Chapter Text
Shen Qingqiu shuddered, the cold seeping into his bones. The Water Prison was dark, so dark. Sometimes he would open his eyes and it was as if they were still closed, his vision swirling with purple shadows. Other times, light would flicker from torches, reflecting in a pale gleam from the rock and the water curtain. Shen Qingqiu did not know whether he preferred the low light or the complete darkness—seeing his surroundings only made him remember where he was. Remember what he had done.
The labyrinth surrounding the Water Prison was inescapable, but somehow a chilling breeze always made its way through the winding walls. The 108 Immortal Binding Cables dug into his biceps, leaving black bruises and restricting his qi so that he could not circulate any inner warmth. The water that the palace mistress had used to wake him up two days ago had not dried, his hair still plastered pitifully to his head and neck, his chest and shoulder still bare to the wind.
The once great Peak Lord Shen Qingqiu, reduced to uncontrollable shivers.
It was almost enough to make him laugh, if only the cold was not so painful. He could not sleep for more than a few moments at a time before his traitorous body shook him awake. At least he had been able to prevent his teeth from chattering—there was very little that Shen Qingqiu had left in the form of dignity, and so he uselessly clung to what he still could salvage.
The outer robe Luo Binghe had left him lay neatly folded to his side. He had folded it not long after Luo Binghe had left in a rage, destroying the rock bed of the prison and creating huge craters with his wealth of spiritual energy.
“… I want to see with my own eyes how in one month, you will be completely disgraced and your reputation ruined!”
The words of his former disciple had cut deeper than any blade. Shen Qingqiu had already resigned himself to this fate, but to hear those parting words as the protagonist closed the water curtain behind him made his heart squeeze.
Several times he would look to the folded robes in the darkness as his whole body seized with cold. But each time he considered shuffling over to them and putting them on with his bound arms he remembered Luo Binghe’s words, the angry and resentment that flowed through them. He would see the flash of pain in his disciple’s eyes as he pushed him into the Abyss, and…
The robes had remained folded.
But now the cold had become torturous to the point that even Shen Qingqiu’s guilt did not out way his need for warmth. His body was beginning to feel like an empty husk, what with his restricted qi and the bone deep soreness of the cold, and he feared the long term effects. Already, his hand which had been poisoned by No Cure was becoming numb, as if it had been encased in a block of ice. He could no longer feel his pinky or ring finger.
He pathetically twitched in the direction of the robes, his limbs stiff from remaining in the same meditative position for so long.
If only Binghe could see him now.
He probably didn’t need to stand up to get to the robe. All he needed to do was crawl over to the side. He grit his teeth.
Shen Qingqiu’s body was racked by shivers, this time his legs shaking with exhaustion as he stood up. Normally, lack of sleep and practicing inedia for a few days was not a difficult task for a cultivator, especially one of Shen Qingqiu’s caliber. But again, the 108 Immortal Binding Cables were a formidable opponent, leaving him as weak as a kitten. For a moment, he simply stood on quivering legs, trying to catch his breath over practically nothing.
“Fuck, shit, bitch, fuck,” he whispered, struggling not to pant.
The humiliation burned in him, but humiliation was not a robe. It did not provide him with much needed warmth. He took a tentative step forward, and then another, feeling shame sinking deep in his gut as he then struggled to kneel down in front of the robe to pick it up. Why had he not placed the robe closer? The Binding Cables cut deeper into his chest as he leaned down, picking the robe up with his functioning hand.
Just as he was standing back up, the cold wind roared into the prison, causing Shen Qingqiu’s wet hair to billow. He grit his teeth. With a woosh, the water curtain suddenly opened, and Shen Qingqiu looked up, feeling his blood run cold as he felt terror sink in. Was it Binghe, come to torture him with his blood parasites again?
But it was not. Squinting his eyes against the flooding of light, he made out a pink skirt and the glistening of many sparkling jewels. Ah. It was the little palace mistress, returning again. In one hand she held her metal barbed whip, and in the other she held a waterskin. She scowled angrily at him, making her hatred from days ago seem paltry.
Inwardly, Shen Qingqiu sighed. So, it was to be like this.
The palace mistress tossed the waterskin at his feet.
“Ha! You worthless scum, you don’t deserve this kindness from our benevolent Big Brother Luo. You had better drink this gratefully.”
Shen Qingqiu nodded slowly, secretly lamenting the effort it would take to kneel down to reach the waterskin. He tried to stiffen his legs to prevent them from trembling, but he felt how his knees wobbled. Hopefully the protagonist’s future wife would not notice his weakness.
It was only then that the mistress noticed Luo Binghe’s robes in Shen Qingqiu’s hand. A stormy looked passed over her already darkened face, and her grip on her whip whitened.
“Why do you have Big Brother Luo’s outer robes?”
Shen Qingqiu opened his mouth to give a snarky, “he gave them to me,” but the words never left his mouth.
The palace mistress cracked her whip, barbs glittering in the low light as they flew towards Shen Qingqiu. He was so weak that he could not dodge as he had several days ago, only managing to flinch to the side as the whip sliced across his bare chest. He dropped the robe as blood splashed to the side, the sudden, sharp pain ripping through the dull aching of his body. His arms spasmed, the Binding Cables keeping them tight to his sides, blood dripping from his biceps around the cords. His legs, already so shaky, gave out immediately, and he fell to his knees.
Shen Qingqiu did not let out any sound of pain though, the shame from being brought to his knees from such a blow rising in his gut. He held his chin high, never letting it fall as the palace mistress laughed mockingly, green jealousy still glinting in her eyes.
“You wretched villain, you should be punished for your crimes!” She raised her whip again, and for a split second Shen Qingqiu thought that maybe Luo Binghe would stride from behind the water curtain and grab the whip again, just as he had several days ago. He would scold her and order her to leave, and then he would turn around and Shen Qingqiu would maybe then muster up the courage to apologize. Or, at least, he would stop her from saying more of these two-bit lines.
But Luo Binghe did not swoop in at the last moment like he had so many times in Proud Immortal Demon Way. The whip fell again, slashing another cut across his chest, perpendicular to the previous one. Blood spattered on the ground, hot white pain accompanying it. Again and again, she cracked the whip across his chest, his remaining robes shredding as the barbs cut more and more into his flesh.
Back when Shen Qingqiu was Shen Yuan, he had become used to the constant throbbing dull pain from chronic illness, and the cold had been easier to deal with. But the knife hot pain of the whip was unlike anything he’d dealt with before, besides perhaps Binghe’s blood parasites. After a few strokes, Shen Qingqiu could not help the small sounds of pain that seeped out of his clenched jaw. He wanted to curl into himself, but the Binding Cables kept his back straight, his chest open for the palace mistress’s punishment.
In all, the palace mistress gave him ten lashes. If he had been reading PIDW, he would have scoffed at Airplane-bro for the drama over such a low number. But, as he had been faced with over and over again, reading about something versus living it were two entirely different things.
His chest was horrific to look at. Blood had splattered with the slashing of the whip, and the wounds themselves crisscrossed over each other in a raw, red mess. The cuts oozed slowly, soaking the tattered remains of his robes. Red flecks shimmered around him, little arches of red rubies lying on the cold stone. It was all he could do but take rattling breaths, his chest heaving, covered in gore.
He knelt there, blinking slowly as he fought to stay upright, when the palace mistress stepped forward and picked up Luo Binghe’s robes from where they’d fallen from his grip.
“You dare to even get blood on Big Brother Luo’s robes. Shameless.”
The words didn’t even register with Shen Qingqiu. His brain was a blank plane of white noise, a place occupied only with suppressing the waves of pain. He didn’t hear her loud footsteps echoing in the prison as she left, but for some reason the rushing of the closing water curtain filled his ears. Long after she had left, the whooshing sound still echoed, reverberating in his head as he knelt on an island surrounded by acid and shadow and his own blood.
It had been fifteen days since he had left Shizun in the Water Prison, anger rolling off of him. In this time, he had contemplated going to visit the imprisoned Peak Lord many times. Only one time did he make it down to the entrance of the Water Prison, only two days after his outburst, bearing an olive-branch in the form of a waterskin. The palace mistress had intercepted him, and Luo Binghe had gotten so upset at just looking at her that he had shoved the waterskin at her and stormed off again, anger red hot once more.
She reminded him of the state he had left Shizun in. His shoulders bare, his own blood parasites hurting him, and his Shizun’s obvious disgust for anything that had even touched him. And then she had the audacity to return his outer robes, freshly cleaned and folded, to him days later, because of course his Shizun had refused to wear them.
The anger roiled. Logically, Binghe knew that his anger was amplified by the presence of Xin Mo, but it was so much easier to be angrier than to feel the hurt that his Shizun’s disregard triggered.
It was easier to sit in his room and meditate, to help with the investigations into the sowers. The Water Prison was an unpleasant place to stay, but his Shizun would be given food and water every day. He was here, in Luo Binghe’s domain. He couldn’t run away anymore. Shen Qingqiu was his.
His musings were interrupted by a knock on his door. To Luo Binghe’s surprise, it was Gongyi Xiao.
The talented cultivator's face was pinched in displeasure and worry. His eyes narrowed at Luo Binghe when he let him into his room, and a tense silence followed his entrance. They sat together, stiff and formal.
“Gongyi Xiao—”
“Luo Binghe!”
Gongyi Xiao’s glare ratcheted up in intensity. Luo Binghe felt a spark of irritation at being so blatantly interrupted.
“Why is no one permitted to visit Master Shen?”
Luo Binghe blinked, thrown off by the question, before narrowing his eyes at the cultivator.
“No one is forbidden from visiting my Shizun, Gongyi Xiao,” he responded coldly.
Gongyi Xiao snarled.
“You lie, Luo Binghe. This one has tried multiple times to visit Peak Lord Shen, and each time this one has been turned away. Tell me, Big Brother Luo, why such a restriction has been put into practice?”
An awful feeling was swelling up in Luo Binghe’s stomach, but for the moment he tamped it down. His eyes became black slits as he looked at Gongyi Xiao.
“This one speaks truthfully. If there has been such restriction placed on Shizun, then it is news to this one as well.”
Gongyi Xiao snorted.
“This one has been monitoring the guards in front of the Water Prison. No one has come or gone from the Water Prison in thirteen days, not even to deliver food. Yet this one is supposed to believe that Luo Binghe had no knowledge of this practice whatsoever?”
Luo Binghe stopped breathing.
Without answering, Luo Binghe was on his feet, anger gripping his heart. An image of his Shizun, shoulder bare, lips parched from lack of water filled his mind. With the Immortal Binding Cables, practicing inedia for so long could be seriously harmful to his Shizun. How dare—!
“Luo Binghe—!”
But he was already out of the door, swiftly walking down to the Water Prison.
Shen Qingqiu had lost the ability to keep track of time. He did not know how many days had gone by, only that it had indeed been days.
He was exhausted. Despite his best efforts, he found it impossible to get up off his knees. On one particularly humiliating instance, he had reached feebly out for the waterskin, but it lay too far out of his reach. His legs would no longer support his weight. He couldn’t even keel over without extreme pain shooting up his calves and his side, so there he remained, kneeling on the floor.
He could no longer feel any part of the arm poisoned by No Cure. The cold numbness that had begun to set in had sunken in deep, spreading up from his fingertips to his forearm, before engulfing the rest of his arm and starting in on his shoulder. It hung limply to one side, ironically only supported by the Immortal Binding Cables.
He had placed his other arm on his lap, a mockery of a formal seated position. It was the most comfortable way to sit, and the one that bore the most dignity. Not that he had any dignity left. He was sure he made a truly pathetic picture, one Binghe would surely triumph in seeing.
His wounds still gaped, his locked qi unable to heal them. The pain from them had abated, but only because his entire body was in the process of shutting down. The cold no longer truly registered either, the freezing bite of the wind whipping his wounds a constant stabbing hurt. In this state, anyone could simply shove him over and he would have no choice but to fall to his death in the acid below.
Hunger and thirst had also become familiar partners, a foreign feeling since transmigrating into the body of an immortal. In a particularly dark moment as Shen Qingqiu sat alone in the Water Prison, he wondered if Luo Binghe had grown tired of the idea of bringing his Shizun to trial for revenge and had instead resolved to kill him through this slow, torturous death. The original Luo Binghe that Airplane-bro had written had definitely come up with such creative means of torment.
Unbidden, a memory of his disciple, smiling up at him sweetly as he served him congee in the early hours of the day came to mind, a bright “Shizun!” cheerfully given as a good morning. Those times, he had been so happy. So happy.
Fuck. Shen Qingqiu was crying. After all this, the memory of his disciple was what caused tears to come to his eyes. Squeezing his eyes shut, Shen Qingqiu fought the lack of sleep and the pain and the cold to just stop crying. He had betrayed his Luo Binghe, wasn’t this how it was supposed to be after all—?
“Shizun?”
Shen Qingqiu opened his eyes, the feeling of resignation once again settling itself in his hollow stomach as he raised his gaze to see his disciple. Here to gloat, perhaps? Or perhaps he would finally end this.
Luo Binghe stood frozen in front of him. His eyes were wide, expression completely blank as he looked down at the pitiful Peak Lord.
Shen Qingqiu tried to straighten up, to preserve at least some of his shredded self-respect, but it was a practice in futility. He tried to sharpen his gaze, a desperate attempt to refocus his senses from the nearly catatonic state they had been reduced to. He looked up at his disciple, whose expression was still blank, and felt a sudden wash of calm flood through him. Apparently, he had dried up his reservoir of fear, and all that was left was a great, empty hole.
“Luo Binghe,” he greeted, inclining his head slightly, voice hoarse from dehydration and lack of use. His neck strained just from the small nod, his spine complaining in a sudden flare of pain, and it felt like a herculean feat to simply raise his gaze back up to the half-demon.
Ah. His Binghe looked…it was not good. Shen Qingqiu felt his breath stop at the rage in his disciple’s eyes. Suddenly the blood parasites that had been sitting quietly in his stomach wriggled to life. So the torture would continue? He felt oddly at peace with it, a dark part of him that had ballooned over the past few days whispering that it wasn’t so unreasonable for him to be subject to this pain after everything he’d done.
But the parasites squirmed up to his chest, knitting the unhealed wounds from the palace mistress’s barbed whip together. They were gently, but worked swiftly, and the sensation was so foreign and strange that Shen Qingqiu could not help but let out a small, pained gasp. He bit his tongue before he could make another such noise, but the parasites only worked faster.
Shen Qingqiu blinked.
At some point, Binghe had grabbed him. Shen Qingqiu’s head spun, trying to figure out when the half-demon had made such a move. His disciple gathered him up into his arms, pressing Shen Qingqiu’s head to his chest. A hand grabbed his wrist, circling through his qi—when had the Immortal Binding Cables been removed? Shen Qingqiu, pressed as tightly as he was to his chest, felt how Binghe’s breath stuttered. Smooth, soothing spiritual energy flowed through his meridians, the decay in his arm from No Cure retreating slowly.
“Binghe,” he mumbled, feeling the warm energy pouring into his frigid form. Unconsciously, he nuzzled into the chest holding him, thinking absently that he had missed Binghe’s smell. The world was growing hazy, weeks of exhaustion and pain fizzling around his vision.
As everything faded to black, he thought he heard someone call out for him.
Nothing could have prepared Luo Binghe for the sight which greeted him when the water curtain opened.
Nothing.
His sweet Shizun, kneeling on the stone, his chest covered in whiplashes. His Shizun’s blood, splattered across the floor, soaked into his robes, streaming down his chest. The waterskin he had shoved at the palace mistress, left untouched and out of reach—had his Shizun not had anything to eat or drink in fifteen days?
And Shizun was crying.
He was crying.
His Shizun was looking at him, eyes resigned, accepting, as if—
Luo Binghe closed his eyes on the memory, even though the image of his tortured Shizun still haunted him behind his eyelids, the blood, the pain, the cold, and starvation all seared into his retinas.
He was in his own quarters, Shizun laying asleep on his bed. Before, the mere idea of having Shizun in his bed would have brought him giddy happiness.
Now, he stared at his passed out Shizun with a ramping despair. Even though his blood had healed him, his Shizun still looked terrible. While normally his Shizun was pale as marble, an iridescent beauty, now he looked white to the point of being sickly. His pallid face was marred with deep, dark bags under his eyes from days of sleep loss. His hair was still matted with blood, flaking off in rusty chads onto the pillows. And he had been so cold. Binghe had wrapped him up in as many blankets as he could, but his Shizun was still freezing to the touch.
Tears welled up unbidden, and Binghe felt ugly sobs wrack his frame as he gazed down at his poor Shizun. He was still incredibly confused and hurt by his Shizun’s hatred towards him as a demon, but he would have never wished for this. But wasn’t it his fault? He hadn’t spoken up in his Shizun’s defense, allowing him to be taken into the Water Prison, and then he had been too much of a coward to check to see if he was being treated properly.
The image of Shizun snuggling into his chest, whispering the name of the man responsible for all of his hurt, overlapped onto the one of his Shizun sleeping. Another gut wrenching sob jerked itself out of his lungs.
“Binghe?”
Luo Binghe blinked through his tears, glancing down at his Shizun, who at some point had awakened. Shen Qingqiu looked up at his disciple, brow furrowed in a rare display of open concern. One of his arms twitched, fingers feebly reaching out as if to pat Binghe on the head, as if to comfort him.
Immediately, Binghe felt more tears swelling up. He dropped down onto his knees beside the bed, head down.
“Shizun, please forgive this lowly disciple—”
He was interrupted by a hand lightly landing in his hair. Luo Binghe looked up, tears dripping down his cheeks, into the pained eyes of his Shizun.
“No, Binghe. It is this master who needs to apologize.”
Binghe felt another sob rip through his chest as he frantically shook his head.
“Shizun—”
Shen Qingqiu gulped, his normally stoic face cracking around the edges. He spoke quickly, as if the words were being forced out of him, emotion thick in each and every word.
“Binghe, this master has always held you in the highest regard. There is nothing this master regrets more than pushing you into that horrible place. Please, forgive this master. Please—”
Binghe yanked his entire body away from the bedside, tearing his Shizun’s hand from out of his hair. He stood up, his legs rigid, pressing the backs of his hands to his leaking eyes.
“Shizun, please, forgive this disciple. This disciple never wanted—I never wanted—” Binghe hiccupped.
Shen Qingqiu reached out again, hand trembling weakly, and Binghe desperately grabbed it with two of his own and brought it to his face. He pressed kisses into the shaking fingers, his lips quivering as he continued to sob. The hand stiffened, before gently cupping his face.
“Oh, Binghe.”
He looked up through tear laden eyelashes at his Shizun who was giving him a sad and endlessly fond smile. Binghe choked on another sob.
“What is going on here?”
Luo Binghe froze. The Palace Master.
“Peak Lord Shen should still be confined to the Water Prison.”
Luo Binghe whirled around, missing the frantic glint that had flashed in Shen Qingqiu’s eyes. His tear-stained face gave way to a twitching snarl. Pure rage swelled up in his chest, encompassing his chest in a tight hold once more. This man—this man allowed the torture of his Shizun—
Beside the Palace Master stood the Palace Mistress, her head flung back, oozing hauteur. Good, Luo Binghe thought. How convenient that these two roaches crawled out from the same crevice. He clenched his teeth.
He smiled. It was not a nice smile.
“Can this one speak to the Palace Master in private for a moment?”
“Binghe—”
For once, Luo Binghe paid no heed to the words of his master. He walked out of the door, back perfectly straight, steps sure and sweeping.
Whatever followed next, Luo Binghe knew that he could come back to his Shizun. His Shizun.
And that was all that mattered.