"These...stories, they don't have to end dismally for them to count, right? I mean, terror is terror, isn't it? So it shouldn't make any difference if they end on a positive note, with things working out for a while. Don't you think?"
"...Well, let's try it anyway. It should make an interesting experiment, and I...I want to talk about Liu Qingge, this time. Maybe it defeats the purpose a little, trying to make myself feel better, but...I do miss him. I think I was on pretty good terms with all my martial siblings, but he and I...we had a special bond, for reasons that you'll see shortly."
"As you might have already gathered by now, I'm not really a proper cultivator. I was never initiated into any sect, never passed any trials or studied martial arts in my youth, unless you count a few tai chi classes I took in high school for a PE credit, which you shouldn't. I did read a lot of cultivation stories, but not anymore than I read palace dramas or Western fantasy or other things. I read Harry Potter even, more than once. My favorite character was Remus Lupin."
"When I was...placed, in Shen Qingqiu's body, I inherited all of his skills. I suddenly knew how to do everything he'd known how to do, how to cultivate, how to wield a sword or to fly on it, how to cast spells. I no longer needed to eat or sleep unless I wanted to, and I didn't really got cold anymore, even though I was living in a bamboo cottage with no insulation on a mountain top. It was amazing...but I still felt like something was missing. Knowing how something is done isn't the same thing as being able to do it, after all; if it were otherwise then every single basement-dwelling Bruce Lee fan would on some kind of government watchlist as dangers to society. And I won't get into it now but my first night hunt was very nearly a complete disaster. I knew that if I was going to be a real cultivator, a real and proper peak lord, then I needed...well, I needed to put in some work. I needed to cultivate."
"I asked the sect leader for permission to enter the sacred caves on Qiong Ding Peak, and of course he agreed. That's probably how Shen Qingqiu reached immortality in the first place, despite starting so late and having so many glaring personality problems, the kind of thing that's supposed to make it harder to reach the right degree of tranquility and inner peace -- Yue Qingyuan probably helped him cheat somehow, with trips to the sacred caves and special artifacts and who knows what else. He shouldn't have, but since I was benefiting from it now it didn't seem right to complain. So I just silently judged him a little and went on my way."
"The caves were...okay? I was expecting some kind of enchanted grotto like out of a book, aesthetically curved walls and stalactites and maybe some bioluminescent moss and a gently babbling brook, to create that perfect atmosphere. Feng shui may or may not be a real thing in your world, but in this kind of setting it very much was, and places with naturally high feng shui became basically reservoirs for spiritual energy, like how water naturally runs downhill. That's why these caves were sacred."
"Well, the shape of the cave was okay, and there was a little brook, but nearly all the moss had been hacked off the walls with a sword, leaving gouges as deep as my hand. There was this odd residue on the walls too, that flaked like a very thin layer of paint, and smelled faintly of copper when I held my fingers up to my face."
"It was very bizarre. Still, I could feel that the place was still teaming with spiritual energy, so I sat down on a sort of natural stone pedestal and settled in to meditate. It was surprisingly easy. Shen Qingqiu had known how to do this too, and I fell into a detached state in only a few minutes. It was...comfortable. Like stepping into a warm bath, in a tub big enough you could stretch out, raise your feet, and just...float there. In a timeless eternity. I don't know how long I'd been resting there when I heard the first scream."
"I snapped out of the meditative immediately. I probably don't need to tell you that people are absolutely not supposed to be screaming in the sacred caves, but...well, they aren't! I sat there in the dark for a long moment, wandering if it had been real, if maybe my mind was just playing tricks on me because I was so unused to the quiet. But then it came again."
"It was long and...the sound was somehow jagged, as if the person doing the screaming was in such immense pain that they couldn't draw a deep breath, but they had to scream anyway. As if they couldn't help it. I thought of the coppery dust I'd found on the walls -- obviously it was blood, what else could it be? -- and I wondered, how long has it been since anyone came in here? Could the sacred caves be...haunted?"
"I got up to look. I wasn't going to embarrass myself by running out of the caves claiming I'd heard a ghost, only for it to turn out to be nothing! I walked deeper into the cave, ears pricked for another scream, or the sound of someone else moving around in the dark. As it happened I saw him before I heard him; a human figure that glowed from within, as if his body had been built from some kind of luminescent marble. He was dressed in white, with long black hair streaming down his back, and he screaming in agony as he chopped at the walls with a shining sword."
"I finally realized what was happening. It wasn't a ghost, it was Liu Qingge, my martial brother. In the book he'd died off-screen, and Shen Qingqiu was eventually accused of murdering him -- but I'd just gotten there, and here he was. It was clear that he'd experienced a qi deviation, a catastrophically bad one. Cultivation isn't an exact science, you see, even in settings where people have been doing it for thousands of years. Every person is different, and some people pick cultivation techniques that are bad for them, or they don't pay close enough attention to what they're doing, or they keep pushing themselves into experiences that disrupt their inner peace. Whatever the reason, Liu Qingge was qi deviating. As I watched, I saw that he was bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, that the entire front of his shirt was soaked with it. I knew he didn't have much more time -- and that his only chance of survival lay in my help."
"There wasn't time to go fetch another person, and how would it look if I said I'd found Liu Qingge in the caves, and by the time we found him again he was dead? Plus, if he lived...well, one good turn deserves another, doesn't it? But that wasn't the full reason that I wanted to help. You see, as I stood there watching him suffer, I just felt...so terribly sorry for him. Liu Qingge was the strongest warrior in our sect, you see! Probably the strongest human warrior in the world, even if Yue Qingyuan outmatched him in purely spiritual might! He wasn't technically an ascended deity, but there were people who already called him the War God of Bai Zhan Peak. Wasn't there something awfully pitiful, about someone so strong dying like this, alone and screaming, in a pool of his own blood? Not to mention..."
"Well, this probably sounds a little shallow of me, considering the circumstances, but...at the time, I was also struck by how beautiful he was. It made a certain degree of sense, his sister was Liu Mingyan, the most popular of Binghe's wives on Zhongdian Literature website for pretty much the novel's entire run. Nobody apart from Binghe had ever seen her face, Airplane never even wrote a smut extra about her, but they say that she wore that gauze mask all the time so her beauty wouldn't blind people. Looking at her brother, I could believe it. He was clearly a man, but he had this...softness about him, like one of those Renaissance statues that were so perfectly carved that the marble looks like flesh. He had high, arched cheekbones, and a strong jaw...a hero's jaw, I remember thinking. And he had this cute little mole under one eye...what do they call those? Right, beauty marks. What?"
"No, shut up. This is relevant! Hey, what are you complaining about? Didn't I just tell you what an amazing warrior he was? I was in mortal peril here! All it would take was a single misjudged step and he'd chop me into tiny pieces, like mincemeat! Not to mention that if I set up the spiritual connection wrong his qi deviation would propagate into my spiritual veins, and then we'd both die bleeding out the face! It was a dangerous situation, you can't blame me for getting a little hung up on the details."
"Ugh, philistine. Are you sure you're really gay? I mean I was only appreciating him platonically, if I was gay I'd probably have started salivating on the floor or something, even with the blood he was just that pretty. Sometimes you can just tell that someone would clean up nicely, you know? Anyway. I knew I had to move quickly, before he could do the mincemeat thing. So I gathered my spiritual power into the palm of my hand and, as Liu Qingge turned to face me, I struck him in the chest! He went flying, rolling and landing on his face-- proof, if any more had been needed, of the savagery with which his qi deviation had wracked him. If I'd tried that on a fully healthy and powered-up Bai Zhan War God, I'd have been the one who went flying!"
"I knelt over him, placing my hand on his back. He struggled, trying to get up, but I pinned him in place and began to pass him spiritual energy. I'm not sure I have words to describe the terror and excitement that surged through me in that moment, feeling such a powerful man struggle and writhe beneath me, huffing and growling like an angry beast and knowing that I would only survive if my will didn't falter. I tried not to think about all the different ways Liu Qingge could kill me -- breaking my neck, tearing my limbs off and leaving me to bleed out, blowing me to pieces with a blast of qi -- and focused instead on keeping the flow of qi between us steady."
"It felt like it took forever, but eventually my qi found a place to settle and take root in his spiritual veins, and he began to quiet. A few minutes more and his breathing slowed and he lay still. He seemed almost to be asleep, but when I released him and stood up he scrambled to his face as well, staring at me like...like he was the one who'd just seen a ghost."
"I pulled out my fan and averted my eyes, to preserve his dignity, and asked him how he was feeling. I could hear him grinding his teeth in the dark before he finally muttered my name -- Shen Qingqiu in a harsh growl -- before snatching his sword up off the ground and storming off! So ungrateful! But I forgave him, naturally. Of course a strong man like that would be embarrassed after being seen in such a moment of weakness."
"But later, after I'd been poisoned with Without a Cure and he stepped up to finish driving an invasion of demons off our mountain, he seemed to think things were even between us. He became my number one assistant in managing the symptoms, and after I...sent Binghe away, we even went on a number of adventures together. He was always taking me on this journey or that, or bringing back pieces of his kills if I hadn't been able to come along. You'd never have expected it from his reputation, but in the end...Liu Qingge really was very kind. His friendship meant a lot to me. I hope that somehow, someway, thanks to the circumstances under which I died, Luo Binghe will give up his vendetta against Cang Qiong. I really...really don't like the thought of the two of them fighting."
Statement of Shen Qingqiu, regarding his first meeting with his favorite martial brother.
"...Well, let's try it anyway. It should make an interesting experiment, and I...I want to talk about Liu Qingge, this time. Maybe it defeats the purpose a little, trying to make myself feel better, but...I do miss him. I think I was on pretty good terms with all my martial siblings, but he and I...we had a special bond, for reasons that you'll see shortly."
"As you might have already gathered by now, I'm not really a proper cultivator. I was never initiated into any sect, never passed any trials or studied martial arts in my youth, unless you count a few tai chi classes I took in high school for a PE credit, which you shouldn't. I did read a lot of cultivation stories, but not anymore than I read palace dramas or Western fantasy or other things. I read Harry Potter even, more than once. My favorite character was Remus Lupin."
"When I was...placed, in Shen Qingqiu's body, I inherited all of his skills. I suddenly knew how to do everything he'd known how to do, how to cultivate, how to wield a sword or to fly on it, how to cast spells. I no longer needed to eat or sleep unless I wanted to, and I didn't really got cold anymore, even though I was living in a bamboo cottage with no insulation on a mountain top. It was amazing...but I still felt like something was missing. Knowing how something is done isn't the same thing as being able to do it, after all; if it were otherwise then every single basement-dwelling Bruce Lee fan would on some kind of government watchlist as dangers to society. And I won't get into it now but my first night hunt was very nearly a complete disaster. I knew that if I was going to be a real cultivator, a real and proper peak lord, then I needed...well, I needed to put in some work. I needed to cultivate."
"I asked the sect leader for permission to enter the sacred caves on Qiong Ding Peak, and of course he agreed. That's probably how Shen Qingqiu reached immortality in the first place, despite starting so late and having so many glaring personality problems, the kind of thing that's supposed to make it harder to reach the right degree of tranquility and inner peace -- Yue Qingyuan probably helped him cheat somehow, with trips to the sacred caves and special artifacts and who knows what else. He shouldn't have, but since I was benefiting from it now it didn't seem right to complain. So I just silently judged him a little and went on my way."
"The caves were...okay? I was expecting some kind of enchanted grotto like out of a book, aesthetically curved walls and stalactites and maybe some bioluminescent moss and a gently babbling brook, to create that perfect atmosphere. Feng shui may or may not be a real thing in your world, but in this kind of setting it very much was, and places with naturally high feng shui became basically reservoirs for spiritual energy, like how water naturally runs downhill. That's why these caves were sacred."
"Well, the shape of the cave was okay, and there was a little brook, but nearly all the moss had been hacked off the walls with a sword, leaving gouges as deep as my hand. There was this odd residue on the walls too, that flaked like a very thin layer of paint, and smelled faintly of copper when I held my fingers up to my face."
"It was very bizarre. Still, I could feel that the place was still teaming with spiritual energy, so I sat down on a sort of natural stone pedestal and settled in to meditate. It was surprisingly easy. Shen Qingqiu had known how to do this too, and I fell into a detached state in only a few minutes. It was...comfortable. Like stepping into a warm bath, in a tub big enough you could stretch out, raise your feet, and just...float there. In a timeless eternity. I don't know how long I'd been resting there when I heard the first scream."
"I snapped out of the meditative immediately. I probably don't need to tell you that people are absolutely not supposed to be screaming in the sacred caves, but...well, they aren't! I sat there in the dark for a long moment, wandering if it had been real, if maybe my mind was just playing tricks on me because I was so unused to the quiet. But then it came again."
"It was long and...the sound was somehow jagged, as if the person doing the screaming was in such immense pain that they couldn't draw a deep breath, but they had to scream anyway. As if they couldn't help it. I thought of the coppery dust I'd found on the walls -- obviously it was blood, what else could it be? -- and I wondered, how long has it been since anyone came in here? Could the sacred caves be...haunted?"
"I got up to look. I wasn't going to embarrass myself by running out of the caves claiming I'd heard a ghost, only for it to turn out to be nothing! I walked deeper into the cave, ears pricked for another scream, or the sound of someone else moving around in the dark. As it happened I saw him before I heard him; a human figure that glowed from within, as if his body had been built from some kind of luminescent marble. He was dressed in white, with long black hair streaming down his back, and he screaming in agony as he chopped at the walls with a shining sword."
"I finally realized what was happening. It wasn't a ghost, it was Liu Qingge, my martial brother. In the book he'd died off-screen, and Shen Qingqiu was eventually accused of murdering him -- but I'd just gotten there, and here he was. It was clear that he'd experienced a qi deviation, a catastrophically bad one. Cultivation isn't an exact science, you see, even in settings where people have been doing it for thousands of years. Every person is different, and some people pick cultivation techniques that are bad for them, or they don't pay close enough attention to what they're doing, or they keep pushing themselves into experiences that disrupt their inner peace. Whatever the reason, Liu Qingge was qi deviating. As I watched, I saw that he was bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, that the entire front of his shirt was soaked with it. I knew he didn't have much more time -- and that his only chance of survival lay in my help."
"There wasn't time to go fetch another person, and how would it look if I said I'd found Liu Qingge in the caves, and by the time we found him again he was dead? Plus, if he lived...well, one good turn deserves another, doesn't it? But that wasn't the full reason that I wanted to help. You see, as I stood there watching him suffer, I just felt...so terribly sorry for him. Liu Qingge was the strongest warrior in our sect, you see! Probably the strongest human warrior in the world, even if Yue Qingyuan outmatched him in purely spiritual might! He wasn't technically an ascended deity, but there were people who already called him the War God of Bai Zhan Peak. Wasn't there something awfully pitiful, about someone so strong dying like this, alone and screaming, in a pool of his own blood? Not to mention..."
"Well, this probably sounds a little shallow of me, considering the circumstances, but...at the time, I was also struck by how beautiful he was. It made a certain degree of sense, his sister was Liu Mingyan, the most popular of Binghe's wives on Zhongdian Literature website for pretty much the novel's entire run. Nobody apart from Binghe had ever seen her face, Airplane never even wrote a smut extra about her, but they say that she wore that gauze mask all the time so her beauty wouldn't blind people. Looking at her brother, I could believe it. He was clearly a man, but he had this...softness about him, like one of those Renaissance statues that were so perfectly carved that the marble looks like flesh. He had high, arched cheekbones, and a strong jaw...a hero's jaw, I remember thinking. And he had this cute little mole under one eye...what do they call those? Right, beauty marks. What?"
"No, shut up. This is relevant! Hey, what are you complaining about? Didn't I just tell you what an amazing warrior he was? I was in mortal peril here! All it would take was a single misjudged step and he'd chop me into tiny pieces, like mincemeat! Not to mention that if I set up the spiritual connection wrong his qi deviation would propagate into my spiritual veins, and then we'd both die bleeding out the face! It was a dangerous situation, you can't blame me for getting a little hung up on the details."
"Ugh, philistine. Are you sure you're really gay? I mean I was only appreciating him platonically, if I was gay I'd probably have started salivating on the floor or something, even with the blood he was just that pretty. Sometimes you can just tell that someone would clean up nicely, you know? Anyway. I knew I had to move quickly, before he could do the mincemeat thing. So I gathered my spiritual power into the palm of my hand and, as Liu Qingge turned to face me, I struck him in the chest! He went flying, rolling and landing on his face-- proof, if any more had been needed, of the savagery with which his qi deviation had wracked him. If I'd tried that on a fully healthy and powered-up Bai Zhan War God, I'd have been the one who went flying!"
"I knelt over him, placing my hand on his back. He struggled, trying to get up, but I pinned him in place and began to pass him spiritual energy. I'm not sure I have words to describe the terror and excitement that surged through me in that moment, feeling such a powerful man struggle and writhe beneath me, huffing and growling like an angry beast and knowing that I would only survive if my will didn't falter. I tried not to think about all the different ways Liu Qingge could kill me -- breaking my neck, tearing my limbs off and leaving me to bleed out, blowing me to pieces with a blast of qi -- and focused instead on keeping the flow of qi between us steady."
"It felt like it took forever, but eventually my qi found a place to settle and take root in his spiritual veins, and he began to quiet. A few minutes more and his breathing slowed and he lay still. He seemed almost to be asleep, but when I released him and stood up he scrambled to his face as well, staring at me like...like he was the one who'd just seen a ghost."
"I pulled out my fan and averted my eyes, to preserve his dignity, and asked him how he was feeling. I could hear him grinding his teeth in the dark before he finally muttered my name -- Shen Qingqiu in a harsh growl -- before snatching his sword up off the ground and storming off! So ungrateful! But I forgave him, naturally. Of course a strong man like that would be embarrassed after being seen in such a moment of weakness."
"But later, after I'd been poisoned with Without a Cure and he stepped up to finish driving an invasion of demons off our mountain, he seemed to think things were even between us. He became my number one assistant in managing the symptoms, and after I...sent Binghe away, we even went on a number of adventures together. He was always taking me on this journey or that, or bringing back pieces of his kills if I hadn't been able to come along. You'd never have expected it from his reputation, but in the end...Liu Qingge really was very kind. His friendship meant a lot to me. I hope that somehow, someway, thanks to the circumstances under which I died, Luo Binghe will give up his vendetta against Cang Qiong. I really...really don't like the thought of the two of them fighting."