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His death was not painful, but neither was it particularly peaceful—such is the lot of a ruler, such is the fate of the Celestial Demons, who cannot die too easily.
Luo Binghe finds it merely amusing that, as he learned later, the whole world dies along with him.
The only one whose death he regrets is Shizun; no more, no less.
He isn’t sure if demons are meant to have another life, or if they’re caught in the cycle of reincarnation. Or perhaps he ended up here because a part of his soul remained human? Luo Binghe doesn’t know, has never thought about it, and has no intention of starting now.
Luo Binghe looks at the text in the air, at the sign glowing blue and appearing with the ugliest sound in the world.
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And the last thing Luo Binghe intended to do was obey some unknown authority.
The System — as he would come to realize a little later—spent what felt like an eternity telling him he was wrong.
The madman’s screams continued to haunt him in his nightmares for a long time.
It wasn’t hard to figure out whose body he was in; there were many children in that family, constant fights over food, and the names had been reduced to numbers, revealing his new parents’ lack of affection. To be honest, they were the most disappointing parents Luo Binghe could remember; and that’s saying a lot, considering his father was Tianlang-jun.
At the age of ten, he was kicked out as one of the most useless, for he refused to toil in a field that no one had even plowed properly for planting, and as one of the youngest; he was given a single sack of dry rice and a single copper coin, and the vile creature above him told him where he was to go and who he was to become.
Luo Binghe laughed, a short, strained laugh, immediately seeking out a stream and staring at his reflection for the first time in that unpleasant, long month; his hands clenched the earth, and dirt worked its way under his fingernails the longer he looked; he knew Shang Qinghua’s face too well not to recognize it in that gaunt child.
The previous generation’s Lord of the Peak, An Ding, was handsome, cold, and cruel, so much so that Luo Binghe seriously considered killing him in his sleep; Shang Ba is just one of the many bees of his Peak; his yellow robes are loose enough to hide fruit stolen from the elders’ tables, and his sleeves are loose enough to arm a small group; He is one among a thousand; he should not be seen, but perhaps it is Luo Binghe himself, or perhaps it is his luck, or perhaps it is that very curse of misfortune that Mo Bei-jun sometimes harped on—but his new Shizun is watching him.
His new shizun also dislikes him; his new shizun searches for flaws in him with the precision of a predator; his new shizun wants to push him off the peak just as much as Luo Binghe wants to give in to his now-nonexistent demonic instincts.
Shu Anli looks at him with green eyes, and Luo Binghe is almost certain that this is his curse: to have a shizun with green eyes, so strongly reminiscent of Shen Qingqiu rather than his husband, that Luo Binghe can only stare back in response, not bowing, not saying a word, showing the little defiance available to him. Shu Anli smiles, the sound like crackling embers, as she tells him she will appoint him as the chief disciple of the Peak, four years after they first met.
Luo Binghe doesn’t understand this man; he never has. He was broken and turned inside out long before Luo Binghe was even born, not to mention this whole unwanted journey into the past in a stranger’s body.
Three months later, Luo Binghe finds Xu Anli with his meridians sealed and his veins slit; he stares at him in silence for no less than half a shichen, thinking of everything and nothing at once, before calling for someone.
He is appointed as a not-quite-Lord of the Peak, and the current sect leader looks at him with such sorrowful eyes that even Luo Binghe feels a flicker of sympathy, enough to object to the appointment or ask for full regalia.
He has existed in this position for ten years, wondering how the real Shang Qinghua, whom he knew, did not become a mass murderer. Because, as the gods can see, Luo Binghe is one step away from it.
And then they tell him that someone killed twenty of An Ding’s disciples on the border with Huan Hua using ice, and Luo Binghe’s eye twitches.
Mobei-jun is young; younger and shorter than anyone Luo Binghe has ever seen; he is also weak, wounded, poisoned, and clearly on the run, crossing the lands of Zang Qiong and Huan Hua.
“Let me make this clear right away”, says Luo Binghe, drawing his sword, though he doesn’t think the battle will be long or difficult, “I’m not playing games with you”.
Mobei-jun looks at him as if he were the last bastard he could possibly have encountered, which is rather ironic, since it was Luo Binghe who had put up with him for over a hundred years, along with his dreadful tendency to make advances.
(Of course, Luo Binghe would have to repeat the same thing for the next forty years.)
Bai Zhan’s protégé, Liu Qingge, is young, stubborn, and incredibly pushy.
“Fight me, shixiong”, says the boy, bursting into his study just as Luo Binghe has been awake for five days and was thinking of asking Mu Lian to simply give him a lethal dose of sleeping pills.
Luo Binghe looks at Liu Qingge, already the chief disciple of his peak, already a thorn in his side, already realizing that perhaps the real Shang Qinghua was some kind of fucking saint.
Luo Binghe looks at the fourteen-year-old boy and wonders what the sect leader would say if he quietly got rid of one noisy child.
Luo Binghe is almost certain he’ll get away with it, because who else would want to take on his position with such an endless pile of tasks and responsibilities? Where would you find a third idiot like that? And yet Luo Binghe remains here, under the watchful eye of that irritating higher power.
“You’d better be a good shidi and go get some wine for this shixun from Zhang-shidi”, says Luo Binghe, returning to his papers; he thinks that this time he’ll simply bring the empire to its knees if they offer him the chance to rule it.
Liu Qingge throws a tantrum, and Luo Binghe bangs his forehead against the table; he isn’t sure he’ll live to see Shizun arrive at the sect.
Shen Jiu is led to stand beside Yue Qi; it is a windy autumn day; Shen Jiu stares at the peaks with anger, resentment, and contempt; Shen Jiu looks around and sees nothing but enemies.
Luo Binghe needs only a second to understand; it takes him just a moment for all the pieces of a puzzle spanning several hundred years to fall into place; he had suspected this before, he just… just hadn’t asked.
Shen Jiu is not his shizun, not his husband.
Years go by, with one lord succeeding another, while Tianlang-jun remains sealed beneath the mountain (he couldn’t do anything about it; that blue creature nearly killed him when he simply wanted to peek at his mothers with one eye), and they hold one recruitment drive after another. Running beside Shen Qingqiu is the small and young Ning Yingyin, and Luo Binghe always has her favorite chestnuts tucked away in his sleeve for her (he has plenty of sweets in his sleeves now, instead of knives; there are so many children around who need feeding).
He looks across yet another field full of girls and boys digging holes, who see themselves as future farmers, who don’t yet know the world as well as they should, when he notices him.
A boy with disheveled, dirty hair and gray eyes, a boy named “Luo Binghe” who digs a hole with the confidence of a man who knows what he’s doing, a boy who looks up at him with recognition, eyes with an age unsuitable for his body.
Shan Qinghua looks at him across the field with the same bewilderment that Luo Binghe feels; decades later, the story begins anew, with hardly any changes.