but a gossipy podcast about the hit reality show Love among the Lotus . They spent most of the drive arguing with the podcasters, but that was part of the fun.

After an hour’s drive down increasingly dusty roads, they parked outside of The Mirage. At night, the casino was a teardrop-shaped spectacle of coloured lights and large windows that faced out towards the desert itself. In the daylight, it was slightly less of a spectacle, but not much.

Qi Qingqi locked the car and left him in the dust, heading for the entrance.

“Try not to die,” she called over her shoulder.

“Try not to lose all your money,” he called back at her. She laughed like it was a joke, but then again, she never seemed to lose any money whenever they came here. Shen Yuan was never sure if it was luck or skill, or the fact that she was on a first name basis with the owner, Madame Meiyin. To be honest, he was a bit afraid to ask.

He hung around for a bit, even after she’d gone into the building. It was hot enough outside already that he didn’t want to stick around for too long before going down to the caves, but the view from up on the ridge was always breathtaking: The sand dunes, stretching out all the way to the vanishing point, blending into the sky.

-

He spent the day fighting through a few strategic levels of the desert caves, and then met up with Qi Qingqi for the drive back and a truly regrettable gas station hot dog. By the time he got back to the tower, he was so exhausted he could barely get to bed without his boots still on. He was too tired to even dream.

Day 11 of Spring, Year 1

The amber filigree slime had to be processed within the first forty eight hours of harvesting. If it wasn't, it would harden until it gained the consistency of, well, amber, and lost all its acidic properties.

Obviously Shen Yuan wasn’t going to let that happen.

He got started early, breaking down globs of slime into a glass pot (covered, to keep the fumes in). He worked in batches, heating the pot until the slime melted into a liquid and then gradually adding more water, careful not to shock the mixture by messing with the temperature too much. Then one part blue cave slug extract per pot, stir until evenly distributed, leave to sit at just below a simmer for forty minutes. Carefully decant into smaller, sterilized flasks. Rinse and repeat until you fall over.

He had just stirred the slug extract into the third batch when there was a knock on the door.

Luo Binghe was standing outside.

He was holding a familiar looking plastic box.

Shen Yuan shut the door on him.

Then, with trepidation, he opened it again.

"Can I help you?" he asked, affecting his best Untouchable Wizard voice. Hopefully the thing with the door didn't retract from it too much.

"I just came to return your box," Luo Binghe said. He was smiling.

"Ah, yes," Shen Yuan said, "thank you."

Luo Binghe did not hand it over. Instead, he leaned forward and said: "May I come inside?"

Shen Yuan stared at him. Absolutely not!

Luo Binghe shifted on his feet. His eyes went wide and earnest.

"... I suppose," Shen Yuan said, stepping aside.

Luo Binghe entered the tower respectfully, and then looked around the main room … less respectfully.

His presence seemed to make the clutter more visible: The piles of books on every flat surface; the sheafs of paper stuffed into every crack of free shelf space. The dust Shen Yuan had neglected to sweep for a while felt suddenly outlined in neon.

Shen Yuan bristled. He was a busy guy! So sue him!

"I'm working on some projects at the moment," he said primly.

Luo Binghe put the box down on a clear spot on Shen Yuan's dining table, carefully (pointedly) avoiding jostling any of Shen Yuan's book-and-paper piles, the filled and corked bottles of filigree acid.

He looked tired, Shen Yuan realised with a start. Inside the tower, the shadows under his eyes became more pronounced. His skin was pale. There was a thinness to him, like a sheet of paper held up against a sunlit window.

What was going on with him? Was he not eating enough? How many hours a day did he spend working out on that farm of his?

"What are they?" Luo Binghe asked. "I would love to hear more about them."

It was impossible to tell from his expression if he was sincere or if he was taking the piss.

"Well," Shen Yuan said. He drew himself up haughtily and launched into a detailed breakdown of the properties of filigree slimes. If Luo Binghe was asking to be an asshole, then that was too bad for him.

He seemed to be listening, anyway. He kept at least seeming to be listening, and making thoughtful little sounds, and asking clever, insightful questions in all the right places, for the next thirty minutes and change, when the kitchen timer went off.

"Oh," Shen Yuan said. He felt - embarrassed. Disarmed, somehow, by Luo Binghe's full attention. "Sorry, I have to -"

"Is there anything I can do to help?" Luo Binghe asked.

Shen Yuan considered it. The acid wasn't very strong, even if something were to go wrong, and besides, Luo Binghe was the protagonist, wasn't he? So he could probably do most things at least halfway well, even without a level in potion making or acid refining or whatever the hell this counted as.

"The acid needs to be decanted," he said, gesturing vaguely at the prepped flasks on the counter. "The flasks should be filled to about the three quarter mark. There will be some sediment at the bottom of the pot that needs to be discarded, so make sure to avoid getting that in there."

Luo Binghe nodded, smoothly moving past him to the pot. The back of his hand brushed Shen Yuan's side as he went. Then he lifted the pot and began to pour. Shen Yuan watched him until he was sure Luo Binghe wasn't fucking it up ("very good, Binghe," he murmured absentmindedly,) and then began to prep the next batch of slime, talking aimlessly about what it usually ended up getting used for.

Once the slug extract had been added to the next batch, he took a step back. Luo Binghe was watching him with a strange expression on his face.

To be fair, “strange” made up most of Luo Binghe's expressions when looking at Shen Yuan so far, but this was a different variation on the theme than his usual looks.

Shen Yuan didn't know what to do with it.

"Are you hungry?" Luo Binghe asked. The question came seemingly out of nowhere, but now that Shen Yuan thought about it, he realised he hadn't actually eaten anything today.

"... Are you? " Normally he would just get himself a ready-made sandwich or some ramen, but he didn't really have enough for two. If Luo Binghe was subtly hinting about getting compensation for his acid pouring in the form of a free lunch, he was going to be pretty disappointed.

"I'll eat something later," Luo Binghe said vaguely. "But I brought you lunch."

He went over to the box at the table and opened it. Shen Yuan flinched preemptively for the ghost of the stinkvine that had been in it earlier, but no unholy stench was released from the container. This was pretty much a miraculous feat by itself, as the smell produced by the purple stinkvine had some real staying power, but Shen Yuan was surprised to find that whatever was in the box … smelled pretty good, actually.

"It's not hot anymore," Luo Binghe said apologetically. "I would borrow your stovetop, but…"

"Bad idea to mix food with acid, yes." Shen Yuan came over and peered into the box. It looked like some kind of stew, with neatly arranged vegetables and meat all lined up next to a beautifully fluffed square of rice. "I'm sure it will taste good even if it's cold."

"Mm," said Luo Binghe doubtfully.

"It looks delicious," Shen Yuan said. He still couldn't help feeling somewhat suspicious. Like Luo Binghe might have hidden a live snake in there or something. "Are you sure you don't want any?"

"It's just one portion," Luo Binghe said. 

Then why are you offering it to me??

Still: Luo Binghe insisted. They sat down together at the table.

Self-consciously, awkwardly, Shen Yuan got a fork and then dug in.

It was delicious, even when cold. The flavours were perfectly balanced, savoury and salty with the faintest touch of something sweet, just to round it out. Shen Yuan found he could not make himself stop eating.

What was in this, cocaine?? Had Luo Binghe really maxed out his cooking skills this quickly??? The protagonist really was too powerful!

Finally, Shen Yuan put down the fork. It was all he could do not to lick the sauce that remained at the bottom of the container.

"Thank you for the food," he said, too aware of himself again. "It was good."

Luo Binghe was watching him again, too. There was an unsettling hunger in his eyes.

If you wanted some food, you could have just said so!

"I'm glad," Luo Binghe said, voice dark and velvet-smooth. He got up from his chair. It made him loom over Shen Yuan - even under the lamp, with the daylight slanting in through the windows, his shadow seemed as deep as midnight.

Oh fuck.

Shen Yuan's throat dried up.

"You know," Luo Binghe said, casual except for the way that darkness still threaded through it like an undercurrent, "I am a little hungry."

"I have instant ramen," Shen Yuan said.

Luo Binghe's face scrunched up in disgust. It was honestly … a little cute?? 

"No," he said. His face smoothed out again. "I can think of something better."

Then he ran his fingers up the side of Shen Yuan's throat. His touch was light, and his hands were smooth and gentle, untouched by the calluses that normally came with farm work.

Shen Yuan shivered.

"Uh," he said.

WHAT??

What kind of game had Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way turned into???

Luo Binghe leaned down. The pupils of his eyes were huge and blown out, ragged and barely outlined in red.

"Don't worry," he said. His breath was hot on Shen Yuan's mouth, whose lips parted unintentionally. Luo Binghe’s eyes tracked the movement, and then flicked away. "I'll be careful."

Then his mouth was on Shen Yuan's throat, opening up, and then he was biting down, and it felt like

It felt like

Like slime melting in a warm pot, like his heart was in his mouth, like something blooming open

Like

Like he

Something shattered. The skin of his ankle was stinging singing burning and he -

Came back to himself with a gasp, like last time, like the time before that, but Luo Binghe was still here this time, teeth sharp in Shen Yuan's neck.

"You're a vampire? " he yelled, unable to help himself, because what the fuck , Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way did not have those, and then became hyper aware of the sharp teeth in his neck that probably should not be jostled too much beyond being removed right the fuck now -

Luo Binghe moved away before he could start hitting him, which was at least something. He stared at Shen Yuan, wild-eyed and open-mouthed. His canines were long and sharp until they - weren't. Not like fangs retracting. More like two pictures, one after the other, spot the difference.

The blood stayed behind, though. Shen Yuan's blood, Luo Binghe's mouth wet with it, dripping down the sides of his chin.

The protagonist? A messy eater?

For some reason, the thought made him laugh, high-pitched and awful. Luo Binghe startled, wide-eyed like some weird, carnivorous forest animal.

"Yuan-ge, I'm sorry," he said. His voice shook a little. There was a broken bottle of filigree acid at their feet. There was blood on his teeth. There was blood coating the inside of his mouth.

That’s mine, Shen Yuan thought.

He couldn't seem to stop laughing. He remembered, now, his hands caked with dirt from Luo Binghe's strawberry patch, his back against the back wall of Luo Binghe's house. It felt like riding a faulty bike down a tall hill, wild and off-kilter.

He was going absolutely fucking apeshit.

"Get out," he said. There were tears in his eyes. His stomach hurt from laughing.

"I -" Luo Binghe said, but Shen Yuan didn't want to hear it. He swatted at Luo Binghe's shoulder.

"Get out!" he repeated. "You're going to get out and stay away from me!"

Luo Binghe hesitated. He eyed the side of Shen Yuan's neck. "Let me patch -"

"I think you've done enough today," Shen Yuan said.

What was the deal with vampires again? Wasn't it, wasn’t there - right.

He said, voice clear and even: "I uninvite you! You are uninvited from this fucking house!"

Luo Binghe went mannequin still.

Without another word, he stood up and left, closing the door quietly behind him.

Shen Yuan stared at it for a while. Then he got up. He swept up the glass and wiped away the acid from the floorboards. It had already begun to eat into them, making delicate, long-lined patterns in the wood. Belatedly, he realized that the puncture wounds on his neck were still sluggishly bleeding.

He slapped some bandaids on them.

The timer on the stove went off.

He went to decant more acid.

Chapter Text

FOUR

Day 14 of Spring, Year 1

He felt too awkward to mention it in the aftermath. Instead he covered himself and anyone who would stop for long enough in garlic and plastered protection spells on every house in town. Whenever anyone complained about sore muscles, he pestered them to let him look at the affected area, just in case, though he didn't find bite marks. Most of them complied in different states of a- or bemusement, except for Liu Qingge, who immediately excused himself, and Shen Qingqiu, who shot Shen Yuan a look so poisonous he genuinely feared for his life.

For another reason. Of course. Because he already feared for his life. There was a vampire in town, and that vampire had been caught in the act drinking his blood.

Of course he was scared of finding himself in a situation like that again.

Wasn’t he?

Was -

Well, he was. Obviously.

Even if Luo Binghe had looked so much less frightening when it happened than he had first appeared. It would be stupid to not be scared.

It was a moot point, anyway, because in the days after he had uninvited him, Shen Yuan hadn’t seen so much as his shadow.

Instead, his dreams were filled with him: Luo Binghe’s eyes, round and red like strange gemstones, pleading; Luo Binghe’s back just turning the next corner, ducking out of sight; Luo Binghe’s mouth on -

Anyway, what could he do? Even if Luo Binghe was dangerous - you couldn't boot out the protagonist from the game! That wasn't how it worked.

Also, (horrifyingly,) he couldn't stop thinking about the look on his face right before Shen Yuan told him to leave, mouth still red and sticky with blood.

He had looked so sad.

It shouldn't matter.

What did it matter, if a vampire was upset about getting caught with his hand in the Shen Yuan-shaped cookie jar? Don't eat people in the first place!

Besides, with a face like that, all he would have to do was ask and surely any of the women in town would fall over themselves to agree.

Now Shen Yuan was seeing him for the first time since he had uninvited him from the tower. It was the fourteenth of Spring, which meant (of course) that it was Love Festival day, which was (of course ) mandatory for npcs.

Not that anyone would ever say so. You just kind of found yourself in the area where the celebration was happening the moment you stepped out of the door.

Now Shen Yuan was standing next to Qi Qingqi and Shen Qingqiu (who, as usual, was dealing with this particular holiday with all the grace of a feral cat in a tub of water), watching the town's eligible bachelors and bachelorettes mill around each other. Yue Qingyuan gave a little speech. It was pretty good, which made Shen Qingqiu mutter furiously under his breath.

That part was pretty funny, at least.

Of course, Shen Yuan would probably find it more funny if Luo Binghe wasn't also here, standing very close to Ning Yingying and laughing way too charmingly.

Please stay safe, Ning Yingying!

"To be honest," Qi Qingqi said, eyeing Ming Fan jealously eye the way Luo Binghe was smiling at Ning Yingying, "I would rather be at The Mirage right now."

"I'm sure you would," Shen Qingqiu said, voice dripping with disdain.

Luo Binghe was taking Ning Yingying's hand. She said something that made him laugh again, and he looked up, his bright eyes briefly skimming over the spot where Shen Yuan was standing. Then he leaned in close and whispered something into Ning Yingying's ear. Her hair was done up and her neck was incredibly open for vampire biting.

Before he could stop to consider it, Shen Yuan was marching over there.

"Luo Binghe," he said. "A word?"

"Of course," Luo Binghe said, smiling. He stepped away from Ning Yingying without another word, following Shen Yuan to the outer boundary of the festival space, in the shadow of a tall fence, thick with blooming jasmine. "What is it?"

“Stay away from her,” Shen Yuan snapped.

The smile took on a decidedly smug quality. “Why, are you jealous? ”

Wow.

With heroic effort, Shen Yuan lowered his voice.

“No, you asshole, ” he hissed, “I’m trying to keep you from drinking her blood?? ”

Luo Binghe - pouted. That was pouting! His eyes went huge and shining with - with limpid tears and everything!

Illegal!!

“Does Yuan-ge want me to starve to death?” Luo Binghe asked pitifully. If he wasn’t planning to Dracula Ning Yingying, it would have been harder to not be a little swayed by it.

Shen Yuan pinched the bridge of his nose. He could already feel the beginnings of a tension headache coming on.

“All I want,” he said, as even and measured as he could manage, “is to keep my friends safe.”

“I see,” Luo Binghe said. The pitiful look slipped off his face like hot butter, leaving nothing but cast iron behind.

Fuck! He was going to get super murdered by this guy! For real this time!

“Do you?” Shen Yuan asked.

Luo Binghe gave him a dark smile. “If you don’t want any of your friends to get hurt, why don’t you offer up some collateral?”

Collateral??

“I’ll show you collateral,” Shen Yuan said. He pulled a clove of garlic out of one of his pouches and flung it at Luo Binghe.

The clove hit him right in the middle of the forehead with an audible pok! before falling sadly to the ground. It bounced once before settling.

Luo Binghe stared at the clove for a single, frozen moment.

Then he turned on his heel, storming off into the dark.

-

Shen Yuan went back to the party, but the whole interaction had him off-kilter. How could Luo Binghe just come to the festival and expect -

Well -

When he knew that Shen Yuan knew what he was up to! Did he think a few days of nothing had wiped the slate clean? Did he really think -

It was hard to keep track of his thoughts; he felt like he was playing Jenga with his brain and losing.

“I told you that man was trouble,” Shen Qingqiu said from behind him. Shen Yuan hadn’t noticed him standing there.

“It’s fine,” Shen Yuan said.

“Hm.” Shen Qingqiu wasn’t looking at him. “If you need him taken care of…”

“I don’t think you could get away with that,” Shen Yuan said. “Everyone knows you hate him.”

“Don’t worry,” Shen Qingqiu said. “No-one would ever find the body. Everyone would think he simply got bored and left.”

The sentiment was strangely heartwarming, coming from this guy.

“I really am fine,” Shen Yuan said. “Just tired.”

“Hm.”

“I suppose I should go get some sleep,” Shen Yuan said. Then he hesitated. “I know you’re -”

“No,” Shen Qingqiu said, cutting him off before he could really get started. “Go home and leave me here to suffer in peace.”

-

He didn’t go home.

Instead, he found himself at Luo Binghe’s doorstep. It was dark already, but the porchlight lit up the evening, outlining everything in gold. Insects hummed in the distance.

Everything looked the same as the last time he had been here.

Everything looked different.

Shen Yuan should probably leave.

He knocked on the door instead.

There was a pause, and then Luo Binghe was standing in the doorway. His curls spilled out into the evening air. On seeing Shen Yuan, his expression cracked a little at the edges. Then it smoothed back over, neutrally sardonic.

“Here to drive a stake through my heart, mister Wizard?”

Shen Yuan frowned. “I just want to talk.”

Luo Binghe stared at him for a moment.

Then he let him in.

Shen Yuan followed him into the main room of the house. It had been expanded. It had all the upgrades: The Cozy Sleeper Bed Nook, the Hobbyist’s Reading Corner Plus, the Chef’s Best Kitchen … None of them were supposed to be available until the end of Year Two, of course, but Shen Yuan couldn’t find it in himself to be too surprised.

“Where are you getting the cheat codes,” he asked under his breath.

Luo Binghe didn’t hear him. He began giving a small room tour, perhaps because he wanted to delay the inevitable conversation, but Shen Yuan knew all of it already, and anyway! There were more pressing things to attend to!

Like the small wooden cabinet in the corner, with its glass-fronted doors. It was filled with small finds from scavenging around town and down in the mines, most likely. Feathers and crystals and precious gems, and at the centre of it all: The geode.

Shen Yuan got up close to double check, but of course there was no mistaking it - there was nothing else like this in this world.

“Where did you - did you take this?” he asked, like it wasn’t obvious. “I’ve been looking for it everywhere.”

“Just keeping it safe for you, Shen Yuan,” Luo Binghe said from where he was standing by the kitchen bench, his back to Shen Yuan, sticky sweet and not caring that he could tell he was lying.

Shen Yuan stared at him, the way his shoulders hunched in his black t-shirt. “Why? ”

Luo Binghe turned his face to look at him, just a slice of his profile.

“I wouldn’t want you to get cursed,” he said casually. Then: “Coffee?”

That’s it??

Luo Binghe gestured toward the brand new, extremely shiny coffee maker , tucked in between the rack of extremely well-sharpened chef’s knives and the three-tier steaming basket.

Fine! Whatever!

“... Sure,” Shen Yuan muttered, despite himself.

Luo Binghe hmmed. He pulled out a bag of what was undoubtedly some very high quality coffee beans, and got the machine going. It took a while; Luo Binghe was meticulous. Shen Yuan watched him in silence.

Once the coffee was brewing, Luo Binghe turned back towards him. For a moment, none of them spoke, lingering in the awkward liminal moment at the edge of what everyone involved knew was going to be an unpleasant conversation.

Luo Binghe broke first.

“Well?” he asked. Just the one word, short and with sharp edges.

Shen Yuan let him sit in it for a moment. Then:

“It wasn’t okay,” he said. “What you did to me.”

Like Luo Binghe didn’t already know.

Of course he knew - and now his beautiful face was doing a complicated series of movements, like a piece of orchestral music. A whole dramatic pirouette of emotion: wide-eyed and teary, then blank, then -

“What I did to you?” Luo Binghe sneered. There was the full force of the disdain Shen Yuan had seen the first time they saw each other, chipped free and exposed like mountain ore.

Shen Yuan held his ground. “You can’t just eat people and mess with their memories without their consent -”

Luo Binghe stared at him, more hateful now than ever, and then - horrifyingly - began to laugh.

Well. It was laughter on paper; the sound that filled the kitchen resembled it like the reflection in a funhouse mirror, stretched out and shrinking and bent back on itself until what was left was just familiar enough to add insult to injury.

“Are you okay?” Shen Yuan asked awkwardly, because he felt like he had to say something.

Luo Binghe stopped laughing. It was like a switch had been flipped, on and then off, but the smile it left behind was just as concerning.

“ Are you okay ,” he repeated, like it was a joke. His eyes were like the end of the world. “Gege, it’s like you don’t even know what we’re doing here.”

“Not your gege,” Shen Yuan said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “And what is it you think we’re doing here, exactly?”

Luo Binghe didn’t answer. Instead, he stalked over to one of the kitchen cabinets and pulled out two cups. He poured coffee into one of them, and kept pouring until the liquid was lapping at the brim, threatening to spill over.

“Luo Binghe,” Shen Yuan said. It came out like a warning, and maybe it was; Luo Binghe stopped pouring.

“I’m only trying to be a good host,” he said. “Sit.”

Shen Yuan glanced at the kitchen table. There was a tablecloth, checkered in red and white, and a couple of unlit tealights. The chairs had soft, pillowed seats. The furniture looked strangely incongruous, like it all belonged in a different kitchen. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Fine,” Luo Binghe snapped. “There is coffee, if you think you can stomach something made by something as monstrous as me.”

“Some one ,” Shen Yuan said automatically.

He did take the coffee, careful to not let it slop over the edges of the cup, and thank Luo Binghe. He had said he wanted it, after all, and unless Luo Binghe had pre-poisoned the beans, Shen Yuan hadn’t seen him add anything weird to the brew.

Also, it smelled incredible .

It tasted somehow even better.

“Anyway, why are you mad?” he groused, once he’d drunk enough that he wasn’t in danger of spilling coffee everywhere. “I’m sorry you’re out of an unwilling juice pack, but whose fault is that?”

“Whose fault is that,” Luo Binghe repeated, less like a question and more like he was tasting the words. “Whose fault is that, Shen Yuan?”

Shen Yuan bristled. He wished he wasn’t holding the coffee after all, suddenly desperate to cross his arms judgmentally. “If you’re just going to parrot what I say back at me -”

Luo Binghe’s smile widened, fangs flickering in and out of existence like the light of a dying lightbulb. “I tried to be discreet. I made a rotating list of who to bite and when, I made sure no-one remembered, I didn’t make a mess -” and there was a snarl to his words now, sharp like gravel digging into the skin of your palm, “- and it would have been fine , but then you - you ruined everything. ”

“Excuse me?”

“From the moment your blood touched my tongue, everything else has tasted like ashes,” Luo Binghe said darkly.

Shen Yuan stared at him.

Then he went over to the table and carefully set down the coffee cup.

Then he covered his face with his hands, pressing his fingers against his eyelids until the darkness burst with stars.

He took a breath, and then another.

Galaxies were born and died in his palms.

Then he put his hands down.

“Okay,” he said.

“You broke me,” Luo Binghe said.

Shen Yuan stared at him, and kept staring. He looked - not imperious or smug or even monstrous. He didn’t even look angry . Not really.

He looked scared .

“Binghe,” Shen Yuan said helplessly.

Luo Binghe turned his face away, mouth twisting.

“This wasn’t how it was supposed to go,” he muttered.

“Well, good,” Shen Yuan said. “I told you, don’t eat my friends.”

“I can’t help what I am,” Luo Binghe said bitterly. “I can’t change my nature.”

“Did you try? Do you even want to?”

Luo Binghe bared his teeth at him, fangs flashing. “Oh, I’ve tried. But I’m not like you, Shen Yuan. I’m not a person.”

“You’re a person,” Shen Yuan said automatically. Then he sighed, and sat down at the table. “Sit down.”

“I’m a monster,” Luo Binghe said. He warily eyed Shen Yuan and the empty chair in front of him.

“Okay, sure,” Shen Yuan said. “That doesn’t mean you aren’t a person . Sit down.”

Luo Binghe sat down.

Good boy.

He slumped in his seat, staring at the tabletop. Even his hair looked depressed.

How pitiful! Shen Yuan did not have the decades of psychology training needed to unpick whatever was going on with him, and the whole scene was more pathetic than any of his meimei’s vampire stories.

Not that he’d read those.

Anyway! Shen Yuan really had expected this whole exchange to end up somewhere scarier. Luo Binghe hadn’t even pushed him up against any walls! Instead, misery radiated off him like a heat haze, which was a very different kind of problem.

Not that it was Shen Yuan’s problem. Obviously. Luo Binghe had been enough of a pain in the neck that Shen Yuan would be well within his rights to leave and rat him out to Shen Qingqiu and Yue Qingyuan, all things considered.

“How much blood do you need?” he asked.

“What?”

“In a,” Shen Yuan vaguely waved a hand, “feeding, I suppose? Or in a week?”

Luo Binghe’s mouth fell open.

“I’m not sure,” he said, clearing his throat. “I suspect it would be different under normal circumstances, but right now, I’m…”

He didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence.

“Right,” Shen Yuan said. He tapped the tablecloth thoughtfully.

It hadn’t been bad.

That was the thing: beyond the asking, it hadn’t been bad. And even if Luo Binghe had been drinking his blood, Shen Yuan had never felt dizzy afterwards; it began and ended with the neck pain and waking up in weird places. Luo Binghe hadn’t taken more than he’d needed.

And looking at the shake of his hands, the strange opacity of his skin - perhaps he hadn’t even taken that much.

“Okay,” Shen Yuan said. “You can drink my blood.”

Luo Binghe stared at him. He didn’t say anything; he was sitting so still it was hard to tell if he was even breathing.

Then again, did vampires need to breathe? Shen Yuan was not a big vampire media aficionado, exactly, but he was pretty sure most of them didn’t. Then again, what did he know? This was Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way! Canonically, vampires weren’t real , so really the rules were all up in the air, weren’t they?

“Yuan-ge?” Luo Binghe asked. His voice was very small.

“As a temporary thing,” Shen Yuan told him. “And don’t try anything weird - if I disappear, Shen Qingqiu knows where I went. He’ll skin you alive and bury your bones in garlic paste.”

Luo Binghe nodded mutely.

“Just until we can figure out some kind of alternative,” Shen Yuan told him.

The whole substitution blood thing worked in Twilight, right? Anyway: Shen Yuan was the Wizard. This world was full of magic bullshit solutions to magic bullshit problems.

He would figure something out.

“And I want to take a look at you,” he said, with a sudden burst of curiosity that felt almost greedy. Curious about Luo Binghe’s more monstrous traits, and how it all fit together. “I’m not Mu Qingfang, but if we’re going to find a magic solution for this, I should know a bit more about you.”

“Yes, Yuan-ge,” Luo Binghe said.

Shen Yuan made him get up from the table, and then instructed him to sit on the kitchen counter. The angle was better like this; he didn’t want to loom over him, and the idea of kneeling on the floor in front of him was so embarrassing he might combust on the spot.

So! The counter. Luo Binghe sat on it. His feet dangled a little off the edge. It was a strangely whimsical movement for him, after all the doom and gloom. Shen Yuan caught himself staring at the motion, oddly captivated.

Anyway!

His throat was tight, so he cleared it. Then he nudged himself between Luo Binghe’s knees.

Luo Binghe took a sharp little breath.

“Don’t worry,” Shen Yuan told him, “I couldn’t hurt you even if I wanted to.”

Like that was ever the concern!

Luo Binghe gave a small nod anyway.

“Now let’s see,” Shen Yuan said. He carefully tilted Luo Binghe’s chin upwards. Everything looked normal: the clavicles sharp and the column of the neck long and graceful; the Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed; the way it was all lined with smooth skin and strong, lithe muscles.

All normal. All perfectly human-looking.

Shen Yuan tilted Luo Binghe’s head back down before he could do anything weird, like squeeze the side of Luo Binghe’s neck.

“Show me your fangs,” he told him, resting his thumb on Luo Binghe’s chin, his other fingers on the skin of his neck.

Luo Binghe opened his mouth. His tongue - pointed and pink - swiped across his lower lip.

Then his fangs flickered in, just like turning on the light.

They were about the length of the final joint of a pinkie finger, gleaming white in the kitchen lights. They tapered into impossibly sharp points, of course, and curved slightly. Almost catlike.

“Hold still,” Shen Yuan told him, feeling like a man possessed. “I’m going to touch them.”

And he did, carefully testing the downward curve, the wet porcelain feel of Luo Binghe’s enamel. The fangs seemed to be hollow - presumably Luo Binghe could produce some kind of venom (???) that could keep victims calm and docile when he was feeding on them.

Shen Yuan shifted uncomfortably where he stood.

Luo Binghe made a small sound at the back of his throat.

“Be good,” Shen Yuan murmured, feeling as though he was watching himself from outside and inside his own body at the same time. He might really be losing it. “Don’t move until I tell you to.” 

Without stopping to think about it, he pressed the pad of his thumb against the point of a fang. It pierced the skin easily, sliding in like a knife through hot butter, but it didn’t hurt , exactly. For a moment, it stung, mosquito-like, but the feeling quickly subsided in favour of a strange heat.

“Interesting,” he said, pulling his thumb away. A perfect pinpoint of blood welled up right at the centre of it, right in the middle of the whorl of his fingerprint.

He could feel Luo Binghe’s eyes on him as though the look had a physical weight to it. When he looked back at him, Luo Binghe’s expression was -

Wrecked. Glassy-eyed with his starburst pupils blown, cheeks pink like plum blossoms.

His lips looked so soft, mouth still open from where Shen Yuan was making it be -

Feeling completely fucking insane, Shen Yuan dragged the pad of his thumb across Luo Binghe’s lower lip.

It left a bloody smear behind.

Shen Yuan stared at the shocking red-and-pink of it.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t look away.

“Good boy,” he said, in someone else’s voice. “You can go ahead.”

All at once, Luo Binghe surged forward, pulling him in, and then -

His mouth was on Shen Yuan’s mouth, all needle teeth and violent tongue, and Shen Yuan was bleeding into his mouth , but somehow all he could do was fist his fingers into Luo Binghe’s hair and tug him closer still, to clutch desperately at the broad hot plane of Luo Binghe’s back, the fabric of his t-shirt, to make a desperate sound at the hot pressure; the soft pain; the spreading smear of pleasure all through his body —-

Luo Binghe hooked his legs around Shen Yuan’s waist. They rubbed up against each other, and Shen Yuan barely had the brain cells to spare to think, holy fuck, is that a lead pipe in your pants?! before the overwhelming rush of feeling pulled him back under, sending him spinning tumbling moaning brokenly into Luo Binghe’s mouth, everything slick and wet with spit and copper;

Then his hand (the one not tangled and stuck in Luo Binghe’s hair like a broken comb), shakily pulling down the zipper of Lou Binghe’s jeans, shoving at his underwear without looking. Luo Binghe’s breath stuttering at the shock of cooler air, at Shen Yuan’s hand desperately fisting his pillar, still damp with spit.

Then Luo Binghe pawing at him too, wrist at an awkward angle, pulling him out and taking him in his fist; then they were moving together in tandem, palms and pressure and their fingers brushing; his chest was aching, sparking into fireworks;  panting into each others mouths like huffing paint, like coming up for air -

Then Luo Binghe sank his fangs into the side of Shen Yuan’s neck.

Shen Yuan came so hard he passed out.

Chapter Text

PART FIVE

Day 15 of Spring, Year 1

He woke up to the sounds of someone cooking: A pot boiling; the clean chop-and-scrape of a knife against a cutting board.

Reluctantly, he cracked an eye open.

Luo Binghe was in the kitchen, moving with a grace and certainty Shen Yuan had previously mostly associated with the National Ballet of China. Shen Yuan couldn’t tell what he was making, though he could smell the freshly cut ginger from where he was lying.

In Luo Binghe’s bed.

He had a sudden, full-body memory of last night.

Fuck!

Shen Yuan turned his face into the pillow. The room was getting really hot all of a sudden!

But Luo Binghe was still moving around in the kitchen. 

The sound was strangely reassuring.

It probably shouldn’t be, but when Shen Yuan tried to summon up any of the unease he’d felt in the weeks leading up to this, he found that he just … couldn’t. The bubble had burst; the worst and wildest option was true and not true at the same time.

True: Luo Binghe was a vampire. Luo Binghe had been drinking Shen Yuan’s blood, and sometimes other people’s blood, and he seemed pretty convinced he needed it to live.

Not true: The thing was, he seemed somehow less dangerous now. Shen Yuan briefly entertained the idea that Luo Binghe had fucked with his brain somehow, but if he’d been able to, there was no way he would have waited this long, right?

Or -

He took a deep breath. The pillowcase smelled like Luo Binghe, though Shen Yuan didn’t know if he ever actually slept. That wasn’t necessarily a vampire thing, right? Unless it was in a coffin filled with dirt from your homeland. But if the bed smelled like him, then -

He pushed his face deeper into the pillow. The minute stitching on the side of the pillowcase was probably making a temporary tattoo imprint on his cheek.

There really was no recovering from this, huh?

Well, in that case -

In that case -

-

He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew, Luo Binghe was gently shaking his shoulder.

“Mfgr,” Shen Yuan managed. He could taste his own breath, which was unfortunate, because it was bad enough that it could probably wilt grass.

Luo Binghe smiled at him. There was a softness in his eyes Shen Yuan was sure neither of them had earned.

He fought the urge to dive back into the pillow again.

Stop!! Looking so charmed!!

“I made you breakfast,” Luo Binghe said.

“You didn’t have to,” Shen Yuan said.

“I wanted to.”

Luo Binghe’s cheeks were a little flushed.

That’s my blood in there, Shen Yuan thought. All over Luo Binghe’s face. Inside him.

Shen Yuan was pretty sure he was going insane. He must have entered a cheat code by accident, somehow, right? Everything felt closer than usual, like his sensitivity to the world had been increased.

He smiled at Luo Binghe, a little wryly. “A meal for a meal, hm?”

Luo Binghe’s face fell.

Fuck! Abort!

“I didn’t mean,” Shen Yuan said, but that wasn’t entirely right either, was it? His blood was in there.

Luo Binghe took a deep breath.

“I won’t do it again unless you let me,” he said. His expression was so earnest it hurt to look at. “I won’t - even if it kills me. Even if I have to starve. I won’t.”

“Don’t be silly,” Shen Yuan said. He patted Luo Binghe’s be-aproned chest, once, twice. “Of course I wouldn’t let you starve.”

“You’re too good, Yuan-ge,” Luo Binghe said, like that was a bad thing. His eyes were very bright.  Shen Yuan was about to protest, but Luo Binghe wasn’t done; his hand tightened on Shen Yuan’s shoulder, then relaxed again. He added, like it was a shameful secret: “I didn’t expect you to be.”

So dramatic for this time of the morning!

Shen Yuan patted the hand that was holding onto him, wishing desperately for a phone or a fan or an Ultimate Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way Strategy Guidebook to hide his face behind.

“What did you make?” he asked instead.

Thankfully, Luo Binghe obliged, explaining with enthusiasm: This was the congee, topped with finely sliced scallions; the pickled radish and cucumber; the seared voidfish; the steamed egg; the pork floss; the list went on and on.

In the end, the dishes barely fit on Luo Binghe’s kitchen table. He had really gone overboard, but tasting it all, Shen Yuan found he couldn’t complain. It was all too good - he struggled to even slow down, but managed to tell Luo Binghe what he thought of each dish, nonetheless. Luo Binghe had his own bowl, but used it mostly as a temporary stop for bits of side dishes that he then snuck into Shen Yuan’s bowl.

It felt like some kind of weird ritual, but Shen Yuan couldn’t help finding it charming. Hopefully he wasn’t signing himself up for any other weird vampire activities by pretending he didn’t see it.

Still:

“Do you eat food?” he asked, once he was too full to eat anything else.

“I don’t,” Luo Binghe said.

“ Can you eat food?” Shen Yuan asked.

“I don’t,” Luo Binghe repeated.

Shen Yuan considered the mostly empty dishes on the table. “Then how are you so good at cooking?”

“You like it,” Luo Binghe said, which was really not an answer. He seemed to sense that Shen Yuan wasn’t really buying it, because he added, halting and awkward: “ I like it. Cooking for you.”

Even halting and awkward, it was a direct hit!!

Shen Yuan took a long, steady drink of his water. It wasn’t like this was going to be a thing now, anyway. It was definitely a one-off.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “we should find something that can serve as a blood substitute for you. You shouldn’t rely on drinking from people anymore.”

Luo Binghe went still. His face didn’t change, but somehow he still managed to look as though he was poking at mushrooms in some dingy dungeon corner, miles down below the ground.

“I mean, I don’t mind every once in a while!” Shen Yuan hastened to add. “But if you need to feed every couple of days, that won’t be sustainable - I’m not made of blood!”

“I told you I wouldn’t without your permission,” Luo Binghe said, a little sulkily. “Yuan-ge doesn’t have to-”

“Well, yes, sure,” Shen Yuan said, waving it away. He cleared his throat. “Sometimes it’s nice, not having to make my own breakfast.”

-

Anyway! Blood solutions. He had spent some time thinking about it, and even if it would probably need some testing, he thought he had a pretty good idea of something that might work.

The flowering bloodvine was a climbing plant that grew on a particularly rare and fantastical species of oak. It could only be found in Pink Twilight Grove, the fan favourite location from the Warm Nights Hot Days dlc. The bloodvine was named for its sap, which, if it was treated with the right spells and alchemical concoctions, could be used in place of blood when making medical transfusions. It was literally magical, of course, but it was also pretty incredible!

The flowering bloodvine was also named for its flowers. Each flower looked like a fist-sized lantern. Their pink petals had a papery quality to them, and were edged with dark red, as though something inside the flower itself had started to leak through in the corners.

They were also filled with pollen.

The pollen had aphrodisiac qualities.

Of course.

Shen Yuan stared at them from the edge of the grove. Every flowery lantern was swaying gently in the spring breeze. Next to him, Luo Binghe was clearly waiting for him to say something.

“Try not to knock them around too much,” Shen Yuan told him. Then he rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

-

Of course, when the flowers did get knocked around, it was Shen Yuan’s fault. He was reaching for one of the branches of an oak he was intending to climb when he slipped, shoe sliding in the dirt, and fell ass-backwards into the carefully placed rows of bloodvine they had already harvested.

A Shen Yuan-sized patch of flowers burst open, filling the immediate area with a dense cloud of pollen, deep pink and lingering.

The fall knocked the breath out of him. The pollen rushed in on his shocked inhale. It coated the inside of his mouth, gritty and sweet and overwhelmingly floral.

“FUCK,” Shen Yuan said reasonably. He was already starting to feel - 

Wrong. It was nothing like the melty, floaty feeling of Luo Binghe’s vampire venom; instead his body was already turning hot and sore and aching, dizzy, skin tight like a drum. Too aware of the world around him, down to the molecules.

“Yuan-ge!”

“Stay away,” Shen Yuan said. “Don’t breathe it in, it’s-”

But Luo Binghe was already coming over, grim-faced in the pink haze. Shen Yuan wanted to bite him.

“Don’t worry,” Luo Binghe said, picking him up. His arms were rock-steady under Shen Yuan’s things, against his back - he really was so much stronger than he looked from a distance. “It won’t affect me.”

You can’t know that!!

Luo Binghe carried him out of the fog. One of his hands kept brushing the side of Shen Yuan’s thigh like a brand. He set him down carefully, leaning his back against - something. His breath was on Shen Yuan’s face. His hands were moving down Shen Yuan’s sides, searching. Shen Yuan pressed himself into them without meaning to.

Luo Binghe pulled his hands away. A sound that came out of Shen Yuan’s mouth. The heat death of the universe.

That was wrong, wasn’t it, that was opposite, but even if Luo Binghe was right there he was so far away and his hands were so -

“Yuan-ge,” Luo Binghe said, “how can I help?”

“I need,” Shen Yuan said, but even near-delirious he found he couldn’t put the words together. Everything was too hot. Luo Binghe’s tongue flicked out across his lower lip and he could feel it on his own mouth, sympathy pains.

“What is it?” Luo Binghe crouched down in front of him. His hand brushed the hair from Shen Yuan’s face with a tenderness that ached almost as much as the rest of his body. His fingers were smooth like water and oil. “I can - oh .”

That was the pollen.

Luo Binghe’s pupils went wide, blown out like candles.

“Y,” he managed. Then he whimpered, sinking down to his knees. It hurt to look at him. It hurt in a different way than the rest of his body was hurting.

Clumsily, Shen Yuan reached out to take his hands. His muscles were itching to contract. To spasm. To touch. At least the touching felt nice, even if the situation as a whole was complete bullshit.

“It’s okay,” Shen Yuan said, through what felt like a mouthful of sand, forcing the words together. “I know how to fix this.”

The pollen must be hitting Luo Binghe harder, for some reason. He didn’t respond; he just looked up at Shen Yuan with his black hole pupils, his ripped red irises, face flushing. His mouth opened, wet and soft.

The sight sent a dry, hot spike of arousal through Shen Yuan, painfully intense. A knife in the gut. He bit back a sound of his own, somewhere deep in his throat.

“It’s,” Shen Yuan said, “we need to do,” he faltered, “the beast of two backs.”

Luo Binghe stared at him. Then, with great effort: “What?”

“You know,” Shen Yuan said, pretending to himself that there was any way in hell he could pull off sounding nonchalant right now, like he wasn’t coming apart at the seams, like he could look away from Luo Binghe’s hands clenching bloodlessly against the grass, “sending a train through the tunnel? Hot - oh, fuck - hotdogging?”

Luo Binghe looked increasingly distressed.

Fuck!

“Okay,” Shen Yuan said. He briefly gave up on life and resigned his dignity to whatever poor asshole could find it. “You need to fuck me.”

Saying it made it real, and then all he could do was see it, the precise way Luo Binghe could push him into the dirt. The way he could open up his mouth wide and wider and swallow him whole.

Luo Binghe groaned. “Yuan-ge … I don’t-”

He didn’t manage to finish the sentence. He also definitely wasn’t getting his pants off.

Don’t what? Don’t what?

Could it be that he didn’t trust himself to not snap and drain all of Shen Yuan’s blood, sexually? Considering last night, he was probably still interested, so it definitely wasn’t that .

“I can gag you, if,” he shuddered through another rolling, cramping wave of arousal, “if that would help?”

“Don’t want to hurt you,” Luo Binghe said.

“You won’t,” Shen Yuan said. He reached out and patted Luo Binghe’s cheek; Luo Binghe turned his face into his palm. His mouth was so soft. Shen Yuan was going to die from a heart attack if they didn’t get the pollen over and done with, fast.

Luo Binghe didn’t seem to have any words left over. With difficulty (and a flash of Luo Binghe’s vampire teeth), Shen Yuan tore a strip off his shirt and turned it into a makeshift gag. Tying it was somehow even harder; his fingers kept twitching as he made the knot. The air was too hot in his lungs.

Once Luo Binghe was securely gagged, Shen Yuan pushed him further down into the grass and fumbled them both out of their clothes.

His memory skipped like a scratched record, from the tied knot to the smooth stretch of Luo Binghe’s body beneath him, both of them breathing fast enough that hyperventilation was right around the corner. Luo Binghe’s pillar was in his hand.

It looked like it belonged there.

With as much care as he could muster, Shen Yuan conjured some grease into his hand. With the way his mouth was struggling to shape the words, he really didn’t want to try anything more direct; if he blew his own asshole off by accident they’d both be dead.

Luckily, the properties of the pollen removed most of the need for preparation. Not that Shen Yuan would know about the preparation needed for this kind of thing, of course. It was just that Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way was very clear about how the pollen of the bloodvine let the protagonist go from zero to fucking anyone at a moment’s notice.

Really, the grease was more a just-in-case thing than anything.

With that in mind, he put his hands on Luo Binghe’s pillar again.

He hadn’t really taken the time to look at it last night (last!! night!!), but now it was quickly and irreversibly searing its way into his eyeballs. He was going to be seeing it in his sleep .

And it was - he sucked in a sharp breath - it really was huge . The skin of it was flushed. It felt like a velvet-covered iron bar in his hands. It was the kind of thing that, if you got it to shoot off, should probably qualify you to become king of fantasy land or something. The kind of equipment a protagonist should have, so of course Luo Binghe -

whimpered under the gag, stomach muscles twitching. Shen Yuan swallowed. His tongue was thick like porridge in his mouth. Dark spots danced across his eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said, patting the shivering muscle of Luo Binghe’s abdomen, even as some part of him was squirming with something he wanted desperately to pass off as embarrassment, even as he struggled to keep the words from pitching into a moan, even as he thought he might be dying. “I’ll take care of you.”

Then he lifted his hips up. Luo Binghe’s hands came up to hold them, to steady him, fingers digging into the skin.

Shen Yuan bit his lip to keep from moaning. The taste of blood bloomed sharp and meaty in his mouth. He could see the moment Luo Binghe must have smelled it, too - the way his pupils constricted and dilated again; the way his eyes zeroed in on Shen Yuan’s face.

The laugh ripped out of Shen Yuan’s mouth, aching in his ribcage. Then Luo Binghe’s hands stroked up his sides, and the laughter turned into something else.

He sat down on the pillar.

It was too fast, and it knocked the breath out of him.

But it didn’t hurt.

There was just an overwhelming stretch . It seemed to fill everything. Like there was no more space for anything; not words or thoughts or barely even breathing. Time slowed and pooled around him, all of space compressing into muscles spasming, into his own heartbeat, into the warmth and size of Luo Binghe under him and in him -

Shen Yuan whimpered.

Luo Binghe stroked his side with a strange gentleness, and then moved lower, fisting Shen Yuan in his hand. Shen Yuan’s hips snapped forward, fucking into it without intending to.

That set off other sensations.

“Oh,” Shen Yuan managed, half-voiced. He hadn’t known it would feel -

And then they were moving against each other. Someone set the pace. Luo Binghe’s hands went back to his hips, helping to slam him down onto his pillar. Shen Yuan’s breath was stuttering in his throat, turning loud and desperate. He felt -

He felt -

There were tears on Luo Binghe’s flushed face. Shen Yuan must have slowed down, because the next thing he knew, he was leaning over him, wiping away at the wetness on his cheeks.

“We can stop,” he said, barely getting the words out. “If Binghe-”

Luo Binghe shook his head. His hands were already nudging Shen Yuan back.

Shen Yuan resisted for long enough to give Luo Binghe a kiss on the forehead, wet and sloppy, and then sat back.

“Nghk,” Luo Binghe said. His eyes were screwed shut.

Then: a flicker, at first.

Shen Yuan blinked, dazed. Luo Binghe’s face slid in and out of focus, his features blurring just slightly at the edges.

Then: a square of pixellated colour where Shen Yuan had kissed him, there and back again. As Shen Yuan watched, the square unfolded, blooming across Luo Binghe’s forehead and cheekbones and jaw like flowers in bright, eye searing CMYK, blotting out his features like censor bars, all

static and violent magenta, shuddering cyan, headache yellow, the gaps blocked out with the colour of void. The glitch filled the air between them like a cloud, slowly growing, stretching out until it covered Luo Binghe completely and still going, overflowing, shifting into some strange amorphous shape. 

There was nothing in Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way like this, which meant -

 Shen Yuan reached out in the direction of Luo Binghe’s face, desperately, like he could run a code patch with his bare hands to fix whatever the fuck had gone wrong here. The glitch cloud felt strangely solid against his skin when he pushed through it. Static flowed out between his fingers, tingling numbly against his skin.

“Binghe!” Shen Yuan cried out. His mouth tasted like he’d licked a battery.

The glitch rose up like a wave. It seemed to go on forever, all the way up into the afternoon sky.

Then it folded over, engulfing him.

He squeezed his eyes and mouth shut, breathing shallowly through his nose.

Static brushed his forehead. In the dark, it felt almost like a hand.

Slowly, it pooled against Shen Yuan’s cheek. Then, suddenly, he could hear -

sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry yuan-ge i 

It wasn’t words, exactly. No-one was speaking out loud. But somehow it still sounded like -

“Binghe?” he managed, breathless. His heart was in his mouth. His chest was burning.

The - whatever it was - brushed against his sides, gentle. Affirmative. The not-a-voice in his head was still a torrent of apologies.

Shen Yuan cracked an eye open. The glitch - Luo Binghe - had made a cave of it - him self, and it would have been dark if it weren’t for the bright neon of the colours shifting through. Even under the rush of Luo Binghe’s not-a-voice, everything felt suddenly close and quiet. “What happened?”

the pollen pollen the pollen

“Will you - ” Shen Yuan swallowed. A bead of sweat dripped off the tip of his nose. His dick was still fucking hard. “W-will you be okay?”

let me fix this let me you need to the pollen it will scorch the earth please let me let me take care of you

“You,” and the heat was rising again, above the initial horror, and he had already had his monster freakout once , and wasn’t that enough? Soft static was pressing against his back, supporting his aching hips, and it felt soothing, and it felt good , and he couldn’t sort it all out in his fried egg pollen-soaked brain, but if it was still Binghe, if he still sounded the same, then - then wasn’t that basically still the same as yesterday? If you thought about it, wasn’t the soft touch at his sides the same as the soft touch just before this? If you thought about it, wasn’t this just like any of the weird monster porn his sister used to read? If you thought about it, wasn’t it really - “yes.”

Luo Binghe didn’t answer in words; instead, Shen Yuan was flooded with a sense of gratefulness that didn’t belong to him, and

the sparking void rose up to touch more of him, clinging to his skin, soft and buzzing, and

it was all around him and all over him, tall as a temple ceiling, as a hollowed-out skyscraper, dwarfing him, drowning him in touch and leaving him still breathing, panting in the warm air, and

It was all in him, too, thick and twisting, opening him up so slow and sweet it made him whimper, made him push down desperately against it, and

his breath was coming out in desperate gasps; his lungs wouldn’t inflate right, and

the world fragmented and turned fractal, spinning out on the bloodvine pollen in his system, the gold thread of pleasure shooting through his nerves, the overwhelming everywhere of the static, of

of Luo Binghe , and -

Shen Yuan reached out a shaking hand into the void, grasping desperately -

The void, in a shape that was almost a hand, reached back.

Chapter Text

SIX

Day 16 of Spring, Year 1

And again: He woke up.

Birds were singing in the distance. The light of the morning sun was soft and muted, tinted green by the walls of the tent.

He pushed his face into the pillow.

No fuzzy vagueness this time; he remembered everything. If he let himself, he could almost feel it - the phantom touch of fingers, and then everything else.

… It hadn’t been terrible. All things considered.

He pushed his face harder against the pillow, fighting the feeling of deja vu and also of lethal embarrassment. The way Luo Binghe had -

He didn’t make any sounds about it. Instead, he turned over on his back, staring up at the bottle green ceiling of Luo Binghe’s Deluxe Pop Up Tent With Safety Barrier.

He’d fallen asleep before he could help set it up. Poor Binghe must have had to -

Shen Yuan sat up, pushing away the blanket he’d been lying under.

He was alone in the tent. When he crawled outside, the grove was quiet. The morning fog clung to the grass in patches like cotton candy, tinted pink by the still-rising sun.

There was no-one else around.

“Binghe?” he called out, feeling like he should be whispering for no good reason. There was no reply. He took a step and then another, and then stubbed his toe on a soup thermos that someone (Luo Binghe???) had carefully set down into the grass.

Shen Yuan swore quietly, rubbing at his foot. The soup thermos rolled a few forlorn inches, and then stopped. It was slightly deformed on one side, the metal blocky and uneven. Low-poly.

Shen Yuan stared at it.

Then he turned and stepped around the tent.

And -

There was a hole in the ground. It was huge, almost a circle, but the edges were weirdly straight , chunked off into ninety degree angles in small increments. The colours inside it were all fucked up, too, jumbled together like a grab bag of legos, grey and green and CMYK. Nothing was moving; in the morning light, it all looked solid as stone.

“Binghe,” Shen Yuan said again, but he wasn’t expecting an answer anymore.

-

The oak trees on either side of the path back to town rustled slightly in the morning breeze. Their trunks were scratched with the wrong texture.

Something caught in his throat.

Gingerly, he lifted up his t-shirt, but his skin looked fine. No weird fractals, no pixelation, no eye-searing colours. And he wasn’t keeling over with abdominal pain, either.

That was something.

It still left the problem of Luo Binghe.

Not a vampire after all, huh? Thinking back, Shen Yuan realised he’d never actually said he was one, either.

Well, Shen Yuan had known all along that there were no vampires in Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way, so really, that part was on him. Still, Luo Binghe had kept himself pretty well-hidden for being, what, some kind of complex computer glitch? With a sense of self?

Shen Yuan sighed heavily. What the fuck, right? It had been one thing when he was high off his dick on lazy fanservice game mechanics, but now in the light of day there was suddenly time to consider the implications on a different level of clarity.

Shen Yuan considered the implications.

They loomed heavy and mysterious in the distance of his brain. Sometimes, there was a faraway spark of panic, like a lightning strike. He couldn’t quite will them into anything like a real freakout, though looking at the hole in the ground he thought he should be losing his shit on epic proportions already.

He packed the implications away.

They could wait.

The only thing that really mattered right now was finding Luo Binghe.

Shen Yuan gave the grove one final once-over. Then he packed up the tent, bagged up a few squashed, depollinated vines, and got going.

-

Luo Binghe’s trail was easy enough to follow. Sometimes part of a tree trunk popped in and out of the tree it was supposed to be part of, shuddering with the disconnect. For a long stretch of forest path, the air was streaked with purple and green in knife-thin, horizontal lines. In other places, time glitched out in patches: a square of snow that was thick enough that it reached all the way up over Shen Yuan’s shins; branches in bloom and withering; mushrooms that had no business being around until autumn. At one point, he came across a multicoloured cluster of lotus flowers that hovered in mid-air, unmoving and in full bloom. On impulse, he reached out and picked one; the stem of it felt staticky like pins and needles in his hand. Reflexively, he clutched it tighter to his chest.

The Pink Twilight Grove was located in the Western Forest of Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way, which meant that the path back to town wound its way past Shen Yuan’s tower. Luo Binghe’s trail had left little rifts of colour in a straight line by the bottom of the tower hill. Shen Yuan stared at it for a moment, and then at the tower.

They had gone out to the grove for a reason. Maybe Luo Binghe was something other than Shen Yuan had thought he was, but that hadn’t changed the end goal, had it? If they could keep the glitches from hurting people, from destabilizing the game world, wasn’t that essentially the same as keeping him from hurting people by sucking their blood out, if you thought about it? And Luo Binghe had wanted that.

Unless, of course, Luo Binghe had changed his mind and was wreaking glitchy havoc on the town right now, while Shen Yuan took up more time than he had standing here, stuck in old plans.

Unless the glitching had broken the part of him that cared about stuff like that.

But (Luo Binghe had been the one who put him to bed in that tent; had been the one who had left him a half-pixelated thermos full of food before he went; had - Shen Yuan suppressed a shiver - held him very gently, all things considered, last night) that seemed less likely. It wasn’t what he was worried about.

And it was always better to go into a situation prepared.

Shen Yuan had died in the mines enough times to know that by now.

He hurried up the hill.

-

The detour didn’t take long. When he left, his backpack was only a little heavier.

-

Then: The path again, from the tower and in towards town. The trees grew more distorted, clumping together with their edges blurred, like a low-res rendering of a Monet painting at close range. It hadn’t rained for days, and the path looked fine, but it felt muddy, sucking at his shoes like it wanted to eat him alive.

No thank you! Try someone with an OnlyFans!

He speedwalked as well as he could, and was very, very careful not to fall over.

-

Luckily, it was a short walk. Even with the weirdly hungry ground, it didn’t take long to get out of the woods. The trees thinned out. The sky widened. Luo Binghe’s trail veered off the path.

It led straight to his farm.

-

The plants were wrong: to begin with.

The ground was choked with weeds; the loquat trees were withered and bare. It looked as though no one had been here for years. Grass had grown into the path that led to Luo Binghe’s house. The blades were sharp and yellow, crunching like glass under his feet.

In front of him, Luo Binghe’s porch looked like an open maw, its slatted railing jutting out like broken teeth. The door was warped with rot, barely fitting in its frame.

“Oh, great,” Shen Yuan said. What a fucking fantastic day to die in Luo Binghe’s haunted-ass house.

But there was nowhere else to go but on.

So he went.

-

Inside: Double vision hit like a brick to the face.

The main room of Luo Binghe’s house was just as it had been when they left, all pillows fluffed and countertops gleaming;

The main room of Luo Binghe’s house had not been touched for years, the room small and barren and grey with dust.

It was one room and then the other, and then both at once, seesawing queasily back and forth and overlapping like a magic eye puzzle from hell. Shen Yuan hadn’t been this instantly nauseous since getting food poisoning at Universal Studios when he was eight.

But -

Some things stayed the same.

The cabinet was there in both versions of the room, empty except for the geode, which gleamed wetly in the shifting light.

There was a trap door, too, right in the middle of the floor. It would have been impossible to spot if it hadn’t been gaping open.

Like a throat with a mouth built around it.

Shen Yuan squeezed his eyes shut, swallowing hard.

At least the way ahead seemed pretty clear.

Eyes mostly shut, he inched his way over to the cabinet. He walked into it before he expected to, and startled bad enough that he nearly knocked the whole thing over.

Fuck!

He wrapped his hands in his sleeves, like that would be any help if the geode decided to emit toxic gasses or some other fucked up thing decided to happen, and picked the thing up. It felt like any other geode he’d ever found in the mines: Just rough stone in his fabric-covered hands.

Okay.

The only way left to go was down. Shen Yuan squinted carefully at the trapdoor, and then (when he got close enough) down into the dark it opened up into.

Did the trapdoor exist in the vanilla version of Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way, too? It wasn’t accessible to players, and Shen Yuan had never seen anything like it in the forum threads where other users discussed datamining the game. Still, did Luo Binghe really have enough control to create something so stable and clearly defined at the moment?

Either way, it didn’t change anything. 

There was nowhere else to go but down.

He hooked his hands around the side of the opening. He lowered himself down into the dark until he was hanging in the dark void under the floorboards; all that kept him from falling were his fingers clutching at the trapdoor frame.

He let go.

There was no feeling of falling. Between one breath and the next, his feet were on solid ground again. The sound of the impact echoed in his ears, but he didn’t feel it. It was like he’d just loaded into a new area.

The area, which was a cellar. The floor was made up of coarse wooden planks; the walls were generic video game cellar stone-and-mortar. There was enough light to see by, somehow, despite the lack of windows, but the walls just kept going up, disappearing into a strangely uniform, hazy darkness.

Luo Binghe was curled up in the corner.

His head was on his knees. His back was to him, but Shen Yuan could still see the way his body was - wrong. Like his skin didn’t quite fit what it was wrapped around.

It hurt to look at.

“Binghe,” Shen Yuan said.

Luo Binghe flinched. His shadow twitched and undulated across the floor, sparking yellow and magenta at odd angles.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. His voice was hoarse. Shen Yuan wished he had some tea to give him, or at least some water. He sounded like he had been crying for hours.

The thought that he shouldn’t have followed him here was so stupid Shen Yuan didn’t bother to acknowledge it.

“Are you okay?” he asked instead.

“I don’t wa̵nt to hurt you,” Luo Binghe said.

Ah. Even if they weren't doing the vampire thing anymore, it was clear that while you could take Luo Binghe out of Twilight, you couldn’t take the Twilight out of Luo Binghe.

“Don’t be silly,” Shen Yuan told him. “If you were going to hurt me, you would have done it,” his mind glanced off the memory, “yesterday. But I’m up and walking around, aren’t I? I’m fine.”

Luo Binghe turned his head to look at him. The line of his profile blurred and resettled. The one eye Shen Yuan could see from this angle was geode-red and rapidly filling with tears. Then Luo Binghe looked away again, wiping at his face.

For a while, no one spoke.

Then:

“I don’t know what to do,” Luo Binghe said, in a quiet voice that still hit like a punch to the gut. Shen Yuan had a couple of strong impulses that he packed away deep in his chest without looking at them.

“Start by telling me what this is about,” he said instead, sitting down on the floor and waving a hand vaguely at Luo Binghe’s flinching, stuttering shadow. He had thoughts about it, obviously, but he wanted to at least wait until next week before boldly assuming something about Luo Binghe without properly checking again. Outside of his own head, at the very least. “Clearly you aren’t a vampire.”

“I’m not,” Luo Binghe agreed.

He turned around to face him, but he still wouldn’t look up, and he didn’t say anything else. 

…

…

Was that all?!

“Well?” Shen Yuan asked, impatient.

“... For a long time, I didn’t exist,” Luo Binghe said. The words came out slowly, like he was mining them piece by piece out of the pit of his stomach. Measured, with rough corners. “And then you broke the geode.”

Shen Yuan remembered the shock of it, when it came apart under his fingers. The way it felt to touch it now, empty of the thing that had been in it.

“That was you?” he asked. “In the geode?”

“You broke me off the thing I’d been. You let me out into the world,” Luo Binghe said, “and for a while I was … I was a knot in the fabric of the universe. A snarl in the weave. I could move through the world, but I wasn’t …” He paused, frowning, before trying again: “All I knew was hunger.”

There was something about the way he said it. It made Shen Yuan’s hair stand on end.

“I floated along for a while, but it was like - I think I was always wrong. Even before the geode broke, the thing that would become me was -”

“Corrupted code?” Shen Yuan suggested, and then felt weird, referencing the whole “we are living in a shitty Stardew Valley clone” so casually. He winced.

“I think so,” Luo Binghe said, and Shen Yuan wasn’t sure if they were both on the same page or if Luo Binghe just liked the metaphor. “I’m not sure. But even if I had only just started being, even if there wasn’t quite an I there to be yet, it still felt like there was something missing. This yawning emptiness -”

Luo Binghe looked up for long enough to give him the pale ghost of a smile. “And then I saw you again. You were walking through the woods, and the collar of your shirt was askew. The fabric kept brushing up against the side of your neck. And somehow I knew how to -”

“Eat me?” Shen Yuan supplied.

Luo Binghe stared at him. His cheeks turned pink. His smile was really more of a grimace now, wasn’t it? Shen Yuan kept expecting to see fangs.

“Yes,” he admitted. “But the moment I fed on you, something went wrong. And when it was over, I was standing over your body in this - this approximation of a human shape. It folded itself around me like the jaws of a trap, and no matter what I did, I was stuck in it. ”

“I’m sorry,” Shen Yuan said. The wood grain by his knee had a knot in it, circle on concentric circle. He pushed at the edge of it with his thumb. “Do you know why?”

“I don’t know,” Luo Binghe said. “But whatever happened that night got my code tangled up in yours.”

That’s -

There was grit under his fingernails. He couldn’t remember how it had gotten there; maybe he had dug them into the dirt yesterday, when he was too high on everything else to pay attention to something as unimportant as the ground.

“Hm,” he said.

“It’s true,” Luo Binghe said, though his tone had gone slightly teasing, like he couldn’t quite help himself. “Yuan-ge remade me in his own image.”

Like - like the thing that would be Luo Binghe, formless and starving, had pushed itself into Shen Yuan like a file through a converter. Like that guy in The Fly.

“So then -” Shen Yuan stopped. Horror curdled in his stomach.

If Luo Binghe was a glitch, but he had been given a human shape by - by trying to eat Shen Yuan, and that human shape looked unmistakably like a vampire, then -

Did that mean the vampire stuff came from him?

Well, it made some sense. A glitch consumes and replicates itself throughout a system through corruptive consumption. What’s a vampire but a monster that consumes in a similarly corruptive way?

Right?

Right??

“That doesn’t make sense,” Shen Yuan said, with an awkward laugh that didn’t feel like it belonged to him. “It’s not like I’m some kind of god.”

“No, but you aren’t from this world either, are you?” Luo Binghe said. He seemed to have temporarily forgotten his distress. He definitely seemed to be enjoying Shen Yuan’s! “Maybe that’s what caused this.”

“You,” Shen Yuan said. Where was that sentence going? You knew? You saw? You think I’m -

“Or maybe,” Luo Binghe said, “it’s just you.”

“What does that mean?” Shen Yuan snapped, off-balance.

Luo Binghe looked away again, eyes tight on Shen Yuan’s left knee.

There was another drawn-out silence.

Shen Yuan opened his mouth to change the subject when Luo Binghe finally spoke.

“Having a body made things more difficult,” he said. “The hunger was familiar, of course. But the depth of feeling was new. The feeling of dirt under my nails, of hearing the first birds sing in the morning …” He swallowed. “For a while I hated it so much I wanted to kill you for putting me in it.”

Shen Yuan remembered the way Luo Binghe had looked at him, the first time they met.

Luo Binghe had wanted to kill him? That wasn’t surprising.

Shen Yuan couldn’t even blame him. If this was really all his fault for touching that geode in the first place, then -

“I was wrong.” Luo Binghe said, breaking through his thoughts. When Shen Yuan looked up, tears were clinging to Binghe’s eyelashes like the crystals at the heart of a geode.

Shen Yuan bit his tongue. He tasted blood. With effort, he managed an “Oh?”

“If you feed a starving man too much too quickly, he’ll die,” Luo Binghe said wryly, “and even in this body it took me a long time to realise that I had been starving.”

Tears dripped down his flushed cheeks.

Fuck.

What could he do? Shen Yuan reached out to pat Luo Binghe on the head. His hair was a starry night of broken code, curling wildly around Shen Yuan’s fingers.

“I couldn’t access the world in the same way anymore,” Luo Binghe said, “but the more time I spent like this, the more I got used to it. The more I got to know you, the less I minded.”

Shen Yuan swallowed. There was a rock in his throat. “And now?”

Luo Binghe laughed like a mineshaft.

“I meant it when I said I’m not a person,” he said. “But yesterday … this vessel split open at the seams. I’m half this and half of what I used to be, and the pieces don’t fit together anymore. I have no control .”

“So what are you going to do? Sit here until you clip through the floor?”

“Better than - ” he began, and then stopped again. “Shen Yuan. I don’t care about the town, or any of the people in it. But you do. So I’ll stay here where I can’t hurt anyone.”

Shen Yuan sighed. “So melodramatic!”

Luo Binghe turned to make an offended face at him. It was so cute that Shen Yuan couldn’t quite restrain himself from patting his hair again. Luo Binghe drew in a wet, shuddering breath, but he didn’t protest. Maybe he had a bit of self-awareness.

“We set out to make a potion that could help you contain your hunger,” Shen Yuan said. “Do you still want that?”

“It’s not the same,” Luo Binghe said. “I’m not -”

“It’s not,” Shen Yuan agreed, cutting him off. “But what if we could still make it work?”

Luo Binghe looked at him for a very long time. His eyes were huge and dark. You could fit whole universes in there.

Quietly, he said: “I’d like that.”

-

Luo Binghe manifested a cauldron for him in the middle of the room. It was made from polished crystal in a red so dark it was almost black; Shen Yuan imagined he could see the faint outlines of code in the depths of the material. When he touched it, the surface was cool and weirdly frictionless.

“Is this food safe?” Shen Yuan asked.

Luo Binghe gave him a flat look. “It’s part of me.”

That didn’t really answer the question, but Shen Yuan couldn’t deny that it was -

Really cool??

“So can you feel this?” Shen Yuan asked, drawing his index finger around the lip of the cauldron. Then a horrible thought occurred to him: “Will it hurt you when it heats up?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Luo Binghe said, with a little half-smile. He probably thought Shen Yuan was being ridiculous. “I can’t feel it. It won’t hurt me.”

Well, in that case.

Shen Yuan wasn’t sure he believed him, exactly, but Luo Binghe was a grown ass man. Coding error. Glitch cryptid?

… whatever. It really wasn’t important right now, beyond the basics of what Luo Binghe had told him. What mattered was that Luo Binghe clearly thought it would be fine.

So it would be fine.

Shen Yuan pulled out his travel kit of tools that he’d swiped from the tower. He laid out the ingredients he had brought with him.

“Magic isn’t real where I come from,” he told Luo Binghe, bruising a length of bloodvine with a pocket knife until the sap began to bleed out from beneath the skin of it, “but it’s easy here. It’s all about finding the right metaphor.”

In Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way, seven rocks in the shape of a T could craft you a stone pickaxe, if you were the kind of weirdo who didn’t want to make use of the village blacksmith. Three leaves of silverweed would make a health potion in a pinch. Add a whispering elderberry and it would reset your health to 50% the next time it fell to zero.

Really, it was vibes almost all the way down.

They watched as the sap dripped down into the cauldron. It really did look like blood, viscous and gleaming in the light.

“And what’s the metaphor?” Luo Binghe asked, staring at the way the drops pooled together.

“Well, this is blood, of course,” Shen Yuan said. “Originally, I was just going to mix it with lockleaf, but things are a bit more complex than I thought, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Luo Binghe repeated. His mouth was an anxious line.

Shen Yuan poured in clear water from the three litre monster-themed thermos Yue Qingyuan had given him for a town gift exchange a couple of years ago. The water needed to go in anyway, but the thermos felt appropriately symbolic, too. A community gift to help Luo Binghe become part of the community, right?

“You’re more than just a normal part of the game,” Shen Yuan said. On a whim, he pulled out one of the lotus flowers from the road and threw it in as well. “And not like a mod, either - you must be tied to something integral in the,” he waved a hand in a vague little spiral. “So technically this is less like modding and more like debugging.”

He gave the potion a gentle stir.

“Hm.” Luo Binghe was staring into the cauldron. His features jumped and shifted across his face for a second.

Shen Yuan stopped stirring. “Binghe?”

 “It’s nothing,” Luo Binghe said. “What’s the lotus flower a metaphor for?”

Shen Yuan stared down at the white petals. Once he got the liquid boiling, they would probably turn pink and then red, too. “Next, I think we should add the lockleaf.”

Luo Binghe gave him an annoyingly knowing look at the non-answer, and then passed him a tupperware box Shen Yuan had brought along from the tower. There was a dead pixel at the centre of his forehead, like a beauty mark.

“Thank you,” Shen Yuan said, resolutely ignoring Binghe’s judgy eyes. He popped the lid off the box too fast, spilling leaves onto the floor. “Fuck.”

He knelt down to gather them up, but Luo Binghe was already there. For a moment, their fingers brushed.

Shen Yuan stood up quickly. It gave him a headrush. He took a moment to steady himself, and then tipped the leaves in his hands into the cauldron.

“To lock you in a more stable form,” he said. Luo Binghe nodded wordlessly and passed him the leaves he’d picked up. Their edges were slightly pixelated.

After a moment of consideration, Shen Yuan tipped them into the cauldron as well. 

Next: He shaved off some dried dandelion root with a pocket knife into the water (for perseverance, which hopefully wouldn’t fuck them over), and then a piece of the geode, which sank to the bottom of the cauldron and immediately began to dissolve.

Shen Yuan stared at it.

What is this, cursed bath salts?? What kind of bullshit -

But there were things more important than video game worldbuilding right now. He gave the cauldron a few more stirs, until things looked reasonably incorporated and the colour of the contents had turned a deep ruby red.

He hesitated for a moment.

“What is it?” Luo Binghe asked.

Shen Yuan frowned. He already had the blood part covered with the bloodvine, but …

He picked up the knife again and drew it in a shallow line across his palm. Blood welled up from the cut, bright and sluggish. Luo Binghe’s pupils skipped and jumped in his irises.

“Sorry,” Shen Yuan said. “I should have warned you.”

“What are you-?”

Shen Yuan let blood drip into the cauldron.

“Think of it as an anchor,” he said.

Something human to tie Luo Binghe to his human body.

To tie Luo Binghe to -

-

They heated up the potion to a boil, and then let it simmer until it turned from pale red to silvery white. Even after it had cooled down, a faint haze of smoke rose from the surface like fog.

It felt right, even if Shen Yuan couldn’t say why, exactly.

Wizard vibes, probably.

Game mechanics.

He poured some of the potion into the monster thermos.

“Here,” he said, holding it out. “I don’t know how much you need to drink for it to take, but this should lock you in.”

Bad choice of words. Luo Binghe raised an eyebrow at him.

Shen Yuan swallowed nervously.

“I can’t promise that this will work,” he said. “If you don’t want to do this-”

“Of course,” Luo Binghe said, cutting him off. He gave him a sickly sliver of a smile. “I’m ready.”

He reached out.

The moment his fingers brushed the thermos, his hand twitched and bent backwards, snapping violently out of shape like something from a horror movie. They both flinched backwards.

Fuck!

The moment there was some distance between them, Luo Binghe’s hand reshaped itself.

“What was that?” Shen Yuan asked. If the potion was this destabilising even without Luo Binghe touching it, would it even be worth trying? “We can try something else, if this is -”

“No,” Luo Binghe said, flexing his fingers. “I want to do this.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Shen Yuan said.

“If it works, it will be worth it,” Luo Binghe said. He shot him a small smile. “But thank you for your concern.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

Luo Binghe didn’t answer. Instead, he squared his shoulders and said: “I don’t know if I can do this myself. I don’t know if my body will let me.”

“Then what -”

“Yuan-ge,” Luo Binghe said. “You’ll have to make me drink it.”

-

So: Luo Binghe on his knees in front of him.

Shen Yuan stared down at him. Maybe it wasn’t too late to leave the room, and possibly the universe altogether.

“All right,” he said instead, fingers tight around the thermos. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, Yuan-ge,” Luo Binghe said, quiet and husky. Like he was scared, and also probably horny.

Okay.

Okay okay okay.

Shen Yuan put a hand under Luo Binghe’s chin and carefully tilted his face up. His skin looked like something out of a makeup commercial; his eyelashes fanned out long and dark above his perfect cheekbones. Shen Yuan bit the inside of his cheek.

He clutched the handle of the thermos a little harder.

He hoped the dosage was high enough.

He hoped it wasn’t too much.

“Go on,” Luo Binghe said. The muscles of his jaw moved against Shen Yuan’s fingers. “I can take it.”

Shen Yuan lifted up the thermos. He placed the metal lip of it on Luo Binghe’s lower lip. Like kissing, he thought, with an edge of hysteria, like he was a kid smashing dolls together. 

He took a deep breath, and then slid the thumb of his free hand into Luo Binghe’s mouth, the pad of it resting against Binghe’s perfect teeth to keep it open.

Just in case there was any more horror movie bullshit.

He tipped the thermos up.

The potion pooled into Luo Binghe’s mouth. When he swallowed, his tongue brushed against the side of Shen Yuan’s thumb.

“Good boy,” Shen Yuan said.

Luo Binghe blinked up at him, slow. His eyes were all fractals.

“Keep going,” Shen Yuan told him. “I’m here with you until the end.”

Luo Binghe shuddered. The shape of his body wavered, its outline uncertain, and then began to unravel into uneven, stuttering pixels.

It happened slowly at first.

Then Luo Binghe’s spine jerked hard, threatening to rip him away from Shen Yuan. There was a sharp CRACK, and then

The thing that had been Luo Binghe’s body came apart completely,

rushing out and then rising like a wave,

brushing up against the side of Shen Yuan’s arms, crawling

up

his

neck

Motherf -

Then it was all over him, pressing in on all sides.

He couldn’t hear anything but the screeching rush of it; could barely see in front of him through the voidful colour.

He could barely breathe.

But somehow he was still holding on to Luo Binghe’s face, was still pouring the potion into his shuddering, warping mouth. Even as he fought to keep his hands from shaking, Luo Binghe’s teeth were sharpening inhumanly under his thumb.

They sank into the meat of it like fish hooks. 

Shen Yuan hissed against the sting, but he didn’t let go.

More blood in the mix couldn’t hurt, right?

“Just a bit longer,” he murmured. All around him, the pixels of Luo Binghe’s body were pulling at him, yanking at his elbows and filling his ears with a shrieking, droning hum. It felt like standing in the middle of a storm.

By now, the only solid part of Luo Binghe was the moonlight oval of his face. Shen Yuan could barely see it through the scream of colour and void, but he could still see it when Luo Binghe’s eyes opened wide. There were no fractals anymore; instead, hanzi flashed across his eyes like ticker tape, cutting through the noise:

RETURN IT TO US

THE AMPUTATED LIMB

…

…

…

What the hell!!

But the words kept coming:

RETURN

WHAT

YOU

 STOLE

“He can return himself to you if he wants to,” Shen Yuan said icily. He couldn’t even hear the words as he spoke them, but what did it matter? This thing didn’t seem like it needed ears to hear him.

The mass that had been Luo Binghe’s body - the glitch - the bug - the virus?? - twisted violently around him, knocking at his back until he was pushed down to the floor (if there was still a floor). His knees stung with the impact.

He was still holding on to Luo Binghe.

Luo Binghe, whose face was drawn in fierce concentration. Who hadn’t stopped drinking. Who was not giving up, and who was trusting Shen Yuan to not give up on him, either.

Kiss him.

It struck like a lightning bolt. It didn’t even feel like his own thought; instead it just hung there, alien and impossible to ignore.

The thing that was speaking through Luo Binghe’s eyes continued like nothing had changed:

THERE IS NO WANT

THIEF SHEN

IMPOSTOR SHEN

IT IS PART OF US

Shen Yuan stared at that final us. It lingered in stereo, duplicated in each of Luo Binghe’s eyes. As he stared, the lines slowly began to bleed at the edges, thickening until the characters were barely legible.

Somewhere in the back of Shen Yuan’s mind, a thought appeared.

“Actually,” he said, channelling every minute spent in deeply stupid forum debates into it and hoping, “because the Heaven’s Starry Harvest Way devs are notoriously unresponsive when it comes to bug fixes, even when they’re game breaking, there is a long tradition of community members providing patches to the rest of the community. In fact, it’s a common theory that they depend on community-driven bug fixes to save money!”

He squeezed the handle of the thermos a little tighter. It was getting lighter; there shouldn’t be too much potion left. The raging void wasn’t dying down, but the characters in Luo Binghe’s eyes changed:

IRRELEVANT

Shen Yuan snorted derisively, like he didn’t feel like he was going to throw up. Pixels displaced themselves and died in the outline of his forearms.

“Well, what are you, if not a bug? You are literally game breaking,” he said. His arms felt numb. He pressed his thumb down a little harder on Luo Binghe’s teeth. “And I can’t allow that. So isn’t it my duty to my community to fix the bugs I can?”

The dead pixels were spreading in uneven patches across his skin.

The last of the potion poured out of the bottle.

“Get patched, idiot!” Shen Yuan yelled.

And then -

Everything went quiet.

There were no more glitches.

The numbness in his arms was gone.

Luo Binghe, body all back together, fell bonelessly into Shen Yuan’s arms.

-

He dragged Luo Binghe back to the living room and into his bed. Then he made himself some coffee in Luo Binghe’s fancy coffee machine, wrapping his bleeding thumb in a paper napkin while he waited for the brewing to be done. The room looked like it had the first time he’d seen it, cozy and clean and (most importantly) stable.

The coffee made him feel more stable, as did sitting in the chair that gave him a perfect view of the bed. Luo Binghe looked normal, or as normal as a guy with a face like Luo Binghe could ever look. He didn’t look pixelated or glitchy, no matter how long Shen Yuan looked at him, which was a relief. He didn’t look sickly, either, outside of the whole “being unconscious” thing.

Shen Yuan watched him for the rest of the night, taking breaks only to piss and to make himself more coffee.

Someone had to make sure Luo Binghe didn’t die in his sleep, after all.

Day 17 of Spring, Year 1

Luo Binghe woke up around six. His eyes blinked open, slowly, and then he spent the next few minutes staring at the ceiling.

Shen Yuan, who had not been hovering, was pretty sure he was going to vibrate out of his own fucking skin. 

“How are you feeling?” he asked normally.

Luo Binghe turned his face to look at him. He blinked again, like he still wasn’t entirely done … dreaming? Did sentient computer glitches dream?

“Yuan-ge,” he said, and then smiled like he couldn’t stop himself.

C-cute!!

“Yeah, yeah,” Shen Yuan said, gesturing impatiently. “Did it work?”

Luo Binghe paused. He sat up, and then carefully looked himself over. Shen Yuan was torn between getting him a cup of coffee and absolutely not under any circumstances taking his eyes off him.

“Yes,” Luo Binghe said, with an easy finality that nearly made Shen Yuan’s knees collapse with relief.

“Good,” he said shakily.

“Thank you,” Luo Binghe said, “for helping me.”

“It’s what anyone would have done,” Shen Yuan said, though that didn’t feel entirely true. He quickly amended: “... If they had the tools.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Luo Binghe said.

“Well,” Shen Yuan said, uncomfortable, and then smoothly changed the subject. “So you’re stable, but do you still have any … powers?”

Luo Binghe hmmed thoughtfully. He stretched out a hand and wriggled his fingers.

Tiny fractals whirlpooled in the air around them.

Shen Yuan couldn’t decide whether it was cool or concerning. Maybe it was both.

“It’s safe,” Luo Binghe said. “I don’t think I can do enough to hurt anyone anymore.”

Shen Yuan chose to believe him.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Coffee? Something from town?”

He hoped Luo Binghe wouldn’t want anything from town; he really didn’t want to let him out of his sight for that long.

“No,” Luo Binghe said.

“Oh,” Shen Yuan said. He was suddenly a bit too aware that he was hovering again. “Okay.”

Luo Binghe must have sensed the awkwardness.

“Come here,” he said.

Shen Yuan did. He sat down at the side of Luo Binghe’s bed. Luo Binghe reached out and tugged him down until his face was resting in the crook of his neck.

“You look tired,” Luo Binghe said. His arms came up around Shen Yuan’s shoulders. When he spoke, Shen Yuan could see the movement of his Adam’s apple. “Did you sleep?”

“How could I?” Shen Yuan asked. “Someone had to look out for you.”

Luo Binghe said nothing for a while. He turned his face into Shen Yuan’s hair, which quickly began to feel a little damp.

Shen Yuan pushed himself away from Luo Binghe’s chest, alarmed. “Are you crying?”

“No,” Luo Binghe said, crying. Shen Yuan reached up to pat at his face.

“It’s over,” he said desperately. “What’s there to be sad about, hm?”

“Nothing,” Luo Binghe said, but now he was sobbing, face so red it looked like he was running a fever. “I just - Yuan-ge-”

“What?” Shen Yuan asked, reaching up to pat the top of Luo Binghe’s head as well. Had he broken him? Was this some kind of potion side effect??

“Yuan-ge,” Luo Binghe said again, “you’re too kind to me. I don’t deserve-”

“Don’t be stupid,” Shen Yuan said. He laid back down against Luo Binghe’s chest again, pushing them both back down.

They lay there for a while. Every so often, Shen Yuan could hear Luo Binghe sniffle above him.

“It really scared me.”

It wasn’t until he’d said it that Shen Yuan realised he had been the one who said it, and not Luo Binghe. He bit the inside of his cheek, wishing for a thicker face.

Luo Binghe squeezed him a little tighter. “It won’t happen again. I won’t let it.”

“Obviously,” Shen Yuan said.

But hearing him say it did make him feel a bit better.

-

Outside, the garden was untended, still dried out and mostly dead.

“Oh,” Luo Binghe said. He looked devastated.

Shen Yuan took his hand. He laced their fingers together and squeezed.

“I can help you rebuild it,” he said.

Luo Binghe was quiet for long enough that Shen Yuan started getting paranoid about it.

It’s whatever! You don’t have to accept it!!

“Only if you let me cook for you,” Luo Binghe said, not looking at him. Before Shen Yuan could reply, he barrelled on: “I want to help you gather ingredients, too. And clean your house, and travel to new places with you. As well as…” (his ears turned pink) “... other things.”

Shen Yuan bit down a smile. He squeezed Luo Binghe’s hand again, and said, in the most neutral tone he could manage: “That would be acceptable.”

A pair of magpies were watching them from the dead branches of a loquat tree. Shen Yuan ignored them and let Luo Binghe pull him into a tight embrace.

Getting the garden back to the way it had been would be a lot of work without the cheating.

Shen Yuan found he was looking forward to every moment of it.