Chapter Text
Shen Yuan shut his eyes as a young man waiting to die in a hospital and opened them again as a wrinkly infant covered in substances best left unimagined.
[Welcome to the System! The System is based on the concept ‘YOU CAN YOU UP. NO CAN NO BB.’ We hope to provide you with a rewarding experience. It is our sincere hope that during the course of your adventure, you can achieve your desire to transform a ‘Stupid Novel’ into a high-end and impressive classic. We pray for your happiness,] a mechanical and inflectionless voice announced over the general hubbub of the group of women handling him. Then it added, somewhat more worryingly, [Error.]
They were all middle-aged dressed in hanfu, although not the elaborate get ups he’d gotten used to seeing in the wild these past few years as street fashion got more and more daring. These were plainer, almost workaday sorts of garments in muted colors and similar enough from woman to woman that he thought it might be a uniform.
[Error] the mechanical voice repeated itself. [System Activation unsuccessful. An unexpected interruption has occurred during the binding process. Host has been re-routed to the closest compatible and unoccupied role. Skill set package already uploaded. Attempting recall. Recall failed.]
As he was an infant, Shen Yuan couldn’t do much of anything about what the System was muttering to itself. He could only note that all of that sounded like bad news for him.
[Binding role: Shen Yuan, Oldest Son of the main branch of the Shen Clan and Heir to Duke of the First Rank, Shen Kang. Weapon: none. Starting B-Points: feature disabled.]
‘That’s my name,’ Shen Yuan thought to himself. Actually, the rest of it sounded kind of familiar too. He wasn’t anyone’s oldest son and did not come from a society that even had an aristocracy anymore.
No, ‘Shen Yuan, the only son and heir to the Duke of Celestial Happiness’ was a character in the godawful fucking webnovel he’d finished slightly ahead of rage-choking on a mantou. Specifically, he was the victim in the ‘Murder in Xianle’ arc from somewhere around chapter 5,000. Shen Yuan had been briefly excited to see his name (correct characters and everything!) showing up in the story until he found out that ‘Shen Yuan’ died off screen before Luo Binghe even got to town.
Worse still, the entire arc was built on the foundation of a dogshit retcon that was lazy even by standards of that 10K-a-Day philistine, Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky.
Luo Binghe, after previously having a fairly solid backstory with most of his youth accounted for as being homeless, briefly happy and poor with an adoptive parent, homeless again, and then a beaten down reject disciple on Qing Jing Peak suddenly developed a new bit of backstory where he’d been a servant for a brief period of time in his early teens in order to pay for his room and board on the mountain.
Nevermind that cultivators hardly used money. Nevermind that Shen Qingqiu was directly quoted as never having allowed Luo Binghe to descend the mountain from the time he was admitted into the sect to the day they departed for the Immortal Alliance Conference. Nevermind that same Shen Qingqiu’s pride would never permit one of his disciples, even Luo Binghe, to be seen drudging for a commoner’s household.
Did Airplane care about that? No, they did not.
So Luo Binghe returned to the Xianle region on an unrelated matter that got immediately dropped when he discovered, to his horror, that the young master of the family that he’d briefly served had been found dead. No exposition was given about why Luo Binghe cared or felt like he needed to get involved since his usual attitude towards non-cultivator aristocracy was lukewarm at best, but the rest of the arc after that rough start turned into a fairly decent mystery where the question often felt more like ‘who didn’t kill the young master?’
Shen Yuan had died of a blow to the head, but his autopsy revealed that someone had poisoned him before that besides getting stabbed at some point. He was also suffering from pneumonia after he got pushed into a pond.
The Main Branch of the Shen Family were all decent people, but Duke Xianle had only one wife who died in childbirth and no concubines, so his household was tiny and became suppressed by the families of his two younger brothers. Shen Yuan grew up safe in the long shadow cast by his father and grandmother, but the knives came out once his father died and his grandmother started to suffer from dementia.
Luo Binghe eventually revealed that everyone in the Shen Family except for the grandmother and one of his female cousins, had taken a shot at Shen Yuan at one point or another. Being the region’s overlord, he had them all executed and the children who were too young to have been involved were adopted out to other families. The cousin vanished into Luo Binghe’s harem and the old woman was resettled in her courtyard at Huan Hua Palace.
‘No way,’ Shen Yuan thought in total dread.
[Correct. Host is occupying the role of Shen Yuan, eventual murder victim in Chapter 5213 of Proud Immortal Demon Way. Original Role -Shen Qingqiu- was unexpectedly unavailable.]
Alright, maybe being a murder victim wasn’t so bad.
Apparently, his alternative was getting turned into a human stick. Although, who in their right mind had classified him as a potential villain? Shen Yuan couldn’t even squash bugs without psyching himself up first. Even then, nine times out of ten, he ended up catching them and taking them outside.
[Host has been repurposed into a {Mob} class role. Opportunities for promotion will become available as the story progresses.]
“He’s not crying,” the woman bathing him fretted.
“He’s warm and breathing,” another one said. She flicked her fingers in front of Shen Yuan’s face and watched as he tracked the motion. “Sometimes they don’t cry.”
“The Master is already worried about Madam,” the first woman said. “Give him a pinch. Hearing the baby cry will distract him and give the doctor time to work.”
‘I’d like to see you try!’ Shen Yuan thought, but was totally unprepared for the giant hand that caught his pudgy thigh between its nails. The noise that erupted from him was unprecedented, and once he started crying, it was impossible to stop. His little baby body just could handle pain on top of everything he was feeling.
“There we go!” the second woman chuckled and cradled him against her chest as she stroked his back. “That’s a good boy. Everything will be fine now. You’ll see.”
Spoiler: everything was not fine.
Young Madam Shen did not survive the night. In fact, she passed out during the delivery and never woke up again.
Shen Yuan was perversely glad that the maids never got the opportunity to take him in to see her. How terrible would it be to let her think she’d successfully brought a son into the world only to have to unwittingly hold the changeling that took his place?
Contrary to the classic archetypes of this kind of novel, Duke Xianle took his wife’s death hard rather than shrugging his shoulders and slotting a new woman into her place the second her mourning period was over.
He refused to marry again, despite the best persuasions of his mother and his sisters-in-law. It was no wonder he didn’t listen to his in-laws. They were looking to maneuver a relative into his household, but his mother would have settled for a noble consort just so that the Duke would have someone to manage his domestic affairs.
No, Duke Xianle hired a steward for his courtyard and nannies for his son. Control of the common finances remained in Old Madam Shen’s hands and, after a period of time where she observed the housekeeping skills of her remaining daughters-in-law with growing dismay, she resigned herself to keeping the main accounts until she could get her grandson married off.
Shen Yuan was privy to all of it, as he spent most of his time as an infant sitting in his grandmother’s lap. So he got a front-row seat to all the hackneyed inner courtyard bullshit that his two aunts pulled on one another. They didn’t dare challenge their mother-in-law directly, but they were constantly jockeying with each other for clout in the mansion.
His two aunts were roughly equal in looks, intelligence, and income, so they kept each other in check while he was small, but eventually his youngest aunt produced a son. They’d both had kids before that, but those were all girls.
Shen Yuan didn’t remember there being a male cousin in the story so close to his age so, predictably, that kid died in infancy. It might even have been of natural causes, but his parents would never ever believe it and that was when the quiet wars of the Shen family’s inner courtyard started to really get bloody.
Duke Xianle was careful with Shen Yuan and he hardly left his grandmother’s sight. He was protected, somewhat, by the fact that there were no other boys in the family yet and wouldn’t be for years yet. As much as his paternal relatives wanted to take over control of the family from his father, they couldn’t risk making a decisive move until they had their own heirs. The dynasty of Emperors who’d granted the family their noble title had been known to take titles back if they thought a bloodline was foundering.
‘Not consistently producing male offspring’ had counted as foundering in the past, in case anyone was curious.
Shen Yuan came to like his immediate relatives as he grew up. His father had a good sense of humor and was uncharacteristically willing -for a man in his position- to make silly faces at a baby. His grandmother had a sharp, dry sort of humor. Very little escaped her notice in the household and he learned most of what he needed to know about the practicalities of living in this world from her incisive commentary, even if she didn’t realize just how well he’d been following along.
Was he resigned to his future as eventual cannon fodder? No, Shen Yuan fully planned on surviving this bullshit novel. The System, which had vanished after his first few minutes of life, had promised him a ‘chance at promotion.’ It was probably going to involve outmaneuvering the sociopaths who lived in his house, which sucked because he didn’t read a lot of Counter Attack type novels.
Usually what happened with those was that the protagonist ran out of enemies from their first life and started losing the armour of righteousness that excused the shady-ass stuff they got up to in the name of saving themselves during their second try at life. When that happened, Shen Yuan had to put the book down and go read something lighter for a while.
Say what you would about Proud Immortal Demon Way, Luo Binghe only ever punched up.
Anyway, it wasn’t the worst way to live out twenty-three guaranteed extra years of life. He adjusted to being in a fantasy version of the past. He got used to the primitive sanitary facilities and incense being more or less a way of life. He learned the intricate rules of behavior and how to read traditional Chinese.
He even got a little bonus when he realized what the System had meant when it said [Skill Set Package Uploaded.]
Shen Yuan could cultivate, which was great on multiple levels. For one, he got the full Xianxia transmigrator experience. For another, he was going to be a lot harder to kill when the time came.
What he could not get used to, however, was how involved his relatives were in his sex life.
When Shen Yuan turned sixteen, his grandmother sent an older woman into his courtyard. She wasn’t a permanent placement. No, she was there for a few very educational weeks at the invitation of his grandmother.
He’d kind of known it was coming and he had lived in this world long enough to understand the anxiety surrounding young men from good families who didn’t know how to self-govern. It was kind of like letting a kid drink at home, so they never developed a fixation on it. As the oldest son, his marriage would be critically important to his family and they couldn’t risk him getting entangled with someone who wouldn’t shore up the Main branch’s position in court.
Shen Yuan hadn’t actually died a virgin, so he wasn’t worried about himself. Even so, he still learned some things.
Specifically, he learned some things about his orientation when the ‘maid’ visited his grandmother about halfway through the first week and later reappeared with another male courtesan.
It was —educational and maybe explained a few things about why he’d been unable to keep a girlfriend in his first life
That was when he learned some things about ‘Proud Immortal Demon Way’ that he hadn’t expected to.
His homosexuality was a non-issue for his family. Well, it was a minor issue; specifically, the issue was his eventual kids. Period accurate homophobia was out, but xiào -filial piety- was definitely still in. His grandmother and father made it very clear that his duty was to produce children, but in the same breath they promised that if he was willing to fulfill his filial responsibilities, then they would work hard to find him someone who would be ‘agreeable’ to his circumstances.
Maybe it came as a relief to them both that Shen Yuan wasn’t likely to repeat his father’s fate. Maybe they thought that he’d do a better job of filling a nursery if they took romance out of the equation.
What ‘agreeable’ meant in this context was anyone’s guess. Did they mean they’d find him a nice lesbian who wanted kids? A straight woman who was fine with treating her marriage like a job? He wasn’t looking forward to finding out and, in all honesty, his only requirement was someone who could survive his aunts.
Mostly he left that conversation trying his damnedest to forget that the words “Popo will look for a nice boy to send you in the meantime” ever left his grandmother’s lips.
In any event, he had bigger concerns because that was the year when Luo Binghe finally arrived in Shen Mansion.
Shen Yuan almost didn’t recognize the Protagonist when he arrived in a batch of other kids under the eye of a servant broker. They were a classification of servant unique to Proud Immortal Demon Way; seasonal help. They were all apprentices who’d eventually become skilled laborers, but in the meantime they didn’t have family to pay their fees so they spent part of the year (the slow parts of winter, specifically, when they weren’t bringing in much money and cost the most to keep) as domestic servants.
Two of his servants were going to get married that year, so, even though they wouldn’t be leaving his service, they would no longer be working in the mansion overnight. He’d mostly managed to delete his grandmother’s promise from his memory until the moment she pointed at a fluffy head towards the back and said, “Bring that one forward.”
“This one is twelve years of age,” the broker informed them. “He is a very junior cultivator of little promise and is guaranteed to be available for a minimum of five years after which he may be available for permanent hire, depending on his aptitude.”
(There, the boy in question flinched. It was the first reaction he’d shown since the broker brought him into the yard.)
“Let me see your face,” Old Madam Shen directed.
The boy had been keeping his gaze glued to the floor, but lifted his face to reveal a moon-pale complexion that Shen Yuan’s aunts would have cheerfully killed for. He had wide black eyes like the midnight sky, a straight nose that was neither too large nor too small, and a clever mouth with a pouty lower lip.
Shen Yuan looked upon that unnaturally pretty child and knew he’d just come face to face with the mother fucking protagonist.
“Twelve is young, but having more time to learn the rules isn’t bad,” Old Madam Shen mused to herself. “Go to the side, youngster.”
Old Madam Shen picked out two more of the older boys for Shen Yuan’s courtyard. They were also pretty enough that he had no illusions about what they were being sent to him for. It’d be years yet before he was old enough to marry and it was poor form to take a concubine ahead of a wife, but bed servants were a different story. A Tongfang was the lowest rank of concubine possible and was generally a servant who’d caught their employer’s eye so it was pretty clear to Shen Yuan that his grandmother was setting him up with a selection.
Shen Yuan had no intention of sleeping with any of the comely young men she was funneling into his household. He was too much of a modern person to even consider sleeping with someone he could call an employee -to say nothing of the fact that the oldest one of them was fourteen, ew- but everything he’d read in this genre and everything he’d learned since reincarnating here told him that trying to get her to stop would probably end with him losing control of the situation so he let her do what she liked. It wouldn’t change the operations of his household in the end.
The new servants spent a few days learning the rhythms of the mansion with the Momos in his grandmother’s courtyard before being sent to formally introduce themselves to Shen Yuan.
From the look on their pale little faces, they all knew their new master was a cutsleeve. Only Luo Binghe managed to keep his knees from knocking together, but even he failed to fully hide his apprehension. When his turn came along, he kept his eyes glued to the floor and introduced himself as ‘Binghe’, since the custom in Xianle was for servants to only use their small name while in domestic service.
Shen Yuan accepted their bows and then let his steward haul them off to break it to them in private that no one was going to serve in the young master’s bedroom except to clean it. The two older boys would become general manservants. Meanwhile, Luo Binghe went to the little kitchen responsible for every meal that Shen Yuan didn’t take with the rest of the family.
Originally, he’d planned to butter the protagonist up and at least give him an actual motivation to look into Shen Yuan’s eventual murder. Unfortunately, that plan didn’t survive his integration into the culture of PIDW. Before long, he realized that paying too much attention to one particular servant just caused a different kind of problem for said servant.
So instead he settled for giving the kid congenial work that he knew Luo Binghe would like in a place where he’d be warm and get first dibs on extra food. Shen Yuan could get away with a little preferential treatment because Binghe was currently the youngest, and he was kind of runty for a twelve-year-old, but he now knew he was going to have to balance that with making sure everyone got regularly rewarded. Otherwise, Binghe was just going to wind up getting targeted again by the other boys who didn’t get it as good.
If nothing else, that engendered loyalty in his people and made it harder for the second or third house to meddle in his affairs. They weren’t trying to kill him yet, but his uncles didn’t seem to like it if he got too comfortable or successful, either. Since they couldn’t suppress him overtly, they tended towards more covert methods. His correspondence went missing a lot if he didn’t take care and the reason he had his own kitchen was because he seemed to get sick an awful lot if his diet wasn’t carefully managed. There were lots of ways to scuttle a young person’s future if you were willing to be patient about it. Shen Yuan didn’t want to accept the reputation of being sickly and unreliable, so it was imperative that his yard was as watertight as he could make it.
Luo Binghe was a future concern, but that didn’t mean he could avoid his current problems. He was not, however, expecting the protagonist to become a stout wall for the courtyard all by himself.
The new boys -led by Binghe, no less- intercepted one of Shen Yuan’s older Biao-meis when, in a fit of desperation, she attempted to deliver a highly suspicious bowl of soup to him alone in his bedroom. They were all ignorant country kids, but even they knew she had no business being in a boy’s yard without an escort, much less after dark. She was in tears and the soup got upended into the dirt, but no other damage was done.
That particular cousin wasn’t usually stupid, so Shen Yuan was forced to look into it.
It came out afterwards that her dumbass older brother promised her to a man with more concubines than he could afford already and it’s not like Shen Yuan didn’t understand that Xianxia patriarchy sucked worse than regular modern-day patriarchy. So he made sure that no one found out about the incident and then embarrassed her potential fiance in public so badly that he had to renege on the engagement or else risk slapping his own face again after Shen Yuan got done with it.
The good news was that his youngest aunt arranged another marriage for her niece quick-fast before the brother could stick his foot into it again. It was probably not the match his Biao-mei had been dreaming of, but it was better than what she’d almost gotten stuck with. As a result, his relations with that branch of the family warmed up for a little while. It didn’t last past the first time that uncle or aunt got dissatisfied with something, but it was a nice pause to the hostilities.
The boys handled the matter so well that Shen Yuan could justify bringing in a teacher once a week to teach them reading and basic accounting as a reward. Normal servants could expect periodic cash bonuses and a separation gift at the end of their employment, but these seasonal workers could also be rewarded in ways that would give them an edge in their future careers without it being weird.
Shen Yuan had them all sent off in the Spring with new clothes, red envelopes, and a stash of preserved food, so when they came back the following winter they were a lot less reluctant to get to work.
Seventeen was a rough year because he began studying for the imperial exams in earnest. His cultivation was at a bottleneck and he’d discovered the hard way that the spiritual arts he inherited from almost being Shen Qingqiu were all performed through highly controlled mediums. He didn’t have a source for talisman-grade mulberry paper, and it wasn’t like you could just buy a spiritual tool. The only thing he could do was to establish his foundation and shamelessly use rental swords as soon as he had the reserves to use one. It was better than nothing and did a lot to improve OG Shen Yuan’s canonically delicate health.
In fact, he was so deep into his books that the first time he realized the seasonal workers were back was when he looked up from his work to realize there was a steaming cup of tea at his elbow and Luo Binghe, all of thirteen years old, was quietly refreshing his ink.
Shen Yuan tested it, and the consistency was perfect. “Well done,” he said without thinking about it too hard. “Wei-laoshi would be proud of you.”
“Thanking Shizi for your kind words,” Binghe ducked his head.
He saw a lot of Binghe in the study in the following days and eventually realized that Binghe had been stationed there specifically to bring him water, remind him about meals, and start lighting candles once the sun set.
Since that apparently involved long periods of sitting at attention, Shen Yuan indulged himself again and had another desk brought in. He gave Binghe a calligraphy copybook to go with it and his old brush set. It was nicer to work if he had a study buddy since it wasn’t like this world had ‘Lo-Fi beats to study and relax to.’
Binghe reacted to it like a stray cat who’d gotten an unexpected pat and spent the next several days staring at Shen Yuan while pretending like he wasn’t. Eventually, he opened up the copybook and used it. His progress was, as ever, alarming. By the end of that winter, Binghe’s handwriting looked like he’d started learning years ago. He knew more characters than anyone in Shen Yuan’s household save Shen Yuan himself.
There was no big event that year for Shen Yuan to use as an excuse to spoil the younger boys, but he gave them each a book (carefully selected to be at their reading level) that he felt would be either relevant to their future careers or be something they could easily turn into money. Binghe’s book was the Classic of Changes, which Shen Yuan thought was the most relevant of the Five Classics and Four Books for his purposes.
Maybe he imagined it, but he thought he saw Binghe’s hands tremble as he received the divination manual. Was he upset? Did he not like it? Should he have gotten the Classic of Poetry instead?
Afterwards, though, Binghe refused to let go of it even when the steward gently suggested that maybe he might want to pack it up in his bag before the broker came to collect them for the trip home.