Chapter Text
Chapter 1: 你上你行,不上別比比
Marie was so enraged she felt like she could kill Juwan. Juwan apparently felt like Marie would kill him as well, since he had stopped scrolling through b ■■ kt ■■ i comments and was instead looking at her with round, watery eyes. He looked incredibly stupid-- not that Marie cared.
“There’s nothing wrong with reading BL,” he warbled pathetically, increasingly tearful. “And besides… isn’t it sweet? I always liked cumplane, and now they can even visit their families in the real world… plus, you read it with me anyways…”
“Shut up,” Marie told him irritably.
Juwan shut up.
Without Juwan’s vacillating, the pounding fury in her head lessened by a half degree. She could see things a little more objectively. Of course, this was still all Juwan’s fault. Who else’s would it be? Liking webnovels was one thing, forcing Marie to help him buy suspicious-looking acrylics was another, but stockholm-syndroming an innocent bystander into reading his shitty BLs through sheer force of incessant exposure was crossing several sorts of lines at once. You could only hear about “top” and “bottom” this and “dual-cultivation” that and be wheedled into editing terribly-written derivative works on p ■ st ■ pe a certain number of times before you basically knew the source material yourself, and at that point, you might as well just read the goddamned thing to make sure your idiot of an author didn’t misremember the name of some magical plant in explicit fanfic number 37.
To make matters worse, Marie had… well, she might’ve actually enjoyed some very few parts of Juwan’s favorite horrible BL. It wasn’t her fault. Naturally, it had been against her will. But even she had to grant that svsss could be, on some rare occasions, kind of funny. On even rarer occasions, it could even be kind of interesting. Where else could you find a work so unashamedly and ignorantly doubly oedipal? What other webnovel was willing to ask, what if your wire mommy turned into cloth, and then you wanted to fuck her? Where else would you find straight men as morbidly sniveling and greasy as Shen Yuan and Shang Qinghua, so innocently open to theories of psychology that reconstructed the wretched personality of their millennial author? So even if Juwan wrote a billion vanilla modern svsss aus and forced Marie to edit all of them, he still couldn’t destroy the fundamental gears that made svsss disgustingly tick.
But even if Juwan couldn’t, maybe Mo Xiang Tong Xiu could.
And, as things turned out, she had.
“Let me see the comments,” Marie sighed eventually.
Juwan seemed to perk up at that, but that was just because he was Hansol’s fudanshi extraordinaire, and dedicated to reading every BL extra. Nevertheless, he obediently passed Marie his tablet, and together they took a look at what the fujoshis on b ■■ kt ■■ i had to say about this tragedy.
lbh’s shining thighs
wahhh CEO au confirmed ^^ +i always knew our binghe could tell, mxtx finally making it canon ^^^
cucumber shooting towards the sky
lol it really was just a parallel dimension anyone else think she was reading derivative works
↳lbh’s shining thighs replying to “lol it really…”
so what at least we got cute modern cumplane ^^
…
“Marie, um, could you be gentler with my tablet?”
“How can they say this shit?” she demanded, ignoring Juwan and gripping his tablet even tighter. “A parallel fucking dimension? Luo Binghe always knew? Does psychoanalysis mean nothing to them?”
“Well,” Juwan said hesitantly, “probably not?”
“Yaoi-brained little fucks,” she cursed, then threw the tablet down on the couch.
Juwan grabbed his tablet and sniffed at her like he really might start to cry. “Hey,” he said, “it’s just an extra...”
Well, of course Juwan would say something like that. It wasn’t like Marie couldn’t tell that he liked it. It was the classic, ridiculous, A/B/O au-worthy happy ending, ten years late, to appease the petty netizen masses. Retconning everything of interest so comment sections stopped calling you problematic; destroying anything worth intellectual investigation because fujos didn’t like losers with greasy hair; feminizing and infantilizing both your shous to the point that Marie felt like she was committing crimes against humanity just by looking at the words with her unfortunate eyeballs. Of course Juwan liked it. He always got starry-eyed for misogynist alpha CEOs in horrible lezhin manhwa.
“I didn’t raise you right,” she cursed him, bitterly. Then she turned her cursing to the sky, raising a fist vaguely in the direction of northwest. “And fuck you, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu! Where’s your heart? Sellout! Big Yaoi Sellout! Dumbfuck author, dumbfuck novel!”
“Woah, don’t say that,” Juwan said. “It’s ominous.”
“I don’t care,” Marie spat, glaring at him. “I’m not fujo-brained. I can write it better.”
“But it’s a BL,” Juwan pointed out hopelessly. “You kinda have to be, you know… fujo-brained. Plus, there’s nothing wrong with being a fujoshi.”
Marie glared at him even more. “There is when you ruin your book like this!”
Suddenly, a mechanical, google translate-sounding voice echoed throughout the empty space of the journalism club room. Marie and Juwan stopped their wild gesticulating and stared at each other in horror.
[Activation code: “dumbfuck author dumbfuck novel.” System 2.0 automatically triggered.]
[Welcome to the System 2.0! This System operates in line with the design concept ‘YOU CANUP YOU UPCAN, NO CANUP NO BB’; we hope to provide you with the best possible experience. It is our sincere wish that during your experience, you can fulfill yourMY desire, and according to yourMY wishes, transform an stupidUNFINISHED work into a high-quality, magnificent, first-rateFINISHED classic. We hope you enjoy.]
[Subjects located, processing timeline retrieval in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…]
“I knew it,” Marie heard Juwan say mournfully.
Then everything went black.
***
“FUCK,” Marie screamed, then immediately shoved her hands over her mouth.
Her hands, which were definitely no longer her hands. Her voice, which had dropped maybe half an octave.
She lay staring at the vaulted icy ceiling for a few moments before she gathered her mind enough to take stock of the situation.
The bed beneath her was covered in thick furs, which wasn’t a good sign. Neither were the braziers placed all around the bed. Marie groaned and forced herself up. Whoever the fuck this was had gone to bed fully clothed, but at least they had the sense to take off their boots.
Despite the adrenaline rush that had accompanied her previous righteous anti-BL fury, the ride over had been rough, to say the least. It felt like her consciousness had gotten hooked and pulled out of her nose, then stretched infinitely, then compressed infinitesimally, then she lost all sense, and the next thing she knew, she was, well. Wherever this was.
Nowhere good. Was Juwan here? She should probably find Juwan.
She slipped the boots on, rose to her full height, and looked around until she found a mirror.
Wait.
No fucking way.
[The System 2.0 was successfully activated! Role bound: Cang Qiong Mountain Sect’s An Ding Peak’s Peak Lord (and traitor), ‘Shang Qinghua.’ Starting M-points: minus one hundred.]
Marie stared for a moment.
Then she stared for another moment.
Then she uncharacteristically forced herself to look on the bright side of things. Well, you know, at least she hadn’t actually died, and at least the System translated itself into Korean, and at least she hadn’t transmigrated in as a baby, either, even if… even if…
Even if, by some fucking miracle, she was Shang Qinghua.
Fuck.
“What the fuck did I ever do to you?” she cursed again at Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, raising her fist anew. “This is all your fault! Your stupid extra is fucking dogshit, and now you have to drag me into this? I’m a high schooler! I pirated your novel! I don’t even speak Mandarin! And,” she howled with great pain and force, “why the fuck do I have to be Shang Qinghua?”
Her expression of rage looked ridiculous on Shang Qinghua’s stupid face, which only made her even more mad. Fuck this! She kicked the mirror, but apparently Shang Qinghua’s body was either exceptionally weak or this anachronistic glass mirror was exceptionally strong, so all she got out of it was a badly stubbed toe.
She then sat back down on the ridiculously furred bed and decided to feel exceptionally miserable and sorry for herself.
Somehow, the System took this as an invitation to continue its introductory exposition.
[You have touched the System 2.0’s command execution, and have been bound to the account ‘Shang Qinghua’. This decision took into account your history, personality, and aptitudes before determining that account ‘Shang Qinghua’ was the most appropriate match.]
Well, she thought miserably, that just made everything even better. So the reason she ended up as this loser was because they were sim… you know what, this was a path of inquiry it was better not to pursue any further. She and Shang Qinghua were literally worlds apart, and they had absolutely nothing in common. Yep! Absolutely nothing in common. Especially not considering that stupid fucking extra.
The System continued.
[You have been summoned here by an external System Administrator to ‘write this stupid fucking extra better’ on the premise of ‘not being fujo-brained’ according to the principle ‘you up you can’; that is, to find an end to the ■ ■ ■ ’s Long Dream. As the plot progresses, many different types of points will gradually become available, please ensure that none of these points fall below 0. Otherwise the System 2.0 will automatically dole out punishment. Stupid kid, how the hell are your M-points already in the negatives?]
At that, Marie scowled more deeply. Even if she was Shang Qinghua and feeling exceptionally miserable and sorry for herself, systems shouldn’t be rude to the hapless y/n’s they pulled into anachronistic fantasy worlds.
“You’re the one who dragged me here, the starting conditions are your responsibility,” she accused it bitterly. “And I don’t even know what M-points are.”
The System seemed to pause. [...They’re Marie-points.]
Marie rolled her-- Shang Qinghua’s?-- eyes. “That’s really stupid,” she said.
The System paused longer this time, before saying in its smooth, mechanical, google translate voice, [Fuck you.]
Wow. What a world.
“Well, fuck you too,” Marie said, then stood up, feeling angry again instead of miserable. “Dumbfuck author, dumbfuck novel, dumbfuck system! Fuck all of you.”
[Ungrateful, spoiled brat], cursed the System, but Marie ignored it.
She looked around the room she’d found herself in.
If she really… if she really was Shang Qinghua, and if the original motive of the System really was to make her rewrite the extra, then this probably was Mobei Jun’s ice palace in the Demon Realm. Which was, just spectacular. Exactly where she absolutely did not want to be, in a situation she absolutely did not want to be in. She didn’t like men, she couldn’t speak Mandarin, and she didn’t want to have a strange NTR relationship with this world’s Shen Yuan. Especially if this world’s Shen Yuan was who she thought it was.
Unfortunately for her, one cursory glance out the window confirmed that this was, in fact, pidw’s (or svsss’s?) Demon Realm, and another cursory glance around the room confirmed that Shang Qinghua’s… relationship… had progressed further than she would’ve liked it to. This place was too goddamned comfortable for a servant. Marie gagged and cursed at Mo Xiang Tong Xiu again in her mind. Then she grabbed an ahistorical furred beizi from Shang Qinghua’s divan and set out to rescue Juwan.
She only hoped that idiot had enough sense in him to not be swayed by the Luo Binghes of his p ■ st ■ pe works. This was not going to be some horrifyingly horny 2nd gen company owner dom, this was going to be a possessive little girl with mommy issues. Marie shuddered at the thought.
***
It wasn’t that hard to find Juwan. All she had to do was follow the sound of wailing and praying to various deities in Korean before she discovered the corner of the courtyard he’d hidden himself in.
He was, indeed, Shen Yuan. Just their luck.
“Who are you hiding from?” Marie asked pointlessly, overcome with sudden annoyance upon looking at him. “Your favorite character?”
“This is all your fault,” Juwan sniffled at her angrily. “And you don’t get it. I have a hard enough time with Haejoon and Eunyung, what am I supposed to do with this guy? I’m a high schooler, and he’s a walking psychology textbook…” and here he broke off into more sniffles.
“At this point, you’re married to him,” Marie pointed out meanly, which only provoked an additional series of sniffles.
Juwan did have a point, though. This was nasty. Systems should take age gaps and language barriers into consideration first, damn it. She draped her beizi over Juwan, who was shivering pathetically, and frowned.
What was their best course of action? Maybe she really could just turn the extra into 25k of platonic cumplane travelouge. That would still be better than what had actually been written, anyways.
But first they had to escape this stupid ice palace, and if Juwan was here, then that meant his favorite character was probably here as well, and, well, fuck it, and on top of that, neither of them spoke Mandarin, and it hadn’t been established that you could return to your original world in svsss until the stupid fucking extra, which they were apparently in the process of rewriting.
So: “System,” Marie spat.
[…]
“Do you, uh, have translation functions?”
[…Google translate is available to purchase for 100 M-points. Do I have to remind you of your current negative balance?]
...Why did an extradimensional construct only have google translate? Shouldn’t it have a dedicated team hired for cases like these? And, well, forget being broke, she was actually in debt.
[Kid, calm down], said the System, sounding like annoyed google translate, if that was possible. [You think it’s easy using borrowed equipment? I had to pull you here to get this thing to work, but I’m trying to get you out. Just go hide or something. I need 30 minutes.]
“It’s not like we wanted to transmigrate,” she cursed at it, but all that came back was an automated message saying, [The System 2.0 is currently offline for maintenance. Please try again in 30 minutes.] So she punched the air in the direction she’d been imagining the System’s presence, which cracked a pillar across the courtyard. She shook out her hand while Juwan looked on, stricken.
“Let’s just, uh, hide,” she offered, feeling a little bit guilty. “For 30 minutes.”
So she and Juwan huddled together in a corner of one of Mobei Jun’s probably several courtyards, behind an ice-sculpture of a rock, and waited for the System to come back online.
“Why do you hate the extra so much?” Juwan asked her after a while.
Marie scoffed.
Juwan started sniffling.
“Look, if Shang Qinghua didn’t come up with pidw himself, what’s the point?” Marie backtracked quickly, patting him on the arm in what she hoped was a soothing gesture. “Scum villain’s concept is only funny because it’s about the subversion of intentional straight male fantasy. And Qinghua loses all his charm if he isn’t a loser.”
“I guess...” Juwan kept sniffling.
“And, and, you know,” she continued to justify frantically, “the whole interesting thing about Binghe is how his psychology processes Shen Jiu and Shen Yuan being the same person, you know? Your abusive mother who throws you away but still ‘loves you’. Isn’t that interesting?”
“Sure,” came another sniffle.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Marie said finally, helpless. “The extra is fine! It’s fine if you like it. I shouldn’t have gotten so mad, and now we’re transmigrated and shit and you’re crying, ugh… you know I hate to see girls crying… It just, to me, it wasn’t the ending the story deserved, is all. I just feel like it’s not fair to the story and the characters,” she grimaced.
“Marie, it’s okay,” said Juwan, still sniffling. “You don’t have to like it, it’s just, this situation is a little bit shocking, and you know I cry easily…”
Ah, fuck. Marie looked into Juwan’s large, round, tear-filled eyes. Even if they were temporarily Shen Yuan’s, they still had that familiar Juwan look to them. And she hated whenever girls and Juwan cried because watching them cry, she couldn’t help but feel remorseful.
“I’m a terrible person,” she sighed, looking away from him. “I’ve been too mean to fujoshi and and got us transmigrated into a historical danmei... Juwan, I’m sorry.”
Juwan just kept sniffling.
Eventually, that mechanical google translate-sounding voice came back, and both of them looked up.
[System 2.0 has updated to System 3.0! Subjects located, retrieval to original target timeline accessible in 60 seconds. Marie, would you like to proceed? ＼(^o^)／ Please select YES/NO (・∀・)]
Shockingly enough, the google translate tts had upgraded to a holographic floating text interface, with… emoticons? More pressingly, though, was the original target timeline even any better than here? What if they ended up at the starting point of svsss, or, worse, in pidw?
[The original target timeline is neither a xianxia setting nor a danmei （*^_^*）], said the System.
Well, that was enough for Marie. Before Juwan could react, she reached out and smashed the YES button. The System started its countdown: [60 ^^… 59 ^^… 58 ^^… 57 ^^…]
“This is definitely better than being trapped here with Luo Binghe,” she reassured Juwan, who was looking stricken again. “Don’t be so scared.”
Juwan just shook his head and pointed towards the opposite corner of the courtyard. Curious, Marie followed his finger.
Shit!
Fuck, it was both of them. Two of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s famous yaoimen were staring at them first in bewilderment, then in suspicion, and finally in… Marie gulped. She grabbed onto Juwan and shoved him behind her, like that would make any difference.
“HURRY UP!” she yelled.
[17 ^^… 16 ^^… 15 ^^… 14 ^^…]
“Marie, it’s okay,” Juwan said, sounding mournful again. “This is my punishment… for being an otaku…”
[8 ^^… 7 ^^… 6 ^^… 5 ^^… 4 ^^…]
Yet just as Juwan’s favorite character shouted something and reached for them, and just as Marie closed her eyes in defeat, a strangely familiar arm reached out of the System’s holographic interface and yanked both of them up and in by the scruff of their necks.
Marie felt that horrible sensation of her consciousness being hooked and pulled out of her nose again, and watched as the bodies they’d been inhabiting collapsed right as the yaoimen reached them.
Thank god, she thought.
Then she blacked out.
***
“Kid, wake up,” came a strangely familiar voice.
Marie forced her eyes open and immediately started to cough. She coughed, and coughed, and coughed, and then started to dry-heave, and then she vomited bile, and then she looked down at her hands and saw that they were hers and sighed. Then she sat up.
The space she was in was strange. It rightfully couldn’t really be called a space at all; more so its absence. Form without form, place without place. She heard some coughing to her immediate left and found Juwan, looking tired and miserable. Then she looked forward. There was a person sitting a bit away, with a blurry face. Huh.
But even with a blurry face, and even with no reason for her to recognize this person, Marie somehow instinctively knew…
“Mo Xiang Tong Xiu?” she asked, in equal parts horror and awe.
“Yeah,” came that familiar voice again, from behind her. “The fujo herself.”
Somehow, she could feel herself accepting that. You know what, why not? She’d just gotten transmigrated twice in 24 hours, so honestly, seeing Mo Xiang Tong Xiu face-to-censored-face in some extradimensional space was not that strange. No reason why it couldn’t happen.
“Okay then,” Marie said. “Is this inside the System?”
“Yeah,” said that voice again.
Marie laughed in spite of herself. She could accept that. At this point, she felt like she could accept basically anything.
But Juwan poked her arm, and whispered, “Marie, turn around.”
What the hell could be stranger than all this?, she wondered, then turned around and locked eyes with the owner of the strangely familiar voice.
Well.
No wonder it was strangely familiar.
“Hi, Kim Marie,” said Kim Marie, looking down at her condescendingly. “I’m Kim Marie, the administrator of this System. Nice to meet you.”
Marie blacked out again.