Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

There was dirt in his mouth, his eyes. He was choking on it.

He coughed and hacked, scrabbling at his face as he struggled to breathe. Was he buried alive? Earth was packed against his mouth and nose and eyelids, gritty and damp, filling every gap. His fingers clenched and found more of it, cool and dense and smelling of wet earth and green growing things. He was in dirt. He was buried in dirt and his throat was— his throat had been— there'd been a meat bun. His esophagus locking. The world going grey and sideways and then gone, and now he was choking on soil instead of food and his body was convulsing with the need to get out—

Shen Yuan clawed at the earth. Didn't know he was going upward until his hand broke the surface and hit air and light. Hhe was dragged himself out of the ground with both arms, soil cascading off his shoulders and back. Gasping, spitting dirt, eyes squeezed shut against sudden sunlight.

He knelt on his hands and knees in the loose soil. There was a wall in front of him, he had flailed out and his arm had struck it as he clawed his way out of the ground. Shen Yuan lifted his clothes to scrub at his face and get the dirt out of his eyes. He reached out again feeling for the wall, pulling himself up away from his shallow grave and blinked open his eyes. The low wall he was leaning on was dark and smooth, like porcelain.

He blinked again. It was a curved wall that went in a circle, it looked a little bit… like a pot? He looked around again. He was kneeling in a gigantic pot, soil packed under his knees, and something rose behind him — thin, segmented, curving. A stalk. It arched above him in a trained curve, the trunk bent into a shape that was too elegant to be natural, with smaller shoots branching off at precise intervals. Bamboo, his brain supplied, though the word arrived without explanation, just a certainty that sat in his bones. Someone had spent years training this plant into this shape, wiring and bending, coaxing it into an aesthetic it hadn't chosen for itself.

He blinked some more.

Sunlight. A windowsill. The pot he was kneeling in sat on a broad stone sill, and beyond the window the sky was enormous and very blue, and beyond the pot's lip the sill dropped away to a room that was — wrong. Wrong-scaled. The bed that he could see from his pot in the window was giagantic, a wooden frame the size of a several buildings, and the figure lying on it was equally huge. He looked down away from the impossible dimensions of things.

His hands were green.

Both hands, clutching the rim of the pot, and they were green. Translucent at the edges, a living vegetal color, new-growth green with light pushing through from somewhere underneath. He turned the left one over. Palm, back, palm. No blood. No pink. The lines on his palm were a darker jade, and when he pressed his thumb to his fingertip the skin dimpled and the dimple showed a darker green color beneath, and nothing about any of this was human.

He grabbed a fistful of his own hair. Green. Deep bamboo green, fibrous, with a sheen to it. The clothes he was wearing was not the tracksuit he remembered. The seemed to be pale silk flowing robes, leaf-patterned and draping in elegant fantasy layers over a body that was willowly and pale. His feet too were bare and they were green as well like his hands, dark green that faded to pale green tinged white, with his fingertips and toes being darkest. He was green, he was in a plant pot, he was in a realm of giants. He held his hand up against the bamboo trunk behind him and his whole palm barely covered the width of one segment.

"What," Shen Yuan said, to the bamboo, to the windowsill, to the vast indifferent room, "the fuck!"

His voice was thin. High and small. It dissapeared quickly into the vast space. Shen Yuan swore again, louder, and it didn't get any bigger. A voice that didn't sound like his, and come to think of it, dirt shouldn't taste like anything to a dead man, and this pot shouldn't be the size of a living room —

The chime split the inside of his skull — mechanical, flat, aggressively cheerful. An automated customer service greeting beamed directly into his brain. Shen Yuan flinched sideways and nearly went over the rim of the pot.

"What— who—"

The chime stuttered. A harsh buzz, like a microphone hitting feedback, split the notification mid-word.

A whine. High-pitched, climbing. The inside of Shen Yuan's skull felt like a dial-up modem trying to connect, and for three horrible seconds he thought his head was going to split open.

Silence. A long one.

Then, very softly, a different chime. Lower. Warmer. The audio equivalent of someone rubbing the back of their neck.

Shen Yuan, gripping the bamboo trunk with both hands, soil up to his ankles, tiny and green, said: "What? What was that?!"

A pause.

Soul transfer. There'd been — after the choking, after the grey, there'd been a screen. Text. A prompt asking him if he wanted — he'd said yes. He'd said yes because the alternative was dead and he'd died too soon and young and he was angry about it and the screen had mentioned a novel and he'd thought—

Qing Jing Peak. Shen Qingqiu. Bamboo.

Oh.

Oh, no.

Proud Immortal Demon Way. Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky's tens-of-millions-word stallion epic. The novel Shen Yuan had hate-read from start to finish, every contrived harem acquisition, every abandoned subplot, every sex scene deployed to cover a plot hole. He was in Airplane's novel. He was supposed to be in Shen Qingqiu's body — that was the deal, the standard transmigration package, wake up as the scum villain and fix the story from the inside. That was what the screen had offered.

Instead, he was twelve centimeters tall. In a plant. In a pot. On a windowsill. He'd come out of the dirt.

"No," he said.

"I'm a what?!"

"What's the bad news?"

"You already said that."

"You put survive third?"

Bamboo spirit. He knew what that was. He knew exactly what that was, because Airplane — who had never met a fetish he wouldn't cater to if it kept his subscriber numbers up — had introduced a bamboo spirit character in the back third of Proud Immortal Demon Way. Chapters 3200-something through 3400-something. A beautiful, ethereal creature who could shift between palm-sized and human-height and had featured in an arc that Shen Yuan had, at the time, described in a comment as "the moment Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky definitively lost his mind, his dignity, and any remaining claim to narrative coherence."

The macro-micro stuff. The size kink arc. Where Luo Binghe's newest conquest could shrink small enough to sit in his hand or grow tall enough to look him in the eye, and Airplane had devoted forty chapters to exploring exactly what that meant in explicit, inventive, reader-supported detail, and the comment section had been split between people who were extremely into it and people like Shen Yuan who had scrolled through it with their teeth clenched, leaving three-paragraph rants about wasted potential and the debasement of genuinely interesting mythology.

He was that. He was a bamboo spirit. He was the thing from the size kink arc.

Shen Yuan pressed his forehead to the bamboo trunk behind him and made a high pitched angry noise.

But — and his brain snagged on this, caught and held, because his stupid brain never fully stopped working even when the rest of him was having a breakdown — the alternative had been Shen Qingqiu. The alternative had been waking up in the body of a child-abusing scum villain. Walking around in that face. Wearing that reputation. Didn't the system say something about OOC locks too? Would he have been forced to still be cruel? He didn't think he had it in him, he'd rather throw himself off a building than be cruel to Luo Binghe.

Being a plant was humiliating. But being Shen Qingqiu would've been 100 times worse!

He wasn't thankful at all that something went wrong. But at least this was better. He could make this work. The grip of his fingers on the trunk loosened, just fractionally. He was alive. He was very small and very green and had come out of the dirt of what was apparently a fetish character's origin plant, but he was alive, and nobody was going to look at him and see a child abuser. He could be a positive person! Look at him looking at the bright side.

Okay. He wiped the remaining soil from his knees. Okay. Alive. Green. Mission parameters. Figure the rest out later.

"System do I have any OOC locks or restrictions?"

Shen Yuan felt one of his ears twitch as it heard something from outside the enormous bedroom. (Ears! Twitching?! Independently!) He was pretty sure that was footsteps. From the corridor outside the huge bedroom, each one a loud thump through the wooden floor that carried up through the windowsill and into his feet. Two sets. Coming closer.

"I'll look at missions later." Shen Yuan muttered, and pressed himself flat behind the curve of his bamboo's trunk, soil up to his ankles, hands gripping the bark.

The door opened. Two men entered, enormous from Shen Yuan's hidden vantage point, giants at a scale that made their robes into architecture, each fold and drape a curtain. They entered the room and Shen Yuan stopped breathing, which turned out to be optional in this body, a realization he'd save to panic about for later.

The first of the giants moved directly to the bed, where Shen Yuan could see through the gauzy curtains around it, lay another man (who must be Shen Qingqiu) who had his eyes closed. He wore white drapey robes that matched Shen Yuan's imagination of what a cultivator would wear. They were trimmed in red and had the sleeves tied back. The man set down a bag on the bedside table next to the bed and it clinked gently. Shen Yuan could smell dried herbs and something sharply medicinal through the leather.

The man then reached out for Shen Qingqiu's wrist and lay two fingers on the pulse point lightly. If he was in Proud Immortal Demon Way then this must be Mu Qingfang, Qian Cao's Peak Lord. The sect's physician. In Proud Immortal Demon Way he'd been a background fixture — competent, kind, perpetually cleaning up after the messes other characters made. Airplane had given him maybe thirty lines of dialogue across tens of millions of words, which was criminal, because the man was clearly the only functional adult in the entire novel. Seeing him in person confirmed it. His hands were steady. His attention was focused on his patient.

The second figure was taller, standing back from the bed, hands clasped behind him. He had dark black robes, with a beautiful gold guan securing his hair. He looked very worried and Shen Yuan could see that his clasped hands were locked together in a white knuckled tight grip.

Yue Qingyuan. Shen Yuan had opinions about Yue Qingyuan that could fill a chapter — had, in fact, filled several comment sections, arguing with user LotusEater88 about whether the Sect Leader's enabling of Shen Qingqiu counted as complicity or cowardice. Seeing him resolved nothing. His gaze kept landing on Mu Qingfang's hands on Shen Qingqiu's wrist and tracking away to the window, the wall, the floor — anywhere but the face on the pillow.

The face on the pillow. Shen Yuan shifted behind the bamboo trunk and looked.

Shen Qingqiu. The Scum Villian himself. He lay prone, long dark hair loose across his headrest — a ceramic pillow, the kind Shen Yuan had seen in museum exhibits — hands arranged neatly folded on his chest. The novel had called this face cold, aristocratic, a weapon given a jaw and cheekbones. Unconscious, it was just — a face. A tired one. The frown lines hadn't relaxed in sleep, cut deep between his brows, and his mouth was slightly open and his hair was matted on one side where nobody had combed it. Seeing the villian disarmed and helpless was not as satisfying as Shen Yuan had expected.

"It is as I have told you before Zhangmen-shixiong. Shen Qingqiu's meridians are stable." Mu Qingfang released Shen Qingqiu's wrist and laid it back on his chest with gentle care. "The spiritual pathways sustained damage, but they're mending. Slowly. The problem isn't the body."

"Then what is it." Yue Qingyuan demanded.

Mu Qingfang frowned, "His consciousness has withdrawn. He is far away, as if dreaming. I can't determine how far Shen Qingqiu has gone or why." Mu Qingfang opened his bag and began removing small jars and packets, lining them up on the bedside table in neat rows. "None of the methods I know can seem to wake him. At this time I am hesitant to try more invasive methods. Sometimes sleep can be healing and being in this state is not causing him any further harm."

He looked back towards his sect leader. "I can maintain the body. Keep his cultivation intact and heal the damage the qi deviation caused. But I can't reach what's retreated, and I don't know when it will choose to return." He paused. Chose the next words with visible deliberation. "Or if."

There was a cold silence from Yue Qingyuan and he moved closer to the bed. Shen Yuan watched through the curtains his hand rise toward Shen Qingqiu's face, or his shoulder, and then hesitate and drop back to his side. The gesture aborted so smoothly it was clearly practiced — a man who had trained himself not to touch.

"What does he need?"

"Regular qi infusions to support the meridians. I have some medicines and treatments to care for the physical body — I'll prepare everything and have a disciple come daily. That is if you are determined he would prefer to stay on his peak rather than be transferred to mine?"

"Yes." Yue Qingyuan said firmly. "Shen Qingqiu would not like to be moved from his home. If care can be given here, it is preferable."

"Understood, Zhangmen-shixiong." Mu Qingfang picked up the now empty bag. "Has anyone been informed about peak operations? His head disciple—"

"Ming Fan is handling what he can. I'll arrange support from Qiong Ding for the administrative functions."

Mu Qingfang's mouth thinned. Whatever he thought about a teenage disciple running a peak, he kept it behind his teeth. He checked Shen Qingqiu's pulse one more time, adjusted the blankets, and left the room with a small respectful bow.

Yue Qingyuan didn't follow.

He stood at the bedside for a long time after the door closed. Shen Yuan, who had been preparing to move, went still. The sect leader's posture had changed — the locked-joint formality had gone slack, shoulders dropping, and his hand rose again toward the bed. This time he didn't stop it. His fingers found a strand of Shen Qingqiu's tangled hair and smoothed it back from his forehead, slow and careful, barely touching.

"Xiao Jiu."

Barely a sound. Shen Yuan wouldn't have caught it if he'd been even a foot further away — two syllables breathed into the space between Yue Qingyuan's mouth and Shen Qingqiu's sleeping face. A name. Not Qingqiu-shidi, not Shen-shidi, not any of the formal addresses that the sect leader should use for his marital sibling. He said it like a secret, something private, dredged up from some sad place.

Shen Qingqiu didn't move. Yue Qingyuan's hand lingered on his hair for one more second. Then he straightened, put his shoulders back, clasped his hands behind him, and walked out.

Airplane, Shen Yuan thought, from behind the pot, with the dawning, furious certainty that he'd been lied to, what the hell did you leave out of this novel.

The door closed. The room went quiet.

Shen Yuan stayed in the pot for a while. The bamboo he was leaning on rustled, and the soil under his feet was warm from his own presence in it, and he felt a pull — a connection, the tether, whatever this was between his plant and him — hum steady and calm. He resented how nice it felt standing in dirt, like he'd taken a strong anti-anxiety pill and his worries just floated away into the leaves.

Okay. Think.

He was in Proud Immortal Demon Way. Shen Qingqiu was comatose — qi deviation, consciousness withdrawn, body intact. He'd recognized three characters: Mu Qingfang, Yue Qingyuan, and Shen Qingqiu. The System had told him his mission involved Luo Binghe, which meant the protagonist was here, on this peak, somewhere. But when was he? The novel covered decades. Shen Qingqiu could be unconscious at various points in the timeline, and Airplane's continuity had been garbage — Shen Yuan had documented at least fourteen contradictions about the peak's layout alone.

"System. Where in the timeline am I? How old is Luo Binghe?"

Fourteen. Three years pre-Abyss. Which meant —

Shen Yuan's fingers dug into his bamboo trunk. Fourteen-year-old Luo Binghe. Qing Jing Peak disciple. This was the period the novel had covered in detail — Shen Qingqiu's abuse, the isolation, the sabotaged training, the other disciples following their master's lead. Three years of it before the Abyss cracked open and swallowed the kid whole.

And Mu Qingfang and Yue Qingyuan had just spent ten minutes in this room discussing Shen Qingqiu's medical care, the peak's administrative structure — and neither of them had mentioned Luo Binghe. Not once. The protagonist of a tens-of-millions-word novel, a disciple of this peak, and two Peak Lords had stood in this room and his name hadn't come up.

Because he's nobody to them. He's the disciple his Shizun hated. With Shen Qingqiu unconscious, they've probably already forgotten he exists.

"System. Where is he? On the peak — where exactly?"

The woodshed. In Proud Immortal Demon Way it was described in a throwaway description, two lines of Airplane's laziest scene-setting: the small outbuilding where Luo Binghe slept, away from the other disciples. He was probably cold, with a thin bedroll, with gaps in the wall that let in the rain the wind. Poor Binghe! Poor little white lotus!

Was anyone feeding him? Was anyone checking on him? Ming Fan was apparently running the peak — Ming Fan, who'd spent half the novel's opening chapters tormenting Luo Binghe at Shen Qingqiu's direction. That Ming Fan was now in charge, and nobody had asked what was happening with the disciple at the bottom of the hierarchy.

One thing at a time. One thing at a time.

"Fine." He pulled himself up by the curved trunk and climbed out of the pot. The rim was ceramic, smooth, and he swung his legs over it and sat on the edge with his feet dangling. The windowsill stretched in both directions — broad stone, dusty in the corners, warm where the sun hit. Gauze curtains hung from a rod above the window, sheer and pale, pooling in soft folds where they met the sill. Beyond the gauze, the room — this was a bedroom, just a bedroom, one wing of a larger house. Through the sheer fabric everything was soft-focus: the bed close by with its translucent silk hangings, more gauze curtains draped around the frame. A dressing table in the far corner with a bronze disc catching the light — a mirror on a carved stand. The bookshelf against the inner wall, floor to ceiling, packed with scrolls and bound texts. A wardrobe. And past all of it, a doorway into a larger central room he couldn't see clearly from this angle.

The bed was close. Through the gauze he could see Shen Qingqiu's profile, the sharp nose, the tangled hair on the ceramic headrest. Mu Qingfang's jars and packets lined up on the bedside table — close enough that Shen Yuan could read the characters on two of the labels if he walked over.

Getting down required thought. The windowsill was maybe a meter off the floor — for him, that was a drop of about eight times his body height. Not fatal, probably, but not a theory he wanted to test on his first day as a plant. The curtain. The gauze curtain hung from its rod down past the sill, pooling on the floor below, and where it gathered at the side a braided silk cord held it in a loose tie. From what he could see it reached the ground and was heavy enough that it wasn't moving too much in the slight breeze from the window.

That'll work.

He dropped out of the pot — glad that it was one of those shallow bonsai kinds —and walked across the windowsill to the curtain. Firmly he grabbed the curtain cord and carefully lowered himself over the edge. The silk was slippery but the braid gave him easy hand and footholds. He went down hand over hand, the curtain swaying gently with his weight, and dropped the last few centimeters to the floor. His forearms burned slightly but honestly it was easier than he had expected. This body was apparently fitter than his previous one. He wasn't even out of breath!

He looked back up where his plant was. He could feel a little pull in his chest, a tether that connected him to it. He wondered idly how far he was allowed to roam from his plant. Would it yank me back? Or would I just dissolve and respawn back in the dirt?

The floor was polished wood. Dark, smooth, his bare feet registering every joint between the boards. From ground level the room rearranged itself into a landscape — the wardrobe a cliff face with closed doors, the bookshelf a wall, the bed a fortified plateau behind its silk hangings. The dressing table in the corner had carved legs and a low silk drape along its back edge, and from down here he could see the underside of the mirror stand.

He walked the room's perimeter. Kept to the edges, kept to the baseboards, kept to shadows. The open expanse of floor where anyone could see him terrified him. There were lots of hiding places for someone of his height. The wardrobe had a gap underneath, it sat on carved feet, so there were a few centimeters of clearance. He could slide under there in a second. A basket sat near the wardrobe's base, cloth spilling over the rim — laundry he guessed or items awaiting repair. A torn sleeve. He could probably tear off some fabric or unravel some of it if he wanted thread without anyone noticing.

The bookshelf was better. He reached it and clambered up on the lowest shelf. He ran his hand across the book spines that were as tall as he was. This shelf from what he could see was sorted by subject, then by date, then by a third system Shen Yuan couldn't decode from the spines alone. Personal preference, maybe. Shen Qingqiu obviously cared about his library, even here on the lowest shelf there was not a speck of dust. He didn't like this. The villian shouldn't care about books, he cared about books! He didn't want anything in common with Shen Qingqiu.

He reached the end of the shelf and clambered back down to the floor. He looked behind the bookshelf and saw where the baseboard met the bookshelf — a gap.
It was wide enough for him to walk into without turning sideways and he walked into the dark space. Maybe he could find some sort of lost item. Like a hairpin for a sword!

It smelled lovely behind the bookshelf, that comforting scent of old paper and wood. He noticed that there was a panel here in the wall and shifted under his fingers. Loose.

Hello.

Maybe a secret compartment? What sort of things was Shen Qingqiu hiding in his room? Digging his fingers under the panel it he was able to pry it loose and slide the thin wood out of the way. Inside the small cavity there was a pouch which was tied tight with a knot and vibrated with a sort of energy to Shen Yuan's new plant spirit senses. There was also a carved wooden box, with pretty flowers painted on the lid. Unfortunately the box was also clearly locked.

Hmmm….. What were you hiding Shen Qingqiu?

He bet that the pouch was some sort of qingkun bag. Maybe this was secret escape supplies? But why would a powerful cultivator like Shen Qingqiu be hiding secret supplies? He could just ask for whatever he wanted. He was rich, the second most powerful person on the sect. What a mystery.

He was afraid to open the bag without knowing exactly how it worked. What if it sucked him in?! And he didn't have a key for the box at this time. But the cavity behind the bookcase seemed like the perfect place for a height challenged plant spirit to make a secret hideout.

The shape of a home was forming in his head — the gap as a door, the wall cavity as a room, the bookshelf as a boundary between his world and the human one. He backed out and looked at the bedroom that belonged to a man Airplane had written as a one-note villain.

The room argued otherwise. The dressing table — he could see the edge of it from here, the neat arrangement of objects on its surface, hairpins in a row catching light, a wide-toothed comb beside a finer one. The bookshelf with its careful three-tier organization. The silk hangings on the bed, chosen and maintained. The wardrobe, the repair basket. Everything placed with intention, maintained with care, by a person who had lived in this room and kept it the way he wanted it. Airplane had never described Shen Qingqiu's private space as anything other than a villain's lair. Standing in it, even tiny, Shen Yuan could tell the man had taste, discipline, and likely a system for his socks.

Don't trust Airplane's characterization. Don't trust Airplane's anything. The man wrote a bamboo spirit as spank material. His judgment is not to be relied upon.

He looked at the bed. Shen Qingqiu's face through the hangings, filtered and dim. The bamboo plant on the windowsill above, its leaves still turned his direction. The gap behind the bookshelf. The doorway to the rest of the house, where there'd be more rooms, more information, more of the life Airplane never wrote. But that was for later. This room first. He needed to plan out routes, figure out the best hiding spots before he needed them, plan his entry and exits.

"How many points for the map?"

Zero points. Starting from nothing, in every possible sense. Shen Yuan looked at the gap behind the bookshelf, then at the bed where Shen Qingqiu lay breathing with his uncombed hair and his ceramic headrest, then at his bamboo plant on the sill that had turned it's leaves to point at him.

"Yeah," Shen Yuan said. "Tell me about the missions."