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The System clearly hated his fucking guts, Shen Yuan thought murderously as he clawed out another hunk of dirt from the hole he was digging. This was just some sick cosmic joke for it, plopping him into the body of some 15-year-old canon fodder character in Proud Immortal Demon Way and demanding that he become a disciple on Qing Jing Peak under threat of immediate ejection back into his corpse if he failed.
His current body was fifteen! Sure, the setting and cultivation rules for Proud Immortal Demon Way were a complete mess because Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky was too much of a hack to establish more than a half-assed system designed entirely for wish fulfilment, but who the hell heard of a disciple being taken at this age?! He wasn't some kind of prodigy like Luo Binghe, the peak lords and particularly the scum villain Shen Qingqiu would take one look at him, immediately see that he was too old and had no potential, and toss him out with a scoff. He was being set up for failure from the very start!
And the worst part was that he wouldn't even get to see Luo Binghe, the only redeemable thing in this entire garbage universe, before he died (again)!
Shen Yuan had briefly hoped that his trial would coincide with Luo Binghe's, so he could at least see the protagonist as a cute little kid, but there was no sign of anyone matching Luo Binghe's description amongst his fellow hopeful disciples.
Shen Yuan briefly wondered where on the novel timeline he was, but came to the conclusion that it ultimately wouldn't matter because his second life was doomed to end after just a few weeks, most of which had been spent hiking to this godforsaken mountain in the first place.
Shen Yuan straightened up in his hole, attempted to wipe some dirt from his face and only succeeded in smearing it across his cheek, and shot a venomous glare in Shen Qingqiu’s direction. Bad enough that the jerk was going to abuse, harass, and mistreat Luo Binghe but now he was also going to get Shen Yuan killed! Bastard. Shen Yuan should have fought harder to get the villain castrated.
The asshole poser met Shen Yuan's glare with a haughty and insufferable look of his own, arching one brow and sneering at Shen Yuan over his fan. Ugh, there was no way he was going to be able to punch an immortal cultivator right in his smug face but Shen Yuan was sorely tempted to at least try , assuming that the System wouldn't immediately boot him back to earth the moment that Shen Qingqiu rejected him. It wasn’t like it could make things any worse.
Shen Qingqiu strode over to Shen Yuan's hole and Shen Yuan's fantasies about punching the bastard were momentarily eclipsed by the realisation that the pit he was standing in put his face right at convenient kicking height.
“Is the assigned task unsatisfactory for you?” Shen Qingqiu asked archly.
Well, if the last thing that Shen Yuan was going to do in this life was getting to complain, he wasn't going to pass up the opportunity. “It certainly is, Peak Lord Shen. What kind of cultivation aptitude are we supposed to be demonstrating with this stupid test, huh? My pit is bigger than anyone else's because I'm older and stronger than them, but are you going to tell me that means I have more cultivation potential than someone younger, with more time to grow? That’s completely stupid. So, are you testing for who can dig the worst hole instead? Or are you just testing to see who's the most willing to do pointless menial bullshit because someone in fancy clothes told them to? This was clearly designed by a talentless hack with no imagination who just wanted to see kids literally claw though the dirt for the hope of a better life.”
Shen Qingqiu's eyebrow kept creeping higher on his face as Shen Yuan's rant continued. “Such strong opinions. You think you know better than the cultivation masters that came before you?”
“I call it as I see it,” Shen Yuan sneered, rolling his eyes. There weren't actually any grand cultivation masters, after all, just a talentless hack of an author.
Shen Qingqiu's eyes flicked up and past Shen Yuan for just a moment, then slid back down to him and narrowed in a smirk. “I see. Well, it should be interesting to watch you crash and burn if nothing else,” he replied, fluttering his fan. “Report to Qing Jing Peak in the morning.”
“Yeah, sure, fu– wait, what?” Shen Yuan faltered, gaping up at the scum villain.
“Did I stutter?” Shen Qingqiu asked, before turning gracefully around and somehow managing to aim a spray of dirt directly into Shen Yuan's face with that movement.
Shen Yuan really wasn't sure what that was all about, but he got to live to see another day and wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Shen Yuan arrived at the central pavilion of the peak before the sun had even peeked over the horizon, practically vibrating with excitement. He had made it! He had achieved the impossible! It was only a matter of time before he got to see Luo Binghe now, and Shen Yuan was sure that the sight of the sweet white sheep Luo Binghe was before his blackening arc would heal his heart and make all the bullshit he had endured worth it.
Maybe Shen Yuan had shown up before Luo Binghe had even made it to the sect. He could work hard and become a respectable older shixiong for the poor kid, and help make his time on Qing Jing Peak less of a nightmare. Or maybe Luo Binghe was already here, and Shen Yuan would be his shidi. No matter where it was on the timeline, Shen Yuan was sure that he could use a friend. He could be like a second Ning Yingying, minus the future wife aspect, obviously.
A teenager with a sour expression strode up to Shen Yuan, looking at his mud-smeared robes with disdain. Shen Yuan didn't know what they expected; he'd been forced to scrabble in the dirt for hours during the disciple selection process, and it wasn't like he had a spare set just laying around. Shen Yuan hadn't wanted to bother with cleaning his clothes more than was required to brush off the dried chunks loose, considering he was going to be wearing the Qing Jing Peak disciple uniform soon. His skin and hair were clean despite him needing to wash up in a horribly cold mountain stream, he should be commended for doing that much!
“You’re the new disciple?” the teenager asked him, folding his arms.
“That’s right,” Shen Yuan agreed, making sure to bow properly. This peak was absolutely full of bullies who relentlessly harassed Luo Binghe, so he wasn’t precisely expecting a warm welcome, but it was probably better to mind his manners nonetheless. “This one’s name is Shen Yuan, and he will be in your care, shixiong.”
“You’ll be earning your keep is what you’ll be doing. Start chopping firewood,” the teenager ordered him, tossing a dull woodcutting axe at Shen Yuan’s feet.
“Ah, this one will get right on that, shixiong,” Shen Yuan agreed, stooping to pick up the tool. “Is there… somewhere this one should report to in order to receive his uniform and cultivation manual?”
The teenager rolled his eyes. “I’ll speak with Shizun about providing you with a cultivation manual this evening. Ning-shimei can help you with getting some more appropriate garments, but don’t waste her time.” He pointed towards one building off to the west. “She should be managing the outfitting and supplies for the peak currently.”
Shen Yuan bowed again and scurried off in the direction he had been pointed. He slipped inside the building only to find a pretty young woman quietly weeping to herself at a desk. He froze up and attempted to retreat, but it was too late; he’d been noticed. The woman sniffled and lifted her head to look at him. “O-oh. Pardon me, I just…” her breath hitched, and she took a deep breath, clearly trying to wrestle back tears. “You must be the new shidi,” she managed to say in a trembling voice.
Shen Yuan stood there awkwardly. “This disciple is new to Qing Jing Peak, shijie,” he agreed quietly, not sure how he would go about consoling a stranger.
“It must seem silly, but I’m afraid I recently lost a shidi, so I’m grieving a little,” the young woman admitted, wiping her eyes.
“It isn’t silly to grieve for someone,” Shen Yuan replied, and couldn’t help but think about his own sister, back in China. Would she be crying for Shen Yuan too, once his body was discovered? “Sometimes it hurts, caring about someone. But I’m sure that wherever your shidi is now, he’s grateful that you’re thinking of him, and that he wants you to be happy in the future, even if you’re sad right now.”
The young woman closed her eyes and more tears slipped down her cheeks. “Thank you, I think I needed to hear that. I’m sorry for making a scene, though. Let’s start over. I’m Ning Yingying, and you are…?”
Shen Yuan froze. Ning Yingying? Luo Binghe’s future wife Ning Yingying? Clearly nearly an adult Ning Yingying, who was weeping over a lost shidi? No. No, no, no, this couldn’t be right, this had to be a mistake. The System wouldn’t be so sadistic as to have put him into the timeline at this location, could it? “I’m… Shen Yuan,” he managed, his voice sounding a bit strangled. “By… by any chance, is your shidi named Luo Binghe?”
Ning Yingying inhaled sharply, then nodded. “He is. I suppose you heard about him? He… he won the entire conference, after all, even if he never got to…” her voice broke, and she buried her face in her hands.
Shen Yuan was forced to attempt to gently coax a weeping Ning Yingying into providing him with a disciple uniform while internally screaming at the top of his lungs.
Okay, okay, this was fine. It was fine. There were still five years before Luo Binghe got out of the Abyss and wreaked his terrible revenge on Qing Jing Peak and the rest of the cultivation world. Shen Yuan could just learn absolutely everything he could in the interim and then run for the hills when the time ran out. He could probably find a nice quiet farming village to live in for a little while before the realms were merged and everything literally went to hell. He wasn’t completely doomed.
[Ding! New Quest Assignment: Save Cang Qiong Mountain Sect From Being Destroyed By the Protagonist! Failure will result in immediate termination of the current transmigration status.]
…He was completely doomed.
If there was one good thing about knowing that he was completely and utterly fucked, it was that he had essentially nothing left to lose. Consequently, he didn’t see very much reason for continuing to pretend to be a diligent and obedient disciple for Qing Jing Peak. What’s the worst thing they could do, kick him out? He was dead in five years already, that didn’t scare him.
Especially not after he received his cultivation manual from the sour-faced teenager he now knew as Ming Fan and opened it up to some very familiar passages, ones he knew from the early chapters of Proud Immortal Demon Way.
This was the same fucking fake cultivation manual they had given to Luo Binghe! Shen Qingqiu really couldn’t be happy ruining one teenager’s life, no, he needed a replacement scapegoat to torment, clearly.
Shen Yuan was no longer willing to play nice, so he didn’t see the point of pretending. He knew Qing Jing Peak, he had read thousands of words of descriptions of it, mostly regarding the areas where Luo Binghe had been horribly abused within, which was most of it. Seeing everything in person got some getting used to, but it wasn’t all that difficult to get his bearings.
He was in the middle of concocting a plan to break into the Qing Jing Peak library and help himself to a real cultivation manual when Ming Fan stopped them in front of a rickety shed. “This is where you can sleep, urchin. Maybe if you prove yourself capable of actually keeping yourself clean, you can actually be trusted to enter the dormitories,” he sneered, and Shen Yuan gaped at him in disbelief.
Really? Really? Was he just Luo Binghe 2.0? Was this what he had been selected for? What the hell, Shen Qingqiu, did you miss having some kid to be your punching bag that much?
“You’d better not be thinking of complaining,” Ming Fan told him. “If you can’t handle something as simple as this, you’ll never be a real cultivator.”
Shen Yuan wasn’t sure what kind of cultivation based around arts and culture was supposed to be helped by sleeping on the floor of a drafty woodshed. Maybe if this was the ascetic peak, Ming Fan would have a point, but currently the assertion smelled like bullshit, especially considering that no one else seemed to be using this approach. Of course, arguing wouldn’t do him any good, so Shen Yuan just bowed his head politely. “Thanking Ming-shixiong.”
“Sleep well.You’ve got chores at dawn,” Ming Fan said, and strode off.
Shen Yuan peeked into the woodshed to see if any personal touches from the protagonist remained, but it seemed like any belongings that Luo Binghe might have kept here had been disposed of. Of course Shen Yuan wouldn’t be able to find anything like a spare sleeping robe to help ward off the cold and maybe cuddle a little, that would be too pleasant. This transmigration was clearly punishment for some kind of horrible sin that Shen Yuan had committed in his past lives and now he was in hell.
Being the new scapegoat for Qing Jing Peak in Luo Binghe’s absence sucked, but Shen Yuan was not a helpless orphan child, and he had no intention of taking the abuse lying down. He intended to make use of every last scrap of meta knowledge to spite everyone who wanted to bring him down, especially Shen Qingqiu.
He’d buried the fake cultivation manual in a hole under a tree and stolen a real manual from the supply storage the very first night. When the kitchens refused to serve him meals, Shen Yuan went off into the mountains to find the pleasant little date locations that Luo Binghe had brought his future wives to, ones that had plenty of lucious, juicy fruits that were magically ripe year-round because god forbid that Luo Binghe need to endure a season where nubile young ladies couldn’t have sticky juices spilling down their cheeks and licked off of their fingers.
He had also stolen a pipa from the music room and found his way to the cave that housed a large population of alto-vibrato bamboo-silkworms, which were fascinating creatures that produced different kinds of silk depending on the different sounds that they heard. One of the only redeeming features of Proud Immortal Demon Way (aside from Luo Binghe) was the creatures, and these things, though not as cool as some of the combat-ready monsters in the later chapters, did demonstrate some level of creativity. Shen Yuan made use of the years of music lessons his earth parents had paid for and played until his fingers bled, gathering yards and yards of all kinds of different kinds of silk by the end of it.
Some of that went into creating a much better sleeping quarters for Shen Yuan. He blocked up the cracks through which the drafts emerged and with the help of a migrating flock of eiderdown-selentium otter geese and a carefully-carved birdcall whistle, Shen Yuan had managed to stuff a fluffy and comfortable futon and duvet for himself. He was probably sleeping better than anyone else on the peak, well, during the few times when he bothered sleeping.
He was originally an internet-addicted shut in, after all, Shen Yuan was used to staying up into ungodly hours of the night reading and operating on a handful of hours of sleep a night. It made for good practice for this, because Shen Yuan had a very limited timeframe to work within and a lot of things to try to get done in that time.
He spent most of his nights sneaking into the library to read through more advanced theory and instruction manuals. He knew a lot of the kinds of bullshit that could be done within the system that Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had written, and just needed a little bit of additional input to grasp how to really put it into practice. His next theft target was some talisman paper and ink, as well as additional array theory he wanted to put into place once his cultivation was more advanced.
His daytime was spent primarily doing chores. He was not permitted to attend lessons, which was honestly a bit of a relief since he didn’t think that he was going to be able to convince Luo Binghe to spare Cang Qiong Mountain Sect by writing a really nice poem or painting a really nice landscape.
(He didn’t think that he would be able to stop Luo Binghe with talismans and arrays and cultivation, either, but if he was going to spend time in a fantasy world then he would at least like to engage with the fantasy, please and thank you.)
Instead, Shen Yuan became a master of malicious compliance and went out of his way to complete each one of his assigned tasks as slowly and ponderously as possible. Of course, he didn’t actually spend three sichen chopping wood, but when he was out in the woods alone he rarely had anyone to try to torment him or beat him up and he had plenty of opportunity to work on his cultivation. One of the first things that he focused on was learning how to toughen his body and improve healing, because no matter how innocently he claimed to not understand that the chore should have been done within a different timeframe, or that he had just lost track of time, he usually ended up getting smacked around a bit. The wound-soothing spring that Luo Binghe had found when he was sixteen was truly a godsend.
Shen Yuan also had no illusions that his privacy was going to be respected and that the bullies on the peak wouldn’t try to destroy his belongings, which was why he gathered a large quantity of vermillion argavian itchwort (while wearing very thick gloves). It was one of the few plants that produced an irritant that didn’t require papapa to resolve, and instead produced widespread, inflamed, and extremely itchy red boils all over any exposed skin for the next 48 hours. Shen Yuan gathered some soothegrass for himself in the event that the exposure affected him as well, but otherwise he just rigged up his contingency measure and waited.
He was six months into his tenure as a disciple on Qing Jing Peak when a group of his martial siblings went to mess with his bedding and insulation and discovered too late that there were several tightly-packed bundles of itchwort that had been carefully placed to be able to be avoided, but only when someone knew what they were doing.
Shen Yuan came back from his chores, dragging his load of firewood behind him, when he was waylaid by another disciple and delivered to the Bamboo House.
“You cause nothing but trouble, it appears,” Shen Qingqiu remarked, staring at Shen Yuan over his fan.
Shen Yuan endeavoured to look as innocent as possible. “This disciple has done his best to follow the tenets of Qing Jing Peak. He apologises if he has fallen short in that effort.”
“You seem to have gone above and beyond when it comes to poisoning your fellow sect-mates,” Shen Qingqiu replied.
“Poisoning? This disciple would never do such a thing, he treats his martial siblings with the utmost respect, just as has been demonstrated for him,” Shen Yuan replied, unable to keep himself from adding that last jibe to his sentence.
Shen Qingqiu did not miss the intended implication, considering the way his eyebrows twitched. “So you deny having anything to do with the mass amount of itchwort found within your sleeping quarters?”
Shen Yuan looked sorrowful. “This disciple is sad to say that he has not received any education on plant identification, so he could not say what itchwort looks like. He admits he did collect some plants to provide a small level of decoration within the woodshed, as benefits a disciple of a peak dedicated to beauty and elegance. Were some of them harmful?”
Shen Qingqiu’s brows drew together. “You cannot pretend to have plausible deniability for a trap that affected five of your sectmates,” he grit out.
Shen Yuan tilted his head to one side. “Five? For what reason would five of my martial siblings need to go into a small woodshed? If they needed additional firewood they simply could have made a request of me, I would have happily delivered whatever was required.”
Shen Qingqiu snapped his fan closed with a scowl. “Insubordination. Twenty-five lashes,” he snapped out.
Shen Yuan grimaced. This was going to suck.
The blows finally stopped, and Shen Yuan closed his eyes and let out a long, pained wheeze of a breath. His back felt like it was on fire.
“Have you learned your lesson?” Shen Qingqiu asked him.
“I have,” Shen Yuan croaked out, and Shen Qingqiu sniffed dismissively. Shen Yuan resisted the urge to point out that Shen Qingqiu had never once tried to teach him anything.
“See that you apply it in the future,” Shen Qingqiu remarked, before dropping the whip and taking his leave, while Shen Yuan was eventually untied by his shixiongs (thankfully not the ones who had been affected by the itchwort, since they were all on Qian Cao for treatment).
The lesson that Shen Yuan learned was that he needed to develop better resistance to blows to his back, because he had no intention of stopping what he was doing.
Shen Yuan was slightly surprised when he rolled out of bed, flung open the door of the woodshed, and came face-to-face with a beautiful young adult with fluffy, luxurious hair and eyes bright as the stars in the sky. He didn’t recognize this disciple; he was sure that he would have remembered someone so pretty. He would have assumed it was a disciple from some other peak, but the young man was wearing the Qing Jing Peak uniform. “Ah, hello, shixiong,” he said after taking a moment to recover, bowing his head. “Is this disciple required for something?”
The youth glanced past him at the woodshed, looking slightly bemused. “Is that normally where you sleep?”
“Ah, it is. It’s a bit of a mess, sorry, I wasn’t expecting company,” Shen Yuan replied sheepishly, nudging the door closed behind him. “What can this disciple help you with?”
“This shixiong has been… absent from the peak for quite a while. I was wondering what sort of changes have happened in the meantime,” the young man replied.
“Ah, that explains why I don’t recognize you! You’ve been gone for five years or more?” Shen Yuan remarked, looking a bit closer at the young man. He didn’t look much older than 17, had Shen Qingqiu really sent a twelve-year-old off on some years-long mission off peak?
…Who was he kidding, that sounded exactly like something Shen Qingqiu would do. “Well, sure, I’m happy to show you around! Welcome back, by the way! Uh, since I wasn’t here when you were still at the peak I don’t know exactly how things are different, but I can give you a tour at least.”
Shen Yuan felt a bit bad for this poor kid, honestly. He was showing up just near the tail end of the grace period that Cang Qiong Mountain had before Luo Binghe made his reappearance and enacted his revenge upon everyone who had mistreated him. Ah, if only the young man had stayed away on his mission for a few more years, he might have been spared the fate of the rest of the sect. Well, the rest of the sect that weren’t destined to be Luo Binghe’s wives, at least. And no matter how pretty this kid was, he was still definitely a man, so he wasn’t going to be added to the harem. In fact, considering how attractive he was, he might suffer some horrible fate as a rival to the protagonist! Truly, this world was unbelievably unfair.
If Shen Yuan could succeed in his ridiculous mission to save Cang Qiong Mountain Sect from Luo Binghe’s destruction then maybe this kid could be spared his fate too, but Shen Yuan wasn’t under any delusions about him having a snowflake’s chance in hell of actually succeeding in his task, the System just enjoyed torturing him.
Shen Yuan sighed and resolved to do what he could for this poor kid. He could at least try to steer him away from any of the protagonist’s future wives and maybe grant him a more merciful demise.
While Shen Yuan was busy lamenting his fate, the kid slipped past him and began to open the door to the shed. “Pardon me, but I’m a bit curious about–”
Shen Yuan paled and quickly flicked a talisman out of his sleeves to slap it against the wall of the shed. There was a brief spark and ripple of spiritual energy, and the young man looked at Shen Yuan curiously before pushing the door open the rest of the way and immediately looking up. Suspended above the open doorway was a basin of some sort, held upright by a small array. “A booby trap, shidi?”
“Ahahaha, sorry, sorry, I take my privacy a bit seriously,” Shen Yuan said, rubbing the back of his neck and hoping that he wasn’t coming across as a complete lunatic. He was probably failing, but, well, this kid would learn his reputation soon enough if he asked around the rest of the disciples.
“It’s clever,” the teenager remarked, looking over the array with interest. “Keyed to activate only for certain individuals, this is a very tidy piece of work. What’s someone with a talent like this doing sleeping in the woodshed?”
Shen Yuan snorted. “I guess it’s just tradition to get the most talented people on the peak to sleep in the woodshed here on Qing Jing Peak. I’m really just walking in the shadow of my far more illustrious shixiong, Luo Binghe.”
The young man paused, then turned his attention from the array to Shen Yuan. “Pardon me?”
“I mean, I’m sure you knew him, if you were here before I arrived. Absolutely brilliant cultivator, a once-in-a-lifetime genius, someone who blazed so brightly that even being targeted and bullied relentlessly, and never actually taught properly, he defeated the great demon Elder Sky Hammer unarmed, at the age of fifteen? Who won the entire goddamn Immortal Alliance Conference even when an overwhelming horde of powerful demons and monsters invaded the event? This stuff is just child’s play compared to the kinds of feats that he could pull off, believe me.”
The young man raised his eyebrows. “I was unaware that Luo Binghe was described in such glowing terms.”
Shen Yuan snorted. “He isn’t, but that’s because idiots are unwilling to actually look and see reality. If anyone was actually willing to give Luo Binghe the recognition he deserved, to nurture the talents that he had instead of stupidly trying to smother them, then Luo Binghe would have been the finest cultivator that Cang Qiong Mountain Sect would have ever produced. But heavens forbid that anyone actually succeeds where Shen Qingqiu failed,” Shen Yuan spat, rolling his eyes. “That guy has no business being a teacher if he only wants people to go through the same hardships he did, the point of an older generation is supposed to be to provide guidance so that things improve!”
“...That’s a very interesting point of view, shidi,” the young man remarked, and Shen Yuan remembered whom he was ranting to.
“Ah, sorry, are you a fan of Peak Lord Shen? I’m sort of his nemesis, so if that bothers you, then you should probably ask someone else to give you a tour. I don’t have much of a verbal filter, as you can probably tell.”
The young man inclined his head slightly and gave Shen Yuan a heart-melting smile. Yeah, Shen Yuan needed to keep this kid miles away from any of Luo Binghe’s future wives, that charm level could rival the protagonist and would spell doom for this poor hapless kid. “No, shidi, I think I’d like to spend this time with you.”
Shen Yuan couldn’t help but return the smile. “Well, all right then, I’ll show you all of my tricks.”
“They locked up the library after I broke in there too many times, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Come on, we just need to shimmy up these supports,” Shen Yuan explained, pulling free one of his sashes and wrapping it around one of the posts supporting the roof of the records building. He looked over at the young man, expecting him to follow suit, but he seemed to be distracted by the way that his outer robes were hanging open. “Ahem, shixiong. My eyes are up here,” Shen Yuan teased with a smile. Obviously he wasn’t being ogled, the kid was probably just shocked at the impropriety. “Don’t worry I don’t do this kind of thing in front of just anyone, I wouldn’t expose tender eyes. Now come on.”
The young man also wound a piece of cloth around a support and the both of them used the leverage to make their way up to the roof of the third floor without using any spiritual energy which would have set off the wards Shen Qingqiu had set up after Shen Yuan’s twenty-third break in. From there, it was a quick leap to the library roof, and then Shen Yuan showed the kid the opening he had discovered in the upper windows, one that let them drop into the library proper. “And that’s how you do it,” Shen Yuan said with a proud grin, gesturing at the shelves around them and lighting up a night pearl he’d swiped from the peak storage. It was nighttime, now, for some reason. Had Shen Yuan really spent an entire day with the kid? Well, he wouldn’t have been able to break into the library during the daytime unnoticed, so it must have been the entire day.
“Impressive, shidi,” the young man agreed, looking around. “How do you get back out?”
Shen Yuan smiled and moved over to one of the shelves against the wall, fishing out a thin but strong rope of alto-vibrato bamboo-silkworm thread that had been painted to be camouflaged against the walls of the library. “Just gotta climb up out using this before morning. Until then, though, I can read whatever I want. You can too, now, no matter what Shen Qingqiu has to say about it. Let me know if you’re looking for anything in particular, I think I know most of the catalogue by heart by now. Currently I’ve been working through the location talisman treatises and instructions, though I suppose I don’t need to any more,” Shen Yuan said with a shrug.
“Why’s that, shidi?” the young man asked.
“Oh, it’s because I found what I was looking for. It was a real challenge figuring out how to key the talismans properly to find fake jade instead of the real stuff, since there’s a number of different minerals that could potentially be. Though I suppose I should be glad that it was fake jade, if it was real I doubt I would have been able to find anything outside of the mass of accessories that Shen Qingqiu ended up hoarding.”
“Fake jade?”
“Oh, that probably sounds weird out of context, huh? Well, I heard from Ning-shijie that Luo Binghe had a pendant that he lost on the mountain as a child, and I thought that it was just too sad to leave a treasured object like that to be consumed by nature, so I decided to see if I could locate it,” Shen Yuan explained. He did not bring up that it was his last ditch hail-mary attempt to see if he could find something that might spare Cang Qiong Mountain Sect from its fate. He had to admit that he probably wouldn’t be able to barter with Luo Binghe; most likely revealing the fake jade guanyin would just result in Luo Binghe immediately killing him in order to snatch it from his cold and unworthy hands, but it was worth a shot. Or at least it would lead to a quick end, right? “Everyone tells me that shixiong has passed on, but I still feel a sense of filial duty, I suppose, to try to do things the way he would have wanted them to turn out. So, I found it for him. Maybe it seems silly, considering that I never met the guy, but I can’t help but feel a level of kinship with him after all this. So this is something of a memento of him, I suppose. I look at it and hope that wherever Luo Binghe is, he’s in a better place now.”
When Shen Yuan slipped his fingers under his collar to fish out the pendant and show the kid, he barely managed to get the necklace clear of his clothes before everything dissolved into meaningless, undifferentiated noise.
Shen Yuan was extremely confused to wake up in the woodshed to a System message which read:
[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Good things must be said three times! Quest to save Cang Qiong Mountain Sect complete!]