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Chapter Text

Proud Immortal Demon Way was a male power fantasy of a stallion novel. To be more specific, it was a monster-fighting, escapist cultivation novel with an incomparably ridiculous length, a golden finger that broke every rule, and a harem size nearing the triple-digits, seeing as every single female character fell for the protagonist.

In other words, it was the type of novel an aspiring young disciple of Qi Fengge would never even touch, never mind reading it cover to cover.
So were most kinds of escapist novels, actually, up to and including the genre sometimes called portal fantasy, isekai or transmigration stories.

Which would make Shen Qiao - daoist cultivator since the tender age of five; inhabitant of a textbook wuxia setting anno 575 C.E.; avid reader of classics, cultivational texts, and only occasionally a few novels - being transmigrated into that exact type of story, quests, System, and mandatory plot points included, a little inconvenient.

Inconvenient, that was, for the System.

(Daoist Master Shen took a very firm stance against harming children.)

Chapter Text

Vertigo. Pain. Yawning emptiness under his feet. The sensation of falling.

"Shidi? Shi-"

Hazily, Shen Qiao blinked awake. In front of his eyes, fragments of a rectangle floated, starting to fill in with blocky, printed-looking characters. His ears rang with cut-off words and a jumble of inhuman voices coming from all directions at once.

[H̵e̴l̴l̴-̷o̶ ̶u̸s̵e̵r̴,̶ ̴w̴e̴l̴.̶.̷.̴c̴o̷m̶e̷ ̷t̷o̷ ̴P̵r̴o̵u̸-̸s̶a̸n̶d̴ ̸A̵u̴t̴-̸a̶l̵ ̷.̴.̶.̷m̴o̵n̵ ̷W̴-̸]

The rectangle flickered, glitched, and died.

"-di, can you hear me?"

Shen Qiao reached up to gently touch his forehead, finding it drenched in sweat. Whatever that had been, it had disappeared. Blinking against the light, he took in the scene around him: a pavilion, a senior martial brother looking at him with concern while helping him sit up, a gaggle of students behind looking at him with even greater concern. Exhaling softly, he looked back at the - his - shixiong. "What happened?"

"You're asking me? You were in perfect health, yet you suddenly came down with such a high fever ... shidi, does your head hurt?"

Shen Qiao lowered his hand from where he had pressed it against his temple and shook his head absent-mindedly. It didn't hurt; yet, he had the strangest feeling that it should. Why was that?

"Excuse me," he said, "I'm afraid ... I can't remember ..." At the edge of his vision, something sparked again.

He pressed his eyes closed, shaking his head once more as if to dispel an irritation or a hint of dizziness. Then he looked back up, seeming helpless. "Just who are you?"

Yue Qingyuan could be said to be many things, but he wasn't indecisive. In an instant, he had overcome the terror gripping him with icy fingers, rallying to round up all of the waiting disciples and direct them outside. The oldest and fastest, Ming Fan, he sent out to fetch Mu Qingfang. Then he returned to the bamboo house and closed the doors behind him.

"Shidi," he said gently, "do you mean to tell me, you remember nothing at all? Who I am? Where we are?"

"Not even my own name, I'm afraid," Shen Qingqiu said with a smile somewhere between self-deprecating and apologetic. It was a charming expression, on an even more charming face, but it sat strangely and ungainly in place of the cool, haughty demeanor Yue Qingyuan was accustomed to seeing there. Xiao Jiu. Apologetic. Imagine that.
The folding fan was lying untouched on a pillow to the side.

"I ... see," Yue Qingyuan said, carefully keeping his tone neutral. He turned away and, lacking something to do with his hands, began to busy them with the soothing task of making tea. "Do you have any idea how you might have ended up in this state?"

A gentle frown dug a notch in between the sharp eyebrows even as the eyes beneath followed him around the room. Even the shade of his irises seemed to have softened from sharp obsidian to smooth river stones, the entire human blurred around the edges.

As far as Yue Qingyuan was concerned, Mu-shidi couldn't arrive quickly enough. Nervously, his eyes searched for and found Xiu Ya, leaning in its scabbard next to the bed. The faint humming of spiritual power soothed his fraying nerves somewhat, proving the situation could not be too dire if the blade still recognized its bond with its owner. Still, Yue Qingyuan knew first hand qi deviations were not to be trifled with. His hands shook a little on the tea pot.

His shidi was still watching him with that little notch between his brows, no slant to his mouth and no tightening around his eyes. Just gentle curiosity and a faint sense of concern beginning to stir.
"I've worried you," he noted, again with that soft, apologetic tone.

"It's - don't think about it too hard," Yue Qingyuan said, pulling on an aura of calm strength again. It was not Qingqiu's part to worry about him right now. "Mu-shidi is on his way here as we speak. He is the world's most renowned healer." He smiled at Qingqiu with all the benevolence he could muster, almost calming himself as well. The shoulders under that light robe seemed to relax slightly. "Even if it should be something serious, there's nobody better qualified to fix you back up."

(Shen Qiao appreciated the attempt at calming him down, correctly concluding that whatever it was that had put him down like this, if it warranted the world's most renowned healer to pay him a personal visit, it was probably plenty serious.)

Mu Qingfang, world's most renowned healer, stroked his beard. He had been stroking his beard for quite a while now.

"Zhangmen-Shixiong, a word?"

"I can't tell anything physically wrong with him," he admitted in a low voice in the hallway of the bamboo house. "Just the remnants of his fever dispelling, but without any hint of what brought it on. High fevers are sometimes known to come with memory loss, but I've never heard of a case this severe, or comprehensive. The personality change, as well, might be a byproduct of cerebrospinal fever, but ... really, the case is a mystery. I can't think of a single reason for him to both lose his memories and completely change his personality at once."

Yue QIngyuan nodded gravely. Mu Qingfang, who had already been moving towards Qian Cao's library to begin researching, stopped mid-turn. "Except, perhaps." He paused thoughtfully. "His system is in disarray, only settling slowly. It's almost like it's trying to react to a great shock it never experienced at all ..."

Chapter Text

To anyone observing Shen Qingqiu from the outside, the scene would seem quite strange - observing his entire house with a neutral, perhaps faintly confused gaze as if he had never seen it before and also wasn't exactly pleased with the interior decoration. Not displeased either, exactly, but definitely not the gaze of someone feeling at home.

Since nothing seemed physically wrong with him, he had been left alone for the time being, while Mu Qingfang was doing research on obscure side effects of qi deviations and traumata sustained in early adolescence and Yue Qingyuan had gone off making whatever preparations a sect leader went off to make when his junior martial sibling and practical second-in-command put himself out of comission for an unknown period of time.

Before rushing off to the library, Mu Qingfang had recommended following his daily routines the best he could, in case the familiar movements triggered some hidden memories. That seemed like good advice. If only his muscle memory was a little more cooperative.

Shen Q- Shen Qi - He surveyed the bamboo house once more. The peaceful, austere atmosphere was something he could get used to, he supposed. The hand-painted decorative fans on the walls were not something he himself would have gone for, but -
Wait. He himself had gone for that.

Well, in any case, the first step was to get dressed. All the robes were, though of simple elegance, cut and pressed to impress, formal to the point of intimidation. The head pieces were worse. Safe to assume they were meant for official purposes only; if he was just walking around on his own peak, there was no need for any of that. He picked the simplest set of robes he could find, put his hair up in a bun, and fixed it in place with a single jade hairpin, elegant in an understated sort of way.

The sound of someone tripping on air caught his attention and he turned around. In the doorway, a pointy-faced youth of about fifteen or sixteen years was holding on to the door frame with wide eyes and a worried expression.

Right, of course they hadn't left him completely alone - there was an entire peak of children, hall masters and employees, all of which would likely go running to the sect leader or their healer shixiong again the second he so much as stumbled. He smiled softly. What good luck, to have such attentive sect siblings.

Something blue and square flickered at the edges of his vision again, almost legible this time.

[OOC Warn-/ ErrOR PLEASE ST[...] BY ... .]

If that didn't go away soon, he would have to see Mu-shidi about it sooner rather than later.

Ignoring the shocked expression that had lodged itself on the boy's face, Shen Qi- asked, "What was your name?"

He was Ming Fan, head disciple, and he really hoped to get something to do, judging by the way he was sidling up to the tea set.

The tea had been good. He could appreciate a sect leader who, despite his other duties, still successfully took care of such gestures himself.

"I see," Shen Qiao said thoughtfully. "What kind of lessons do you usually have?"

Two hours and three conversations with his hall masters later, he had what he thought was a rather comprehensive overview of what his peak was, what they were supposed to be teaching, and what he did.

It was on the way back to the bamboo house that he ran into an unusually good-, (if fierce-), -looking young man who moved like a fighter. His posture and economy of motion alone were, at a glance, sure to put him a notch above the rest in any room he was in. Sensing this was another peak lord, Shen Qiao gave a polite nod as befitting to a junior, but evidently highly skilled, fellow cultivator.
"Liu-shidi," he guessed. Upon asking, he had received a crash course from his hall masters.

Liu Qingge mustered him coldly from top to bottom. "Causing such a ruckus when clearly, you're on your feet and perfectly fine," he said derisively.

"Apologies for worrying all of you," Shen Qiao said, quite sincerely. "Aside from the obvious issue, this one is feeling quite well - I decided to follow Mu-Shidi's advice and take a look around."

Liu Qingge's gaze turned, if possible, even colder. He leaned back a little, as if he was worried about being bitten, or covered in acid. "Who worries about you? I was sent by Zhangmen-Shixiong to tell you Mu-shidi hasn't found anything yet, and that you are to tell either of them immediately when anything changes for better or for worse."
Ah, so this shidi of his was annoyed at being relegated to messenger duty. Shen Qiao only smiled slightly. "I see. Please thank them for their concern, then."

"Tell them yourself, if you're feeling so well."
Saying this, Liu Qingge stepped up to the edge of the path, drew his sword and set it into the air before him. Without sparing Shen Qiao another glance, he stepped onto the flat of the blade and took off like a comet in silver-white robes.

Shen Qiao, left behind on the path towards the bamboo house, pressed his hands against his temples to combat a sudden flare-up of migraine coupled with dizziness. That was. That was sure something.
He was pretty sure swords didn't fly. So what, and why -

"Shizun!" came Ming Fan's harried voice from the direction of the bamboo house. A moment later, the boy himself burst from the bamboo forest surrounding the peak's summit. He came to a halt a few steps in front of Shen Qiao and bowed respectfully, almost frightenedly. "This disciple apologizes for being late for the afternoon tea, I could not find you. Requesting punishment."

Shen Qiao dismissed the idea with a faint shake of his head; he had lost the boy on purpose to inquire about him with the hall masters. Now, he couldn't exactly punish him for it. "Forget about it for today," he said softly. "Is there any way to meet with the sect leader privately? I have something to discuss with him."

If he had dared to do so in front of his famously strict shizun, Ming Fan would have scratched his head. He couldn't exactly say, Sect leader always wants to spend time with you, usually you're the one sending him away again. I'm sure if you just wait a few days without doing anything, he'll drop by on his own. Instead, he searched for something appropriate to say. "Shizun, if you want, I can go take a message?"

"Do that," Shen Qiao nodded. "I'll retreat into the forest further down to cultivate; before you go, make sure people know to stay out of range."

Ming Fan found the choice of words strange; surely, his shizun feeling disturbed in his meditation was a greater priority than the safety of anyone stupid enough to walk into a sword glare themselves. Still, he saluted and left to fulfil his errands.

Once he finished practising, dawn had spread its dusky wings across the horizon and speckled it with stars. Over the soft rise and fall of his chest, Shen Qiao could make out the noises of crickets in the far underbrush. On the clearing he had practiced on, not a single blade of grass remained standing. Cut with laser precision, a swath of complete annihilation spread to the edges of the clearing, the ground churned into mud and the rocks pulverized from the titanic pressures bearing down on them, while the peaceful forest only an inch next to it remained completely untouched.
Noting that his breathing was only slightly strained, Shen Qiao stood still for a moment more before sheathing Xiu Ya.

The sword, despite the astonishing muscle memory that came with it, had also prompted a sudden feeling of wrongness. He had not attempted to fly on it.
He sheathed the gleaming blade and watched the ravaged clearing fade back into the darkness of the evening.

He had certainly learned a lot. There were, undeniably, oceans of skill above a rock solid base, even as they didn't seem to be joined properly. Had he started late? His spirit veins, though well-developed, seemed to carry traces of heavy damage from a long time ago, and his qi seemed to be moving sluggishly at times. For some reason, that seemed reasonable to him, though. Like he almost expected it. As if he had been badly injured recently ... what was that? Oh, right. The fever.

It was obvious there was a not inconsiderable level of skill there; it was just that, in some places, ... well. Some of these techniques could use some more polishing. That was all.

(Just how much time did he spend teaching, if he hadn't bothered to correct these blatantly obvious imperfections?)

The sword, to his endless unsettlement, could fly and strongly expressed its wish to do so.

Finished with his analysis, he turned to finally acknowledge Ming Fan standing at the edge of the clearing.

The boy saluted. "Since it sounded urgent, Sect Leader suggested a meeting tonight, if you are amenable. If not, he suggests meeting first thing tomorrow."

Not feeling very amenable, Shen Qiao decided to go with the second option. He had developed another headache.

Chapter Text

"Would you say my personality has changed since my qi deviation?" Shen Qingqiu asked in a thoughtful, mildly curious tone.

Yue Qingyuan froze, tea pot in hand. He had tried to have the meeting at Qing Jing to minimize the strain on his recovering shidi. Shen Qingqiu had gently, but firmly insisted they have it over at Qiong Ding, citing he didn't want to keep the sect leader from his duties for longer than necessary. Yue Qingyuan had thought to settle the matter by coming over to Qing Jing earlier than agreed and pretending he had something else to do in the area. That plan had been foiled by Shen Qingqiu coming over to Qiong Ding first thing after dawn and waiting in the ancestral hall until Yue QIngyuan woke up.
Which in itself already answered the question - not only had his shidi voluntarily sought him out, breaking a decade-old morning routine in the process, but he had also had a friendly conversation with Liu Qingge, without provoking or being provoked at all. Liu-shidi had reported with his usual gruffness and lack of detail, but he was visibly still out of sorts about it, if one knew how to look closely.
Yue Qingyuan internally shook himself, poured the tea for both of them - yes, it was supposed to be the other way around, but he'd argue Shen Qingqiu's sickness if pressed - and set the tea pot back on the pad with the heating talisman. "Barely," he said, looking back up and smiling reassuringly. "I'm sure it won't linger after you've recovered completely."

Shen Qingqiu's eyes still hadn't regained the cutting edge they used to have, but Yue Qingyuan suddenly felt uncomfortably transparent.

"I see," Shen Qingqiu said. Yue Qingyuan felt slightly uneasy at the thought that he might. "Then, what was I like as a person?"

Yue Qingyuan thought for a moment, choosing his words carefully before answering. "Shidi, you were - you are - a person who is first of all ambitious. You are highly disciplined, and dedicated to your cultivation. Strong-willed, so you sometimes clash with others. You never hesitate to share your opinion when you think someone else is wrong, and you always care about defending our sect against outsiders."
Shen Qingqiu didn't seem satisfied yet. Yue Qingyuan hesitated, the next words teetering on the edge of being said before coming out. "You manage your peak well and you're an accomplished scholar, poet, and artist. Yet I also can't help the feeling that, a good deal of the time, you are ... unhappy."

Heaven knew Yue Qingyuan wasn't blameless in that.

Shen Qingqiu completely failed to react, just listening with a look of concentration, so Yue Qingyuan continued further.

"You ... can be very strict with your students, but never as strict as you are with yourself." He smiled again. "Cang Qiong is fortunate to have you."

Shen Qingqiu finally nodded, a satisfied, if thoughtful air about him. Then he smiled back faintly and bowed. "Not nearly as fortunate as I am to have a sect that takes such good care of me." Yue Qingyuan had a sudden, if not entirely unexpected bout of heart-ache. "Thank you, Zhangmen-Shixiong. You've helped me greatly. I'll take my leave."

When Shen Qiao returned to Qing Jing, it was already late morning, and the peak began to warm up under the glow of the spring sun. He had left early enough Ming Fan hadn't even been up yet, and the boy was waiting for him with a slightly worried expression. Shen Qiao let him fuss through all the little morning rituals he apparently usually liked to observe before waving him off to do some paper work.

It was not until early noon that he called him back.
"I need to speak to my hall masters, call them into the main hall for an assembly," Shen Qiao said. "Also, let your martial siblings know I wish to schedule an assessment of their skills."

Ming Fan nodded dutifully and recited his orders back to make sure he had gotten them right. Uncharacteristically, he then lingered in the door instead of rushing off.

Shen Qiao turned his attention back towards the Peak's expenditure reports, as far as they existed. Most of the bureaucracy seemed to be handled by An Ding peak, which was confusing. How was he supposed to know what had and hadn't been requisitioned over the past few years?

"Shifu," Ming Fan began hesitantly.

"Yes."

"You know that I normally wouldn't say anything, but it has been almost five days now, and perhaps you forgot. Don't be mad if you didn't. But, er. Should we maybe let Luo Binghe out of the woodshed?"

Chapter Text

The tip of Shen Qiao's brush stilled over the expenditure reports. "There has been a disciple locked into the woodshed?" he asked in a very calm tone. "Since three days before I came down with a fever?"

Ming Fan shifted unconsciously. Outwardly, his Shizun hadn't changed at all. However, it was as if the air of the bamboo house had suddenly frozen in fear. Hurriedly, he said, "As you ordered, Luo Binghe was strung up and beaten before being confined to the woodshed. You usually leave him there for no more than three days, but with the fever -"

Shen Qiao cut him off with a sharp movement of his hand. "When you leave, let him out before you do anything else. What does the confinement entail?"

"Usually, he is locked into the woodshed while still tied up. He doesn't receive food or water until -" Ming Fan realized the implications of what he was saying only while he was saying it.

The brush clacked loudly against the table, and suddenly Ming Fan found himself scrambling out of the way as his shizun crossed the room in two large steps.

In a voice almost as sharp as before the fever, Shen Qingqiu said, "Lead the way."
Only a moment later, he reached for his head with a pained expression, forcibly shutting his eyes. He shook his head once before focusing his eyes back on Ming Fan, who had anxiously frozen in place. "Now."

Ming Fan found that he had never moved this quickly in his life.

Shen Qiao had grabbed the tea pot and a cup before rushing out and was keeping it steady while moving, running numbers in his head at the same time. How old was the student? How long had it been? If he had been whipped, how bad had the blood loss been?

Shen Qiao reached the door and placed his palm against the lock, ripping it clean off. Then he gently opened the door. Light fell on the body of a young boy - fourteen at the most, but older than ten, good, ten would have been a disaster - a boy who stirred a bit against the blinding sun streaming in. Quietly, Shen Qiao knelt down.

"Luo Binghe?" he called out to him while pouring a cup of tea, cooling it to drinkable temperature with a stream of qi from his fingertips at the same time. "Binghe, can you hear me?"

---

The first cup of tea, Shen Qiao had to hold to parched lips because the kid couldn't hold it himself. Shen Qiao cut through the rope with a flash of qi - signs of a struggle, evidently the boy had tried to cut through it on his own when he realized they had forgotten about him and failed - and propped the boy's head up to pour the tea into his mouth in agonizingly small sips.

From this angle, it looked like there was something red glowing on Luo Binghe's forehead for a few moments. Shen Qiao frowned at it slightly, but the longer he looked at it, the less clearly he saw it.

A grunt from the child he was holding drew his attention back to the task at hand. Shen Qiao focused on getting some tea into the kid.

When the cup was a quarter empty, Shen Qiao put it down to the side, mentally setting a timer. If the water stayed down, he could have more in an incense stick's time. Instead, he reached for the kid's wrist.

"How are you?"

Luo Binghe's sunken eyes were growing a little clearer, but when he tried to answer, it didn't even amount to a whisper. His breathing was quick and shallow. That didn't present an immediate problem, his pulse was telling Shen Qiao everything he needed to know. Weak and disordered, with a rapid heartbeat, qi moving sluggishly but still moving, so his spiritual foundations hadn't begun to consume themselves to keep him alive. Severe dehydration, hunger, and confusion, but none of the wounds were infected and nothing was broken. No immediate danger, except for who knew what kind of damage the dehydration had caused.

---

Ming Fan was apprehensively watching from the door of the shed.

The tea happend to be a blend of qi-replenishing Thousand Year Snow Lotus tea, a gift from Sect Leader Yue, and worked something like a qi transfusion. There were some early core formation cultivators who would fight to the death for a cup of it, and here Shen Qingqiu was pouring it down the throat of one of his students, Luo Binghe at that.
Ming Fan mentally noted that down as a sign that the situation was really, really bad.

Inedia was one of the first things a student learned, but only within a limited scope. At an early stage, they were still largely dependent on water.
Five days without water wouldn't kill a low-level cultivator with any kind of certainty, but they certainly came close.

After three intervals of tea, Luo Binghe was conscious enough to focus his eyes on Shen Qingqiu for more than a second and he could almost string together a sentence again. Shen Qiao looked up at MF. "Get another student, preferably one he gets along with well. Bring him to Qian Cao together for a check-up."

Ming Fan held back his protests. There was really only one student who Luo Binghe got along with, and usually, Shizun couldn't stand seeing them together any more than Ming Fan did. But these were extraordinary circumstances.

Ming Fan bowed and turned on his heel to look for his youngest shimei.

---

When he returned with a cheerful, but increasingly confused Ning Yingying - ("But shixiong, isn't it good he's finally allowed out?" Ming Fan reminded himself that she was a particularly air-headed twelve-year-old and also possibly didn't know people could die, like, for real.) - Shizun was crouching next to Luo Binghe, who was now sitting up leaning against the outer wall of the woodshed. Luo Binghe was nibbling on some kind of sweet that Ming Fan vaguely remembered his Shizun taking with his tea sometimes. Those, too, were probably worth their weight in silver outside of Cang Qiong. Shizun was still talking to him in that quiet, even tone. Luo Binghe's eyes lit up a little when he saw them approach.

His skin tone and overall look had much improved, so much so he actually tried to get to his feet on his own when they got closer. He wobbled so much that Shizun reached for his forearm to steady him, not letting go until Ning Yingying and, unwillingly, Ming Fan had taken up positions on each of Luo Binghe's sides.
"I want him monitored for at least the next eight hours," Shen Qingqiu ordered. "Make sure he receives water every ten minutes for the next two hours and food - plain rice, crushed apple, or unsalted bread - every hour. If he's steady on his feet by tomorrow, he can be sent back."
Ming Fan noticed to his relief that their shizun seemed to have relaxed. The danger had, apparently, passed. "Come on then," he said to the other two. Luo Binghe was already trying his irritating little sunshine smile on Ning Yingying, who was more clinging to his arm than steadying him. In response, Ming Fan slung Luo Binghe's arm more firmly across his shoulders, separating the two for a moment. "The sooner we get there, the sooner we can leave."

Chapter Text

Having put out that particular fire, Shen Qiao returned to his original plans for the afternoon: Talking to his hall masters to get an overview of his students.

The got caught up rather quickly on one in particular.

"Did none of you realize he was going to die if he was left there?" The furrow between Shen Qiao's eyebrows was foreboding, but nowhere near as cutting as Shen Qingqiu's open malice had been in the past when someone crossed him. The hall masters failed to tremble in fear. They exchanged glances.

"Apologies, Immortal Master Shen," the most senior among the three said. "Barely a week passes without Luo Binghe getting punished, and it isn't the first time he was confined to the woodshed either. As you normally handle his discipline yourself, none of us ... bothered to keep track."

Shen Qingqiu's silence was heavy. The two junior hall masters exchanged some more meaningful glances behind the back of the third.

"I see," he finally said. "This kind of thing happens often, then?"

"He isn't usually left there for this long, as far as I know," the hall master said carefully. He had begun to sweat slightly without knowing why.

Shen Qingqiu nodded with an inscrutable expression. He remained silent for another few seconds before returning to their overview, which concluded without further digressions. It finished, to their surprise, by Shen Qingqiu ordering an assembly of all students mid-morning of the next day.

"Is this still about Luo Binghe, you think?" one of the younger hall masters murmured to the other while they hurriedly left after being dismissed. The older hall master cut them off with a sharp look from the corner of his eye.

They weren't nearly out of hearing range yet.

As had become habit over the course of the last few days, Shen Qiao raised a hand to his temple and pressed to relieve the headache.

That conversation had told him some things about himself that he ... would have to consider. With growing skepticism.

Shaking the thought off, he turned back towards the bamboo house. There was more work to be done.

Luo Binghe had spent the day drinking water, different kinds of juices, and eating very small portions of plain white rice. After the pounding headache had left up, the boredom had set in pretty quickly, but he had resolved not to cause any trouble.

Night had fallen. Still, there were voices coming from the hallway outside of the infirmary. Luo Binghe listened closely, straightening up when he heard the voice of his shizun.

"... sorry to bother you," he heard Shen Qingqiu say in that gentle, unaffected tone he had never used before today. "How is he?"

Soundlessly, Luo Binghe slipped out of bed and tiptoed over to the sliding door. In nudging it open a bit, he missed Dr Mu's reply, but he was in time to catch Shen Qingqiu's wrily amused, "Well enough to get into trouble already?"

"The opposite," Mu Qingfang replied. "He has been an exemplary patient."

Steps sounded in the hallway. In a hurry, Luo Binghe slipped back beneath the covers and laid back down like an exemplay patient who wasn't eavesdropping.

A few moments later, the door opened to admit his Shizun alone.

Luo Binghe had recovered much, by the looks of it, Shen Qiao noted. Even though his skin was still pallid, the boy himself was buzzing with energy again, eager to get out of bed despite the hour. He had probably slept away a good deal of the afternoon.

Shen Qiao was glad to see it. That only left some things to clear up.

"Luo Binghe," he said by way of greeting, gesturing for the boy to stay in bed while he drew up a chair. "How are you feeling?"

"Mu-shishu's disciples have been taking very good care of me," Luo Binghe said.

Shen Qiao nodded. "That's good." They didn't get to deal with cases such as dehydration a lot and had probably tripped over themselves to demonstrate they knew the exact procedure to follow.

"The past few days, I came down with a sudden and unexpected fever," Shen Qiao began. The boy began to perk up in alarm, so he raised his hand to forestall any interruptions.

"As a consequence, I lost my entire memory. I did not find out you were locked up until this morning."

Luo Binghe had grown very still.

"You have my sincere apologies nobody else let you out, either," Shen Qiao continued. "I have spoken to the hall masters to make sure it never happens again. Even if -"

Something dropped to the ground in a crash in the room adjacent to theirs. (A Qian Cao disciple on night shift had dropped something at the sheer shock of the words 'sincere apologies' leaving Shen Qingqiu's mouth.)

"Even if," Shen Qiao continued, "I lose my memory again, they are authorized and instructed to end your punishment in my stead. I hope you'll give me the chance to make up for it."

Luo Binghe's eyes, if possible, widened even further. Then he broke through his stupor with a wave of denials, thank you's, and unintelligible stammering.

Shen Qiao let him wear himself out before asking, "What were you punished for?"

As if by cutting a string, Luo Binghe shrunk back into himself. "This one was punished for backtalk."

Shen Qiao frowned again. "You were strung up, beaten, and put into solitary confinement without food or water ... for backtalk?"

Luo Binghe kept his eyes on the blanket, shoulders raised awkwardly. "That's what Ming Fan-shixiong said."

" ... and you didn't kill someone, steal something, or endanger any of your fellow disciples?"

With a visible shift going through his entire body, Luo Binghe raised his gaze to look up at him in horror. "No?????"

That was not the look of someone with a guilty conscience.

"I see," Shen Qiao said after a beat. With a sigh, he straightened the blanket across the kid's chest. "Stay here overnight. Get some more juices, they're good to rebalance your blood. Eat some more."

Luo Binghe couldn't help but grimace at that.

Shen Qiao found himself smiling wrily. "Not a fan?"

"No, I, of course -" the boy began hurriedly. Shen Qiao gave him an amused look.

On Shen Qingqiu's normally cold and austere face, the expression was like spring blooming in fifty cities all across the land, all at once. That friendly look, together with the silence of the ward in the evening wrapping everything into a blanket of peace and security, gave Luo Binghe the courage to add something else.

"It's just. So bland. I could make something better if they'd just let me."

"They'll let you eat something better tomorrow, when you have recovered some more," Shen Qiao said, a shadow of a smile still lingering in the corners of his eyes. Then he rose to his feet. "I've kept you up long enough. Good night and recover well, Luo Binghe."

Luo Binghe stared after him until long after he had left the room.

--

When Shen Qiao returned to the bamboo house, it was already late at night. Nonetheless, he summoned Ming Fan once again.

Ming Fan opened the door quietly and inobtrusively to find his shizun sitting at the desk once more, setting down the brush.

"The incident that got Luo Binghe locked into the wood shed," he began without preamble. "What did he do, or say? Don't leave anything out."

Ming Fan, ever dutiful, began to recount the incident. Not that there was much to tell.

When he finished, shizun simply asked, "that was all?"

Inexplicably, Ming Fan felt a little chilled. The Shen Qingqiu from only a few days before would never have reacted to Luo Binghe making the slightest mistake with just a, 'was that all?'

Nonetheless, he answered, "It was."

"I see. You may go. Get some sleep, it's late."

He left his shizun at his desk, making no move to go to bed. Instead, he was staring into the light of a single candle, face cut sharply into harsh light and cold shadow.

Chapter Text

First thing next morning, Ming Fan was sent by his shizun to invite Xian Shu Peak Lord Qi of all people for tea.

The rest of the day was spent outside on the mountain, in the classrooms and on the training field with shizun testing and evaluating the skills of every individual student on Qing Jing Peak with the exception of Luo Binghe.

(Luo Binghe's disappointment knew no bounds. He was so recovered! He was so fine! If everyone except him was going to get individual guidance from shizun, he was going to fall behind! He thought his punishment was over!)

Early in the morning, Shen Qingqiu bid them pack all of their equipment before leading them a precipitous route halfway down the mountain on foot, easily drifting from one craggly piece of rock to the next, barely even touching the ground. The students were left to scramble after him while also balancing their easles, brushes and instruments.

They reached a small plateau with a peacefully running waterfall and decent view of the neighboring Qiong Ding Peak, the rainbow bridges hazy in the distance.

Shen Qingqiu, not a speck of dust on him, was waiting patiently for the last of the students to filter out of the woods and onto the outcropping. They emerged in various stages of disarray and breathlessness.

When they had all gathered, he indicated the view with one sweeping sleeve. It was beautiful, that much had to be said; the waterfall produced a faint mist which shimmered in the morning sun, the steep cliffs of Qiong Ding in the distance portrayed a harsh contrast to the gently swaying bamboo behind them. "Paint this to the best of your abilities," Shen Qingqiu ordered, his gaze wandering from one student to the next without betraying his thoughts.

Some students exchanged tired looks before setting down their things and beginning to shake out their wrists. Ning Yingying was already unpacking her things and setting up her easle, while Ming Fan got to shooing the others to work.

There hadn't been a single harsh or sharp word so far, even though they all had the feeling they hadn't done too well on the way here, so more than one disciple flinched when Shen Qingqiu spoke again. "And better hurry," he added, pointing to a bank of rapidly darkening clouds moving in from the east. "It looks like it's going to rain. You've got a shichen."

The announcement was taken in by pale faces, followef by frenzied unpacking.

After the shichen, there were lots of unhappy faces - most of their pictures were unfinished, uneven, unbalanced, a disgrace to their own eyes. Apprehensive glances were thrown in Shen Qingqiu's direction, but his face remained inscrutable and unmoved. He examined every picture for a minute or so, but didn't comment on even a single one.

After painting, they were instructed to write and recite poetry on a similar time limit. After poetry, they took turns playing the guqin in front of the waterfall and criticising each other. By the time they were finished, the sun was high in the sky.

After the last round of feedback was done, Shen Qingqiu rose from his lotus position and gestured for them all to pack up. He still hadn't offered any commentary on a single of their works, only watched and listened. "Time for lunch."

A round of cheers rose from the disciples. It transformend quickly into groans when they realized the way back was the same way they had come, only uphill.

They hurried to follow.

It started pouring on the way back.

After drying off and eating lunch, they were led to the classrooms to play weiqi against the hall masters, three teams of two at a time with the rest observing. Shen Qingqiu was striding around the room like a cat, looking here and there, but offering no comments besides occasionally indicating a position on the board with one finger.

By the time the last game of weiqi was done, their heads felt like they were about to start smoking, and Shen Qingqiu sent them out to the training field. The weather had cleared up by now, giving the sun room to lengthen their shadows on the wet ground while they ran through their formations as a group. The exercise and clear, fresh air were a welcome change.

Shen Qingqiu kept them going until they were all sweat-soaked and exhausted. Then he had them start on individual demonstrations, which were somehow worse.

During the single demonstrations, Shen Qingqiu had Ming Fan stand beside him as he watched. The longer the evaluation went on, the more Ming Fan got the feeling Shen Qingqiu was not impressed.

Still, Shen Qingqiu was neither gentle nor firm in his instructions, just regarding everything with an unreadable gaze until the student had displayed the top of what they were currently able to achieve. Even Ning Yingying was gently rebuked when she tried to wheedle and whine for a break. They were all tired; what was unusual was that not even their youngest could charm some leniency out of their teacher.
When the last one had finished, night had fallen. The stars had risen in the sky against the last purpling remnants of sunset. Shen Qingqiu finally dismissed the rest of the group, who had been watching, and sent them off to bed. Then he turned to Ming Fan, raising his eyebrows slightly. "And?"

Around them, the children shuffled off the training field. Tired voices filtered all around them, fading into the distance quickly.

Ming Fan found himself at a loss for words. And what?

Shen Qingqiu sighed in disappointment and shook his head. Apparently he had expected something else.

"The last student was far behind his possibilities. The talent is there, but none of them are trying as diligently or as determinedly as they would have to if they want to achieve great things in the future. My students are wasting their talent. It's like they're afraid of being too good." He shook his head faintly. "As head disciple, it is part of your duties to guide your younger siblings. It's important that you learn how to evaluate them and notice when someone is lagging behind their possibilities."

Ming Fan straightened up with wide eyes and nodded quickly several times. "I'll learn, Shizun!"

"Good," Shen Qingqiu said. "Then, now it's your turn."

Ming Fan paled.

When he crawled into bed that evening, almost too tired to stand, he thought: Shizun really went a little crazy with the fever.

Then he was out like a light.

Chapter Text

Qi Qingqi, Peak Lord of Xian Shu Peak, had accepted the invitation to meet up and suggested to make it brunch, today. Shen Qiao silently wondered if none of his martial siblings had anything to do with their time if their schedules were this flexible, or if he was just special.

The idea that she might have agreed so suddenly out of any kind of affection for him capsized and drowned the second they made eye contact across the rainbow bridge. Qi Qingqi was a young-looking, sharp-eyed woman whose cool gaze almost seemed to cover the dewy grass with a layer of hoarfrost. A step behind her followed a young woman with politely lowered eyes, the lower half of her face covered by a veil. This must be Liu Mingyan, head disciple of Xian Shu. Despite her demure aura, she didn't exactly emit friendliness, either.

Shen Qiao went to greet Qi Qingqi and led her to the pavilion they were going to have breakfast at, followed by their respective head disciples. The atmosphere remained cool and stagnant and didn't change in the slightest as they sat down to eat.

Nothing for it.

Shen Qiao set his teacup back down. "Qi-shimei, I need your opinion on something."

With a pleasant, but cool smile, Qi Qingqi responded, "There's a first time for everything, I suppose."

Shen Qiao elected to ignore this for now, filing it away for later. "Would you mind answering something for me?"

"Since you're asking so nicely," Qi Qingqi said, not dropping her smile but searching his face with increasing suspicion.

"Then let me be frank. The people around me act like I'm a completely different person all of a sudden, and I'm afraid Zhangmen-shixiong might be holding back some things out of concern for my health. I need to know, do I usually act differently?"

Qi Qingqi took a second to savor the tea in silence, holding the cup between her hands. "Let me ask you something first. Is it true one of your students, the one with the curls, was at the infirmary for dehydration?"

It took Shen Qiao a moment to suppress his displeasure about that specific situation. "He was. Fortunately, he is recovering well."

Qi Qingqi gave a sharp, quick, "Hah!" She set her own cup down with a clack. "No wonder nobody knows what to do with you!" She leaned forward, a glint in her eyes. "Let me tell you what you are usually like. You beat your students, especially the one with the curls. You get into arguments at the drop of a hat and are an all-around insufferable person and poisonous viper. You've been involved in a feud with Liu Qingge since the two of you were still head disciples, but to be honest, the only person who holds any real fondness for you seems to be Zhangmen-shixiong, and you can't stand him. Now, you have this fever, suddenly it's like you're a completely new person, and none of us trust this change even one bit.
"There, how was that?"

She looked at him sharply, clearly waiting for something and bracing for an explosion of sorts.

Shen Qiao didn't seem to notice, mulling it over in his head. "I see," he finally said. "Thank you very much. Would any of you be upset if I never reverted back to my old personality?"

Qi Qingqi dissolved into laughter. If it was a touch hysterical, nobody pointed it out.

"You know, I thought this was going to be a trap of some kind when you invited me over," she said later, when they were walking back towards the rainbow bridge. "But the old you never would have reacted so calmly to me speaking to him like that."

"Mh," Shen Qiao replied noncommittally. "Many thanks to shimei for coming anyways."

Mustering him with narrow eyes, Qi Qingqi shook her head faintly. "Are you sure you're not possessed or something?"

Shen Qiao smiled a little helplessly. "Not to my knowledge, at least."

After saying their respective goodbyes, Shen Qiao turned around to find Ming Fan hissing at Luo Binghe, who had appeared out of nowhere.

"Luo Binghe," Shen Qiao acknowledged him. Both of his students immediately stopped their fight to let Luo Binghe greet him properly.

"Shizun," Luo Binghe said hopefully, "this disciple has been cleared. I missed so much already, may I resume my lessons?"

Shen Qiao, still following the receding figure of his shimei with his eyes, sighed and nodded.

The mellow reaction encouraged Luo Binghe. "And, since we're already at it. I almost don't dare ask. Since everyone else received an evaluation of their skills ...?"

Shen Qiao turned back to him. "What did Mu-shidi say about your state?"

"36 hours until cleared."

Shen Qiao threw a short look up at the sun. "... meet me at the training field in half an hour."

Luo Binghe beamed.

Luo Binghe's evaluation was much the same as the others yesterday, except shorter because he was only one student, exclusively held with Shen Qingqiu for the same reason, entirely in the shade, and seeded with regular mandatory water breaks. He held up ... okay-ish. All in all, there was nothing of note. Mentally, Shen Qiao mourned he hadn't been able to keep Ming Fan around to train the boy's eye. But there had been too many other errands to be run. Oh, well - there would be other opportunities.

In the afternoon, Shen Qiao went to meet with Yue Qingyuan again. He was beginning to feel like a social butterfly with how many meetings he was getting into recently.

You let me beat my students to this extent? Shen Qiao criticized him internally, looking at him across a weiqi board.

Unaware of or simply used to the displeasure across from him,Yue Qingyuan gave him a friendly smile. "You rarely take the initiative to see me. What can I do for you?"

"I've been hearing some interesting things about myself recently," Shen Qiao began. "It seems like I really was a completely different person before the fever. You know, I thought about it and I'm pretty sure the only way I would ever act that way was if I was hiding a secret that i was terrified of anyone ever finding out and now forgot about."

Shen Qiao looked up and found that the sect leader had gone white as a sheet.

"... I see," Shen Qiao said neutrally. "Thank you." He picked up another weiqi piece. "In any case, I need to teach my students and my swordsmanship is not as good as I thought it was. Or ... at least a bit weird. Did I ever actually use this sword?" Yue Qingyuan nodded, still not quite recovered and refusing to look at him. "Then I need to know what else I unlearned from the fever. I know it's a lot to ask, but could you help me with that?"

(Yue Qingyuan was never going to turn down free Xiao Jiu time.)

Shen Qingqiu's calligraphy was beautiful as ever, if a little ...

(Shen Qingqiu stared at a sheet of paper bearing a half-begun radical. Then he turned to Yue Qingyuan, frowning faintly. "Which Shen ...?")

... different. Yue Qingyuan stared at the characters for a long time, but he couldn't put his finger on it: They were undeniably in Shen Qingiu's handwriting, elegant and dignified, beautiful and balanced. It took him several minutes to realize that they had grown more relaxed, less painfully rigid and more natural. The characters looked like someone hadn't been holding themselves to a standard, afraid to be judged.

Somehow, Yue Qingyuan felt bereft.

Playing the guqin was ... interesting. Shen Qingqiu seemingly remembered few pieces - enough to be well educated by mortal standards, but far from his former endless repertoire of classics. He listened to Yue Qingyuan stiltedly play one of his former favorite pieces with a small furrow in his brow before taking over. After a few seconds, the piece flowed from his fingers as naturally as water.
It lacked the bone-shaking, aching bitter-sweetness it used to have, though.

Shen Qingqiu remained excellent at weiqi. If he was a little less eager to sacrifice his pieces, well. He remained as aggressive, as strategic, as determined to exploit a weakness as ever. Perhaps a little less vicious, a little more ruthless. But overall barely changed at all.

It was an enjoyable game. Yue Qingyuan was almost sorry to win it by one point, because that meant it ended.

After placing his last piece, Yue Qingyuan looked up with a smile to find Shen Qingqiu leaning aside, away from the light of the window, pressing his hand to his forehead as if he was dizzy or experiencing a migraine.

Yue Qingyuan hid his alarm and asked as calmly as he could, "What is it? Is the fever acting up again?"

Shen Qingqiu shook his head. "I think ... memories."

"You remembered something?" Yue Qingyuan felt an ache in his heart. On one hand, that would mean an end to the enjoyable time they had been spending together. On the other, could he really bear Shen Jiu never remembering who he was?

"I think I had a brother once," Shen Qingqiu said softly. "I think ... he betrayed me and let me down."

Yue Qingyuan froze, his hand suspended mid-air where he had been reaching out to steady him.

Shen Qingqiu was staring sightlessly into the distance, wincing from time to time as if assaulted by the force of the memories.

"I was really upset about it. I thought I could trust him."

Yue Qingyuan felt a vice close around his throat and squeeze.

"I remember .... a fight. Being injured. Broken bones. Excruciating pain."

Through a blurry sheen of tears, Yue Qingyuan mouthed, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I should have - But his voice didn't seem to work. What use, after all, was there to saying it now?

"But it's all so blurry." Shen Qingqiu sighed and shook his head, returning his attention to the room. He seemed surprised to find Yue Qingyuan leaning on the table with both hands, head lowered so far it abscured his face. "I really don't remember -"

"Well," Yue Qingyuan said kindly, affecting an air of gentle good cheer now that he had regained control of himself. "It's already getting late, anyways. Didn't Mu-shidi recommend you stick to your daily routines? Perhaps more of your memory will return if you go and rest some more. Really, you've been straining yourself too much recently. Allow me to walk you back?"

Shen Qingqiu gave a mildly amused smile. "I've been cleared completely except for the memory loss," he replied. "I'm doing nothing I shouldn't be doing. Can I just let the work pile up?"

By the time they made it back to Qing Jing Peak, the sun had set almost completely, only tracing faintly glowign red edges around the highest peaks in the distance. Shen Qingqiu turned back to Yue Qingyuan once more. "Oh, before I forget. I need a thank you gift for Qi-shimei."

Yue Qingyuan gave him a bemused look. "Well," he said, thinking quickly, "there's a set of hair pins that double as throwing darts in the treasury. I'll send it to her on your behalf."

Shen Qingqiu gave him an equally puzzled look. "... shouldn't I give her something myself?"

Yue Qingyuan almost cringed at the idea. "No, you. Just. Focus on recovering, shidi. That's the most important thing." Shen Qingqui starting another inter-sect blood feud really was the last thing they needed right now.

(Shen Qiao secretly sent Qi Qingqi a gift of his own anyways. He did not appreciate being patronized.)

("Shifu," Liu Mingyan said. "You received two thank you gifts. One from Shen Qingqiu, and one from Shen Qingqiu via the sect leader. Shoud we send one back?"

Qi Qingqi didn't even look up from what she was doing. "Absolutely not. They can figure things out themselves, I'm not touching that with a ten-foot pole.")

Chapter Text

Wan Jian peak, the "peak of ten thousand swords," was ranked third in seniority. They were known for both the wall from which every disciple of Cang Qiong chose a spiritual sword once they were old enough, drawing it directly from the stone, and for producing generations of outstanding swordsmen.

Wei Qingwei, peak lord and resident expert on spiritual weapons, rubbed his chin. "It's good you're coming to ask for advice since you feel something is off, but I'm not sure what if could be," he admitted. "The blade is in good condition, and the sword spirit harmonizes well with your qi. Xiu Ya as a whole seems quite comfortable with you."

"The problem is that I don't feel comfortable with ... them," Shen Qiao said, struggling to explain. Sure, sword intent was a thing, but ... was that really what that term meant? He thought for another moment before waving it off. "Since the fever, several others of my skills have also felt strange to me, and I couldn't pinpoint why. I just want to refamiliarize myself with Xiu Ya, so I can be sure I will disgrace neither myself nor my blade."

All members of Cang Qiong valued their weapons. Still, it pleased Wei Qingqwei to see someone treating their spiritual sword with such care. "Alright. Then feel free to use our training field to try out some things, we have more open space than Qing Jing does."

The Wan Jian training field was more of a quarry, carved deep into the side of the mountain so it was surrounded on three sides by sky-high vertical stone walls. The ground was made from packed dirt to cushion falls, though nobody who had taken a tumble here would ever call it soft. At this hour, the morning drills had concluded, leaving the field completely deserted.

Shen Qiao stood in the middle of the pitch, controlling his breathing for a few moments. Then he drew Xiu Ya, focusing only on his connection to the sword for a few moments. It answered with a sense of calm anticipation. Swinging the blade into a starting position, Shen Qiao began with the sequence his feet told him was the oldest and most familiar and let himself fall, caught by muscle memory.

The sequences came easy once he let go of his conscious mind.

After a while, Xiu Ya separated from his hand to move around him, striking independently but with increasingly good synchronization while he continued the sequence open-handedly. After a particularly fierce set of blows, Xiu Ya returned near him. He whirled around and seized the hilt to execute a broad, sweeping motion, sending a wave of qi surging across the field. Like a real wave, it rose with a roar, battering itself against the cliffs surrounding the arena with a deafening crash.

The stone walls were thick and sturdy, part of the mountain and additionally reinforced with talismans to absorb shock waves. Nonetheless, they shook.

Off to the side stood a cluster of training dummies. After the ground had stopped trembling, a little pangolin stirred next to them, chancing a look across its scaly tail. Seeing that it was safe again, the little pangolin, whose job it was to keep score when the students were training, unrolled from the ball of scaled armor it had turned itself into and held up a little sign with the number 10.

"That wasn't a qing jing peak technique," Wei Qingwei said casually from behind Shen Qiao.

Instead of flinching, Shen Qiao furrowed his brows and surveyed the billowing clouds of dust he had torn up for another few moments. "... thank you for letting me train here," he said finally, turning to face Wei Qingwei. "I've benefitted greatly. The stone walls especially are very practical."

"No stray sword glares to cut bystanders, and no winds to impair aerial maneuvers," Wei Qingwei said not without pride. "The pit has been an indispensible part of our training for generations."

Shen Qiao gave a rueful chuckle. "For the same reasons, I always have to decimate the bamboo forest and hope nobody comes looking for me." He turned Xiu Ya over in his hands, mustering the blade intently for some more. It seemed as if something had settled within him. "I'm trying to bring my swordsmanship back up to par, and I'm reaching the limits of what I can do purely on my own. Is there a sparring partner you could recommend to me?"

Running a peak himself, Wei Qingwei was unwilling to offer himself up. He didn't have a lot of time in the first place, and it wasn't like him and Shen Qingqiu spoke often enough to have a particularly good realtionship. "There's always someone at the training field in the mornings and afternoons," he said after a moment's hesitation. "Come by again and look for someone, I guess. The seniors usually train in the early afternoon, after the pit has started getting some sun."

"Thank you, Wei-shidi. You've really helped me a lot."

When Shen Qiao arrived back on Qing Jing peak, it was mid-morning, which gave him enough time to check on his hall masters and sit in on every type of lesson once.

This was accomplished by entering the back of the classroom silently, motioning to the hall master in question to keep doing what they were doing, and watching the class unfold until he was satisfied with what he had seen. When there was only an incense stick of time left, he would motion to the hall master again to indicate he wanted to make himself known. At this point, the hall master finished what they were saying and announced they had a visitor.

The disciples' heads turned towards the back, often startling. They hadn't noticed their shizun entering at all. This was followed by a flurry of motion, as they all scrambled to their feet to chorus a greeting.

"It's alright, I'm just here to get a view of your lessons," Shen Qingqiu said with an uncharacteristic smile. "However, since I'm here already - how about a demonstration?"

Demonstrations were as cherished as they were rare. Like most of the peak lords, Shen Qingqiu took a rather hands-off approach to teaching, leading the disciples on excursions now and then but rarely teaching himself so he had time to focus on his own cultivation. As such, an opportunity to learn directly from shizun was something nobody wanted to miss. The evaluation a few days ago had been the most time their shizun had spent with them in a while, and he hadn't even demonstrated anything!

Consequetly, every disciple was staring anxiously and with bated breath as Shen Qingqiu played a piece on the guqin, made a quick study of the motif they were supposed to be painting, or showed them a few moves of weiqi, throwing in one or two sentences of explanation. "You don't have to grasp everything now," he added when he saw a few students look dejected after the first few brushstrokes. "Just watch and try to understand some of the essence of what I'm doing."

As he had during the evaluation, he went through every student present, usually three or four, and made them state if, and what, they had noticed.

At the end, all of them really did feel they had learned something.
The maneuver went off flawlessly in the first two classes. Only in the third, after a few minutes, a curly head rose from the characters it was supposed to be looking at and turned towards the back.
Luo Binghe's eyes widened.

"It is a good thing to be aware of one's surroundings," Shen Qiao said in a slightly admonishing tone, "however, if you noticed me, you might want to focus more on your work."

Luo Binghe flushed, while the rest of the disciples startled. "Greetings, Shifu!"

On the way to the front to do a demonstration, Shen Qiao passed Luo Binghe's desk to have a look at his calligraphy practice. Mustering it for a long moment, he nodded in approval and said, "Passable."

Luo Binghe reddened further, for a different reason.

At lunch, Shen Qiao caused the next uproar. Usually, the disciples took their meals together in the mess hall, supervised by one or two hall masters or elders, while Shen Qingqiu withdrew to the bamboo house, occasionally tended to by Ming Fan.

Today, Shen Qingqiu marched across the mess hall up to the front and raised his hands until the rapid whispering had died off. "You may remember your teachers told you about an assembly a few days ago," he began. "Accordingly, afternoon classes are cancelled until further notice. After lunch, meet me at the training field. You do not need to bring anything."

As he left the hall again, whispering took back up behind him and quickly grew in volume until the elder on duty had to call them to order.

At the training field, all twelve inner disciples of Qing Jing watched as Shen Qingqiu ran through all forms of Qing Jing sword technique.

As everything on Qing Jing, it was beautiful and elegant on the surface, while determined and ruthless underneath. It reminded the onlooker of looking at a sword encased in silk, or a flower with poisonous thorns.

When Shen Qingqiu's feet touched the ground again, a hush had fallen over the entire field, not even birds calling in the distance.

His voice like a clear, ringing bell, Shen Qingqiu spoke into the silence. "Disciples who don't put their whole effort into studying have no business being cultivators. Out of respect for the time of their teachers as well as their own, anyone who isn't putting their whole effort into their studies will be demoted to an outer sect disciple or expelled," he said coolly. "The others," he held the gazes of every one of his students for a moment, gentling his voice, "with patience, diligence and dedication, I will lead to excellence."

The reactions, ranging between terror and elation as they were, remained completely silent out of respect for the moment.

That meant, of course, that Liu Qingge had to ruin it. Yue Qingyuan had sent him to check in on Shen Qingqiu again and he was not happy about it.

What on earth has gotten into Shen Qingqiu, he wondered silently, catching the tail end of his little speech. Out loud, he called, "Students who fall behind their potential are going to get expelled? That's rich coming from a second-rate late start like you."

Shen Qingqiu's demeanor, which had been pleasant and placid the last few days, cooled by several degrees as Liu Qingge approached. "The way I teach my students is my business," Shen Qingqiu said firmly. "Especially," he turned to face him fully with a foreboding expression, "since you can't seem to keep yours under control. Or what's this I hear about them breaking into Qing Jing Peak to disturb my students? Don't they know on Bai Zhan that uninterrupted rest is crucial for good development?"

None of the disciples dared to move even a single step while the two peak lords measured each other up. Shen Qingqiu hadn't put his sword away yet, which lent the air an extra sense of sharpness. "I have no idea why I have tolerated it for this long, but if they keep this up they really can't count on my mercy to let it go."

Never mind, Liu Qingge thought, matching the frosty look with an equally steely glare, That's Shen Qingqiu alright.

Shen Qiao dismissed the class with a sweep of his sleeve, mentally already writing up a curriculum. The most neglected disciples of the bunch really seemed to be the two youngest, Ning Yingying and Luo Binghe, as well as Ming Fan, the oldest. He would start by getting these three into shape.

Chapter Text

Shen Qiao lowered his sword, smiling against the morning sun. "Well fought."

The Wan Jian elder lowered his as well, panting slightly. Had he hoped to knock Shen Qingqiu down a peg or two? Yes. Had it still been a good fight? Also yes. "Well fought," he returned grudgingly. "When you said you needed to get back into shape, you must have been joking. It's clear you have improved." There hadn't been a single provocation or underhanded strategy in the fight, which should have made the loss less frustrating but somehow didn't.

"Not at all," Shen Qingqiu responded with an almost painfully earnest expression. "I've forgotten a lot. I'm grateful for the help."

Instead of flying directly, Shen Qiao took the scenic route off the peak to get to the rainbow bridges. Despite his bond with Xiu Ya evidently being more than intact, he still avoided flying as much as he could.

The scenic route led past the terrace of sword trials, which again meant that it took him past the low wooden pavilion housing some kind of powerful sword. Passing the wooden steps, Shen Qiao noticed a small group of people had gathered in the distance and seemed to be watching the pavilion with keen eyes.

Out of curiosity, Shen Qiao threw a look over as well. The sword was in its sheath, mounted on a wooden stand, bolted in place and chained down, either to prevent it from getting stolen or from moving on its own. Whichever it was, the ancient blade failed to do anything of interest.

"Master Shen?"

Shen Qiao turned back to the person who had called.

"The sword you just passed, could you try to draw it?"

"Isn't it rude to draw someone else's sword?" Shen Qiao asked, bemused. "Whose is it?"

"Ah, I'm afraid it hasn't had an owner in a long time," the elder replied. "It's just that none of us have ever been able to draw it. Perhaps you could try?"

Seeing no reason to refuse, Shen Qiao climbed the few stairs to the dais and stepped up close. From here, it was evident the scabbard had been quite beautiful one time. Underneath the chains and the moss, he could make out the name of the sword again: Hong Jing.
With the care awarded to a weapon of unknown strength, Shen Qiao closed one hand around the hilt and pulled. The sword did seem to be stuck. He switched to using both hands, stemming both feet into the ground and tuging. The blade didn't even budge.

Not stuck, then; sealed.

He turned and gave the crowd of onlookers who had gathered an apologetic look. "It seems I have embarrassed myself," he said modestly. "Drawing the blade is beyond me."

The two elders at the front exchanged a look. "Not at all," said the one Shen Qiao had fought earlier. "Thank you for trying. We'll, uh. See you around."

Shen Qiao gave a nod and strode off.

Upon returning from his morning workout, Shen Qiao found Ning Yingying waiting for him at the bamboo house, one hand pinching the other.

She barely waited for him to acknowledge her morning greetings before pitching a very righteous tantrum.

"Shifu, A-Luo only got back from the infirmary again and the other boys are already picking on him. He even lost the pendant his mother gave him because of them! It really went too far this time!"

Shen Qiao paused in switching out his training boots for one of the more comfortable ones. "... this time? What do they usually do?"

Ning Yingying was all too happy to provide an itemized list of grievances. Shen Qiao listened closely until she was finished, then sent her to bring Luo Binghe.

About an hour later, Ning Yingying returned to the bamboo house, not having found her only shidi, but running into Ming Fan by accident.

"Shimei," Ming Fan said, pleasantly surprised. "What are you doing here this early, don't you have classes?"

"I need to talk to Shizun again," Ning Yingying said vaguely.

"Really? What about?"

As they were talking, they approached the bamboo house. From within, they could overhear Shen Qingqiu's clear, steadfast voice.

"Binghe, where are these bruises coming from? And judging by your hair, did you sleep in the wood shed again?"

Apparently Luo Binghe had been found on his own. The question was answered by quiet mumbling. Ning Yingying stopped and strained her ears to listen.

Shen Qingqiu's voice remained calm and clear. "Alright, who?"

More mumbling.

"I don't want excuses, I want names."

"... I see. To be honest, I can't seem to find out why I treated you as harshly as I did in the past. I haven't seen you do anything that justified it; I can only assume there was a reason but since I don't know what it was, I'm not going to hold it against you. Consider this a blank slate, and behave well in the future."

This time, there was a marked absence of mumbling. Ning Yingying's eyes were wide and shining with disbelief and joy; Ming Fan's eyes were wide and shining with disbelief and horror. Shen Qingqiu continued.

"You don't seem to fit in very well, nor be exceptionally talented if you are still at this level after years of training here, but you're clearly dedicated to your studies. It's admirable. Keep going, and one day you may very well attain mastery."

This time, Luo Binghe's voice rang loud and clear from the bamboo house. "Yes, shizun!"

Once again, every inner disciple on Qing Jing Peak was assembled on the training field.

"I have no idea why this kind of behavior was tolerated in the past," Shen Qingqiu said, addressing the entire long row of students. "I don't expect all of you to like each other, but you're still martial siblings and from the same sect, the same peak. I demand a minimum of mutual courtesy, respect and aid from all of you."

One of the braver, older ones - one of the two who only yesterday had been holding Luo Binghe's arms while Ming Fan hit him - threw a look towards Ming Fan. Trying to murder him with his eyes, Ming Fan implored him to shut up.

It didn't work.

"Shizun," the student said plaintively, hoping to convince Shen Qingqiu otherwise or at least to understand how the tables had turned so quickly, "But don't you agree Luo Binghe is somewhat - I mean ... isn't he an embarrassment to the peak -?"

"He's your junior, it's your job to teach and help him," Shen Qingqiu cut him off mercilessly. "If he's not good enough, it's your job to help him improve, and it reflects poorly on you if he doesn't. From tonight on, he will return to sleeping in the disciple's dorms and nobody will give him any trouble for it. I am severely disappointed it came this far."

He let his gaze rove over the main perpetrators specifically, ending with his head disciple.

"Ming Fan," he said.

The boy in question jumped. "Yes?"

"I'm counting on you specifically to make sure there will be no ... lapses." He held the boy's gaze until he gulped. Good; a head disciple who allowed and participated in this kind of thing was not going to be much of a head disciple for long. Apparently the message had been received.

Shen Qingqiu turned back to the full group. "I hope I've made myself clear."

There was a chorus of, "Yes, shizun!"

Shen Qiao mustered every single one of them again, from Ming Fan's sweat-soaked brow past different levels of confusion, guilt, fear, elation (Ning Yingying) and very careful neutrality (Luo Binghe). The latter had tried to speak up for his bullies a few times, likely a mixture of trying to protect himself from future retribution, genuine self-delusion and misplaced loyalty to his sect siblings.

This was going to be a pain to straighten out. Well, nothing for it.

"Going forward, this is never going to come up again," Shen Qiao said abruptly. "Class dismissed."

The rest of the afternoon was spent by all twelve disciples of Qing Jing Peak searching one particular clearing in the forest for a certain green fake jade pendant.

"Shizun," Luo Binghe said very, very quietly after a while, "aren't you going to tell them you spotted it a while ago? Most of them weren't even involved."

At first, Shen Qiao had been letting his eyes roam across the clearing, but for the past few minutes, he had just been staring ahead. It wasn't hard to guess he had spotted what he had been looking for. Shen Qiao smiled.

"They are still sect siblings, and could have chosen to get involved. Something that concerns one of you concerns you all; one day, a crime committed by one of you will implicate everyone else, and an achievement of one elevate the rest as well. Cang Qiong Mountain Sect is built on the bonds between martial siblings; we stand as one, or we fall as one. The sooner the lesson sinks in, the better for all of you." Shen Qiao turned back towards the group; one of the shijies was getting closer, but looking in the wrong direction. "Now, get back to searching. Unless you already found it as well?"

Luo Binghe and Ning Yingying had already searched thoroughly yesterday, directly after the pendant had been lost, and come up empty-handed. Obviously he wasn't keen on repeating the exercise in futility, but knowing the pendant had been spotted, Luo Binghe threw himself back into the search.

In the end, one of the older students spotted the pendant high up on a branch, the string caught firmly between two twigs. A sigh of relief echoed through the entire clearing. Ming Fan and one of the older students held up Ning Yingying on their shoulders to pluck it down. Under the cheers of everyone, the three of them handed the pendant back to Luo Binghe, who cradled it to his chest like a baby bird.

"Good job," Shen Qiao tore them all out of their mutual congratulations. "Now, if you'll hurry, you can even still make it back in time for dinner."

Eleven adolescents took off at basically a running pace. Only Luo Binghe dithered somewhat, throwing complicated looks at his Shizun. Then, Ning Yingying called, "A-Luo! Come on, we'll be late!" and the boy took off as well.

Deep in thought, Shen Qiao watched as his students disappeared on the path winding between the trees.

So far, so good.

Chapter Text

The nature of bullying being as it was, of course it did come up again. It was only a few days until one of the older students - not Ming Fan, who had been feeling his Shizun's gaze boring into his back more often lately - decided to test out these new boundaries. Could their shizun really have changed his tune so completely?

"You heard what shizun said, we're supposed to help each other out and stick together," the older boy said with a smile and dropped his empty water buckets in front of Luo Binghe. "So, why don't you do my chores for me today? I'm feeling really tired."

"Since you seem to care so much about solidarity on our Qing Jing Peak," Shen Qiao said, having materialized seemingly out of nothing. The older boy yelped. Binghe, hand already reaching for the bucket, stopped and stared. "Why don't you go and help everyone else with their chores today, hm? Yes, everyone. Including the stair sweepers."

"It's fine, shizun," Luo Binghe said, eyeing his shixiong warily. "I can use the extra training anyway." As of yet, nobody had taken the rapid changes in their shizun's behavior out on him, but he was very much still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"If you feel like you need more training, you can go run laps," Shen Qiao said, throwing him a look from the corner of his eye. "Do you?"

Luo Binghe gulped and shook his head.

The perpetrator was still wincing from sore muscles days later.

And that really was the last of it that came up.

Chapter Text

"I can't believe you're making me do your job," snapped Liu Qingge, leaning in the doorway of the bamboo house.

"Good morning, shidi," Shen Qiao said placidly, setting down his cup of tea. "Thank you, I really appreciate it."

"You can spar with the elders from Wan Jian any day, but you're telling me you’re too sick to handle the mission you volunteered for?!"

Shen Qiao waved for Ming Fan to set out another bowl. "The mission was supposed to be a training opportunity for my disciples. We've been dealing with some cohesion issues recently; I don't want to put them in a situation where they’re forced to rely on each other just yet. Are you staying for breakfast?"

Liu Qingge scoffed and pushed off the door frame. "No," he said. "One of my martial siblings isn't doing his job, so I have to clean up after him."

While Liu Qingge stalked off in a whirl of white and black robes, Shen Qiao pressed a hand to his temple again and blinked hard. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the burning after-image of a glowing blue rectangle.
"Shizun?" he heard Ming Fan ask hesitantly. "Are you alright?"
"... fine," Shen Qiao said after a few seconds. Keeping his eyes closed, he could see the words Warning! OOC, Warning! Mission failure will result in […] ERROR. "But I should perhaps go talk to Mu-shidi again, just to be sure."

These flickers and migraines couldn't be normal.

Shaking his head, Shen Qiao turned his attention back to more urgent matters. “Now, how did the situation with Luo Binghe go yesterday?”
Ming Fan suppressed a wince.

“Ming Fan. You need to learn how to handle this.” Shen Qiao caught his gaze and held it. “One day, you'll need to lead this peak, and you can't have them fighting amongst each other; they'll weaken each other and you. It’s going to be your task and your task alone to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
If Ming Fan had been a few years older and more mature, he would have wondered why and when his shizun had switched from an "encourage infighting; if they are at each other's throats, they're too busy to go for yours" strategy to, well, this.

Fortunately, Ming Fan was fifteen and didn't have the time for any such considerations.

Ming Fan hesitated again. “What if I can't,” he finally forced out. “What if they don't listen to me.”

Shen Qiao had turned his attention back onto the reports he was nominally reading. “They listened to you in the other direction,” he said, dipping the brush into the ink again. “They're going to listen to you now.”

Ming Fan swallowed hard and nodded.

Shen Qiao continued with the reports for a few minutes. When Ming Fan looked at him again, Shen Qingqiu was staring into the middle distance, deeply lost in thought. Then he said out of nowhere, “I really changed a lot as a person, didn't I.”

Hesitating but ultimately unable to refuse answering a direct question, Ming Fan replied, “You did.”

Shen Qingqiu looked thoughtful. “Almost like I'm ... a completely different person.” He spoke slowly, as if sounding out the idea.

Ming Fan didn't know what to say to that. Yes. In some ways, he did seem like a completely different person.

The conversation stuck with Ming Fan for the rest of the evening. As the head disciple, he was the only student in the dorms who received a room of his own, separated from the sleeping quarters of the others by a wall of paper and wood and a sliding door.

While he was dressing down for bed, he was torn from his thoughts by a commotion outside. He pushed open the door to a familiar scene: One of the older boys had approached Luo Binghe and was towering over him, intimidating.

Luo Binghe, as always, failed to notice and stayed where he was, head up high and eyes wary, but meeting those of the older boy straight on. Stupid, Ming Fan thought. Was it any wonder he always got picked on if he didn’t even know how to back down? Standing up for yourself only ever got you beaten down even harder.

“Come on, at least show us that stupid pendant shizun made us look for so long. It has to be pretty impressive, right?”

Luo Binghe’s hand had instinctively gone to clutch at the pendant around his neck, looking resigned and stubborn at the same time.

Somehow, Ming Fan found himself saying, "Hey. Knock that off."

Both boys startled. The older turned to Ming Fan, the annoyance on his face outweighed by confusion.

Miraculously, he really did knock it off, with barely any grumbling. Luo Binghe went to sleep in an actual bed for the second time in as many years.
There were no other attempts this day or the next.

Late still that same night, a group of four Bai Zhan disciples were sneaking up the cliff side, single filed.

Breaking in to wreak havoc like a very one-sided game of capture the flag, they were following the ancient tradition of Bai Zhan disciples getting on the nerves of every other peak and generally acting like young bulls in a china shop. Whenever they weren’t caught in time, they tended to “pick fights” (beat people up), “rearrange some furniture” (trash the place) and “loosen up the monotony of daily life” (cause general mayhem).
While Qing Jing was, due to the antagonistic nature of their master’s relationship, a favorite target, this happened on almost every peak from time to time. In fact, the only peak they didn’t dare break into was Qian Cao, since the aspiring healers leapt a little too eagerly at the chance of pinning them down and getting them a check-up, or simply to treat any of the multitude of sprains, bruises and lacerations the average Bai Zhan disciple was sporting on any given day.

One of them whispered a question, the one on the front hushed them and signaled to duck down. To enforce the curfew, there was always a sect elder keeping guard in a pavilion near the dormitories. Therefore, the band of merry misfits laid down on their stomachs one by one so they could crawl though the high grass in a semi-circle around the pavilion.
Stopping behind a low hedge, the leader carefully bent the branches apart and peered around.

“Can we go?” whispered the disciple from before.

“Not yet.”

A short pause.

“How about now?”

“Shush!” The leader turned around to snap at his shidi, only for the words to get stuck in his throat.

Seeing him pale, the others followed his gaze.

Behind them, looming against the dusky remnants of the sunset, head tilted in an unimpressed manner, was the dark outline of Shen Qingqiu crossing his arms.

Their shifu didn’t hold a lot of respect for Shen Qingqiu, so they hadn’t really expected to be caught out.

Despite their reputation as thick-headed brutes, they weren't completely stupid. One individual trying to catch an entire group was usually hopelessly outclassed, so -

"Scatter!" the Bai Zhan disciple farthest to the right yelled, jumping up and making a run for it. After no more than two steps, he froze mid-movement, teetering on his tiptoes for a moment before falling flat on his face. The way he had fallen gave all of the others a decent view of the leaves stuck to each of the major acupoints on his back.

The rest, who had been scrambling to follow, froze as well.

Shen Qingqiu brandished another handful of leaves, fanned out like playing cards. "Anyone else?"
For some reason, nobody volunteered.

Having corralled the bunch of misfits together and escorted them to the main hall, Shen Qiao soon managed to find out a lot more about the situation. He had known Bai Zhan's disciples just showed up on the peak one day and refused to leave, but he hadn't realized to which extent the hands-off approach to teaching went over on their neighboring peak. Apparently, Liu Qingge's idea of teaching mostly consisted of beating the students up in a fight, and even that was more often than not handled by the elders instead of by the man himself.

Internally, Shen Qiao shook his head. He had carried the immobilized kid over to the main hall himself while the others walked in front, looking over their shoulders anxiously from time to time. Now, he had propped the kid up against the leg of a bench, assembling the others in a semi-circle around him.

Outwardly, he said, "We run sword drills every morning at sunrise. On the first of every month, I'm going to lead these myself. Come by if you ever want to get some actual guidance." He tapped the layer of leaves he was still holding against the table. The ones still stuck to the disciple's back moved away from the acupoints and fell to the ground without ever having broken skin.

The youth pulled himself to his feet, shooting him wary looks.

"Outside of those drills," Shen Qiao says in a deceptively mild tone, "I don't want to see you around here bothering my students ever again."

Oppressive silence reigned for a few moments.

"Now get out."

They got out.

(Without fail, they all showed up to the first drill Shen Qiao promised to lead himself. The second time, they brought friends.
Afterwards, all of them were too tired to move. Still, they came back every time.)

Chapter Text

Shen Qiao looked up from a conversation with a Wan Jian senior disciple to see Liu Qingge marching towards them across the training field. To the left and right, elders and senior disciples alike were moving out of the way as Liu Qingge passed, the determined whirl of white robes cutting an impressive figure among the black around him.

"Liu-shidi," Shen Qiao greeted when he was close enough, pleasantly surprised. That was a quick mission.

"I kept hearing you were practicing here, so I came to check it out myself," Liu Qingge said without preamble. "Are you up for a fight?"

Shen Qiao nodded to the disciple he had been talking to, who retreated with wide eyes before disappearing from view.

"Certainly," Shen Qiao said, turning back. "I've been looking forward to getting the chance."

Liu Qingge scoffed. Instead of an answer, he drew Cheng Luan, immediately sending out a sword glare. Shen Qiao barely brought Shan- Xiu Ya up in time to parry.

Then they were off, trading hits and blows across the training field. Liu Qingge aimed another horizontal strike, so Shen Qiao deflected and dodged, stepping around a pair of disciples locked in their own combat. The hit went wide, missing the two other duellants but cleanly halving the amount of usable training dummies on the other side of the field and knocking over a weapons stand. Shen Qiao's brow furrowed.
He returned the favor and moved to evade the next one when he realized one of the pangolins was behind him. He abandoned the maneuver, taking the hit head on instead.

"Watch where you're aiming," he said coolly, suppressing the pain radiating through his wrists; Liu Qingge hit hard. "We are guests here." Behind him, the pangolin unrolled, skittered towards a corner, and re-rolled there.

Liu Qingge scowled back and lunged, determined to force him to engage directly.

Throwing more energy behind the movement, Shen Qiao swung to block, the blades barely ringing out before he pulled away for a series of three quick slashes.

Liu Qingge caught each of the attacks, his eyes filling with a gleam while he did. He took a few steps back and threw himself into a running leap, and Shen Qiao rose up to meet him in mid-air.

The space around them had emptied quickly, as every other person in the pit receded out and took the stairs up the walls - either out of concern for their own safety, or to spectate from above. Sword glares flared up and died, steel rang out, wave after wave of qi shattered against the fortified stone walls, sending small rivulets of sand scattering down from above.

From the outside, the fight was spectacular. It went without saying that the "war god" put up a good show. Shen Qingqiu's moves had also never been bad, but Shen Qiao had spent the last week integrating the suppressed memory of Mount Xuandu's Azure Wave technique with the long-standing muscle memory of Shen Qingqiu, and he suddenly had an immortal's cultivation base to back it up with.

On a superficial level, Shen Qingqiu could only ever have been said to be a perfect scholar, refined and cultured. His humble origins could be read only perhaps in the way he held himself to these standards a little too carefully.

When he fought, that façade came down.

Shen Qingqiu fought like an alley cat, never passing up an opportunity to gain an edge no matter how unfair. Traditional Qing Jing techniques were beautiful to watch, and he had learned them well; in calmer moments of the fight, he even used them the way they were intended.

Therefore, a fight with Shen Qingqiu consisted of lovely techniques to lull the enemy into complacency, interspersed with dirty tricks, switching seamlessly.

He could perform a flawless parade and textbook riposte, the very image of a lofty immortal master, only to throw sand in his opponent's face the next moment, drag their feet out under them, and kick them while they were down for good measure.

Liu Qingge, well acquainted with this kind of behaviour, stayed on his guard. After hearing for days that Shen Qingqiu was training tirelessly on Wan Jian every morning, he had come to check out what he was planning - it was more than likely, and better to find out now before he was done rather than later, when the trap was sprung.

However, Shen Qingqiu didn't even try anything. His moves had changed profoundly, even if Liu Qingge could still recognize the bones of the old techniques in them. He had also lost the gritted-teeth ferocity he used to have, no longer seething with barely constrained fury and bitterness and jealousy, no underlying feeling of not good enough. As it was meant to be, it was just himself and the blade.

It was unsettling.

~

Wei Qingwei had, in passing by, noticed the commotion as well as the crowd of people ringing the banisters and staring down rather than training. Unnoticed by them, he stepped up to the railing and rested his elbows on it.
For once, Shen Qingqiu was putting up a good, fair fight. Both combatants' swordsmanship was lovely, every maneuver carefree and unrestrained even as it became clear Shen Qingqiu was struggling to meet each of Liu Qingge's blows with equal force.

From the outside, it was difficult to pin down exactly what had changed - besides the fact that he had passed up at least three opportunities to try an underhanded trick and possibly gain an edge. Even Wei Qingwei had some trouble. After a while, he recognized that - in the week since the fever - Shen Qingqiu's style had lost the elegant flourishes characteristic of Qing Jing peak and become simpler. It was as if he had taken the entire set of Qing Jing's martial arts and stripped them of all additions, carving away at them until nothing remained but their purest essence.
The result was less flashy than before, more solid and dependable than erratic and flighty. Every movement was performed unhurriedly, neither quick nor slow, with Xiu Ya somehow still always ending up in exactly the place it needed to be.
Additionally, even if Shen Qiao couldn't remember, he had still practised with Mount Xuandu's azure wave technique for years. As such, he was mostly using Qing Jing techniques, but with the occasional surprise thrown in.
His own swordsmanship and Shen Qingqiu's, together with Shen Qingqiu's golden core, made for a formidable mixture.

If anyone had been paying plenty of attention to Shen Qingqiu's fighting style specifically, they might have noticed all of these changes. However, Shen Qingqiu was neither Cang Qiong's best swordsman nor the most powerful or even second most powerful fighter, and he was usually so unpleasant to fight that very few people bothered. As such, nobody had been paying close attention to such details.

Nobody, that was, save for Liu Qingge.

~

As the fight went on, Shen Qingqiu began to flag, inferior mostly but not only in terms of raw strength. The exhaustion took its toll - a mistake in footwork here, a delayed block there.

After a particularly heavy exchange of blows, they both floated to the ground separately, sizing each other up.

After a second of silence, Shen Qiao moved Xiu Ya to the side with a flourish. "I admit defeat," he announced, conceding gracefully. Through the space between them, he could see Liu Qingge's eyes first widening, then narrowing in suspicion. Liu Qingge also moved out of his defensive stance, but remained on his guard.

That snake has to be planning something.

"It's good to see you're back," Shen Qiao said, not quite willing to sheathe his sword yet when Liu Qingge apparently wasn't going to. "I take it the mission didn't give you any trouble?"

"No."

When it became clear that was all he was going to say, Shen Qiao probed, "Then, how was it?"

"Fine. A skinner demon, barely worth the time. Even your students should have been able to handle it."

Shen Qiao puzzled over the phrasing for a moment before reasoning, likely, he's referring to a demonic cultivator using the "counterfeit sun and moon technique" to skin off people's faces and steal their identities. Good that's taken care of!

"Nicely done," Shen Qiao said with a nod of approval. Then, remembering something, he continued, "Speaking of students -"

"Goodbye." Liu Qingge, correctly identifying that this was going to be about his teaching methods again, turned on his heel and left.

Watching his receding back, Shen Qiao felt his mouth twitch. What was it with that attitude? He'd only wanted to tell Liu Qingge he had invited the Bai Zhan disciples over for sword drills once a month ...

Shen Qiao didn't get to think about whether courtesy demanded he follow up on that, since Wei Qingwei touched down in the arena the same moment.

"Shidi," Shen Qiao greeted, taking in the chaos their fight had caused and suppressing a wince. "Apologies for the mess. Liu-shidi and I got a little carried away during the fight."

"No matter," Wei Qingwei said. Fortunately, he didn't seem to be angry they had disrupted morning practice and overturned most of the assorted equipment. Unfortunately, there wasn't a hint of a smile on his face anyway. "Follow me for a moment, please."

It didn't take long for Shen Qiao to realize they were headed towards the sword trial terrace. He found himself unsurprised to see Wei Qingwei stopping next to the familiar pavilion housing Hong Jing.

Wei Qingwei turned to Shen Qiao, expression still rigid. "Would senior please be so kind as to draw this sword."

You forgot to phrase that as a question, shidi ...

"I already tried," Shen Qiao said mildly, noting that Wei Qingwei really seemed very tense today. "To no avail, I'm afraid."

Wei Qingwei waved him off. "Just indulge me, alright."

Dutifully, Shen Qiao stepped up to the sword, gripping the hilt and tugging firmly. It didn't budge this time, either. "Still no luck," Shen Qiao said with a sigh, running his gaze along the elaborately decorated scabbard. Despite the showiness of the display, it was evident the blade was a very good one. "What's the meaning of this sword, anyway? Should I know about it?"

When he looked up, Wei Qingwei was staring at the sword like it held the answers to the universe and he didn't like the ones it had deigned to share.

"It might have been an explanation for why you're acting so differently all of a sudden," he said half-absently. Then he shook himself. "Ah, my apologies. I've dragged you here with no explanation at all. Hong Jing sealed itself after its master died, but it unsheathes itself in the presence of a sinister spirit or resentful soul."

"So now you can be sure I'm not possessed." Shen Qiao nodded thoughtfully. "I really can't blame you for checking - I do feel like I'm a completely different person than I seem to have been before the fever." His tone was even, but as he said it, he was carefully watching Wei Qingwei for reactions.

Wei Qingwei blew out a breath. "Well. You sure act like it." He shook his head as if to throw off the stupor. "You really don't remember anything from before?"
Abruptly, Shen Qiao decided to keep his cards closer to his chest this time. "Bits and flashes," he said, choosing his words with care. "I lost a fight I didn't expect to lose. Arguing with the elders about something, but not about what. These kinds of things."

"Hm. Weird. ... in any case, you really seem to have gotten a lot more interested in the art of swordsmanship than you were before. You're no longer relying on talismans and that fan of yours so much, eh?"

Shen Qiao gave an embarrassed shrug. It was not like he knew what "he" had been doing previously. He had also never heard of talismans used in open combat; perhaps he would have to look into it sometime.

Wei Qingwei, for his part, had come to a decision. "If you ever want to spar and exchange some pointers on technique," he said resolutely, "Come to me in the future." His hand, which he had raised to hit Shen Qingqiu's shoulder, froze as he remembered what reaction that would have gotten a week ago. Instead of coming down, it just hovered awkwardly.

Shen Qingqiu didn't seem to notice, turning to him with a gentle, beaming smile. "I definitely will. Thanks a lot, shidi - I'm looking forward to it."

Despite having braced for this kind of reaction, Wei Qingwei couldn't help but throw another look towards Hong Jing - but he sword, uncaring of the unnatural processes around it, remained as inert and silent as ever.

Chapter Text

A few days later, Shen Qiao was overseeing the sword drills at Qing Jing. The Bai Zhan disciples were participating with solemn concentration. Shen Qiao wasn't even running this one personally, 'just' watching to offer some advice, but they had kept showing up during the week and his own students had argued for them to be allowed to stay, so. He supposed their training field fit twenty disciples about as well as it did twelve. If anything, being closer together would improve their situational and spatial awareness, and later on their ability to fight back to back without getting in each other's way.

Approaching with soundless footfalls, Liu Qingge stepped next to him, watching silently. Shen Qiao didn't turn his head, but he heard the scowl when Liu Qingge spoke after a few seconds.

"What," his shidi said with the flat disbelief of someone finding the vermin in their kitchen unionized and demonstrating, "is that."

Without looking away from the group of students, Shen Qiao replied, "I tried to tell you last time. They were coming over anyway, might as well teach them something."

"And use them as a training opportunity for your own students," Liu Qingge said sharply.

True, the Qing Jing disciples were benefitting from sparring with others who had more fighting experience, but not more than the Bai Zhan disciples were from being taught clean, orderly techniques and training strategies. All in all, the entire arrangement was beneficial to everyone.

Shen Qiao gave an affirmative hum. "I'm also making them learn some weiqi. They need to learn some strategy, or the only thing they'll ever be good at is hitting very hard."

Liu Qingge could almost imagine the customary sneer with an added, you brute. Nonetheless, both were missing.

Pushing down the unease, he said, "I'm here to check in on you one last time before I'm going into seclusion in the Lingxi caves. If anything happens to my students while I'm gone ..." The threat went under completely as Shen Qingqiu turned to look at him for the first time, a frown between his eyebrows. "On your own? That far out?"

"It's called seclusion for a reason," Liu Qingge said drily. "Shouldn't you know?"

Shen Qingqiu was known for disappearing some lengths of time, trying to force a breakthrough. When he had come down with a fever that took all of his memories, the general assumption had spread that he had pushed too far too quickly, damaging his cultivation in the process.

Nonetheless, Shen Qingqiu didn't respond to the barb. Instead, he continued to look at Liu Qingge with that furrow in his brow, almost looking worried.

~

Yue Qingyuan looked at him in faint exasperation before setting down his cup. "Shidi, what's wrong?"
They were sitting in a pavilion on Qing Jing peak, drinking tea again. Shen Qiao pursed his lips and breathed through the flickers and noises that came with the action, back in full force since he had invited Yue Qingyuan over. It got worse every time he responded. What on earth was an OOC and who was making this many errors?

But there were more important things to worry about. "Liu-shidi is planning to go off to meditate in the Lingxi caves."

Yue Qingyuan gave a him an inquisitive look. "Would you like to go as well? It might help finally clear your qi."

Shen Qiao faintly shook his head. "I'm not sure why, but the thought of him being there on his own without anyone to check in on him ... it makes me uneasy. He might die of a qi deviation, and we wouldn't know until years later."

"Don't worry about it. The natural qi there is very mild." Yue Qingyuan paused a beat too long. "If you haven't already been injured and qi deviating at the start, the chances of deviation are low."

Shen Qiao gave a wry smile. "Well, surely nobody would go into seclusion with already unsettled qi. Even our youngest disciples know better."

"If one has a choice, of course not," Yue Qingyuan said, something off about the soothing tone he was using.

Shen Qiao looked up at him, frowning. "Is Liu-shidi -"

"He's fine," Yue Qingyuan said. At Shen Qiao's refusal to be soothed, he sighed. "If a student was already qi deviating, locking them into the Lingxi caves is a way to give them the chance to straighten themselves out while making sure they won't harm anyone."

"Zhangmen-shixiong," Shen Qiao said very, very carefully. "Am I to take it that we lock students into these caves so they either fix themselves up or die?"

"Shidi, of course not," Yue Qingyuan said with another sigh. "That hasn't happened in decades."

Shen Qiao nodded slowly and allowed for the topic to change. Internally, he resolved to never let his disciples leave the peak again without supervision, since apparently the rest of Cang Qiong Sect could not be trusted with children either.

~

After Yue Qingyuan had left, Shen Qiao decided enough was enough. He sent Ming Fan on an errand and went on a walk across the rainbow bridge towards Qian Cao peak.

Mu Qingfang seemed both surprised and alarmed to see him. Alarmed enough that he, despite Shen Qiao's insistence he could wait, dropped everything and took time out of his schedule to check him over.

"So you have been having visual and auditory hallucinations since the qi deviation," Mu Qingfang summarized half an hour later. "Those manifest as blue flickering in the center of your vision, written characters that don't make sense, and a chorus of inhuman voices speaking nonsense over each other."

"Yes." Shen Qiao winced. That had triggered something again, along the lines of penalty and secret and ERROR, PLEASE STAND BY.

Mu Qingfang kept two fingers on his pulse and frowned in concentration.
"What do they look like? Do you recognize someone's handwriting?"

"It's legible, but strange," Shen Qiao replied, rubbing his temple with his free hand. "As if someone carved the hardest printing case they could and then used it to print with cold light - the characters are all uniform, but there's no feeling to them at all."

Mu Qingfang released his wrist and shook his head. "Are there occasions when they get noticeably better or worse?"

"It gets worse when I talk to people, usually - the effect is strongest around Zhangmen-shixiong." A pause. "It's usually gone completely while I'm sparring. Except for that one time I spoke to Liu-Shidi afterwards, even though that was very weak."

Mu Qingfang hummed thoughtfully. "Might be the emotionally fraught nature of these relationships. Excuse me for being frank, you didn't get along well with either of them before your fever - it might be that your subconscious is remembering the stress of those interactions and is trying to rebel."

Shen Qingqiu looked thoughtful.

"But these are just theories. I couldn't find anything wrong with your qi - it seems more settled than it has been in ages, actually - so I can't tell you for sure what it is. It's still a good thing you told me; please let me know if anything changes."

Shen Qingqiu gave a serious nod. "I will."

Carefully, aware that he had been extended far more leeway than usual already prying into Shen Qingqiu's affairs, Mu Qingfang said, "Something seems to be weighing on you. Is there anything else on your mind?"

Shen Qingqiu looked up as if torn from his thoughts. "To tell the truth, I'm a little worried about Liu-shidi being alone in those caves for months. If he qi deviates, there's nobody there to notice until far later."

The first thought Mu Qingfang had was, somewhat uncharitably, not everyone has as unstable a cultivation base as you, shixiong. He put the thought aside to look closer - despite his newly found calm outer impression, Shen Qingqiu's brows were slightly furrowed while he was looking into the middle distance. It was clear he was sincerely worried, and Mu Qingfang had a strong suspicion why.
Recently, Shen Qingqiu had almost died from a qi deviation himself. Paired with his strange new mellowness towards his martial siblings, it was clear where this was coming from.

"I'll talk to him, alright? He'll be careful."

~

Pinning Liu Qingge down for an examination was even harder than wrangling Shen Qingqiu - if one discounted the surprising willingness to cooperate the latter had shown today, which one should. Miracles happened, but they shouldn't be counted on.

"Liu-shidi," Mu Qingfang said while he was pinning the man in question in place with a series of silver diagnostic needles to take his pulse, "Shen-shixiong was rather worried about you suffering a qi deviation in the Lingxi Caves. Maybe it's just his own recent experience with them. But do you think there's a reason for that?"

Liu Qingge gave an alarmed look and tried to scramble up from his lying position, foiled by the veritable forest of silber needles sticking out of his back. "He's not coming too, is he?"

If Shen Qingqiu was joining him, it was likely the precursor to the evil plot he had been waiting for. After training like a man possessed for a week, upturning all of his personal relationships and trying to steal Bai Zhan's disciples, sabotaging Liu Qingge's seclusion was absolutely something he would guess Shen Qingqiu capable of.
He was a little worried what Shen Qingqiu's influence would do to these students, if left unsupervised with him for months on end.
But at the end of the day, Bai Zhan's students were Bai Zhan's students because they showed up. They were responsible for their own progress, and were awarded a significantly higher amount of freedom as a result. Bai Zhan took in disciples to raise the next generation; if the students got put out of commission for trusting in Shen Qingqiu, it was their own fault and their own problem.

He was relieved to hear Mu Qingfang shake his head. "No, definitely not. He is actually focusing on healing for once."

While Shen Qingqiu was too suspicious to trust anyone to take care of him, Liu Qingge had the "walk it off" attitude of Bai Zhan down pat and applied it liberally. It was a point of contention between the doctor and him.

"Good," Liu Qingge grumbled, lying back down. "He needs to mind his own damn business."

"Let me finish checking you over before you go, just to be sure," Mu Qingfang said, turning his focus back onto the diagnostic needles. "And also, take it easy. Seclusion is dangerous, he's not wrong there. Don't push too hard too quickly."

~

A few days later, Shen Qiao received the message Liu Qingge had entered the Lingxi Caves on his own. He frowned slightly. Then he turned back to the training field, where his own students and the ones from Bai Zhan were watching him in silence.

He continued running drills.

Chapter Text

For Shen Qiao, the absence of Liu Qingge was barely felt. His daily life continued. He worked with his students and his other sect siblings.

The first time he left the mountain range behind to lead his students on a mission in a nearby city, he looked back at Qing Jing peak. For a second, through the shivering morning air, it was almost as if he was looking at a different mountain, and he was hit with a pang of longing so strong he had to make himself breathe through it.
Aside from moments like these, things were fine.

He had started sparring with Wei Qingwei regularly. Once Shen Qiao had recovered from the fever completely, it became evident that they were quite evenly matched for spiritual power, but Wei Qingwei had an edge on him in technique. Often, his shidi was just that bit faster, more practised, more precise. It felt like playing weiqi, sometimes; for all that they were both making their moves, he never saw the one coming that ended up taking him out.

Shen Qiao had also begun working with Luo Binghe, whose initial distrust had turned to worship worryingly quickly. To dissuade some of the attachment the boy was clearly starting to form, Shen Qiao flat out refused to dote more on him than on the others. He made it clear that the increase in attention was because of Luo Binghe's skill deficite in comparison to his peers and would cease when he had caught up.
When the boy's progress stagnated immediately after, Shen Qiao reminded him, not unkindly, of his declaration to expel or demote any disciple not attempting their best. That fixed the problem rather quickly.
Well, that part of the problem, at least. Even though Luo Binghe was slowly improving overall, there were sudden, inexplicable setbacks in his cultivation, unexpected swirls and turbulences hinting at an unruly riverbed where a smoothly dug canal should have been.
It was the work of two months to pare the entirety of the techniques Luo Binghe had learned down to the basics, only to find underneath them the most rag-tag, chaotic mixture of guesswork and sheer luck Shen Qiao had ever encountered. It was clear the boy had mostly learned from watching his seniors; it was equally clear he hadn't done it well. Where those ideas about meditation and forming a core had come from, Shen Qiao would probably never know, but some of them were straight up dangerous.
Over the course of another month, he and Luo Binghe deconstructed most of Luo Binghe's cultivation and started over with the foundational exercises. The boy showed himself very demure and respectful. Nonetheless, he was not quite skilled enough yet to hide his sullenness at being relegated to the very first beginner's exercises, the most basic forms and the simplest manipulations of qi. Nonetheless, it was worth it when Shen Qiao saw, at irregular intervals, understanding light up behind Luo Binghe's observant eyes, mixed with a good dose of bewilderment, a hint of surprise, and a dash of joy: Oh, so that's what that exercise was for!

It was disconcerting that Luo Binghe seemed to either have forgotten some of the most load-bearing exercises completely or to never have seen them at all.

~

Shen Qiao continued working with Ming Fan. Every evening, when all other work was done, the two of them sat in the bamboo house while discussing the progress and relationships of all the other students. It was as much a way to keep tabs on the pulse of the peak as it was training for Ming Fan - strengthening his ability for leadership, training him to see with clear eyes, making him mature.

As ever, they finished with their troubled youngest. One evening, after a particularly slow-going session with Luo Binghe, Shen Qiao called out for Ming Fan again as he was about to leave.
The boy stopped in the door. "Shizun?"

A beat of silence. Shen Qiao sighed and closed his eyes. Carefully, he said, "Did Qing Jing stunt him this much, or did I?"

Ming Fan hesitated, deliberating. "It was very much a joint effort, shifu." He sounded tired, washed-out in the overly warm evening air.

With a thoughtful nod, Shen Qiao dismissed him. When he looked up again a while later, he was surprised to see Ming Fan still standing in the doorway.

"Shifu, if I may."

Shen Qiao put the brush down and looked at him.

"I'd like to get Luo-shidi a new cultivation manual. I think his old one has gotten somewhat damaged over time."

Shen Qiao looked at him for a long time. "Do that," he finally said. Ming Fan quietly left.
The bamboo house had decent airflow to keep the atmosphere fresh and cool. Nonetheless, Shen Qiao felt there was something stifling about the mild summer air. He suddenly was as tired as Ming Fan had sounded.

~

Ming Fan handed Luo Binghe a new cultivation manual, finding the excuse he had told his shifu sticking in his throat like a fishbone.

“Luo Binghe,” he said, searching for words. “We’re sect siblings. Shifu said to take better care of each other.”
Luo Binghe looked up, the surprise and elation he had felt just now tilting and falling from his face, capsized by a wave of wary- and weariness. He had heard that one before.
Ming Fan squared his shoulders and looked him in the eye, difficult as it suddenly was. “In the future, I’ll do better.”
Luo Binghe didn’t drop the manual, but it was a close thing.
Turning on his heel, Ming Fan stalked off towards the dormitories, Luo Binghe's confused thanks ringing after him.

~

Ning Yingying’s training was similarly challenging, for different reasons. For her, it wasn't that she had never seen the exercises before, but that nobody had bothered correcting her until she did them exactly right, leaving her to develop odd little habits that sabotaged the overall result. Shen Qiao could see a groundwork of attention and diligence in there, especially in the things she enjoyed doing and subsequently had practiced more, but she didn’t have the discipline that came with being made to practice in earnest for ten hours a day, six days a week. She also didn’t think she could - or should - do better, which meant she never tried.
Ning Yingying, like Luo Binghe, wasn't happy with being made to repeat the basics. Unlike Luo Binghe, when she was pushed, she whined. She complained and wheedled and sighed with artful exhaustion, throwing despondent, pleading looks. She kept looking for the leniency that had allowed her to fall behind her peers so far and found none with Shen Qiao. A different disciple, Shen Qiao would have sent away already; it would have been easy to assume she lacked the drive it took to cultivate, simple to make the decision to save both of them the effort of letting her fail. She could still get a decent enough education as an outer disciple if she didn't want to cultivate seriously.
However, she had proved she had a spine, as well some sense of justice more advanced than most of her peers, to go against the rest of group and to stand up to them on behalf of Luo Binghe, the outsider and the –
People liked to call it lonely wolf, but that implied the ability to defend oneself without the help of a pack. In most settings, a student like Luo Binghe, without the bulwark of a friend group to shield him, was closer to sitting duck.
To go against the grain, ignoring both seniority and social convention, could be read as immaturity - air-headed and aimless as it looked on the surface–or it spoke of a maturity beyond her years, and an unyielding moral core.

About a week in, Ning Yingying pitched a bit of a fit during sword practice. She stomped her feet, threw down the sword and begged to be allowed to stop, sitting down and looking up through teary eyes, lower lip trembling pitifully. The display was artful enough that Shen Qiao could tell it usually got her her way with the hallmasters. He made a mental note to bring this up with them - though, perhaps they only had been following his example in this, too.
"Ning Yingying," Shen Qiao said. His voice was gentle, but unyielding as steel. "I meant what I said."

Ning Yingying gave a quivering, confused look.

"You can become an outer disciple, where no one will ever make you do a set like this again." She would never have to hold a sword again like she apparently never seriously had to before. "You can join their classes on calligraphy and painting and become an elegant young lady who will doubtlessly marry well."

Shen Qiao looked down at her with placid eyes devoid of pity.

"Or you can pick up your sword and do the set again."

Ning Yingying stared up at him, the - very young - pair of eyes suddenly dry.

Shen Qiao could see the moment the decision was made. The small shoulders rose and fell on a deep breath. Ning Yingying's fingers closed around the hilt of her training sword. Stabbing it into the ground, she dragged herself back to her feet with it, before settling into the opening stance.

Puffing her dishevelled hair from her face, Ning Yingying started over.

~

Despite all her complaints, she never asked to outright stop again. It took her almost as much time as it did Luo Binghe, but she, too, rose to the challenge.

~

About four months in, Ming Fan approached Shen Qiao to ask for help with a bullying case that he himself had been approached with. Even while keeping his smile mild, Shen Qiao was internally glowing with pride.

He listened intently as Ming Fan described the situation – one of the older boys, one of those who used to pick on Luo Binghe with him, was doing something similar to one of their shidi. He wasn't beating him, but he did foist off his chores, keeping the best parts of the care packages the younger boy received from home and making humiliating comments just within earshot of the others.
Shen Qiao coached Ming Fan through a list of possible responses – most of which Ming Fan was already coming up with by himself - and then called him back when he was about to head off to bed. "Ming Fan," he said, holding the boy's gaze.

"Shizun?"

"You have come a long way in a short time. Be proud of yourself."

Ming Fan, standing in the doorway, swallowed. Then he bowed. This way, he could hide his face behind his sleeves, but not his hands. The latter were trembling faintly. "Thank you, Shizun."

~

One day, Luo Binghe scored a hit on one of the Bai Zhan disciples during sparring. In response, one of the older students clapped him on the shoulder and commented cheerfully, "Not bad."
And just like that, something had shifted.

When Luo Binghe drew his spiritual sword out of Wan Jian's sword cave, returning with the newly named Zheng Yang, the rest of his age-mates were cheering him on, without exception.

Children tended to forget quickly. Shen Qiao suspected - from the way Luo Binghe's eyes sometimes turned flinty when he thought nobody was looking, from the looks some of his peers sometimes threw each other - that it hadn't been forgotten completely. Most likely, Luo Binghe would never fall into the embrace of a group with the same feeling of trust and safety Ning Yingying did.
But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. They were working together. There was genuine affection and respect mixed in with the rest.
It was more than good enough.

~

Beneath it all, beneath the satisfaction from his aching muscles growing stronger, from feeling his skills flex and stretch and bud, from seeing Luo Binghe outracing two older Bai Zhan disciples on Zheng Yang and Ning Yingying successfully executing plucked leaves, flying flowers for the first time, and from friendly spars with Wei Qingwei and companionable cups of tea with Yue Qingyuan and Qi Qingqi -
Beneath it all, Shen Qiao still felt he didn't belong. Or that there was, at the very least, some other place he should be, somewhere he had left at least half his heart, his soul and his roots.

But he had no idea where that somewhere might have been, who or what or where he longed for with an ache that never quite subsided, taut like a piece of string tugging on his sternum, but disorienting because he didn't know where it was tugging him. And how could he go up to someone, to his sect siblings, to Yue Qingyuan, whose eyes lit up whenever he entered a room, and say: I believe that this is not where I am meant to be, there is some other place I need to go?
There was no other place he needed to be. He was needed here.

So he focused on teaching, and on rebuilding relationships that didn't seem like they had ever been quite there, and on learning, and learning, and learning.

Five months in, Shen Qiao had polished his new set of sword techniques to perfection. It combined the qing jing techniques, airy and flowing like a breeze, with something else that was always at his fingertips, steady and dependent, flowing like a river.
A ways out from qing jing peak, in a valley between two tall and precipitous mountains, Shen Qiao ran through his new and improved forms, completely losing himself to them. He moved up without thinking, spun and struck and slashed, the attacks cresting higher like waves. He stepped upwards on falling leaves and practically nothing, rising higher and higher. He finally lowered Xiu Ya, stepped on the flat of the blade, continuing the set with empty hands and keeping his footwork up, the blade ever shifting to meet the soles of his feet just where he set them down.
He pushed off Xiu Ya and soared into the air, calling the sword back to his hand as easily as breathing or moving a finger. Raising it with the lightness of moving a willow branch, he then brought it down, executing a final sweeping strike.
The sword glare that broke forth was a torrent of light, crashing into the mountain with the sound of thunder on a clear day.

Opposite of him, the tip of the mountain groaned and listed to the side. Then it fell, the rock below crumbled away into dust.

Shen Qiao opened his eyes and took a breath, lightly landing back on Xiu Ya. The valley stretched out beneath him, meadows and forest and air.
The block of stone he had sliced off hit the ground soundlessly, only followed by a dull roar a beat later. After another few heart-beats, the sound echoed back from the surrounding peaks.

Shen Qiao breathed, filled with a profound sense of peace.

~

Half a year after Shen Qiao had woken up as Shen Qingqiu, Qing Jing was blossoming. Both his own students and those from Bai Zhan had improved greatly, with Luo Binghe outpacing everyone else by leaps and bounds. The latter might have been a problem, but the boy was likable enough, and generous enough with his time to help anyone who struggled with their own exercises. No new tensions had arisen. Their bi-weekly sparring sessions with Bai Zhan continued to be a boon for everyone involved. Shen Qiao was even considering a joint field trip, holding back mostly out of respect for their absent shifu, who should at least be asked, if not involved.
He was also finally starting to feel he had put out enough fires that he could relax a bit and lean back to take care of his own matters, like figuring out where this homesickness was coming from, what he actually wanted in life, and what Yue Qingyuan's deal was.

Shen Qiao hadn't read Proud Immortal Demon Way. As such, he didn't think much of it when Yue Qingyuan and most of the other peak lords left Cang Qiong for a meeting with Huan Hua palace to discuss the planning of the upcoming Immortal Alliance Conference.

Chapter Text

A crowd of chattering juniors behind him, Shen Qiao climbed the last steps up the nigh-infinitely long staircase up Qiong Ding peak. To his satisfaction, there were barely any groans of relief. Even the youngest of juniors had kept up well.
"Let's see if your shifu is back yet," Shen Qiao said, addressing the flock of Qiong Ding disciples making up half of their group. Since Liu Qingge hadn't been available to discuss the idea of an inter-peak field trip, he had brought up the idea with Yue Qingyuan more as an idle thought, only for the latter to latch onto it immediately and offer his own disciples instead. Improving relations is between peaks is a fantastic idea, shidi. Remember all of the missions we used to go on together back when we were disciples? ... well, they'll definitely benefit from going together.
Yue Qingyuan himself was away to meet with representatives of Huan Hua palace to sort out preparations for the upcoming Immortal Alliance conference, but two peak lords on one training field trip would have been excessive anyway. Shen Qiao had led disciples from both peaks to investigate a curse in a nearby town that had allegedly repeatedly flooded the servants' quarters with lake water and made the people sleeping there disappear. The kids had worked together decently well in discovering a series of completely mundane cover-ups for an elopement, a coercion, and a murder committed by a human being. All in all, Shen Qiao was quite satisfied with their showing.
It was a matter of politeness to drop the Qiong Ding disciples off at their home peak, but Yue Qingyuan and his party didn't seem to be back yet. Taking in the lack of lights, Shen Qiao decided not to wait around for them and turned to the most senior Qiong Ding disciple.

"My students and I will head back, then -"
A frown went over his face. The student turned to look over his shoulder to see what he was seeing.
Through the gates, they had a perfect view of the rainbow bridges connecting the peaks giving out one by one.

~

Shen Qiao sent a few of the older disciples to check on the other peaks while he began to scan the surroundings. The disciples returned only minutes later to report an invisible barrier surrounding Qiong Ding, no matter how high or low they flew.

"Ming Fan," Shen Qiao said quietly. "Enter the Lingxi caves and get your Liu-shishu to exit seclusion. Tell him Cang Qiong is under attack."

"Shishu, allow me to go as well," the most senior Qiong Ding disciple jumped in. "It's our Qiong Ding peak, the responsibility of asking for help should fall to me."
Their train of thought was quite obvious: Liu Qingge might not believe Shen Qingqiu's head disciple if he came alone.

While the two took off, Shen Qiao turned to the others. "The rest of you, stay together."
The Qiong Ding and Qing Jing disciples clustered around him, preparing to follow him deeper into the complex.

As they approached the pavilion housing the array matrices responsible for the upkeep of the rainbow bridges, they were greeted by a dark figure leaning against the post of the gate. With graceful, sinuous steps, the person moved out of the shadow.

The first thing Shen Qiao noticed were long, pointy ears, poking out underneath a myriad of black braids.

What otherwise resembled a girl of fifteen was slight, young, and had, in a vague nod in the direction of clothing, wrapped a bolt of red gauze around hips and torso. The cloth was accompanied by a bunch of silver bangles and little bells that jingled with every move she made, though Shen Qiao suspected that, like a cat that had learned to hunt despite its collar, she could move perfectly silently when she wanted.
Her eyes were painted boldly and flashed as she gave them a playful moue, following it up with a wave of her long, claw-like red nails.

"A welcoming comittee!" the girl crooned, her voice high, sweet and cold. As she spoke, white fangs flashed white between the scarlet of her lips. "And led by Immortal Master Shen, no less! This Ling-er is honored."

Without turning his head, Shen Qiao scanned his surroundings. On the rooftops and walls surrounding the courtyard, a group of armed individuals rose up.

"You'll have to excuse our sect leader's absence," Shen Qiao said. "If this visit wasn't so unexpected, we would have given you a warmer welcome. Still, I'm more than able to entertain guests in his stead."

Most of the people on the roof were vaguely humanoid, but that was about where the similarities ended. While the girl at the front was able to pass as human at first glance, most of them decidedly could not.
Shen Qiao mentally went through a list of texts he had read during the last six months that suddenly made a lot more sense. He marveled a bit at the abundance of shapes, colors, animal attributes, and sizes. Then he set the entire thing aside to deal with later. Human or not, a threat was a threat.

So, they were dealing with demons.
Based on stances and weaponry, it was evident they had sent a vanguard, every single one a capable fighter. Shen Qiao's gaze went back to the willow-thin, pointy-eared girl in red who was watching the proceedings with barely concealed hunger in her eyes.
Shen Qiao recognized the look; he had seen it quite often in Luo Binghe's eyes.
Young and needing to prove herself, then.

Without taking his eyes off Sha Hualing, he murmured, "Luo Binghe, as soon as you can, grab a signal flare and head to the western cliffs. If at all possible, try to call the delegation back home, without being seen from here."
Luo Binghe was smart enough not to acknowledge the order outwardly.
Shen Qiao addressed the demons again. "You have me at a disadvantage, though. It's clear you traveled far to get here, but what are your names, and what brings you to our door so late in the evening?"

While they were speaking, Luo Binghe silently disappeared into the shadows.

The demoness was called Sha Hualing, daughter of a prominent demon lord, and as they could have guessed, she was here to cause trouble.

"Of course we were hoping to exchange pointers with a sect as lofty as Cang Qiong." She smiled, running her eyes over the collection of inexperienced juniors behind Shen Qiao. "How about three matches between representatives to determine the winner?"

Light blue and white exploded across Shen Qiao's field of vision, leaving his ears ringing. He hadn't had any flare-ups like these since Liu Qingge had gone into seclusion.
Mu Qingfang had hypothesized the source were events that would have triggered great emotional turmoil in him before the qi deviation.
Shen Qiao took three breaths to calm his simmering rage into cold fury. He couldn't afford to be distracted.

With Shen Qiao in attendance, he suspected both sides were about even in martial ability. However, the average demon was considerably stronger than the average human. As such, the distribution of power was skewed; while Shen Qiao could probably kill any demon in the opposing party without breaking a sweat, any demon in the opposing party could do the same to most of their disciples.
If it came to an all-out conflict, both sides would definitely take heavy losses, not to mention it might trigger a blood feud between Cang Qiong and the southern demon race. As such, Sha Hualing suggesting the matches was not a terrible idea; it gave her the opportunity to prove herself without forcing a conflict detrimental to them both. Still, if Shen Qiao hadn't been present, the invasion would likely have been a massacre; and even now, there was no telling what had happened to the handful of elders and staff that had remained on the peak today.

Shen Qiao's vision cleared in a crackle of grey static as he stared down Sha Hualing. "I accept. For the first match, I suggest a duel between myself and Demon Saintess Sha."

She widened her eyes exaggeratedly, wrapping a strand of her bangs around a finger and biting her lip. "Really, a big, strong immortal master like you against a little girl like me? That wouldn't be appropriate."

"If you're old enough to lead a strike force, I couldn't insult you by implying you are in any way lesser than the fighters under your command," Shen Qiao said coolly. "Aren't you the strongest in your group? I am in mine; it matches."

"Ah, but I lack the experience needed to challenge one such as you. I couldn't hope to measure up!" Sha Hualing gave a beaming smile. "Elder 'One Arm' Dubi will take on this challenge instead."

A tall, violet demon with the scales of a lizard made his way to the front. He was, indeed, missing an arm.

The demons had collected in the courtyard, both sides forming a loose circle around the two combatants.

Being quiet people by nature, neither combatants bothered to make any opening remarks. Sha Hualing made a few attempts to goad them, but when neither of them replied to her or the shouts of the demon crowd jeering for blood, she gave up the dramatic flair as a lost cause. Shen Qingqiu simply looked on coldly until the duel was declared to start.

When it did, nobody was quite sure what happened. They all saw Shen Qingqiu move, sidestepping a swing of Elder Dubi's saber, but the next moment, he was clutching the demon's wrist, pressing on an acupoint and forcing him to his knees. The blade clattered harmlessly to the floor between them.
It should look comical, the hulking lizard demon folding next to the willowy human cultivator like a sheet of paper. Nobody laughed. An awed hush had fallen over the disciples.
He hadn't even drawn his sword.

Among the demons, the tension ratcheted up.
There was beating someone, and then there was humiliating them.

"I understand the reluctance of someone of your rank not wanting to fight just anyone," Shen Qiao said with a polite nod after Elder Dubi had conceded the match and disappeared back into the crowd of demons. "I hope I have proven myself worthy."

Sha Hualing's eyes had become hard and angry. Still, she forced a laugh. "I wouldn't dare. Also, since we're here to compare strengths, the next match should be fought by someone else."

"I'm the only representative of Cang Qiong here right now," Shen Qiao retorted. "If you want someone else, you'll have to wait until our sect leader's delegation makes it back."

Sha Hualing widened her eyes exaggeratedly. "But I see you have plenty of young heroes here! Can't you pick one of them to uphold your sect's honor?"

Shen Qiao just smiled. "How could we do that? Saintess Sha, surely you're not saying your subordinates are at the level of juniors and children?"

She sent Elder 'Sky Hammer' Tianchui. The name was as aptly chosen as his predecessor's. He was almost twice Shen Qiao's height and wielded a war hammer of proportional size. His armor was covered in gleaming black spikes.

Shen Qiao faintly raised an eyebrow at the explanation for the latter. "That's ... quite the serious poison," he observed.

"If you're scared, no need to fight," Sha Hualing said, waving her hand magnanimously. "Just forfeit the match, or nominate someone else!"

"Unnecessary. I'm just wondering, since it's meant to be a friendly competition, how is this friendly behavior? If he insists on wearing this armor, he really can't count on me to hold back that much, either."

"Oh, you're speaking too seriously. He'll be careful."

"He came here, to what you call a peaceful competition, wearing lethal poison armor. He has not been careful, he might have injured any of our disciples in the excitement earlier.
Since he hasn't been taking care of who he might injure or kill, I won't be careful with him, either."

The elder tossed his head, his long curved horns cutting through the air. "Good! It's no fun to best someone who is holding back. Peak Lord Shen, do your worst!"

Shen Qiao didn't react.

The fight began.

Shen Qiao dodged the first attack, then the second, giving Elder Tianchui a wide berth while looking for an opening. Finding it, he leapt up, gripping one of the horns on top of the demon's helmet - or were these growing out of the skull, going through the metal? - and swinging around it, Xiu Ya finding the gap between pauldron and helmet with unerring accuracy.

Shen Qiao landed behind the demon, not a scratch on him. With a gesture, Xiu Ya moved to the side and then back, sending out a spray of blood as it unsealed itself from the demon's carotid artery. It swerved in a wide arc, sloughing off the blood above the demon crowd before returning to Shen Qiao's outstretched hand.
Elder Tianchui collapsed to his knees, then onto his stomach.

The disciples as well as the demons remained silent.

"You killed him," Sha Hualing drawled, her eyes narrowed. "That wasn't the deal."

Shen Qiao turned to Sha Hualing, casually sheathing Xiu Ya again.
"Wouldn't I have died if the poison had touched me?"

Shen Qiao was thinking quickly. Cang Qiong had won two of three matches and thus overall, but there was still a chance Sha Hualing would simply refuse to leave. If she ordered her subordinates to kill every disciple in reach, Shen Qiao wouldn't be fast enough to prevent a blood bath. The best option was to stall for time. He needed to get the situation back under control, and fast.

"It would have been your own fault if you couldn't dodge," Sha Hualing said with a sickly-sweet smile.

"Then it was his own fault for not doing the same." Shen Qiao mustered his off hand for a second, before hiding it in his sleeve. "Now, demon saintess, we said best of three, didn't we? Let's hold one last match for your people to get some face back. Come collect some of the experience you said you lacked."

Sha Hualing's eyes sharply tracked the movement of his left hand where it was tucked away into his sleeve. She licked her lips, a leopard with a taste of blood.

Shen Qiao had a reason for hiding the hand that had gotten near Elder Tianchui. If he had gotten pricked by Elder Tianchui's armor, it was going to be an easy victory for her, and a monumental one at that. If he hadn't been, it was going to be a one-sided beat-down. If he could convince her to accept, he'd be able to delay an actual fight breaking out until ...

Their eyes met, both of them gambling.
"I accept," said Sha Hualing.

She moved into the circle. In response, the demons began to stomp rhythmically, the beat rising and speeding up as the opponents began to circle each other, until the ground was trembling.

Sha Hualing lunged first, quick and ferocious. Unlike the two elders, she was fast.

She was doubtlessly powerful. Demons, as a rule of thumb, were more powerful than humans of the same age and experience, never mind that they lived far longer. The only reason the human realm hadn't been overrun was that they reproduced incredibly slowly. Sha Hualing was the first child the southern royal family had produced in almost half a millenium, so while demons were famously cold to their offspring, even though she wasn't cherished, she was valued. She'd received the best training there was.
But she was young, inexperienced, and this was her first real combat trial.

Shen Qiao caught the wave of demonic qi on his blade and responded with a sweeping backhand motion, throwing her across the ring like a feral cat. She landed lightly, then took one, two more sharp nips at his defenses, probing.

When he remained passive, she stood still for a second. She could sense he was holding back; he was, but it wouldn't work for much longer.

Shen Qiao imagined the tail of a cat twitching.

Then she leapt at him in earnest, spiritual and demonic qi clashing in mid-air.

The noise around them crested into one big cacophony.

Their energies collided, raw strength against raw strength. If Shen Qiao had been injured, this was where his meridians would give out, he himself stumbling backwards and coughing blood.

He did not.

Consequently, Shen Qiao could see the moment Sha Hualing realized she was going to lose. Her posture shifted, her eyes moved, scanning the ring of spectators for an out, for the weakest link.
When she spotted it, Shen Qiao was a split-second too late.

The next moment, Sha Hualing's claw-like fingers were around Ning Yingying's throat, the red lacquered nails as sharp and pointy as knives digging into the skin over the relevant arteries, just where Shen Qiao had stabbed elder poison armor minutes earlier. And yes, like a cat pouncing, she had suddenly moved without any noise at all.

"You'll forgive me for being impolite," Sha Hualing purred, her little fangs bared in a devious smile directly next to Ning Yingying's ear. "I've heard so much about your favorite student, Master Shen, I felt I just had to get close with her."

Ning Yingying, cleverly, loosened her knees to force Sha Hualing to support her weight or drop her. Unfortunately, Sha Hualing wasn't a human kidnapper. She was physically strong enough to hold up her hostage one-handed with barely any effort.

"Since it would be a shame to lose such a disciple, as I'm sure you agree," she tightened her grip, the claws just barely not breaking skin, "you'll let us leave without any difficulties." She backed away, holding Ning Yingying like a shield between herself and Shen Qiao.

Shen Qiao took a step forward for every step Sha Hualing took back, manintaining the distance.
"We weren't going to indiscriminately kill all of you either way," Shen Qiao said calmly. "Do tell me, though, what happened to the elders monitoring the rainbow bridges? We couldn't find them earlier."

Sha Hualing bared her teeth again. "They shouldn't have gotten in the way."

"How many of them are dead?"

"I really couldn't say. Humans can be so fragile sometimes." She kept moving backwards, stepping over Elder Tianchui's giant hammer without looking down. "Oh, and we'll also take the name plate in front of the main hall, I think. Qiong Ding loses some face, but your disciple gets to keep her pretty head. It's a fair trade, don't you agree?"

A shadow in the corner of his eye alerted Shen Qiao that Luo Binghe had finally returned. He couldn't afford to focus on that, though. "Qiong Ding Peak losing face is all of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect losing face. That name plate was carved by the first founder of our sect, centuries ago. We really can't just be handing it over." Also, he was rather sure that given the chance, Sha Hualing would just kill Ning Yingying anyways as soon as she had what she wanted, gladly leaving behind the corpse halfway down the mountain. "Be reasonable; ask for something else."

At this, several things happened at once.

Sha Hualing's eyes narrowed as her hand flexed.

From the corner of his eye, Shen Qiao saw something lunge.

By sheer luck he managed to keep Sha Hualing's claws from going through Ning Yingying's carotid artery and jugular. Xiu Ya cut through the infinitesimal space between Ning Yingying's neck and the hand clutching it, severing three or four fingernails in the process. At the same time, Luo Binghe grabbed Ning Yingying's wrist, dragging her to the side and away, while Zheng Yang stabbed towards Sha Hualing's midsection.

Seeing that Ning Yingying was as good as safe, Shen Qiao sent a palm strike towards the center of Sha Hualing's chest, throwing her back. As a result, Zheng Yang missed her by inches.

(Good. If she'd died here, it would have been a political nightmare.)

Sha Hualing crashed into one of the statues in front of the pavilion and crumpled to the floor. As she raised her gaze, it was filled with nothing but hatred.
"Kill them," she hissed through clenched teeth, slowly dragging herself back to her feet while getting some air back into her lungs. Then she roared, "Raze the place to the ground, and don't leave a single member of Qiong Ding peak alive!"

The demons around her drew their weapons where they hadn't been out already and moved. Screaming rose.

This very second, a glowing comet shot towards Qiong Ding, shattering the barrier separating them from the outside world like so much glass. Before the comet could impact, though, a sword glare cut through the outbreaking melee, separating the freshly mingled combatants and throwing the demons back.

Shen Qiao looked overhead as Liu Qingge and Yue Qingyuan descended from the skies like two wrathful gods of old. Disciples from both peaks burst into wild cheering and threw themselves into the fight.

Seeing the tide turn, the demons scattered and began to flee. Two hulking elders threw themselves against the wall of the courtyard until it gave, providing an out broader than the narrow gate they'd all been trying to squeeze through.

Shen Qiao sent a sword glare to direct the stream of the fleeing demons back towards the staircase rather than the cliffs - most of them couldn't fly, he was pretty sure - and leapt up on the half-collapsed wall of the courtyard to watch their retreat.

Liu Qingge shouted something belligerent and swung Cheng Luan. At the movement, a burning hail of hundreds of swords began to descend from the skies like fiery tears.

In response, Sha Hualing - half running, half carried by a subordinate - threw a bolt of red gauze into the air, which fluttered and stretched to envelop the entire fleeing group beneath a translucent red shield dome. Where the swords met the fabric, it smouldered and tore, but they slowed down for a second.

If he was honest with himself, Shen Qiao was too wrapped up dealing with the crisis to even start thinking about either of these things.

Instead, he watched and waited until he was sure the demons were definitely, absolutely on their way and out before he turned back to greet his sect leader and his shidi.

"We have a serious security problem," he said when the situation was mostly back under control. "Whose job is it to handle that?"

Liu Qingge and Yue Qingyuan had both touched down in the courtyard and were now giving him two very different different looks.

Actually, Liu Qingge looked like he was about to fall over. On one hand, the spell he had performed must have taken up a lot of energy. On the other, Shen Qiao had other priorities at the moment.

"It was my responsibility?" He took a moment to process the looks he was getting, then sighed. "Alright, I'll put it on the list."

He jumped down from the wall to join them before turning to them with a frown. "I wasn't teaching, I wasn't researching, I wasn't making any relevant new art, I wasn't maintaining our security. Tell me, what have I been doing these last fifty years?"

Yue Qingyuan gave him a placating smile, even as he was taking in the situation. "You were doing many of these things," he said loyally. "Besides, you did focus on your cultivation a lot."

Liu Qingge was leaning on his sword to stay upright. Though his voice was hoarse, it was still scathing when he said, "Frequenting brothels, mostly." His breath was coming laboredly.

"Brothels." Shen Qiao stared at both of them, trying to reconcile this with what he knew. "... alright. Which ones specifically?"

Liu Qingge rolled his eyes. "The Violet Pavilion or something? But really -"

Shen Qiao was suddenly hit with a series of flashes, memories rushing through his head like a snow storm.

Being carried on someone's arm while he asked questions about sword forms. Yu-shidi's sword didn't point upwards as much as yours did, Shizun. Was that wrong?

A pavilion on the top of a mountain, surrounded by a daoist monastery, the entire scenery covered in snow.

A-Qiao, once I'm gone -

Shixiong! Shixiong! How do I -

A cup of tea and a smile, wishing him the best for the upcoming duel.

- all this, I entrust to you.

Shen Qiao clutched his head, only vaguely hearing Yue Qingyuan sigh. "No, it's called the Warm Red Pavilion."

In front of Shen Qiao's eyes, blue flickered.

"Alright, thank you," Shen Qiao said, trying to force the headache to subside by sheer force of will. "Excuse me for a moment. Luo Binghe!"

Luo Binghe, who had been fretting over Ning Yingying, stepped forward with a hesitant expression. Shen Qiao moved them both towards the edge of the courtyard to make the following scene a little less public.

As soon as they were out of the way, Shen Qiao turned around and said, "What were you thinking?" For the first time since the fever, Shen Qiao's eyes were blazing with anger.

Luo Binghe reared back, eyes wide.

"You interfered with the duel. How could you be so reckless? The balance with the demon race is a delicate one," even if Shen Qiao had only seen them as a foreign human nation until two hours ago, he still knew that much, "Never mind that they attacked us first, if you had actually succeeded in killing Sha Hualing just now, we would be at war!"

"But - Ying-er!"

"That's Ning-shijie to you," Shen Qiao said, voice clipped. "Do you really think I would have let something happen to her?"

Based on Luo Binghe's expression, there were some conflicting feelings to that question. Shen Qiao remembered the boy had almost died of neglect at his hands and admitted to himself he couldn't entirely blame him.

He switched gears. "Do you realize your stunt almost got her killed? If I hadn't moved quickly enough, if Sha Hualing had twitched -" He shook his head. "Did you think at all before you moved?"

Luo Binghe remained silent, his shoulders drawn up to his ears. Even though he had grown in the intervening months, he still looked much the same as he had on that hospital bed.

Shen Qiao gave his words a moment to sink in, then changed the topic.
"You're going to help your Ning-shijie with all of her chores for the next month. And I don't mean do them for her, I mean doing them together and correcting every single mistake she makes until she does them right. I'll check her progress at the end of the month."

Something in Luo Binghe's shoulders loosened even as he fought a grimace. It would cut into his own training time and annoy them both, even though Ning Yingying would benefit in the end.

(But despite Luo Binghe's fears, this event wasn't what transformed kind Shizun back into cruel Shizun. The certainty helped settle him. A bit.)

Shen Qiao raised his hand, massaging his temples against the renewed flare-up of light blue OOC. He sighed, relenting a bit when he saw the genuine contrition on Luo Binghe's face. "... but fortunately we got out of this without any serious injuries for anyone."

There was a hacking cough from the center of the courtyard.

When Shen Qiao turned, Liu Qingge had sunk down on one knee despite still being braced on his sword. Blood and saliva were dripping from his mouth, his eyes wild. One hand was clutched into the fabric at his chest, as if he had trouble breathing.

"Go get Mu Qingfang," said Shen Qiao without taking his eyes off Liu Qingge. "Sect leader?"

"On it. Everyone back!" Yue Qingyuan's authoritative voice cleared a circle around them immediately.

Slowly, Shen Qiao took a step towards Liu Qingge. "Shidi? Can you hear me?"

Behind them, Luo Binghe stepped on his sword and took off like an arrow.

Liu Qingge raised his bloodshot eyes to Shen Qiao's, ignoring all attempts of Yue Qingyuan to draw his attention.
His shoulders were heaving with every breath he took. A bead of blood was running down from his nose to his upper lip to mix with the saliva there. The hand around his sword hilt spasmed erratically.

To himself, Shen Qiao thought, we probably should not have interrupted that seclusion.

Liu Qingge yanked his sword out of the ground and, with a roar, flung a sword glare at Shen Qiao.

Chapter Text

By the time Mu Qingfang arrived at the peak, Luo Binghe trailing behind him nervously, Shen Qiao and Yue Qingyuan had succeeded in pinning both of Liu Qingge’s hands behind his back and holding him down. They were feeding him energy the best they could, but his qi was unbalanced and hostile, lashing out at them when they tried.

With a well-placed pinch to a crucial acupoint, Mu Qingfang immobilized Liu Qingge and then sent him to sleep. As he went slack beneath their hands, Shen Qiao reached forward to lower him down.

Mu Qingfang ran some diagnostics and applied some stabilizing first aid in the form of more silver needles. Lying there unconsciously, Liu Qingge had nothing of his usual hard, sharp demeanor, reduced instead to looking young and vulnerable.

Yue Qingyuan began sending the disciples off to their dorms to reduce the amount of staring. Minding his own disciples, Shen Qiao sought out Ming Fan and collected the younger students around them. He spoke a few words to soothe them before sending them back to their own peak. He himself followed Mu Qingfang when he transported Liu Qingge to Qian Cao peak on a stretcher.

The latter was a first in the last fifty years or so. Bai Zhan had a certain “walk it off” kind of philosophy, applied liberally to everything from concussions to broken legs.

“If there's anything we can do to help ...” Shen Qiao ventured, moving closer to the stretcher with a worried look.

“Hard to say,” Mu Qingfang replied, signaling to set Liu Qingge down on the examination table. “Let me do my job first before I tell you anything.”

Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qiao waited outside of the infirmary. This, too, would later be chalked up to memory loss and qi deviation related trauma on Shen Qingqiu’s part, since the animosity between the second and seventh peak lord was a well-known fact. Yue Qingyuan kept throwing his shidi looks from the corner of his eye, which Shen Qingqiu completely failed to notice. He had settled into a meditation pose and had closed his eyes, seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world.

An hour later, the door slid open. Mu Qingfang stood on the threshold, looking down at them with a grim, but not harried expression. After a moment, he said, “Qi transfusions would help.”
Yue Qingyuan blinked blearily before getting to his feet, only to notice Shen Qingqiu was already two steps ahead of him.

With their combined assistance, Liu Qingge made it through the night. At some point, Yue Qingyuan had to forbid Shen Qingqiu from continuing, afraid he would work himself into another qi deviation otherwise. Banished from the room, Shen Qingqiu took up his vigil outside again, meditating on the floor of the hallway.
(Yue Qingyuan made a mental note to schedule another visit to Hong Jing. Just to be really, really sure.)

Spending the night in the corridor outside of Liu Qingge's sickroom, Shen Qiao finally had time to breathe and think.

He thought about the myriad of flying swords coming down from the skies and the giant red gauze shield protecting the demons' retreat. He thought about the demons, period. About all the little and quite seriously big things that should not be possible, for any human, ever. In the dark of the corridor, he shivered a little.

Silently, Shen Qiao came to terms with the fact that wherever he was from, it was not this world.

Chapter Text

Shen Qiao blinked into the morning sun stretching hesitant fingers across the corridor to see Mu Qingfang look down at him with a severe expression.

“He’s past the worst of it,” was pretty much all the doctor told him, before promptly throwing him out to get some sleep.

Shen Qiao straightened up. It was true that he hadn’t slept, but he had been meditating for a few hours. The effect wasn’t quite as pronounced as confused instinct told him it should be, but it was going to be enough to keep him on his feet.

He largely spent the day investigating how the demons had managed to get inside in the first place.

For all intents and purposes, they seemed to have simply climbed the stairs.

The stairs were charmed to become endlessly long to anyone without either an invitation or a sufficiently high level of cultivation, and the entire party had fallen into the second category.

According to the elders who survived the attack unconscious and locked into the rainbow bridge pavilion, they had then used stealth, silence and superior numbers to quickly incapacitate the guards and take over the relevant infrastructure. Nobody could tell Shen Qiao how the demons had known which infrastructure to target in the first place, but he was starting to get used to that headache.

In the evening, he left Cang Qiong behind to go visit the Warm Red Pavilion in the city near the foot of the mountain range. (How inconvenient it was that brothels were closed during the day; he would have liked to ask his questions sooner.)

When he arrived, two smiling young women led him to the madam of the place, not asking a single question.

The madam was a stern woman in her fifties, greying across the temples and gently closing the folds of a fan in front of her chest as he entered. Scrutinizing him from top to bottom, she only faintly raised her eyebrows. “And after no visits for six months,” she said with a low, velvety voice. “The prodigal son finally returns. We were beginning to wonder if you had forgotten about us.”

Shen Qiao let himself be seated at the table across from her, waiting for her to take her place as well. “About that,” he said carefully, waiting for the two young women to be out of earshot.

When he finished outlining the situation, he had ended up receiving a thick stack of reports and a verbal update on any information too vague or too sensitive to put down in writing.

Shen Qiao blinked down at the collection of compromising information about half the gentry and merchants of the surrounding cities and took it in stride. “How is the payment usually handled?”

The madam paused to elegantly pour tea for him again, then for herself.

“There's a monthly stipend you send. Though,” as she looked up through her lashes, Shen Qiao caught a glint of amusement, “it's probably not written down as such in your budget. Now,” her tone turned businesslike, and with a wave of her closed fan, she summoned two other young women, this time armed with a zither and a plate of sweets, “since you're finally here, sit down, sit back, relax. We have some new music we want to show you, and also, Immortal Master Shen – if I may be so bold?” A little taken aback, Shen Qiao indicated for her to go on. “- you owe me three rematches in weiqi, young man.”

The slight reproach in her tone coaxed a smile from Shen Qiao. It was with genuine regret in his voice that he said, “I’ve been ordered by Mu-daifu to get some sleep tonight.”

“And don't you always, when you’re here?” the madam said, arching a brow with a touch of amusement. “We’ll never be able to do business again if word of that gets out.” Shen Qiao smiled and said nothing.

Her tone teaching turned sympathetic, “I can't begin to imagine how tired you must be, after half a year all alone on that peak. Don't worry, we'll leave you alone starting zi shi.”

“As good as that sounds,” Shen Qiao said apologetically, “I still have things back on Qing Jing peak that require my attention tonight. I’ll have to rely on your hospitality another time.”

This caused great disappointment especially from the younger women, who seemingly had been looking forward to showing off their improvement. Shen Qiao privately wondered if he had been here, too, if he was so involved in their progress.

He did allow himself to be browbeat into playing a single game of weiqi with the madam, assuming it wouldn’t be too long.

He assumed wrong. Almost an entire shichen of harsh competition later, he was surveying the final layout, finding himself only a few points ahead. He raised his gaze to find the madam eyeing him speculatively behind a secretive smile.

Shen Qiao began gathering his stones. There was really only one response to that. When they had sorted the stones back into their containers, he rose to his feet and bowed.

“I’ll try to make it harder for you to let me win in the future.”

From the hearty chuckle he received, he knew he had guessed right.

~

All in all, the evening had been very productive. It was reassuring to know that he had been doing some aspects of his job properly, at least, and he was looking forward to having a source of intelligence not based on the – clearly limited – scope of vision afforded to Cang Qiong by virtue of literally being above it all, on the top of some of the world’s highest mountains.

(Thinking that felt a little like a betrayal. He put it down to loyalty to his sect leader, which felt right.)

Despite his efforts, he returned to his bamboo hut on Qing Jing in the dead of night. This made it all the more surprising to find someone waiting for him there.

Ning Yingying was standing in front of the doors, having her only shidi’s wrist in a vice grip to keep him from running off. Based on how shifty Luo Binghe looked, that was a real concern. They were both in their night clothes and had evidently thrown on an outer layer only haphazardly to ward off the nightly chill.

“Ning Yingying?” Shen Qiao asked calmly, already preparing for the worst.

Ning Yingying pointed to her shidi with wide, worried eyes. “Shizun, A-Luo has a person in his head!”

There weren’t any flashes of white and blue this time, but Shen Qiao was beginning to get used to the headaches.

Chapter Text

Now, it wasn’t like Luo Binghe ever tried to get in trouble. It was just that his luck was such that, when Sha Hualing pitched a fit back home and decided to pick a random ancient magical weapon to point at the teenager that had gotten involved in her hostage situation, it ended with something called 'dream demon' stuck to Luo Binghe’s hind brain, with the dream demon very unwilling to leave.

Apparently, the dream demon had created an extremely realistic dream that had forced Luo Binghe to relive and confront some rather disturbing childhood trauma about his mother dying and him being helpless to stop it, and Ning Yingying had gotten caught up in the whole scene before unceremoniously getting put in time-out in a rather relaxing dream meadow.

It was just as well Shen Qiao hadn’t slept yet: At the very least, it made falling asleep on cue far easier.
Seeing as Shen Qiao opened his eyes in a formless, joyless stretch of scenery consisting of vague grey outlines, he assumed Luo Binghe had successfully dragged him along into his dream.

~

“So, you mean to tell me you’re taking a new Shizun, is that it,” Shen Qiao said after a long and confusing discussion between him, Luo Binghe, and someone who had smoke for hands. It was not exactly how he would have imagined this dream demon to look like, but what did Shen Qiao know? He hadn’t gotten around to researching the demon race (races? Was there more than one?) yet after realizing only yesterday that they existed.
The dream demon was more commonly called Meng Mo. When he wasn’t floating around as a cloud of incorporeal smoke, he looked like a distinguished human elder, with a flowing white beard and sharp, glinting eyes. From his sleeves and the lower hem of his robes poured white mist, or smoke, and he was hovering a few inches above the ground.

Luo Binghe’s eyes went wide as he turned to Shen Qiao. “Of course not, Shizun! This disciple would never.”

Shen Qiao faintly raised an eyebrow at him, ignoring the expression of silent outrage that went over Meng Mo’s face in the background. “Then what were you thinking?”

“Well, Ming-shixiong mentioned you were thinking of hiring another hall master – “

Watching Meng Mo’s eye begin to twitch, Shen Qiao found it comforting to know someone found the situation even less pleasant than him.
Politely, Shen Qiao said, “Senior Meng, how would this work? Can you teach all the children on my peak?”

“As I said before,” Meng Mo said, crossing his hands in front of his chest, “I’m attached to the brat, and I’m not planning to switch. They’d have to crowd into the kid’s dreamscape, which would put him in danger. Anything that breaks in here directly corresponds to something in his psyche; it’s not worth the risk.”

“Then, could Luo Binghe teach the others what you're teaching him?”

Meng Mo stared at him flatly. “I suppose he could,” he said after a prolonged period of silence.

Shen Qiao closed his eyes, rubbing the spot between his eyebrows. “Alright. If you're going to be a hall master here, we need to talk about a curriculum.” Meng Mo's eye twitched harder, which Shen Qiao ignored. “So, what can you teach him?”

Meng Mo threw an aggravated look towards Luo Binghe. Unfortunately, the boy was sparkling with innocence, completely unwilling to help him out. “He’d learn to create and manipulate dreamscapes, enter other people's dreams – “

“Why,” Shen Qiao said slowly, “would he need to enter and manipulate other people's dreams?”

Meng Mo silently ground his teeth at this dense immortal master. Espionage and psychological torture, mostly - but I can't say that to you, can I?
Instead, he plastered on a smile. “It’s useful for communicating over long distances. No matter where someone is, you can always talk to them.”

“So, they always remember their dreams after they wake up?”

Only if you let them, which makes the psychological warfare part better. “Of course. There would be no point to sending messages otherwise, would there?”

Shen Qiao thought it over for a moment before turning to Luo Binghe. “I’ll consider it,” he said sternly. “We’ll have a probatory period, and if he ever does something to make you uncomfortable – “

The dream realm collapsed around Shen Qiao, leaving him to fend for himself in an underground labyrinth full of spiders and human-eating monkeys, always chasing someone who was just out of sight. After fighting his way through, the scenery changed again to the interior of a pavilion with a lovely view across a pine forest stretching across the side of a mountain.

Shen Qiao saw someone’s face reflected in a cup of tea, feeling a shiver running down his spine. He tried to look up, to catch a glimpse of the real person in front of him, but the room had begun to spin too hard to recognize any kind of detail.
He awoke bathed in sweat, lying on his back in his bed in the bamboo cottage. Breathing heavily, Shen Qiao dropped his head back onto his pillow.
After having caught his breath, he rolled to his feet and went to check on Luo Binghe, who had been lying on a cot one room over. The boy was still sleepily rubbing his eyes.

“You’re alright?” Shen Qiao said, careful not to mention anything he didn’t want to get back to Meng Mo. He wasn’t sure how much the dream demon could hear or see, but it was best to be careful with these things.

Luo Binghe nodded. “Shizun, are you really going to employ Sen… Meng Mo as a hall master?”

“I’ll need to think about it some more,” Shen Qiao said evasively. “But I’m considering it.” He helped the boy back to his feet and walked him to the dorms. “Get some sleep. Uninterrupted, this time.”

Before the boy had entered the building, he called him back once more. “Luo Binghe?”

The boy turned back with a hint of wariness, which he immediately concealed behind something more open and trusting. “Shizun?”

“I’m glad you two came to me for help,” Shen Qiao said softly. “Sleep well.”

~

"Mu-shidi, can you spare a moment?" Shen Qiao had spent the night in the library in a research-induced frenzy. He probably looked a little manic. Nonetheless, Mu Qingfang set aside what he was doing and invited Shen Qiao inside. "Liu-shidi is still asleep. We can talk for a while."

"What do you know about dream demons?"

~

The conversation with Mu Qingfang proved illuminating in more ways than one.

First, there was no way of separating the demon from Luo Binghe’s consciousness without severely endangering the boy. Second, there were next to no protective measures to keep the demon from entering someone else’s dream and staying there. Third, by all means, Shen Qiao should have been the better host by far, if the demon kept himself alive by way of absorbing his victim’s qi, and the fact that Meng Mo hadn’t jumped on the opportunity when Shen Qiao was right there was incredibly suspicious.

“Maybe it's his unconventional foundations?” Shen Qiao theorized a little hopefully. “He had to figure a lot of things out on his own when he first arrived, maybe it’s something about the flow of his qi …?”

Mu Qingfang shook his head. “As long as he’s a spiritual cultivator, his base should be the same as yours. The only thing I can think of is that he hopes young Luo Binghe will be more susceptible to … any form of persuasion, than you would be.”

Shen Qiao's eyebrows drew together in worry. The demon had already been trying to poach Luo Binghe before Ning Yingying had gotten the chance to come looking for him.

“At least,” Mu Qingfang continued, “he doesn’t seem outwardly aggressive. If he had wanted, he could have trapped you both in the dream realm forever, only switching to a new host when Luo Binghe died.”

"I suspect he doesn’t have the power to switch to someone outside of his immediate dream realms at the moment; he might have doomed himself trying for someone as far away as the disciple dormitories." Shen Qiao shook his head.

"So we’re only safe until he regains enough of his power," Mu Qingfang concluded. The two pondered this for a moment, neither particularly happy with it.

(Mu Qingfang was a doctor and, as such, not inclined to point out they could wipe out an ancient, powerful demon by sacrificing one somewhat promising disciple. However, he did wonder why Shen Qingqiu hadn’t made the suggestion yet.)

Shen Qiao rubbed his nose, thinking deeply. "You said he was sealed before. What kind of vessel could hold a demon elder like this, and how did he let himself be confined into it in the first place?"

"A dream demon uses up power each time they switch hosts. There's a kind of vessel that would allow them to stock up on energy again, which he would likely have entered willingly, but I have no idea where that vessel would draw its energy from, or how to go about constructing one."

Shen Qiao hummed thoughtfully. "But it does mean there’s some way to keep him contained. I’ll have to keep looking."

"See," Mu Qingfang said in the tone of someone bringing bad news, "that would still require him transferring back voluntarily. And as of now, whatever it is that makes Luo Binghe so interesting doesn't seem to make Meng Mo too inclined towards letting go of him."

They let that one sit for a while.

“Meng Mo is an ancient demon who lost his body in a heavenly tribulation more than a millennium ago," Shen Qiao said finally. "I’m really not comfortable having someone like that near my student, never mind on my peak. If we can’t expel the demon completely, could I at least force him to transfer to myself?”

“If we could, there would be nothing we could do to keep him from switching back the second he felt like it as soon as he had enough energy for it – or talking to Luo Binghe in his dreams despite being based in yours. Or any other one of your students, for that matter.”

Shen Qiao nodded grimly. “So, the best thing we can do at the moment is keeping him in our sights and keeping him busy.” He gave a faint smile. “This is not how I imagined acquiring another hall master.”

Mu Qingfang smiled drily. "Who knows? If he actually is willing to share his techniques, it may yet be of use. Being able to enter someone's subconscious would be immensely helpful for conversing with coma patients, for example."

"Don't start planning for it yet," warned Shen Qiao. "I still need to speak with Zhangmen-shixiong about this. There's no guarantee he won't just insist on quarantining the boy halfway across the country and hope for the best."

~

“What if,” Shen Qiao began carefully, looking at Yue Qingyuan, “I wanted to have a rather … unconventional hall master. Someone most righteous cultivators would frown upon.”

Once again, he was treated to the sight of Yue Qingyuan paling. “Is he connected to Wu Yanzi?”

Shen Qiao frowned. The name sounded unfamiliar. However, seeing as Meng Mo had spent the last several hundred years inside of a bottle in the demon realm, it seemed unlikely anyway. “I doubt it.”

Yue Qingyuan’s shoulders lowered in visible relief. “You can hire whoever you want, shidi. I trust your judgement.”

Shen Qiao wondered slightly at the carte blanche, but decided not to question it.

~

“Hall Master Meng,” Shen Qiao said once Luo Binghe had arranged another meeting with him, “I look forward to working with you. Would you prefer to receive your salary in gold or in spirit stones?”

In response, he received a confused, suspicious frown from the demon elder. “You're offering to pay me?”

Shen Qiao suppressed a sigh. If the idea was to entice Meng Mo into something resembling an official agreement, then yes, he would need to be paid. It was somewhat disappointing to think the elder had been thinking they were just going to exploit him. Or, wait -was there any form of long-term employment in the demon realm? What was their main currency? Had there been either of those two things, the last time Meng Mo had been outside? “Of course you’ll be compensated for your efforts.”

“Give the spirit stones to the brat,” Meng Mo said after a lengthy pause. “I can't consume them directly, but he can metabolize it, and I can siphon off more of his energy that way.”

Shen Qiao thought privately that if Meng Mo was even willing to strengthen Luo Binghe's cultivation long-term, then he really did not have any plans to leave anytime soon.

Which meant in turn that there really was something special about Luo Binghe.

Shen Qiao made a mental note to look into it. Then he began drawing up the students' timetables. Fitting an extra class in there somewhere was going to be a nightmare all of its own.

Chapter Text

As Shen Qiao touched down on Bai Zhan peak, he was almost immediately swarmed by its disciples. Even though they had built some rapport in the inter-peak training sessions, the feelings about his arrival seemed mixed, ranging from glad to see him to suspicious and worried. It took some gentle prompting for them to show him to the pavilion their peak lord resided in.

When he entered, the windows in the entire house were covered by paper screens, leaving the light filtering in dim and muted. He found Liu Qingge sitting on the edge of his bed, in his sleeping clothes.
As the only screen in the house, the covering on the window next to him was slightly ajar, allowing a band of light to fall into the room, but it didn’t touch Liu Qingge. His hair was loose, falling in tangles past where he was resting his elbows on his knees and covering most of his unnaturally pale face. Hearing Shen Qiao cross the threshold, he looked up for a moment but made no move to rise for a greeting.

Shen Qiao set down the basket he had brought with him on a side table.

“Here to gloat?” Liu Qingge said in a hoarse voice.

Shen Qiao set out the tea and the blood-replenishing cakes he had brought and kept his tone open and neutral. “Why?”

Liu Qingge was silent for a moment, the only noise in the pavilion the soft sound of his hands running over his face and through his hair.

Finally, he said, “I pushed too far during seclusion and suffered a qi deviation. I set my cultivation back decades, to the point that I may never recover.” He let out a sharp breath through his nose. “It’s funny,” he said bitterly, “This is something I would've expected from you much rather than me.”

Shen Qiao finally turned around. The silence sank between them like lead. Softly, he said, “I'm here to apologize.”

Liu Qingge didn’t look up. He looked as if he should brace for a hit but simply didn’t care enough to.

“Zhangmen-shixiong and I would have sufficed to handle the situation. If I hadn't called for you as well, you would not have interrupted your seclusion and might not have qi deviated. It was my wrong assessment of the situation that caused you to suffer.”

Finally, Liu Qingge raised his eyes to stare at him blankly. For a few moments, neither of them spoke. Then Liu Qingge looked away with a scowl.

Quietly, Shen Qiao added, “Additionally, I still owe you for taking on that mission with the skinner demon a while back. So, if you ever need help … please don't hesitate to ask.”

Seeing as he wasn't going to receive an answer, Shen Qiao turned to leave, feeling that he had said what he ought to and was overstaying his welcome.

From behind him, Liu Qingge rasped, “It wasn't your fault.”

Shen Qiao came to a halt.

“Didn't Mu-shixiong tell you?” Liu Qingge chuckled mirthlessly to himself, a hoarse, breathy sequence of sounds. “I pushed too far, too recklessly. By the time your student found me, the damage was already done. I would have deviated just as much if I'd stayed in the cave, and then I would've been on my own.” Every word sounded like it was pried from his mouth with rusty pliers. “The damage I took was severe because it took Mu-shixiong so long to arrive, and you and Zhangmen-shixiong needed to keep me restrained until he did, unable to help me. If I had still been in the Lingxi caves, I almost certainly would have died.”
He was looking at his hands, Shen Qiao noted, running his fingers against each other as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them when they weren’t holding a sword.
“You owe me nothing, Shen. Finish stealing my students while you're at it; even if I wanted to, there's nothing of value I can teach them anymore.”

With these words, he turned to the only half-open window. The light streaming in turned his face into a bright outline of a dark profile, effectively hiding his expression.

For a few moments, Shen Qiao internally debated saying something. Then he decided there was far too much to be addressed here for him to fix in a few sentences. Politely, he said his goodbyes, spared his shidi the well-wishes, and left.

~

“So,” Shen Qiao said, dropping in on Luo Binghe while the boy was – oh, he was finally meditating instead of chopping wood, how nice. “Did I ever ask about your parents?”

If there was something that made Luo Binghe catnip to powerful demons specifically, it would need to be addressed. Equally, it would be good to find out everything about the boy that could, somehow, be a clue.

Luo Binghe’s face turned rigid for the fraction of a moment, only to be smoothed over by basic politeness like nothing happened in the next. “Shizun, you have. My mother was a kindly washerwoman who took me in as an infant and raised me as her own.”

Shen Qiao nodded thoughtfully, taking note of the past tense and electing not to comment. “Were you the child of a relative?”

Stiffly, Luo Binghe replied, “No. She was unmarried and wanted a child.”

“Then she took you in from an orphanage?”
“She found me in a basket floating down Luo River in December.” Seeing Shen Qiao stumped for a moment, he added defensively, “Hence my name.”
“I see,” Shen Qiao said, recovering from the surprise and brief bout of horror. “What a lucky coincidence she found you in time. Was there any hint of who put you there, or why?”

“I was swaddled in an outer robe my mother has sold since.”

“Any specific colors?” Shen Qiao probed. Merchant families, noble families, and cultivation sects often had their own distinct sets of colors, so perhaps that might help narrow it down. His hopes were dashed immediately.

“Pitch black,” Luo Binghe said succinctly, before adding almost grudgingly, “It also had some protection charm stitched into the sleeves. Shizun,” he chanced a look up at Shen Qiao, “my mother was a washerwoman, and my birthday is the day she lifted me from the water. She took me in, clothed and fed me, as well as raised me as her own. I don’t need to know anything else.”

Shen Qiao smiled. For some reason, the recalcitrant words struck a chord with him. “Your loyalty does you credit,” he said, friendly. “Now, I believe I’ve kept you from your studies for long enough.” Before leaving, he hesitated. “Luo Binghe.”

The boy opened his eyes again, wary.

“I meant what I said. If Meng Mo does anything to you that you don’t want, I trust you to find a way to tell me, and we will get him out of there, no matter what it takes.”

“Of course, Shizun.”

Shen Qiao hesitated again, feeling like he was missing something. “You’ll be fine teaching your martial siblings how to deal with this, if the trial period goes well?”

“It will be an honor, Shizun.”

Despite Luo Binghe’s earnest expression, Shen Qiao left feeling ill at ease. He put it down to the entire situation. He would send out some inquiries and then do some more research on what kind of vessel could hold a dream demon.

~

“I need to know what could have happened fourteen years ago near the Luo River, upstream of one particular village,” Shen Qiao began, “that would have made someone put a baby into a basket and send it downriver midwinter. Since the robe he was swaddled in was worth selling, at least one parent must have been wealthy - and very likely a cultivator as well, a talented one at that. Rich merchants sometimes wear protective charms on the inside of their sleeves, but they need to be recharged by a cultivator on a regular basis, which is more trouble than they’re worth. As such, they are more superstition than useful. Since the child hadn’t frozen to death by the time he arrived downriver, there are two possibilities: One, the stretch of time spent on the water itself was very short; or two, someone threw some real power behind those protective charms.” Shen Qiao paused. Personally, he was leaning towards the second one. “The person was likely desperate, as well. It would be good to know if there were any corpses that turned up in the vicinity a few days later, regardless of their status. Equally so if none turned up at all.”

The madam of the Warm Red Pavilion raised a quizzical eyebrow but accepted the envelope of paper money he was handing to her without questioning him. “Not quite like your usual order,” she noted, setting the envelope down without checking it – a mark of trust. “A lot farther back than most, for one; people might have forgotten. But I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter Text

“Leaving your own dream realm is, while a little tricky at first, a simple affair.” Meng Mo crossed his sleeves in front of his chest and looked down at his new protégé.

Luo Binghe nodded earnestly. Meng Mo felt the back of his neck prickle and ignored it.

“The difficulty arises when you attempt to not only find a dream realm outside of your own, but also the specific dream realm of the person you are trying to – “

Meng Mo interrupted himself. Turning around with irritation, he snapped, “Would you stop that?”

Looking up from where he was sitting on a nondescript rock in the dreamscape, Shen Qiao lowered his novel with a nonplussed expression. “Stop what?”

“Stop hovering. You’re making me anxious.”

“You agreed to participating in a probatory period. All the other hall masters were subjected to one as well, and they managed just fine.”

Meng Mo was visibly grinding his teeth. Luo Binghe watched his two teachers locked into a battle of wills and silently wished for some roasted melon seeds.

Shen Qiao laid a bookmark into the novel he had dreamed up and closed it. “Senior Meng, can we speak alone for a moment?”

Meng Mo flicked his fingers. Almost immediately, Luo Binghe sank to the ground, eyelids slipping shut.

Shen Qiao stood. “Let me be frank. You’re an outsider, and you essentially broke into my peak and took my student hostage.”

“If you think,” Meng Mo said bitingly, “that this is what taking a hostage looks like, I’ve been going too easy on you people.”

Shen Qiao raised a hand to interrupt him. “It is evident you have. I was getting to that, but we need to establish some other things first. For one, we can’t trust you; we also can’t tell who you are talking to at any given moment, or who you may be passing information onto. As a result, we will keep Luo Binghe away from any critical defense infrastructure. As long as he’s attached to you, he also won’t ever be head disciple.”

Meng Mo stroked his beard. “That was on the table? From his memories, I didn’t get the impression you liked him much.”

“I had considered it,” Shen Qiao said measuredly. “He outpaces all of his peers; if the hierarchy doesn’t reflect that, it can cause resentment. He’s on friendly terms with everyone now but not close enough that it would impair his ability to lead them, which would make him a decent candidate.”

“Oh, and you’re hesitating because of little, old me?”

Shen Qiao gave him an unamused look. “You likely know better than me how dangerous you are. But that’s only part of the reason; more than just strong cultivation, it takes strength of character and maturity to lead. Luo Binghe may develop both in time. But for now, Ming Fan has been shaping up very well.”
His tone took on a more forceful quality. “Meng Mo. You came to us in circumstances that make it very difficult to trust you. But,” Shen Qiao raised his hand again to forestall any objections, “it is also clear that you have been holding back. I would be glad if this teaching relationship turned out to be a real one. I really hope we can make you comfortable here.”

Shen Qiao let his gaze roam across the murky landscape to give Meng Mo time to think and get his expression back under control. After a while, Meng Mo said drily, “No threats about what you’re going to do to me if I do poach your student?”

Turning back to him, Shen Qiao replied, “If Luo Binghe wants to forego this teacher and seek out another, that is between him and me. If you harm him –” He didn’t make any grand gestures, mindful not to disturb Luo Binghe’s dreamscape and inadvertently harm him, but his eyes were suddenly hard and unyielding. “– then you die. I don’t care how, or how long it takes, but I will find a way.”

“Well,” Meng Mo said softly after a few more seconds of silence. “… it’s a good thing harming him is the furthest thing from my mind.”

“Yes, that’s the impression I got. My question is, why?”

“Well,” Meng Mo said, still sounding as if he was choosing his words with care, “as you said, he’s got potential. See it as … an investment for the future.” Meng Mo looked up, his eyes suddenly turning shrewd. “If anything, we should be worried about the harm you are going to cause him.”

“I reserve the right to punish future infractions according to the Cang Qiong penal code,” Shen Qiao said slowly. “But I do admit previous judgements seem to have been excessive.”

Meng Mo attempted to stare him down. At the same time, he dove down into Shen Qingqiu’s memories, finding absolutely nothing that would explain this change of attitude.

Shen Qiao only looked back, placid.

“If you ever endanger the kid again the way you did leaving him in that woodshed,” Meng Mo finally said, enunciating every word, “You’ll find yourself stuck in your dreams until the day your core gives out and then die in your sleep.”

That, Shen Qiao thought, was a bad idea. If he never woke up again, Mu Qingfang was going to guess why and tell their sect leader. Yue Qingyuan was going to be a lot less inclined than Shen Qiao to let a student live who was host to a demon that could demonstrably take out a peak lord. As a result Luo Binghe would be dead before the next time anyone on the peak slept and gave themselves an opening.

But pointing that out wasn’t in his best interests just in case Meng Mo decided to rectify that oversight and tried to find out the hard way if he could take out the entire sect in one night. As it was, Shen Qiao just hummed noncommittally, moving towards the mist that surrounded their little dream clearing. “Wake Luo Binghe back up and resume your lesson. I’ll see you next week for the unit on lucid dreaming.”

Meng Mo looked after him with narrowed eyes. “Master Shen,” he called after him, voice deceptively gentle, “where did your fan go?”

Shen Qiao stopped. “My fan?”

“A green one, with a silk painting of Mount Tai. You never went anywhere without it.”

Shen Qiao frowned. He vaguely recalled there being one next to him when he had woken up from the fever. “It’s probably in my room somewhere. What does that have to do with anything?”

Luo Binghe was stirring on the ground. Meng Mo watched Shen Qiao for a moment longer. Then he smiled. “Nothing,” he said, friendly as you please. “Nothing at all.”

~

When Shen Qiao returned to visit Liu Qingge, the pavilion was still dim and the man himself still not dressed properly, but at least, he could be persuaded to throw on an outer robe and sit at the table. Taking a look at his shidi’s brooding and sinister face, Shen Qiao decided asking for tea was probably pushing it and moved to handle it himself.

“I’ve been thinking,” Shen Qiao began, drawing up a talisman and setting it to heat up the water like he had seen Yue Qingyuan do. The tea he had brought as a gift last time was still on the table where he had left it, joined by a basket of sweets. Ah, it was nice to see their sect leader had already been here. "How could the demons enter Qiong Ding in the first place?”

Liu Qingge seemed better insofar as he tracked his movements with a grumpily suspicious frown. It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome, but anything was better than the soulless apathy of the last few days. “Our security was lax,” he said, flat and straight to the point. After a few moments, he added gruffly, “Nobody had tried in decades.”

Shen Qiao frowned. That had been what his investigation had come up with so far, but the entire thing had just been too well executed to make a series of accidents believable. “But then, how did they know Zhangmen-shixiong would be away? That would have been a very fortunate coincidence for them.”

“That visit to Huan Hua Palace was public information, and it happens every four years.” Liu Qingge rubbed a hand across his eyes before leaning his face on his fist, looking bored. His hair must have been brushed at some point in the last few days, since it wasn’t tangled and matted as badly as it could have been, but Shen Qiao suspected privately the man hadn’t gotten out of bed for anything else. “It wouldn’t have been difficult to find out when he was going.” Liu Qingge had the long-suffering tone of someone answering a series of stupid questions, but so far, he was humoring him.

Shen Qiao decided not to mind. “And how did they know how to deactivate the bridges and stop Qiong Ding from calling for help?” he challenged, rising to set the tea steeping before returning to the table.

Liu Qingge sighed through his nose. “The array hasn’t changed in five hundred years, which was the last time a demon strike force got past the guards. As it happens, that one was led by Jiuchong-jun, lord of the southern demon realm.”

Shen Qiao paused, looking at him.

“That’s her father,” Liu Qingge clarified.

Shen Qiao kept looking at him.

“What?” Liu Qingge said, irritated. “Bai Zhan is the war division. You can agonize over strategy all you want; battlefield layouts and history are part of our job.”

At Shen Qiao’s unchanged expression, he scowled, then looked away. “Anyway, it isn't that complicated. There's no plot or conspiracy here. We just got careless. Zhangmen-shixiong will leave more elders behind next time, and the guards have already started using the mirror system again. It's not happening again, so stop being paranoid.”

“The mirror system?” Shen Qiao asked.

Liu Qingge frowned harder but started arranging things on the table to demonstrate how, using light signals and mirrors, the peaks could signal all-clears or distress calls
to each other at regular intervals. If a signal failed to be sent at the correct time, the guard on the other side would raise an alarm.

Shen Qiao considered the constellation of cups, writing utensils and paper weights and nodded thoughtfully. “What keeps an intruder from faking the signals once they’re in?” he asked, liberating the cups and setting one in front of each of them.

Liu Qingge mustered both cups and the pot like they had challenged him to mortal combat, making no move to pour. “The guards know their own signals by heart, and they change depending on the time of day and vary by peak. Even if you see the signal coming in, you don't know what the correct answer is. You'd have to watch the signals a day in advance and write them down. They’re almost impossible to see from any angle other than the intended one – it would take a strong mist for them to show up at all from the outside. This high up?” Liu Qingge scoffed. “Not a chance for that.”

Shen Qiao was quietly impressed. That was the longest he’d ever heard Liu Qingge go on without prompting. He nodded towards the teapot. “It’s a blend Zhangmen-shixiong got for me while I was recovering. You might find it soothing.”

Liu Qingge stared at him for a few moments. Unsure of what he was waiting for, Shen Qiao just looked back and waited patiently.
Reaching out slowly, like Liu Qingge expected the pot to bite, he poured first for Shen Qiao and then himself.

They both took a sip, Liu Qingge waiting for Shen Qiao to drink first before trying it himself. Then he almost choked on it. The blend was both rare and potent, definitely not something Shen Qingqiu should have been willing to just give away. It also hadn’t been tampered with, since the qi-replenishing effects were impossible to replicate. What was Shen Qingqiu playing at?!

“Alright,” Shen Qiao said, unaware of the suspicion brewing on the other side of the table. “Who else knows these signals or has access to the records?”
Liu Qingge sighed again and dropped his face into one hand. Slightly muffled, he said, “The guards have access to the ones for their own peak. The peak lords have access to all of them.”

“… and since the peak lords trust their head disciples …” Shen Qiao spun the thought further.

“Those usually have access too, yes. They’re supposed to take over one day, after all.” There was a trace of mocking in Liu Qingge’s voice at this. He didn’t really see the point.

Shen Qiao shook his head, somewhere between baffled and concerned. “Why are we so open with these things?”

Primly, Liu Qingge replied, “We are martial siblings, so we don't keep secrets from each other.”

The two of them exchanged deadpan stares, both aware of the irony.

“I don't like the sound of that,” Shen Qiao said.

Liu Qingge rolled his eyes, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Wonder why.”

Shen Qiao ignored him. “Well, enough of that. If we don’t keep secrets from each other, shidi – what's in the letter that has you scowling like that?”

As if to prove his point, Liu Qingge flicked his eyes over to the opened letter next to their mirror system model and scowled again.

With some more coaxing and guessing, Shen Qiao got out of him that a village a day’s travel out had asked for help slaying some mythical beast that kept decimating their livestock. Injured as he was, Liu Qingge wasn’t up for a day of flying, never mind a fight afterwards.

“Why don't you let me do it, then?” Shen Qiao offered. “I still owe you a mission, after all.”

Chapter Text

The next time Shen Qiao returned to visit Liu Qingge, he did so with a slightly haunted look in his eyes.
He brought with him a large bouquet of wildflowers bound with a cloth ribbon and a bundle of medicinal herbs. Picking out a vase, Shen Qiao added water and set up the former, arranging the flowers a bit to make them look better.

“What’s that,” Liu Qingge asked, looking at what had to be half of a meadow as if it had offended him.

Shen Qiao turned. “Oh, when the villagers heard you had fallen ill, a few of their children got it into their heads to gather you a bouquet. In response, the adults gathered some of their medical herbs to pass along. I’ll take those to Qian Cao later, if you don’t mind. Maybe Mu-shidi has some uses for them.”

Liu Qingge stared at the yellow-red-green monstrosity taking up space on the sideboard and seriously contemplated if this was supposed to be some code. But then, when had Shen Qingqiu’s vitriolic messaging ever been short of peerlessly elegant?

“It’s an eyesore,” he finally volunteered.

“It’s a sign of goodwill,” Shen Qiao said, not unfriendly. “It will also liven up the place a bit, which should do you good.”

Liu Qingge’s quarters were so austere they made the bamboo cottage look gaudy by comparison. It was as if the man never actually lived here – which, Shen Qiao supposed, was the truth. He took a seat at the table, pleased to note that the gifts had been cleared away by now.

“They seemed to remember you fondly from when you handled a silver mist tiger in the general area a few years ago. Which brings me to my next point. The mission was doable, but it certainly wasn’t easy. You do this regularly? Respect.”

Liu Qingge scoffed but couldn’t find anything to say. ‘Respect’ was a nice thing to be told, especially from someone who was usually trying his hardest to one-up him.

“Their problem was a water monster striking from the nearby river which kept snatching sheep. It’s a good thing they called for help before it started getting a taste for humans. I set up a few wards to keep future predators at bay while I was at it, so they’ll hopefully be better off in the future.” Shen Qiao looked at him curiously. “I just wanted to ask about one thing. I didn’t realize until after I left that the village was in Huan Hua territory. Why are you getting involved in their affairs? Won’t they be displeased that Cang Qiong is meddling?”

Liu Qingge drained his cup of medicine. “They won’t.”

Shen Qiao gave him a moment to elaborate. When he didn’t, Shen Qiao prompted, “Why not?”

Liu Qingge sighed with his eyes closed before swallowing and looking directly at Shen Qiao. “Because the area is poor and can’t muster the bribes that would afford them the same protection as the other areas.”

Shen Qiao frowned. “Huan Hua still collects taxes from this area.”

“Mn.”

“If Huan Hua palace claim the village and are extracting taxes, they owe the village their protection.”

“And who is going to make them?” Liu Qingge gave a mocking laugh. “That's how it is. Either do something about it or suck it up.”

Shen QIao looked at him thoughtfully for a few moments and drained his own cup of tea. “You know, I think you’re right,” he mused. “I will.”

Liu Qingge suddenly had the feeling that he had started something he hadn’t been planning on kicking loose. He scrutinized Shen Qingqiu from the corner of his eye, but the man was as placid as the man ever was, these days. He decided to change the topic. “How's your security investigation going?”

Shen Qiao set down the cup with a click. “We don't even really encrypt our communications. And every single decision made on any peak is passed on to An Ding peak, because they’re responsible for the logistics to set it up! All it would take for a catastrophic security leak would be one spy there – or, not even a spy, just someone with a loose tongue and a penchant for drinks downtown – “

“Never mind,” Liu Qingge cut him off, rolling his eyes. “Remember when I was one of the people you didn’t trust enough to talk to about this? Go back to that.”

Shen Qiao gave a quick, there-and-gone-again smile and said nothing.

~

“Shidi,” Yue Qingyuan began.

Shen Qiao politely inclined his head and waited for Yue Qingyuan to sort through the paper on his desk. It didn’t seem to need sorting, but sometimes people needed the time to sort their thoughts first.

“Huan Hua has lodged a formal complaint against you.”

Personally, Shen Qiao was impressed. For an area Huan Hua couldn’t be bothered to maintain basic security in, that was a very quick reaction.

Yue Qingyuan gave him a piercing look. “They say you beat one of their representatives and obstructed him in fulfillment of his duties.”

Shen Qiao’s face remained attentive and open.

Yue Qingyuan put down the report. “May I ask what that was about?”

“There was an old woman taking care of her friend’s children on her own. Since the water monster in the nearby river, which Huan Hua didn’t remove despite several requests for aid coming from the village, killed most of her livestock, she couldn’t pay the taxes the collector demanded. In response, the … representative,” Shen Qiao paused for a moment, “decided to take the children as payment instead and sell them into slavery.” He returned Yue Qingyuan’s gaze steadily. “I reminded him they weren’t entitled to demand taxes if they weren’t upholding their side of the bargain.”

“One might wonder why that required your interference,” Yue Qingyuan pointed out mildly, looking more curious than disapproving.

Shen Qiao really had expected to meet more resistance on antagonizing another great sect. However, he couldn’t just let this go unanswered.

Tone cooling considerably, Shen Qiao said, “They were going to sell two children into slavery.”

Mentally, Yue Qingyuan arrived at several conclusions at once. It was strange for Shen Jiu to step in and save someone from the goodness of his heart, since he was rather cautious by nature and guarded with any and all displays of partisanship. He had only ever risked himself for Yue Qingyuan, and that had gotten him sold to the Qiu estate.

However, since the fever, Shen Qingqiu had been far more mellow than before. Perhaps, in a momentary flash of subconscious memories, he had recognized a younger version of himself and Yue Qingyuan in the two children, triggering an uncharacteristic bout of protectiveness.
Yue Qingyuan nodded. “Morally, you were certainly in the right,” he confirmed. “In return for a vassal’s allegiance, the liege offers protection. I’m just your efforts in saving them were misplaced. Now, Huan Hua is going to make an example out of that family, to quell any idea of regions switching allegiances to other sects. As long as Huan Hua Palace is the way it is, and as long as the region stays this economically poor, nothing is going to change.”

Shen Qiao frowned, mind working quickly. “I gave the old woman what money I could and told her to take the children and go to ground for a while in case the tax collector decided to come back for revenge,” he replied, mentally going over the problem again. “I hadn’t realized Huan Hua’s hold over their territories was tenuous enough that they would feel threatened. In that case, I should go back and make sure they manage to flee to Zhao Hua Monastery’s or Tian Yi Outlook’s lands.”

“I’m not sure that’s wise,” Yue Qingyuan said with a warning glance. “As a peak lord of Cang Qiong, you’re not exactly inconspicuous. Trust the woman to know the land well enough; she’ll find her way. In the future, just make sure you don’t act rashly again.”

Shen Qiao stood and bowed. “This … this Qingqiu understands,” he said solemnly. “In future altercations with Huan Hua, I’ll be sure to plan for the long term.”

Yue Qingyuan smiled a little sadly and let the topic be.

~

“Did you hear?” one of the older students told Ning Yingying at lunch excitedly, “Shizun took on a monster on Huan Hua territory and then got into a fight with one of their cultivators who was bullying a poor old woman!”

“Really?” Ning Yingying asked back, cheeks glowing. “Tell me more, what kind of monster? And what did they fight over?”

While the storyteller happily shared the full story, Luo Binghe looked down at his bowl of congee in front of him and thought of a different old woman doing everything she could for the boy she had taken in.

~

Alone on a walk through the woods, Shen Qiao was pinged with a light blue window.
+̸1̴0̶ ̷C̶h̵a̴r̵a̴c̵t̸e̸r̵ ̵d̷e̷p̶t̶h̶ ̸S̴h̵e̸n̷ ̷Q̴i̸…
̶+̴1̸0̵ ̸p̴r̸o̴t̷a̸g̴o̸n̵i̵s̶t̷ ̸s̴a̷t̸i̸s̷f̸[̴.̸.̶.̸]̷ ̴p̶o̷i̴n̵t̸s̶
̷K̴e̵e̶p̵ ̷u̶p̷ ̸t̶h̸e̶ ̵.̶.̷.̴ ̶w̷o̶r̸k̴!̷ ̵<\b>

He shook his head to dispel the mirage. He had plans to make.

Chapter Text

When Shen Qiao returned from another dinner with Yue Qingyuan, he found a letter on his desk, stamped with the scarlet seal of Zhao Hua Monastery.

“Shizun, how was the dinner?” Ming Fan asked.

“Fine,” Shen Qiao said, taking off his outer robe and hanging it over a chair, already reaching for the letter. “Zhangmen-shixiong approved the extended version of the wards I’ve been meaning to set up. We’ll test the preliminary stages here on Qing Jing, and once we’ve worked out the kinks, they’ll be extended to all the other peaks as well.”

“Congratulations,” Ming Fan said, sounding curious. “What kind of wards are you planning?”

“I haven’t found a way yet,” Shen Qiao said, waving him off, “but the general idea is to spot intruders, ring a silent alarm and confuse them when they attempt to climb the mountain, so they get turned around.” The particulars were vague, but he was almost sure he had at some point relied on something like it. With the knowledge of Qing Jing’s sizable library at his fingertips, the implementation had to be possible somehow. It was baffling – all these things that felt fantastical to him, and this was the part that was missing and made people look at him strange.

Like Ming Fan was doing right now, for a fact – that look of confusion and astonishment was not flattering in any way. “As expected of Shizun,” Ming Fan replied loyally, rallying impressively well. “If you set up these kinds of wards on Qing Jing, your name will definitely go down in the annals of the sect!”

That was probably an exaggeration, Shen Qiao supposed, but then, he still couldn’t quite remember more than the vague underlying structure of the arrays. They would need a lot of fine tuning. Waving Ming Fan off, he broke the seal on the letter and began to read, his eyebrows rising of their own accord as he did.

Abbot Wu Wang of Zhao Hua Monastery had written,

Any child sent down the Luo midwinter should have been lucky enough to drown. If this is the boy I suspect it is, show him no mercy; he is a spawn of an unholy union with hell, born of tragedy and scorn. The runt will bring disaster upon any house he lives in.

Shen Qiao lowered the page, a deep frown etched between his eyebrows. Ming Fan observed this expression, considered speaking up and decided against it, quietly taking his leave.

Drawing up a response, Shen Qiao began to write, if I may trouble you to elaborate on that, the strokes of his calligraphy hard and sharp. The letter went back out the same evening.

~

“Liu-shidi,” Shen Qiao began a few days later, rapping his knuckles against the door frame to announce is presence.

There was a beat of silence, followed by an irritated, “If this is about the security thing again, then so help me – “

“I received a call for help from the city magistrate two towns over,” Shen Qiao cut in, feeling mirth tug at him in unexpected ways. Ah, he had missed having an irritable little shidi. “I was thinking of going, but I still can’t remember much of how to handle these things. Why don't you accompany me? I could benefit from your guidance.”

~
Spending a few days tracking the disappearance of several young men and women turned out to be a good way to get both their heads free. The search for the killer was demanding and took up most of their focus, forcing them to put all other concerns to the side.

It turned out to be a demonic cultivator – these did exist! And they were completely different from actual demons! Which left Shen Qiao to wonder what exactly the term ‘demonic cultivation’ was referring to, the cultivation path followed by demons or the one pursued by humans straying off the orthodox path? It couldn’t be the same thing, could it? Seriously, strange – who had been abducting young women and men to harvest their primordial energy for an attempt at an elixir of immortality.

Once they had found him, the man wasn’t difficult to subdue, even if Shen Qiao had to admit some of the curse talismans he threw their way had some creative merit.

"Should have known that was right up your alley,” Liu Qingge said archly, regarding the blackened, disintegrating wall that had taken the hit for him.

“The talisman work is interesting,” Shen Qiao replied half-absently. “Do you think the way they store energy could be used to – “

Liu Qingge sent Cheng Luan across the nightly town square by physically launching it towards their fleeing suspect. It flashed in the moonlight, crossed the town square silently and then embedded itself an inch deep in the wall behind it. As a result, their suspect had to skid to a stop to avoid decapitating himself on one and a half meters of steel jutting out from the wall. Then he ducked under the blade and kept running.

Liu Qingge scowled; his aim had been off by a hand’s breadth, and the strength behind the throw had been paltry at best. “No,” he snapped, glowering at Shen Qiao. “I try not to think about your ideas at all, it cuts down on headaches. Now, are you going to let the guy get away?”

Taking the hint, Shen Qiao stepped onto Xiu Ya and launched into a high-speed chase through the narrowing streets, nooks and crannies of the old fisher’s quarter. He stayed above the rooftops at first to keep the height advantage, but soon the houses leaned too closely together for him to keep an eye on the narrow streets beneath, so he had to duck below the roofs and start maneuvering his way through some very sharp curves and turns.

Unfortunately, their suspect seemed to be familiar with the city and kept turning unexpected corners. More than once, Shen Qiao had to backtrack his steps when he realized the man had slipped down some other hidden back alley instead.

Having the man in his sights once more, running towards an intersection dark enough to hide him, Shen Qiao fished a talisman out of his sleeves.

He had found a stash of them inside the enchanted sleeves of almost every robe he owned, though it had taken him a while to realize that the sleeves of his robes had almost infinite storage space without ever getting any heavier. He had gotten around to testing most of them, finding them to cause sudden gusts of wind, leaping flames, loud noises, shrapnel, paralysis and other things that might be used on a night hunt.

If he was reading this one right, which he was fairly sure he was, it would get him a short moment of light, illuminating which direction his quarry was about to take on the upcoming t-section.

He threw it ahead. The paper zoomed through the air and activated in the middle of the intersection.

For a split second, the heavens descended to the earth with the fury of several suns. The street turned into blinding, burning, flat-out white with the occasional side of light grey shadow thrown across it. Then the world turned entirely black, leaving Shen Qiao to blink into swimming blots of purple and green.

Shen Qiao heard the guy curse and brought his sword to a stop. He was not about to pilot a sharp piece of metal across a civilian city without being able to see where he was going.

He could hear receding footsteps down the alley to his right and moved to follow, focusing on his hearing. The suspect had turned towards the pier, which was more exposed at first but offered plenty of hiding places, from boxes and cargo crates to boat houses. They were about to lose their guy.

Only, the next thing Shen Qiao heard was a whisper of air, like someone moving quickly and near-silently, followed by a heavy thump. “Really,” Liu Qingge said, supremely unimpressed. “They call this guy a cultivator? What do they teach kids these days?”

Shen Qiao walked out of the alley with one hand brushing along the wall for orientation. “Well done, shidi,” he called out cheerfully. “I’m really glad you came along; this would have been so much worse otherwise.”

Liu Qingge scoffed. “Yeah, yeah. Not like it was much of a challenge, I don’t think he could even see me properly.” He looked up to find Shen Qiao squinting at him in the low light of the nightly harbor. Incredulously, he asked, “Did you blind yourself with your own flashbang?”

With a pinched expression, Shen Qiao rubbed his temple. “It’s getting better now,” he admitted ruefully. “That was not what I expected the talisman to do.”
Tone as flat as a sheet of paper, Liu Qingge said, “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“All those times,” Liu Qingge said with a thousand-yard stare. “And the one time the thing could actually be useful, you –”

“Why do I even have that talisman?” Shen Qiao asked, feeling wronged.

“Why do you HAVE that?” Liu Qingge snapped, his volume rising. “Okay, let me remind you of a story about a duel back in our first year – which I won anyways, by the way –”

“I'm afraid I still don’t remember that,” Shen Qiao said, sparing a thought for the people in the surrounding houses trying to sleep. “Let’s get this guy back and then I’d be happy to hear about it, alright?”

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s just say, it –” Liu Qingge paused, seeming to have difficulties speaking.

Shen Qiao gave him a questioning look while Liu Qingge tossed the man across his shoulders.

“It was not your.”

Shen Qiao raised an eyebrow higher, waiting for the inevitable.

“Brightest moment.”

The demonic cultivator, paralyzed and thrown across Liu Qingge’s shoulders like an errant sheep, chose this moment to groan in what sounded like the depths of despair.

~

The cultivator had been, as it turned out, hired and funded by an aging, endlessly rich merchant, which made clean-up absolutely terrible. The city’s upper class was very resistant to establishing any kind of precedent of one of their own being held accountable for their crimes.

The less said about the whole thing, the better. Again, Liu Qingge proved a valuable asset by navigating the political waters with surprising ease if not exactly peacefully.

“Do you do this a lot?” Shen Qiao asked carefully after they had left the offending merchant behind bars and the deputy mayor in tears.

Liu Qingge gave a noncommittal grunt. “Sometimes. The problems that go back to negligence usually crop up again quickly if you don’t go and do something about the root cause.” He sighed through his nose. “On our own land, it’s easier to get Zhangmen-shixiong to send a message. Outside, a guy with a sword yelling does get some things done, but I try to stay out of it as much as possible. No point in trying to get involved and drag our own sect down, or we won't be able to take care of our own people, either.”

Shen Qiao nodded slowly.

~

“So, what was the point of that? It's not like I was useful in any way,” Liu Qingge growled at Shen Qiao’s back from where they were hiking up the first outliers of Cang Qiong mountain range. They had flown back the first half of the way, but Liu Qingge had tired quickly, even if he had tried not to show it.

“You caught the cultivator,” Shen Qiao pointed out drily. “And you did quite a lot of the original leg work.”

“Any junior disciple could have, at that point.”

Reaching a natural outcropping, Shen Qiao stopped and turned. “Liu Qingge.”

The man in question stared up at him with a mixture of belligerence and bone-deep tiredness. He had stopped walking as well.

Shen Qiao weighed his words carefully. “Being a martial artist is, first of all, grueling, painful training if you want to improve.”

He had expected some kind of sarcastic quip, but it seemed the trip had driven the fight out of Liu Qingge.

“There is no one who can force you to put yourself through this again, and you don’t have to, either. But,” he gave a sharp look, “if you don't, stop complaining. This kind of self-pity is beneath you.”

The wind brushed over the outcropping, teasing the dry grass. A falcon cried in the distance.

“You can't know if putting in effort again is going to get you back to the excellence you had a few months ago. Yes, maybe your foundations are too damaged to ever let you cultivate properly again, and you’ll forever be stuck at mediocrity. But when you started out, you didn't know that either; you were just one of many students hoping and trying their best, without any guarantee of success. And that is the true spirit of martial arts. To try and try again. The tenacity,” Shen Qiao took a breath, “With nothing but the reward of hopefully becoming better than you were yesterday.
“What I’m telling you is, whether or not you're a martial artist at heart, whether it's worth it to keep going, is your decision. You have to make that choice for yourself, every day.”

Shen Qiao was looking slightly down at Liu Qingge from a rock he had set one foot on, standing as he was a little further up on their walk to their respective summits.

Liu Qingge stared at him like he had never seen him before. Then he looked away, turning red, and snapped something angry and unintelligible.

“What was that?”

With the ferocity of an angry dog, Liu Qingge shook his head. Contending with something, he struggled for another few moments before biting out, “Damn you. Of course I'm a martial artist at heart!” His angry voice echoed across the mountainside, coming back to them as staggered responses. “What do you even know about the spirit of martial arts! Shen Qingqiu, I'll wipe the floor with you two years from now!”

Looking down at the barely contained fury, Shen Qiao felt himself smile. “I’ll hold you to that. Liu Qingge, I accept your challenge. I'm looking forward to it.”
With an angry shout, Liu Qingge stormed past him. In front of them, the path split, one leading towards Qing Jing, the other towards Bai Zhan, and Shen Qiao watched his shidi’s retreating back as he stomped up the latter.

With a broad smile, Shen Qiao called after him, “Wei Qingwei and I practice Monday and Wednesday mornings on Wan Jian peak! You should join us sometime!”

Liu Qingge’s answering shout was unintelligible again, but Shen Qiao privately decided it wasn’t a no. A win was a win.

Turning towards the path up to Qing Jing peak, Shen Qiao began to focus on the wards he had set up before they’d left. He had just reached the outer fringes. The strands of qi stretched out to meet him and whispered, person, back of the mountain, cliff side.

Shen Qiao’s eyebrows rose. Accelerating his stride, he abandoned the path up, rounded the mountain within a few minutes and looked up.

The northern slope was an almost vertical rock face, vertiginous and steep. The more of a surprise was it to find a small, yellow person climbing around on it. A glint of metal told Shen Qiao all he had to know: That guan belonged to a peak lord, which meant this intruder – or uninvited visitor – had to be Shang Qinghua, peak lord of An Ding.

Shen Qiao knew the guy only peripherally, for all that An Ding peak was ranked fourth and they were close together in age. The one time they had spoken, Shen Qiao had come away with the impression of a squirrely little man, constantly nervous and flinching, but with a solid head for numbers. Frowning internally, Shen Qiao stepped onto Xiu Ya and quickly rose the fifty or so meters separating them from having a face-to-face conversation.

Shang Qinghua didn’t seem a fan of the height either, from how he was leaning back against the rock and openly sweating. “Shang-shidi,” Shen Qiao greeted him, still surprised and more than a little suspicion rising in the back of his head. “What are you doing here?”

Shang Qinghua yelped, almost flailing off the cliff side.

“O-oh, you know,” Shang Qinghua said when he had recovered, giving less of a laugh than a high-pitched, terrified chitter, “Just. Uh. Checking. If your wards are going to be implemented on all peaks, I need to know in advance what kind of materials we’re going to need. And you weren’t there, so I couldn’t ask, but the next wave of requests is supposed to be going out tomorrow, and I just thought you would prefer it if they were there already when you needed them …”

“How thoughtful,” Shen Qiao replied, suspicion not quite assuaged. “May I ask what your investigation yielded?”

Shang Qinghua did offer a surprisingly insightful account of material, including one or two suggestions Shen Qiao himself hadn’t yet thought of testing, so maybe that really had been the reason why he was there. Still, the fact that he was there at all was a little strange.

Shen Qiao nodded thoughtfully, not taking his eyes off him. “I’ll think about your suggestions. However, you shouldn’t rely on these estimations. We’re still at the testing stages; there will likely be more than one change to the fundamental layout before it’s ready to deploy on the other peaks.”

Shang Qinghua squeaked a confirmation before fleeing back up onto level ground. Shen Qiao watched him scramble up the cliff face like the hounds of hell were on his heels and wondered.

(For some reason, he had found that he now had an unfounded suspicion against younger martial siblings.)

When he reached his office, an answering letter from Zhao Hua Monastery was waiting for him, this time signed by one Wu Cheng rather than the Abbot himself.

It only said four words:

We need to meet.

Chapter Text

The same day, Shen Qiao heard through the grapevine that Liu Qingge had begun practicing the very basic training sets, leaving Cheng Luan on its stand in favor of a wooden practice sword. Personally, Shen Qiao approved, making a note to visit with some sweets and congratulate him on beginning his training.

~

“This is actually an opportunity in some ways,” Liu Qingge explained.

Shen Qiao, who was watching him with a disturbed look, began to privately wonder if he had maybe overdone it with the motivational speech.

Liu Qingge was sitting in a wooden tub filled with hot water, having stripped down to his underwear. Anyone else might have bothered being presentable when they knew they had guests coming over, but Shen Qiao supposed he had seen the man in direr straights.

Now that Shen Qiao thought about it, the concession to propriety probably was that he was wearing underwear at all.

Below the water was the reddening, swollen muscle of Liu Qingge’s right leg, crisscrossed with purplish lines all the way down to the toe joints. Liu Qingge had shattered the bones beneath, cooled the surrounding tissue with ice water and a talisman to reduce the initial swelling, and soaked it in hot water afterwards to promote blood flow and recovery.

According to him, the bones healed back stronger, and he healed quickly enough for it to work.

“Have you,” Shen Qiao began, staring at Liu Qingge with uncharacteristic trepidation, “Have you, perhaps, considered clearing that with Mu Qingfang? Or discussing a physical therapy plan with him, in general? Because …” he grasped for diplomacy and came up empty, “Liu Qingge, why would you do that to yourself?”

“Upwards of a certain range of hard hitting, your muscles can pulverize your bones,” Liu Qingge said with good cheer. His voice was strained, but seeing Shen Qiao’s expression teeter between confusion and horror was doing wonders for his mood.

“That’s an issue?” Shen Qiao said faintly.

“Of course it is,” Liu Qingge said, rolling his shoulders while keeping his legs perfectly still. “You did some minimal work in that direction during training yourself. Nothing as comprehensive, since you always preferred things like your fan and talismans in addition to your sword, but you did. I think it was mostly punching rocks for the Qing Jing scholars.”

Skeptically, Shen Qiao probed his own bones with his qi. Perhaps, yes, there did seem to be some faint lines running through them if he focused.

He summarily decided that all of these people were insane.

“And you need to renew it?” Shen Qiao asked, resigning himself to the fact that this was his life now. “Did the qi deviation weaken your bones somehow …?”

“No, it stays. But at some point, I started healing too quickly and cleanly for it to keep working, and in this case, more is better.” Liu Qingge took a piece of wood to bite down on and slotted it between his teeth. Gripping his right forearm with his left hand, he took a few deep breaths around the wood. Then, with a faint glow, he sent a stream of qi through the arm.

There was a small noise, a little like the crunch of dry leaves in autumn. Liu Qingge bit down against the wood and screamed into it, his jaw clenching furiously. For a long moment, he did nothing but sit there, fighting his body for control while his shoulders heaved with the exertion. Then he submerged the limb in a bowl of ice water he had been keeping next to the bathtub.

Shen Qiao walked backwards out of the room and decided to go visit Mu Qingfang.
Breathing heavily, Liu Qingge shook his hair out of his face and rolled his eyes. Scholars. No stomach for anything.

~

A meeting with Wu Chen was arranged under the pretext of wanting to debate philosophy, comparing the two schools of thought. They met in a secluded pavilion at the top of a mountain, having left their respective retinues at the bottom.

Wu Chen swirled the liquid in his cup and looked out over the mountainous forest below, watching a single eagle circle upwards on a warm wind.

“The woman you are most likely looking for was named Su Xiyan,” he finally said, the words dropping between them with the weight of a stone. “And the man in question would have been known under the name of Tianlang-jun. Your sect leader must be more familiar with him than I am, of course.”

Shen Qiao politely inclined his head and said nothing.

“About twenty years ago, Su Xiyan was the vaunted head disciple of Huan Hua palace,” Wu Chen began. “The old palace master cherished her like nobody else, and it was generally agreed upon that she was to inherit the sect from him. She was a formidable leader, keen, clever, ferocious in battle and cunning to boot.
“On a mission in the borderlands, she encountered a handsome youth sitting under a willow and playing songs. Finding the proximity to the demon realm suspicious, she reported the finding to her master at once, who ordered her to investigate. She soon determined the young man was the sheltered emperor of the demon realm, Tianlang-jun, and was told to stay close to find out more.

“When the old palace master followed them on one of their outings, he discovered they had fallen in love. Enraged to lose his disciple like this, he brought the four great sects together under one banner to kill Tianlang-jun by accusing him of plotting against the human race. Su Xiyan was meant to lure him to the ambush site, but she refused.
“The old palace master brought Su Xiyan back to Huan Hua palace’s water prison and tortured her, finding out she was pregnant in the process. As she refused to give up either her lover or the child, the old palace master offered her a deal: She was allowed to leave if she took an abortion drug.
“She accepted, hoping to be able to warn her lover, but the ambush site had already been changed. The battle took place without her, Tianlang-jun was taken by surprise and greatly outnumbered, and so he was sealed beneath Bai Lu Mountain, where he still lies today.
“We sheltered Su Xiyan for a while when she was highly pregnant. As the time came for the child to be born, she disappeared without a word. It was the last time we or anyone else heard of her until you began asking around about that robe of hers.
“Master Shen, I request that you be kind to her memory. She certainly wasn’t innocent, but she didn’t deserve her fate.”

Shen Qiao opened his mouth, then closed it again firmly. Finally, he bowed. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “I’m sure it will be a comfort to my student to know what happened to his parents.” He paused. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand: If she took the drug, how could the child be born at all? It couldn’t be that the poison failed completely, could it?”

“We can only speculate,” Wu Cheng said. “I do know the pregnancy weakened her far more than it should have. Perhaps she burned up her cultivation trying to keep the ill effects away from her child. Perhaps the poison didn’t work against a child that was half-human instead of a full-blooded demon, and the pregnancy was difficult because her human blood clashed with the child’s demonic one. How should the old palace master have known for sure which kind of poison could kill a heavenly demon? There really is no way to know.”

~

Having laid down the full story in front of Luo Binghe inside of an empty classroom on Qing Jing peak, Shen Qiao waited patiently for the boy to collect his thoughts.
His understanding of the situation was still only that of “two nations at war with each other,” so he didn’t quite understand the intense ideological hatred that saturated the debate from both sides. Then again, he had never really bought into the general disdain against the Xianbei. His Shizun had never spoken with anything but the highest respect when it came to –
To whom, exactly?
Shen Qiao pressed his eyes shut against the pain lancing through his head.

Luo Binghe still hadn’t spoken.

“At least you know your parents had a good reason not to be around now,” Shen Qiao finally ventured.

Coldly, Luo Binghe said, “My mother was a washerwoman. I don’t have a father.”

There was a prolonged period of silence.

“I see,” Shen Qiao finally said, rising to his feet. “If you ever do want to talk about it, you can come to me.”

Something still seemed to be fighting inside of Luo Binghe, struggling to get out. Before Shen Qiao had turned away completely, the boy burst out, “How can you still look at me the same? I’m a monster!”

With some distinct feeling of alarm, Shen Qiao turned back. Luo Binghe was clutching the edge of his desk so hard he was trembling. His eyes had filled with tears, but he was still choking out words. “I can see it in your eyes. Nothing changed for you. How can you be so calm about this?” His voice rose until it cracked. Then he laughed bitterly. “No, I get it. It’s because you’ve always seen me that way, isn’t it? ‘Little beast’. I should have known.”

“Luo Binghe,” Shen Qiao said carefully. “I get that the invasion didn’t enamor the demons to you, but that’s a bit harsh.”

This time, Luo Binghe’s laugh was one of disbelief. “Harsh? You –”

“You are still,” Shen Qiao cut him off, “the same person you were yesterday. You’re the Luo Binghe who helped Ning Yingying understand a text she was having trouble with. You’re the one who trained with the others and exchanged pointers with Bai Zhan’s head disciple. You have an attitude problem and a bit of a manipulative streak, but all in all, you are a kind, loyal, generous young man.” Shen Qiao held his eyes to make sure his words made it through. “You weren’t a monster yesterday, Luo Binghe, and you’re not one today either.”

“Demons,” Luo Binghe said very slowly, “are dangerous.” At least he seemed to have calmed down. He was staring back at Shen Qiao with the air of someone watching a cart hurtle off a cliff and praying, hoping against hope it would somehow still be alright.

“We are, as a species, more or less at war with them,” Shen Qiao sighed. “Of course they are. Otherwise, Cang Qiong and the other sects would long have eaten them alive.”
Luo Binghe’s eyes were still teary, but there weren’t any new tears joining them. Shen Qiao decided the situation was secure enough to change tracks. “But since you’re not about to defect to the other side, you’re not going to be dangerous to us.” He quirked a brow. “Are you?”

“No,” Luo Binghe snapped, blazingly indignant before he got his tone back under control. “I mean, no, Shizun. This disciple would never leave Qing Jing for the sake of following the likes of,” his mouth curled in disdain, “Sha Hualing.”

“Well,” Shen Qiao said kindly, “there you have it.” He pulled a stack of books from one of his qiankun sleeves and dropped them on the table in front of Luo Binghe. “So, the bad news is, Tianlang-jun seems to have been imprisoned under Bai Lu Mountain and is still there to this day, and we can’t get him out.”

Luo Binghe had taken to eyeing the stack of books like it might bite.

“The good news is,” Shen Qiao suppressed a smile at the expression – Luo Binghe was such a bookworm usually –, “you apparently have an older cousin who is half giant snake.” The expression dipped into absolute bafflement. Shen Qiao watched it closely. “Do you want to meet him?”

“Absolutely not,” Luo Binghe said. “… half giant snake?”

Shen Qiao raised one shoulder in a way that indicated, You know as much as I do. “In any case, here’s some reading material about the history of heavenly demons and what abilities they purportedly wielded. Not that there's much information accessible about either, unfortunately; I marked out the relevant parts, you'll see there's not a lot." Shen Qiao had also spared him the passages that were especially unwelcoming towards demons, he figured the boy had already read enough if those. "Going forward, we’ll pay even closer attention with how your medical care might interfere with your system. Just because we can’t see the differences to fully human anatomy doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

“You can’t tell Mu-shishu about this,” Luo Binghe said, eyes suddenly wide and panicked. “I mean – Shizun, he’ll –”

Shen Qiao raised his eyebrows at him until Luo Binghe fell silent. “I won’t tell him unless I believe it becomes necessary to save your life,” he conceded. There was no knowing how Mu Qingfang stood on the whole demon thing, and if it caused Luo Binghe distress, it was better not to risk it. “In return, you will report any changes you believe might be a danger to you or to others to me as soon as you notice them. That includes if you feel your cultivation techniques aren't working the way they should, if certain foods affect you differently, or if your strength and speed are increasing at a significantly quicker rate than usual. Especially quick, unexpected improvement is a risk during sparring. In that case, we might need to put you with the seniors for a while until you adjust.”

Luo Binghe took a deep, trembling breath, but he had finally regained control of most of himself. He nodded firmly. “Understood.”

~

Shen Qiao spent the evening working on his ward designs, feeling himself getting drowsier with every minute. He decided to just rest his eyes for a bit, leaning towards the surface of the desk.

His consciousness gave out the second his head touched his arms.

“Do you realize what you’re doing?” Meng Mo snapped at him, wasting no time materializing out of the billowing mist of the dreamscape. He was looking rather frazzled; if Shen Qiao had to guess, Meng Mo had been vibrating out of his skin the entire afternoon until he could kick down the metaphorical door to his dreams

“What am I doing?” Shen Qiao returned rhetorically, rubbing his eyes. Just because he couldn’t be tired in a dreamscape didn’t mean he couldn’t be exhausted. “Just because we can’t live in peace with them right now doesn't mean we can’t ever. True, it’s always difficult to find your place if you’re between two nations at war, and these prejudices don’t make it easier –”

Slowly and clearly, Meng Mo stressed, “Demons. Eat. Humans.”

Shen Qiao blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a delicacy. Rotten human flesh that’s –”

“Alright, I got the idea –”

“- positively crawling with maggots –”

“I said I get it –”

“- there’s a thing where you just send out ‘sowers’ that cause a plague that makes humans rot alive to make them –”

“Not all of them, I’m sure?”

“- easier to eat - uh, no. It’s a delicacy. Only nobility gets to eat it. Like Luo Binghe is, by the way.”

“It’s not a necessity, then?” Shen Qiao asked, feeling relieved. “That’s good to know.”

Meng Mo stared at him as if he had just declared his intention to establish a demon-human exchange program, which Shen Qiao found a little exaggerated. “Doesn’t that … bother you?”

“It’s a sad but true fact that humans also sometimes eat humans. It almost happened to me as a boy.”

(Meng Mo floundered for a moment, unsure if Shen Qingqiu meant that he had almost been eaten or had almost eaten someone. After deliberating for a moment, he decided it would be tactless to ask.)

Shen Qiao continued. “Minus the rotten part, obviously. But it’s not that uncommon, especially during famines. And while it is a crime against the heavens, you don’t see us wiping out those people either, we just … keep our distance, and try to improve on their living conditions.” He frowned. “Though any peace treaty with the demon kingdoms would obviously have preclude that sort of behavior, especially if it isn’t for survival. That won’t do.”

Meng Mo flung his sleeves out to the sides. “So, you’re just FINE WITH THIS?”

“Definitely not,” Shen Qiao said seriously. “If Wu Chen is right, the old palace master tried to kill my students’ mother, and also, Tianlang-Jun seems to be innocent of the crime he was imprisoned for. We need to get to the bottom of this.”

Suspiciously, Meng Mo said, “When was that? The cannibalism thing? That’s not in your memories.”

Shen Qiao opened his mouth and paused, sidetracked. Where had that conviction come from? “I’m not sure about …” He trailed off before blinking at Meng Mo. “Well, of course the memory isn’t there. I don’t remember anything, save for bits and flashes.”

“Of course they’re there, you’re just cut off,” Meng Mo snapped, temper stretched to its very limits. “Kind of damaged in parts, but there.”
Shen Qiao hesitated for a moment, deliberating. Then he asked, “Could you show them to me?”

Meng Mo gave him a hard look. “Some other time,” he finally returned gruffly. “The kid just fell asleep and wants to talk to me. I’ll see you around.”

Shen Qiao woke up at his desk and rubbed his eyes. There was an unpleasant crick in his neck. Sighing, he shuffled his notes into a stack and set them aside. It was high time to go to bed.

~

Luo Binghe was pacing through his dream realm with the air of a young, hyperactive tiger. “‘There’s some kind of demonic thing hidden in you’,” he repeated in a mocking tone that barely managed to conceal the edge of hysteria beneath it. “YOU MEANT HALF OF MY DNA?”

“In my defense,” Meng Mo said, floating safely out of reach above a rock formation a few steps away. “There really was no way to see this coming.” Warily, he watched the teenager brood for a while. Heavenly demons had been formidable in the old days, and Tianlang-Jun had been said to be the strongest one in generations. If Luo Binghe really was his son, there was no telling what kind of power the boy would wield when he grew up.
Nonetheless, there was a series of things about this that didn’t add up – most of them centered around Shen Qingqiu.
Meng Mo finally spoke up. “There’s more than one thing fishy about this story, though. I have a suggestion."

“Is it illegal?” Luo Binghe asked in the tone of someone who knows the answer.

“We’re breaking into the old palace master’s nightmares and finding out the truth.”

“That’s definitely illegal. Shizun wouldn’t approve.”

“There’s more than one thing fishy about your shizun, too. Shen Qingqiu is insane and a pathological liar to boot.”
Instead of getting mad, Luo Binghe flashed an impish grin. “Such harsh words about your employer. Hall Master Meng, are you sure you want to risk your tenure like this?”

“On the other hand,” Meng Mo continued, ignoring the kid completely, “he encouraged you strongly to check in with your demon family, so he can’t disapprove that much. Don’t you at least want an independent source about them before you make a decision?”

Luo Binghe hesitated.

“… You can see this as some sort of midterm exam,” Meng Mo added grudgingly.

The smirk returned. “You’re really having fun with the hall master thing, aren’t you?”

“No. Go die. I haven’t really started teaching anyone else things yet.”

“Even if she didn’t know they were from you, Ning-Shijie really appreciated those techniques for falling asleep quickly. She’s been having trouble ever since the invasion -”

“Shut up!”

~

The old palace master had a series of weird dreams that night and the next, bottomless and tiring.

~

“How’s your memory doing, shidi?” Yue Qingyuan asked. They were strolling along one of the winding, picturesque pathways of Qiong Ding, watching a few students run through their forms in the distance.

“It’s improving,” Shen Qiao said measuredly. He took a second to choose his next words. “I remember in perfect clarity the day I received my first practice sword, going through the katas, and enjoying the feel of it. I bowed to my Shizun and went to put it away. When it came to sheathing it, I cut myself in the space between thumb and forefinger of my left hand, because I was holding the scabbard too loosely and I wasn’t expecting the blade I was putting there to be sharp.”

“I don’t remember that, shidi, but I wouldn’t have been there,” Yue Qingyuan said with an encouraging smile. “Why does it seem like the memory is bothering you?”

Shen Qiao raised his left and flexed his fingers, examining the open palm.

“The scar isn’t there,” Shen Qiao said.

Chapter Text

“Cultivator Shan Qiuzi,” Shen Qiao introduced himself to the guard and saluted. Xiu Ya was, for once, neither drawn nor stored in the funny little pocket dimension it disappeared into whenever he stowed it away but instead sheathed in the plainest scabbard Shen Qiao had been able to find, slung over his shoulder on a leather strap. In general, the simple, travel-worn get-up he was in clashed terribly with the shining, white-and-golden interior of Huan Hua palace. He was drawing looks just by standing there and conversing. “I’m here with a message from Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, to be delivered to the Master of Huan Hua Palace.”

The guard in question stared at him like he was worried poverty was contagious. Shen Qiao tried not to find it funny. “No,” the guard said flatly, unimpressed with Shen Qiao in general; not with the way he was dressed, and definitely not with the way was offering no connections or proof of identity whatsoever.

Shen Qiao allowed himself a smile, at that. “Strange. I really did get the impression he wanted an answer, the sooner the better.” Rather, the old palace master wanted one specific answer regarding The Incident which he wasn’t going to get, but there was no reason to bother the guard with such details.

“If you’ll excuse the interruption,” a new voice cut in.

The speaker was a young man of perhaps eighteen, with an attentive and gentle appearance. During the fraction of a second that they were standing there, the young man’s eyes flitted across Shen Qiao, taking in the way he was holding himself and how his weight was balanced on the balls of his feet, the easy, coiled strength in his limbs; then finally catching on Xiu Ya’s hilt sticking up behind his shoulder, identifying the sword as of excellent make.

Gongyi Xiao, head disciple of Huan Hua, brought his hands together and bowed respectfully. “It is clear this senior has had a long journey,” he said when he rose again. “Cang Qiong have long been our allies in the fight against the demon race; we should hear them out. Senior, since you haven’t announced yourself in advance, you’ll be asked to wait; if you’ll allow, I’ll lead you to a waiting room.”

Shen Qiao looked at him appraisingly. The young man had decent bearing for his age, as well as the respect of his subordinates, if the guard holding his silence and controlling his expression was any indication. More than that, Gongyi Xiao bore the scrutiny without faltering, looking back with an easy smile, not discomfited in the least.
Shen Qiao nodded at him, pleased, before returning the greeting. “I’m grateful for the hospitality.” It saved him the trouble of arguing with the guard or breaking in.

Gongyi Xiao took it upon himself to escort him to a waiting room. At the entrance, he turned back. “Senior, since you haven’t been scheduled in, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a while. There are some other petitioners as well; don’t let it bother you.”

For the lower-ranked petitioners, there was a dais to sit or stand on; the higher-ranked ones each received a platform to themselves, partitioned off behind richly painted folding screens. Gongyi Xiao led him towards the latter and seated him at the low table before taking his leave. Not two minutes later, someone brought Shen Qiao tea and snacks.

The folding screen cordoned him off from the rest of the room at least visually, but he could still very well hear what was being said.
Listening to the chatter between the other petitioners for a while gave Shen Qiao a pretty good impression of the way Huan Hua liked to run things: with neglect bordering on cruelty, rampant bribery and corruption as well as an iron fist.

At the sound of loud voices from inside the room, the chatter in the room died down. There was silence for a few moments, parsed by the sound of steps approaching the doors.

The large double doors leading to the main hall slammed open. A commotion broke out as everyone hurried to their feet. At a more sedate pace, Shen Qiao rises and moves beyond the screen, falling into a greeting a little later than the others.

Beneath the hurried whispering was a hushed, “Xiao-Gongzhu,” before the noise died completely.

Small shoes tapped sharply against the marble floors. A moment later, the imposing double doors swung open. The little palace mistress exited the room, flanked by two servants. If her expression was any indication, she had spoken to her grandfather and was not pleased with the results.

She strode through the room, eyes passing cursorily over the crowd before catching on Shen Qiao. Her steps slowed, then stopped completely.

Shen Qiao rose slightly from his bow, lifting his eyebrows curiously.

“You,” demanded the little palace mistress, setting her dainty little feet firmly. With her flowery dress, it was a little like being stared down by a gauzy pink curtain with pom-poms. And a spiky iron whip.

Shen Qiao inclined his head politely and greeted her. “How may this lowly one be of service?”

She cast her eyes around suspiciously among the other petitioners before dragging him out of the room and into a side corridor. When they were safely out of view and possibly earshot, her maids took up vigil behind them to make sure they remained alone.

The little palace mistress stared at him. “You’re a Daoist,” she declared.

Shen Qiao had chosen the robes of a simple Daoist priest without thinking about it; both Cang Qiong and Huan Hua were, strictly speaking, founded on Daoist teachings, even if the original monastery aspect had largely fallen to the wayside. He hadn’t expected it to cause trouble. “… indeed, I am,” he answered bemusedly.

“Can you interpret dreams and tell fortunes?”

“I know some,” Shen Qiao said carefully, “But I’m certainly not an expert.”

She puffed up her cheeks angrily and pursed her mouth, thinking.

Gently, Shen Qiao asked, “Is it that you’re worried about someone?”

“No,” she snapped, continuing to chew on the inside of her lips. She went back to pacing, making wide gestures with the coiled iron whip in her right hand.

“Is this about bad dreams?”

She stubbornly refused to look at him and ignored him.

“I could recommend physical exercise, lighter food before going to sleep, reducing stress and practicing relaxation techniques before bed,” Shen Qiao said, watching her carefully, “as well as cleansing one’s conscience in prayer and meditation.”

“Pah!” the little palace mistress threw her head back at the last one. Caught somewhere between amusement and bitterness, she deliberated for a bit before swallowing her words. Nonetheless, her pacing became more hesitant, and she seemed to have calmed down somewhat. “Whatever,” she finally spat, getting her lips out from between her teeth. “Thank you, I suppose. I’ll see you around, priest.” Without waiting for an answer, she disappeared in a billowing cloud of fabric and sweet floral perfume.
When Shen Qiao had returned to the waiting room, one of the other petitioners who had his own folding screen had loitered instead of returning behind it, catching Shen Qiao’s eye as he returned.

“You’re back alive,” the man said quietly as Shen Qiao settled behind his table. By the shadow on the screen, he could see the stranger do the same. “Did the tigress try to take a bite out of you?”

“I’m well, thank you for the concern,” Shen Qiao returned equally quietly.

The stranger chuckled. “She’s just terrible, isn’t she? Demanding and rude. The Palace Master really spoils her too much …”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Shen Qiao said, smiling faintly to himself. “She didn’t seem too bad to me.”

The attention in the room shifted again as someone new entered, passing through and moving straight for Shen Qiao’s partition. “Senior Shan,” Gongyi Xiao said, stepping behind the screen. Very apologetically, he leaned down to speak next to Shen Qiao’s ear. “Our Lord has been in a terrible mood these last few days, and it appears he has gotten worse,” he murmured. “He’s afflicted with night terrors, and it’s bringing up some very old memories he’d rather forget. It’s probably for the best if you leave and return another day; you’ll have better odds of success then.”

Shen Qiao nodded his understanding. “Many thanks for the warning,” he said, reaching for Xiu Ya as he rose to take his leave.

“Don’t mention it,” Gongyi Xiao said, looking at him with sincere regret. “I’m only sorry you’re leaving empty-handedly.”
Shen Qiao smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I found more than I expected.”

~

“The Huan Hua Palace Master has been suffering from nightmares recently,” Shen Qiao said, sorting through his notes during Meng Mo’s next teaching evaluation. Luo Binghe had been making progress, from what it seemed; this time, they were holding the meeting in Shen Qiao’s dreamscape. “Is there –”

At a sudden choking noise, Shen Qiao looked up. Both Meng Mo and Luo Binghe were looking back at him with twin expressions of attentive diligence.

“Shizun?” Luo Binghe asked with an open, soft expression that basically screamed, I am entirely trustworthy.

Shen Qiao slowly narrowed his eyes at both of them. “- something you want to tell me?” he asked, relegating a way to find out what is causing them back to the shelf.

~

Five minutes later, Shen Qiao was rubbing his temples to stave off the impeding migraine. “I see,” he sighed. Considering he had been about to ask them to do exactly what they had ended up doing, he could hardly fault them for it. Even if it had been rash, dubiously moral, and ill-advised. “Did you at least learn something useful?”

“The palace master’s conduct towards Su Xiyan was …” Luo Binghe shot a hesitant look towards Meng Mo, who stepped up. “Unconscionable,” Meng Mo said flatly. “Never mind leaving behind her sect, it’s a wonder she didn’t kill him herself.”

Luo Binghe pressed his lips together. “And,” he added grimly, “Su Xiyan really took the poison to kill me.”

“Then why is she dead and you alive?” Shen Qiao asked quietly.

Silence. Luo Binghe opened his mouth, then closed it. He turned his head to the side to hide his expression.

“If she had wanted you dead, you would be,” Shen Qiao said quietly. “If she could have tolerated your death, she would have. The fact that you are here, hale and healthy, should tell you something.”

Shen Qiao gave Luo Binghe a few minutes to compose himself.

In the meantime, Shen Qiao began to make plans. Long-term ones, this time.