Chapter Text
It had been years since the end of Proud Immortal Demon Way. Somehow, someway, it still lurked on the edges of Shen Yuan’s mind like a burr, feeling like a missed opportunity.
Maybe, it was because he spent so many years devoted to it and the last chapter had nearly killed him before he’d managed to free his airway. Maybe it was the extras that followed the main story and made him reread the whole thing in a new light. Maybe it was the way the fandom exploded when the attic wife conspiracy folks ended up being right.
He didn’t know, but he still looked in on the smoldering ruins of that fandom from time to time, to see what new things were being put out. After all, there’d been that American game about Binghe’s brother of all things, though you had to play the special plot to unlock that information. He had. Given the possible alternate romance plot, that had been absolute chaos and it had been quite banned in China.
There had been the Drama. Horrible, horrible thing that Arrogant Gods and Demon’s Way had been, he’d watched it anyway. It had taken everything he’d loathed about Airplane’s writing and ratcheted it up to thirty. Luo Binghe? Arrogant from the start, actually picking fights, justifying his Shizun being harsh on him. He’d about spewed blood at the change. The wives? Concubines to a one, not a single proper wife in the lot. He’d wanted to find the people who approved the changes and set them on fire. The only thing it had going for it was that censorship had tweaked things so the monster fights and combat mechanics were so so much cooler. Luo Binghe had had almost no struggle, he’d been flatter, less lovable, and that was a horror on the best character in the whole story.
He wasn’t even going to get into the weirdness of the Donghua. Even less so the weird plotline that had actually crossed with that one huge fanfiction called Scum Villain’s Self Saving System as a movie. From what he could tell, the Donghua, unlike even Arrogant Gods, had followed the storyline of the extras more than the original body of work.
He’d gotten it all of course. How could he not? He’d invested years of his life, when his health was at its lowest, into that stupid story. Still, it had eventually trickled to a standstill, even that hack apparently struggling to find new ways to reinvent his demented wheel.
He might have, maybe, been a little sad about it.
All the same, just like every other fan out there who had their fandom end, he picked himself up and moved on while keeping an eye out for new stuff. If there were new figures or art put out, he got them, now that he wasn’t constrained by his parents’ allowance. He had a job. He’d finished college and found one. His Da-ge had helped greatly, if he was being honest. He’d never once considered going into academics until his brother offered to let him be a teacher’s aid in his classes while he was struggling. He hadn’t expected to like it.
Somehow, he’d ended up in academics himself, though unlike his brother who was strictly a historian he’d gone into archaeology. He felt like he was Indiana Jones, honestly. Sure, there might be less thievery and fighting bandits. He’d never had to fight a black market person out to sell a treasure he’d found, fortunately, but there were plenty of academic battles.
His sharp writing style had never been so praised.
Though, when he ended up in a battle with his Da-ge on opposite sides of the same topic that had been a hilariously thorough mess, and they’d ended up joining forces in the end to utterly destroy someone else’s fool attempt to call them both out. Their theories were similar, but different in nuance. That guy had just been wrong. From there, they’d teamed up when their fields crossed, and it worked out well for them when writing papers about any of the mythology and supported finds that involved Cultivation in particular.
So, Shen Yuan had grown as a person, but he’d never left his Xianxia roots. He was known for it, these days, but not in a bad way. Sure, he wasn’t always taken seriously, but he could read any old spellwork and translate it to warnings about disease and the like readily enough where others might flag while trying to decipher some of the most heinous versions of sealscript. It made the rare times he went on digs worth it every time.
Mostly, however, his time was spent in restoration rather than the field, and his ability to read the documents he was putting back together was just as important there, if not more, than it was out among the rocks and trees. His biggest project, one he’d spent a solid six years on around other, less time consuming projects, was testament to that. It was probably going to be the exhibit of his career when it was finally fully preserved, given its nature.
It was a book, one with a lot of names and a lot of description, so very likely a story of some kind, or possibly a family ledger. He’d been making a transcription as well, as he doubted that it would ever be sturdy enough to survive being handled more than it absolutely had to, though he’d resisted the temptation to sit down and simply read it so he couldn’t be sure. It was so very valuable because books this old never survived to the modern day, and that this one had was a marvel.
He was still stunned that he and his team had managed to get their hands on it, and he’d never thanked the fact his parents were those Shens as much as he had when he’d gained access to this. Which he had nearly finished transcribing. There was still more work to go on the document itself, that would be a few years yet most likely, but the words on the pages had all been carefully penned out and pieced together from picture after picture as each damaged page was put back together. There were gaps, missing characters, and it was written in a seal script dialect he hadn’t actually seen before, but he’d recognized enough to know what he knew and that was enough, for now.
At least, that had been his thought before he’d started to actually translate things, and he’d had to check against all of his references repeatedly when he saw the utterly bewildering headline name of the old book. Luo Binghe. Like an Icy River. Flipping through his notes saw the same characters used again and again, and he truly couldn’t find a different interpretation of the name.
Bewildered, there was nothing he could do but power on, suddenly, somehow, even more invested in this book that he had been. Maybe it was a Pavlovian response to the name Luo Binghe, but he didn’t care. He needed to know what kind of coincidence this was, and reassure himself that there was no way that this was anything like Proud Immortal Demon Way. It made no sense.
There was no way it was possible. None.
Absolutely not.