Chapter Text
Liu Mingyan could not get a thought in edgewise.
That is, both Liu Mingyan and Liu Mingyan were thinking so constantly, with such wall-to-wall enormity, filling up all available space in their newly shared head, that neither Liu Mingyan nor Liu Mingyan could actually parse a single solitary thought.
Not at first, at least.
She could feel. Both of them could, rather.
There was pain—both the sharp, tearing sort from injuries, and something more complete, crushing in on her from all sides.
(How many sides exactly she had was a problem for later.)
She could hear, too.
Screaming. From very close by. Someone should help that person; Liu Mingyan felt her fingers twitch, seeking out the handle of her sword.
It was very close by. Surely even in this state she could get to that person to help. She could crawl; she could drag herself. She managed a larger movement, and the screaming intensified.
Oh, no, never mind.
That voice was hers.
That had come dangerously close to comprehension, and as such it prompted even more attempts at thought from two complete working minds crammed into one too-small space. Everything hurt all over again.
Better not to think.
Much better not to think.
So they focused on feeling, again. First of course there were the wounds, raking claws of pain deep into their abdomen. And there—that was the wind whipping by. Hair lashing their face. (They were pleased to report that they seemed to have only one face.)
That was their Shizun’s voice, also very close by, and raised in a familiar high fury. There were notes of something else in it, too, though.
Was that fear?
They seemed to be moving. Carried. With ease supplied only by joint effort, Liu Mingyan and Liu Mingyan cracked one eyelid open and squinted out, and found the world racing by in a rush of light and shadows.
They saw the familiar pale violet of Qi Qingqi’s robes, fluttering about them. Both Liu Mingyans settled then on a sense of comfort among all the chaos. Whatever else was happening, Shizun was there.
And yes; they were being carried, and at considerable speed. Qi Qingqi had them, and must have been flying on her sword.
That couldn’t have been easy, especially since there were two of Liu Mingyan.
There is one of me, both Liu Mingyans thought at once, sternly, with affronted dignity. You’re an intruder.
Both Liu Mingyans gave a mental hiss of frustration at having been so disrespectfully mimicked, and then sank once more into disintegrating chaos as their thoughts diverged. This continued for a few moments—images rushing by, bits and pieces of splintered memories as they tried to remember what had happened to them, and then—
The hole in the sky—
On some immediate impulse the Liu Mingyans jerked their head to one side and flung their eyes open wide, and found there—flying along next to Qi Qingqi, on his own blade—a familiar white-clad figure.
Brother, both of them thought, but each in a wildly different tone—one with relief, one with outright horror.
And then everything went to pieces again. One Liu Mingyan yanked one way, one Liu Mingyan yanked the other, and they both fell into darkness.
* * *
The next time Liu Mingyan and Liu Mingyan came around, they were no longer sailing through the air. They felt heavy, with the steady press of the ground, or a bed, under their back. Their body didn’t ache as much as it had—those tearing wounds seemed to be mending, though there was still a strange pressure all around them, as if the world was trying to compress them out of it.
One Liu Mingyan flexed her fingers, while the other opened her eyes. It was disorienting for all that light to spill in when one half of their consciousness hadn’t been ready for it, but each Liu Mingyan was after all an accomplished cultivator. They didn’t shriek or grimace, but they did need a moment to let their eyes adjust.
Who are you?, said one of them to the other, after feeling her eyes turn to take in the room where she lay. It was small and somewhat dingy. An inn room, given its barrenness. She was alone there, except for this other presence in her head.
Liu Mingyan, her own voice responded, wearily.
You can’t be, because I am.
Too bad.
The Liu Mingyan whose eyes were still smarting resentfully at the deluge of sunlight scowled a little (and the other Liu Mingyan felt her do it).
Where is Shizun? Each of them asked the other, to a general embarrassed silence. The slightly less taciturn Liu Mingyan went on:
Where is brother?
This time, she received a response instantly.
He’s dead.
Garbage, Liu Mingyan sneered. What a pathetic ghost. If it was going to lie, it should pick something believable. Nothing could kill him.
The hole in the sky could. It did. He’s dead.
Lies. You’re some ghost or demon. You can’t trick me so easily.
He went to Huan Hua Palace with Shen Qingqiu and he never came back. There was no body to find. The heavens and the earth opened up and began to swallow themselves and none of us could stop it, not any of the sects alone, and none of us could work together and it just kept opening wider and wider and wider and if Liu Qingge had still been alive then he would have been there to stop it but he wasn’t, he died there, right outside the gates—
That Liu Mingyan, mercifully, didn’t seem able to carry the thought any further. It had taken all her energy to get that out.
The other Liu Mingyan had no idea what to do with that. This had to be some sort of amateur on its first attempt at a possession. It seemed dizzy and confused, when she was fairly sure that condition was supposed to be reserved for her, the victim. She almost felt sorry for it. Whoever had taught this creature would be embarrassed to be associated with the whole display.
Maybe you had better get some rest to regain your composure, she thought, and sat up. Muscles groaned, and wounds pulled and ached, but nothing stopped her from doing it. The room spun unsteadily around her, but she braced her hands against the bed and breathed. In, slowly; out, slowly. The other Liu Mingyan seemed to agree with the technique, and breathed with her.
There. She felt a little better already—maybe from those slow, careful breaths, or maybe because the other presence in her head had subsided slightly.
One clear thought she managed to form was this: that tear must have been through to the Endless Abyss, or something like it. This other Liu Mingyan had fallen out from there, and must have been created there in the first place—
No, no, the dizziness was back. Liu Mingyan wobbled back down to a horizontal position so as to avoid throwing up. She and the other Liu Mingyan jointly stared up at the drifting beams of the ceiling.
Collectively, they decided to take a more organized approach.
My name is Liu Mingyan. The way the thought echoed seemed to mean they had agreement; they’d both thought it as one.
Excellent. They could build on that.
I am a disciple of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect.
I cultivate on Xian Shu Peak under my Shizun, Qi Qingqi.
My brother is Liu Qingge.
He is—
—the strongest in the sect—
—dead.
Both Liu Mingyans heaved a sort of mental sigh.
He really was the strongest, the other Liu Mingyan offered.
It just didn’t matter.
Liu Mingyan could not imagine such a world. Liu Qingge worked too hard—this she knew. She had seen its effects. He’d had a qi deviation and terrified the whole sect half to death with the thought they might lose him.
Even so, it had only been a thought. He couldn’t be killed. Even that qi deviation hadn’t outmatched him. Nothing could.
That seemed to be a good starting point, then—the place to hammer the wedge, to separate out this Liu Mingyan from that Liu Mingyan. Liu Qingge was what they couldn't agree on, so that was where they would start.
Though it was difficult to understand why that should be the biggest issue. The sky was torn open, and Luo Binghe had disappeared into the Endless Abyss; there were so many inexplicable things in the world as it was. Why should her brother be the thing that she and her shadow could not agree on?
Luo Binghe did go into the Abyss, but he came out again, the other Liu Mingyan thought.
He came back hateful. He tried to destroy us.
More nonsense, Liu Mingyan thought coldly. He went in to save us.
That seemed to give the other Liu Mingyan pause, and for a short while the world was blessedly quiet and not a roaring, raging headache. Liu Mingyan watched the light dance on the ceiling, and heard birds and the soft murmur of passersby on the street outside the window.
Much seems to be different here, the other Liu Mingyan said after a while. Let’s keep reviewing.
So they did. They lay there together, though they could hardly help that. They set out all their memories, like children laying out prized baubles on the floor to count and compare them—sometimes holding them up, tilting them this way and that, to see how the sunlight shone on or through them.
Whether there were any flaws.
That other Liu Mingyan had simply more memories, to start with. She was older. At a certain point the younger Liu Mingyan could only fall silent and listen to the other one rattle dully through almost a decade’s worth of open horror.
There, they both declared at once, after they had exhausted themselves with memories and gone flipping back through them to seek the source of the problem. Right there.
The demonic incursion on Qiong Ding Peak was where things had begun to change. After that, one Liu Mingyan had continued to train and cultivate on Xian Shu Peak under Qi Qingqi, though with perhaps a little more urgency.
The other Liu Mingyan had begun to train on Bai Zhan Peak under Liu Qingge, and alongside Luo Binghe and other disciples from across the twelve peaks.
Why?
There seemed no straightforward answer, but after that, things had become more and more different.
What happened next? The other one asked.
I told you already.
More detail.
So Liu Mingyan gave it. This time it was her turn to go on, while the other Liu Mingyan waited quietly; the longer she told the story, the more the younger Liu Mingyan felt the older one’s presence—a large stillness lying right alongside her own consciousness. Stillness with movement underneath it, like she was forcing herself to be calm with tremendous discipline when she would rather be screaming.
This, Liu Mingyan could understand. She felt just the same way.
At one point the other Liu Mingyan stopped her in her retelling. She seemed horrified at the knowledge that Liu Qingge was, quite transparently, in love with Shen Qingqiu.
Not in my life, she insisted.
She sounded more as if she were trying to convince herself than her fellow Liu Mingyan.
He didn’t. Shen Qingqiu was with Luo Binghe. Brother—couldn’t have…
Liu Mingyan found herself awash in grief and guilt that were not her own, as well as something like pure mortification. Her other self did not seem to want to discuss the matter further, so she let it be.
Maybe he knows something, she said. The fulcrum point is the point at which he agrees to train me, after Qiong Ding Peak is invaded. Maybe he can explain.
The other Liu Mingyan seemed quite willing to seize onto this thought.
It would have been nice if they could surge to their feet and go and find him, but that was simply not going to happen, in their present state.
There’s nothing we can do for now anyway. Let’s rest.
Yes. Let’s rest.
* * *
The next time Liu Mingyan and Liu Mingyan awoke, they were not alone in the room. Qi Qingqi was there, and let out a sound of pure relief when her disciple(s) opened their eyes.
Then she arched her eyebrows and said, “It is about time, Liu Mingyan! Do you know how long you made your Shizun wait?”
This was typical of how Qi Qingqi greeted wounded disciples; it was her way of showing concern. The elder Liu Mingyan had not felt so relieved in a long, long time. The younger one had, at the Immortal Alliance Conference when her brother had smashed his way onto the scene. The younger Liu Mingyan was less out of sorts and so took the lead in the response, allowing her elder to sit back and peacefully reflect on the experience.
Really, all the younger Liu Mingyan was responsible for was expressing, at appointed pauses in her Shizun’s shows of outrage (worry) and fury (anxiety), an appropriately demure demeanour. That, and sternly repressing the urge to laugh or cry with relief.
Shizun was Shizun was Shizun, and Liu Mingyan would not have traded hers for any other.
When Qi Qingqi had vented her frustrations, she finally asked, “What happened to you, Liu Mingyan?”
“I am not yet sure,” Liu Mingyan said, carefully.
“I see.” That she had even asked meant that she and the other Peak Lords had no idea, either. It wasn’t an encouraging thought—but then, they didn’t have all the information.
“I wonder…” Liu Mingyan began, even more carefully, but then decided she had no real choice. She would like to begin by telling her Shizun everything, but first she wanted to ascertain some things for herself. It was no good to deliver an unclear report. “I wonder if my brother is nearby, Shizun?”
“Nearby!” Qi Qingqi said, and the elder Liu Mingyan braced herself for the obvious. Either Liu Qingge had gone back to investigate that rift in the sky—holding to his assigned mission—or he had gone back to the sect to seek direction. That meant Liu Mingyan was alone here, with herself, to think of what to do.
Hardly had she begun to steel herself against this inevitability when her Shizun went on.
“He’s planted himself in this inn—it would take the whole sect to dig him out. Shen Qingqiu spent half an age trying, and the other half being browbeaten into going back to the sect for reinforcements.”
That startled both Liu Mingyans terribly.
“But—the sky?” they asked, both stumbling over their words in unison.
“The tear, or whatever it is, is visible from here. He’s had an eye on it. He's not much one to linger at bedsides.”
Except one, the younger Liu Mingyan thought, and the elder Liu Mingyan stifled a sort of mental groan.
“Could I see him?”
“If I can pry him away from glowering at the sky.” Qi Qingqi made for the door, but paused when she reached it. “You’ll be alright, Mingyan. We’ll see to it.”
Then she stepped out.
Soon enough Liu Qingge replaced her in the doorway. He looked, both Liu Mingyans thought, uncharacteristically wary as he approached. The Liu Mingyans were sitting up by now, having spent considerable effort on coordinating the motion. What they were about to say to their brother would perhaps go over best the steadier and more coherent they appeared; they didn’t want to be flat on their back and delivering this speech to the ceiling.
“Brother,” Liu Mingyan said. They had both decided to be as blunt and direct as possible—to speak to him in his own terms. “There are two of me.”
He didn’t even blink, and she couldn’t grasp why until he spoke.
“So I saw.”
Of course. The elder Liu Mingyan had not seen the younger one before she’d lost consciousness, but the younger one had certainly seen her elder dropping out of the sky. Liu Qingge had caught her. This part would be no great shock to him.
“I…we,” Liu Mingyan amended, “are both still present.” There was a brief silence. Liu Qingge was not looking quite directly at her, now. He was looking at the wall slightly over her shoulder, as if thinking hard. “Does that…not surprise you?”
Liu Qingge shifted his gaze back to her and remained impassive, which was an answer of itself.
Something like panic began to rise in both Liu Mingyans. Now that they had some sort of confirmation—even if it was only the confirmation of silence—this all suddenly felt much less like some sort of qi deviation or delusion, and much more like something real, that was really happening to them.
“I want to understand,” the younger one said, some doggedness creeping into her voice from that other Liu Mingyan—the older, wearier one. The one who had willingly thrown herself into the tear in the sky in a last, desperate bid to save her world. She'd done it to see what that breach was, what caused it, and whether she could kill it.
Hot knives of guilt and shame tore at their stomach. She’d failed; she’d failed. Her world was in pieces behind her and she hadn’t been able to do a thing about it. She’d failed, and worse, she’d survived her failure.
“When did you come from?” Liu Qingge asked at length, and Liu Mingyan knew they were on the right path, because that was the right question. They leaned forward, both consciousnesses urging their body towards answers.
“Years from now,” the elder Liu Mingyan said. She had been preparing what to say, how to frame it in a way that would be meaningful to her brother. “Luo Binghe returned from the Abyss, attacked the sect. Shen Qingqiu self-destructed to save him from Xin Mo. You fought with Luo Binghe over the body for five years, then Shen Qingqiu returned—Luo Binghe captured him, his father Tianlang-Jun raised an army, tried to merge the three realms…”
Liu Qingge said nothing, but the younger Liu Mingyan saw him tensing, as if waiting for what came next.
“Luo Binghe died at Maigu Ridge, and then you and Shen Qingqiu died at Huan Hua Palace, after a tear opened in the sky.”
Liu Qingge’s knuckles looked as though they might tear through the skin.
“Mingyan,” he said finally, as if setting down a boulder that he’d been balancing on his back for months. It was a great show of emotion, from this man.
It was a moment of profound joy for the elder Liu Mingyan, and profound isolation for the younger. One had just found her brother restored from the dead; the other had been diminished, set aside.
The elder Liu Mingyan rushed to tell her brother in more detail what had happened after his apparent death—the encroaching chaos, the spread of the tear in the sky, the last desperate struggle against the end.
Qi Qingqi and Yue Qingyuan had still been alive, the last that she had seen them, but not for much longer. They’d been evacuating the sect, but there had been nowhere for them to run. The whole world had been coming apart.
“Yang Yixuan?” Liu Qingge asked, and the elder Liu Mingyan lowered her head slightly. It was a name the younger Liu Mingyan did not know, even after that review her elder had given her of events in her own lifetime.
She didn’t know who that was, but the other Liu Mingyan did.
And her brother did.
“He helped me to reach the tear,” the elder Liu Mingyan said slowly. “But did not come through after me as we intended. I know that he would have if he could. I do not know whether he survived.”
Liu Qingge just nodded slightly and said nothing, but there was a flicker of something in his eyes. Something like loss.
The younger Liu Mingyan felt smaller and colder and more bewildered every moment.
“Mingyan,” Liu Qingge said suddenly, and somehow she knew that he meant her, specifically. The younger one, the one who hadn’t experienced all these things that he was discussing with her elder.
She found that he was looking at her hands, which were clenched on her knees and trembling. He was looking at those hands as if they were intruders, but—those were her hands, on her knees. This was her own body, and that was—that was supposed to be her own brother. Not this other Liu Mingyan’s. Hers.
But here she was an interloper, and an embarrassingly emotional and out-of-control one at that.
Her back straightened, and even if her throat was trying to close up on the words, she managed to say, “Requesting to understand, brother.” She even sounded almost steady.
Almost.
Her brother looked strangely out of sorts for a moment, but then he looked more familiar again—irritable, though not, she thought, with her.
“There is an enemy,” he said, and a few bits and pieces of the broken-up world seemed to fall back into place again. Liu Mingyan’s back straightened even further. The situation was familiar enough now that she could find a handhold.
“What is it, and how do we fight it?”
Liu Qingge shook his head.
“It’s that tear in the sky. Still finding out how to fight it. But it’s the thing causing chaos. And making things complicated.”
Complicated was certainly one way of putting it, and if Liu Mingyan had had the energy she would have laughed her brother out of the room. There were supposed to be limits on how stony and unflappable a person could be.
“And it’s why you’re not really my brother.”
The look of annoyance increased.
“I am your brother.”
“But you’re the one she knows. You’re not—you’re not—”
Her breath was getting away from her. The other Liu Mingyan must have been seizing her lungs, trying to speak overtop of her. The younger one held on, forcing increasingly jagged air in and out until she had enough to speak.
“Or I’m not…” she managed to push out, with great effort. Of all the words she’d thought she’d might say, these were not the ones she’d expected. They were mortifying; they were weak. She was under attack somehow, in some way she still could not quite define. Either she was possessed, or she was trapped in some illusory realm with a false brother and a false voice in her head trying to convince her that she was the intruder.
“You are Liu Mingyan. I am Liu Qingge.”
That did sound like him. It was Liu Qingge’s voice exactly, and better still, it was his tone exactly. That bedrock of certainty.
“Then she…”
“Is also Liu Mingyan. But from a different time. A different life.”
The other Liu Mingyan wasn’t choking her after all. That was her own panic throttling her. This was mortifying in the extreme. Here she’d spent all this time chasing her brother’s back, training and fighting and cultivating, and now she was choking on her own spit.
At least Liu Qingge did not look embarrassed to be present. Oh, he did not seem in a good mood, but he wasn’t curling his lip or looking away from her.
“I do know the other one,” he said, as if he would have rather been ramming his head into a wall, “but I know you too. There are too many of you in too small a space. So we’ll get the other one out.”
The relief when he said that last sentence was like rainfall after a years-long drought. She wasn’t going to be cast out of her body; this other one was.
“How?”
“Shen Qingqiu is bringing Mu Qingfang to help.”
That meant ‘I do not have the first fucking idea’ and Liu Mingyan knew it, but it was good that he'd put it the way he had. If he’d gone ahead and said it directly—if Liu Qingge of all people had admitted that there was nothing he could do—Liu Mingyan would know the sky was really falling.
Oh. Except that it was, probably.
But he hadn’t admitted it was hopeless, which meant reality was still holding together in some places even if it was developing cracks in others.
Right now, Liu Mingyan was prepared to accept that much.
She was Liu Mingyan; the other one was Liu Mingyan; and this was Liu Qingge. That was all she knew for certain for the moment, and it was going to have to be enough.
* * *
Liu Mingyan had, grudgingly, gone back to sleep—and Liu Qingge had, grumpily, gone back to his own room to glare out the window at the flickering scrap of sky. He’d told his sister he would give her more detail after she’d had some rest. Piling more slop onto this mudslide of information was only going to make things worse.
He hadn’t wanted to tell her about all this, and certainly hadn’t wanted to tell her like that, but he couldn't very well keep it a secret when she had the other Liu Mingyan mushed into her head along with her. Better to be honest than to lie and make her doubt even more of the world than she already did.
It had only been a last-ditch effort to help the younger Liu Mingyan hold things together, and he supposed he could thank the Shen Qingqius for tipping him off that it would be necessary. Shen-xiong and Shen Yuan (both names still felt strange even to think, but also shiveringly correct), seemed jealous of each other as fussy cats. He didn’t need two warring Liu Mingyans, too.
Shen Qingqiu might have been the better person to have on the scene, but he had gone back to the sect for help. Liu Qingge didn’t know what ‘help’ would look like, in this case. He didn’t think they could leave two minds in one body, but he didn’t have the first idea how to separate them out.
And he didn’t know what Yue Qingyuan would make of all this.
Still. He was more at ease having shoved Shen Qingqiu away from that hole in the sky, particularly once things had begun falling out of it. If at all possible he was going to keep local crises in an orderly queue—one person at a time could be in excruciating mortal peril. Right now it was Liu Mingyan’s turn. If Shen Qingqiu wanted to experience a cataclysm he was just going to have to wait.
“How is she?”
He turned. Qi Qingqi had arrived in his doorway without his noticing and was looking at him expectantly.
“Confused.”
“She is in good company, then.” Qi Qingqi closed the door crisply behind her without apparent care about what others might say, seeing her step into a man’s private quarters. “Some fine job you have done, Liu Qingge; my prized disciple asks to see another Peak Lord rather than her own Shizun.”
Liu Qingge just gave a slight shake of his head; she wasn’t really angry with him, or with Liu Mingyan. She crossed the floor and joined him by the window, looking over the street as the sun drifted down past the horizon. The walls, the roofs, the river all seemed gilded in the late light of day.
“How were there two of her?” Qi Qingqi asked after frowning out at the scene for a short while. The archness had left her tone. “You saw as plainly as I did—you caught the other one. There were two of Liu Mingyan. And she knew me.”
Liu Qingge nodded. He wanted to tell her—Liu Mingyan probably would anyway, and it would be better coming from him than from a screaming and ill disciple.
But if he told Qi Qingqi, then she would tell Yue Qingyuan, and then who knew what would happen. Shen Qingqiu was not good at these manoeuvres necessarily, but he was at least more experienced. He could handle the story, whatever the story was going to be.
“Mu Qingfang will help,” he said. Mu Qingfang was capable. If anyone could help, it would be him.
People were passing by below the window, oblivious to the end of the world hanging over their heads. Liu Qingge couldn’t quite make out the tear in this light—the sky was too brilliant for it—but once the sun had set he would see it, flickering dimly, just barely visible near the mountain.
“Go and stare it down in-person if you like,” Qi Qingqi said. “See if you can get anything out of it that I haven’t.”
After they’d effected their retreat and brought Liu Mingyan safely to the inn, Qi Qingqi had stormed back up the mountain to look into what had harmed her disciple, while Liu Qingge had stayed down here in case Liu Mingyan’s situation had changed. Qi Qingqi had come back fuming and without any answers.
Denying that he was interested in examining the tear would be ridiculous, and they had come all the way out here, after all. Liu Mingyan had woken up and seemed to be out of immediate danger, and for now she needed her rest.
And Shen Qingqiu wasn’t around to get snatched up into the thing. Really, he could not have asked for better conditions.
So the next day Liu Qingge set off up the mountain with nobody else to worry about. He flew up to greet the hole in the sky, keeping a careful distance at first until he had some understanding of its dimensions and behaviour.
He circled beneath it a few times, keeping his eyes on it as if it were a wild and cornered beast. He directed Cheng Luan up above the tear to observe it from that angle, but strangely, it disappeared. He could only see it from below. It was a door that only opened in one direction, it seemed.
Then he had better stand on the right side of it, in case anything else came flinging out. He dipped lower again so that he could look up into that depthless, flickering mass of nothingness. Liu Mingyan had said Yang Yixuan had been meant to come through after her, and that she hadn’t seen him. Maybe that meant he’d been killed trying to get in, much as his Shizun had been killed trying to get away.
Or, maybe he was still in there.
If that one particularly excruciating qi deviation Liu Qingge had had—the one that had seen him destroy his own home on Bai Zhan Peak—had constituted a visit to that timeline that had been destroyed, then he knew what it felt like to be in there. But he’d never gone physically, the way Liu Mingyan had, and the way maybe Yang Yixuan was still doing.
Liu Qingge had not been a Shizun for nearly as long as Shen Qingqiu or Qi Qingqi had. He’d only ever had one direct disciple, and only for a few years.
But that was still his disciple. Yang Yixuan was a huge part of the reason he’d been able to, gracelessly, find his way around to training Luo Binghe without throttling him. If he was trapped in that tear—or trapped on the far side of it—Liu Qingge had to get him out. One more item on a growing list of impossible responsibilities, and one more impossible responsibility he was absolutely going to fulfil.
Liu Mingyan had come through physically. That meant she’d continued to exist in there. She’d held her shape, or been able to take it again, even in that shifting slurry.
It was tempting to just fling himself directly into the gap, but Liu Qingge's skull rang pre-emptively with the lecture he would get from Shen Qingqiu.
Liu Qingge was not as opposed to being lectured as he sensibly should have been, these days, but even so. He returned briefly to the ground and scooped up a stone, smooth and grey and perfectly sized to fit in the cup of his palm. It was a good recognizable rock, regular in shape.
He flew back up to the breach and tossed the rock up into it, watching it carefully as it rose past the edge of the tear—
—and dissolved.
The pale, silvery dust drifted back down towards the gap, and when it passed into the clear sky again, it reformed into a rock. Liu Qingge snatched it out of the air and turned it over in his hands.
It looked the same as before, but it was difficult to say. A rock was a rock. If he wanted to see that everything came together the same way it had gone in, he would have to mark it in some way.
He looked around as if a writing desk might materialize up here in the sky. Naturally he hadn’t brought any ink or brushes with him.
Fine; he could make do.
He bit his finger hard enough to break the skin and scrawled a quick word on the rock with the blood. Then he tossed the stone again, straight up into the flickering maw of the rend in reality. Again the stone dissolved away like so much ash, and again it reformed, once the ash had dropped back into Liu Qingge’s world.
He caught it deftly and turned it over.
The word was still perfectly legible, except where the fresh blood smeared against his palm.
Test complete. An inanimate object could disperse and reform without incident. A living person could, too, although Liu Mingyan’s status was still somewhat mysterious. She was alive, anyway, if badly wounded, but she had probably been hurt before she had gone in. Liu Qingge knew Qi Qingqi well enough to know without asking that she would not have sent her treasured disciple into that except out of desperation. The sect in that other timeline had probably been, in all practical senses, fallen and unsalvageable.
But Liu Mingyan had made it through. If she could do it wounded, then he could do it healthy.
Cheng Luan lifted him a little closer to the gash—so close he could feel some unnatural wind pulling at his sleeves, at his hair. He lifted his left hand towards the tear. It had surprisingly sharp and distinct edges, from this close, like one reality breaking through to another in one quick slash rather than fading gradually in.
And it was silent, apart from a distant whisper which Liu Qingge was not entirely sure he was actually hearing. He wasn’t normally the type to imagine unsettling details where there were none, but he and this sky problem had a history.
So, no. There were no whispers. It was him and a hole in the sky, and the hole in the sky was being just as austere and glaring and silent as he was.
Well, he’d tried one test. Now it was time to try another. He let the fingertips of his left hand brush against the light fluttering within the tear.
The pain was immediate. He could feel the skin whisking away into the gap, and the muscle and tendons—it hurt, and yet was utterly bloodless and impersonal.
When he tried to pull his hand back, there was a lurching moment of resistance, but all those miniscule fragments of flesh and bone coursed back down just as the rock had done, and once they were all in place, he was free to withdraw.
He rubbed the pad of his thumb against his fingertips a few times. There was a vague tingling left behind in his skin, buzzing through the bone, but it quickly faded.
That hadn’t been so bad. Not as bad as his first or second qi deviations, and certainly not as bad as being trapped in (what he suspected was) this same tear during the deviation that had destroyed his house.
He tried again, letting the juddering nothingness shear fully half of his hand away this time. This time he realized, with a jolt, that he could still feel those tiny shreds of his flesh, even as they were scattered to the wind like so much dust.
They weren’t really cut away or crushed to nothing; they were just…pulled aside. They were still him, still alive and feeling. Screaming out for one another, he thought—that was where the pain came from. It was aversion to being separate.
Maybe if he could just keep them together. Then he could direct his movement and not be subject to whatever forces had dropped Liu Mingyan through to this timeline.
This tear seemed to be able to appear in any of the timelines. Maybe that meant it was a way through to these other timelines.
A highway. A road.
A road to his first timeline’s Yang Yixuan and Qi Qingqi and Yue Qingyuan.
A road to Shen-xiong. To get there physically—to be able to help him.
Liu Qingge didn't remember moving, but his entire left arm was so much glinting dust when all of a sudden he would swear he heard Shen Qingqiu’s voice.
“Liu Qingge!”
That was definitely Shen Qingqiu’s voice, but it was not Shen-xiong calling from within the tear—it was coming from behind him.
“Liu Qingge what the purple spotted fuck are you doing?!”
Liu Qingge could not immediately turn around—the tear wouldn’t release him except in tiny fractions, and he didn’t know what would happen even if he did succeed in pulling himself away before his arm had reconstituted himself. He twisted his neck, trying to see—and there was Shen Qingqiu, flying towards him like an angry wind. He came to an abrupt halt next to Liu Qingge, which Liu Qingge supposed was good; he’d half-expected to be tackled and to leave his arm reattaching itself to empty air.
“I leave you for a few days! And I find you! Armpit deep! In the shrieking void—”
“It’s not shrieking,” Liu Qingge said, in what he acknowledged as a doomed bid to head some of this off. Finally, the strange grip around his limb slackened; his arm was whole again, and he pulled it free.
“It was!! Until literally just now!!” He flapped one arm at the breach. “All while you were climbing into it!! Did you seriously not notice?!”
“No.” He hadn’t heard a thing, up until Shen Qingqiu had spoken. He’d been too focused on trying to hold his arm together in that terrible rending space.
“Maybe because your head was too far up the universe’s asshole!”
…Well, Shen Qingqiu was angry. He was very angry. Liu Qingge briefly held out hope that they were going to fight in order to settle the matter, but he recognized that that would help him more than it would Shen Qingqiu. Liu Qingge did not particularly need help right now. Apart from the lingering and inexplicable feeling of…shimmering, in his left arm, he felt quite as normal.
Fighting was what he did to sort himself out; talking seemed to be what Shen Qingqiu did. So, he would talk.
“I can move through it.” Shen Qingqiu looked at him mistrustfully. “Liu Mingyan moved from one timeline to another.”
Shen Qingqiu’s brows twitched.
“You let your sister go through?”
“No. The Liu Mingyan from our timeline came through on her own.”
“Oh.”
“From one tear to another. If I can go through, I can get to the other you. Physically. Not just in the dream realm.” He dropped the next sentence reluctantly. “And Luo Binghe might be able to get to this timeline, physically, too.”
He’d felt certain this would be a winning tactic, but Shen Qingqiu reared back like an angry horse.
“Don’t try to distract me with Luo Binghe!” These might have been the most gratifying words ever spoken, even if Shen Qingqiu seemed intent on using them to bludgeon him to death. “If Luo Binghe jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too???”
“…”
“…What, Liu Qingge.”
“…If he jumped off a cliff with you. Yes.”
Shen Qingqiu was in too high a fury to interrogate that statement.
“Just because you have done it before does not mean that you should make a habit out of it!”
Another statement which was going to go tragically unexamined. Liu Qingge watched it go by, wondering what he would do if Shen Qingqiu ever actually listened to the things that either one of them said.
Probably best that he didn’t. Just because Liu Qingge had made his own private realization didn’t mean that anything could or should change. Best if Shen Qingqiu just kept on doing whatever he wanted.
Right now what he wanted was obviously to harangue Liu Qingge, so Liu Qingge kept quiet and let him. This discovery he’d made was like a cool, rounded stone, polished smooth. Pleasant to hold; pretty to look at, perhaps; but not useful. Not now. Maybe never. As long as he could hold it in his hand, that was enough.
“Liu Qingge, are you a man of your word or are you not? We had an agreement. ‘No enacting wild plans without consulting the other person.’ You agreed.”
That one landed like a blow to the gut, and ended the round decisively. Liu Qingge hadn’t forgotten that agreement, but he hadn’t thought it applied here because this was not really a plan—it was just testing, just laying the groundwork for a plan.
But he really had been short one arm when Shen Qingqiu had arrived here. After reflecting a moment on how he might have responded to the same scene if their roles had been reversed, he nodded.
“Right,” he said, and Shen Qingqiu blinked.
“Right?”
“You’re right.” Shen Qingqiu looked puzzled, and then he looked deeply gratified. Smug, even. Maybe a little crafty. Like a cat who had scammed extra scraps from the nearest human rube.
It suited him.
“Well, of course I’m right. But people don’t tell me that enough. You should make a habit of that, Liu Qingge.”
Liu Qingge could not actually think of a reason to disagree. Shen Qingqiu was right in front of him, looking so pleased, that rational thought was almost impossible; all Liu Qingge could think was that he would like to see that look on his face more often. Would like to put that look on his face more often.
This line of thinking was not doing anybody a single bit of good, so he decided to change the subject.
He rummaged around in his sleeve until he came out with the rock.
“I tested it first.”
“Tested it?”
“I threw a rock in. Saw that it disassembled and reassembled properly. Liu Mingyan came through more or less alright. The rock did. I tested to make sure that it came through right by writing on it.”
“Writing what on it?”
Liu Qingge tossed the rock to him. Shen Qingqiu caught it, then laughed.
“Well, what you lack in imagination you make up for in tenacity, Liu Qingge!” The character he’d scrawled on the rock said, quite bluntly, ‘Rock.’ “And I’m glad you tested before you went through. But—ah—the fact is, you still didn’t have a left arm, when I arrived.”
The anger had gone, but now that pleasant look of satisfaction had disappeared too, and another cast was creeping over his face. He looked terrified—he looked sick.
Liu Qingge had put that look on his face, too.
Again—Liu Qingge was a simple man. If Shen Qingqiu had now pulled off the remarkable coup of moving from the Bad category, hoisting himself over the meridian into the Good camp, and finally running clear on through to the top of the list, then—
Well, then making him look as if he’d recently received a fatal stab wound could be only, inevitably, formally, Bad.
Not as bad as a hole in the sky; not as bad as any iteration of Shen Qingqiu being left to Luo Binghe’s mercy.
But still bad.
He glanced up again at the tear in the sky, and then said, “Let’s check on Liu Mingyan.”
* * *
Shen Qingqiu felt better the farther they got away from that tear in the sky, and by the time they reached the town he was even able to do the proper civil thing and ask after Liu Qingge’s sister.
“There are two of her,” Liu Qingge said bluntly.
“Yes. You’re really sure the second one is from our timeline?”
“Yes.”
Shen Qingqiu squinted thoughtfully along the street, past the crowds of townspeople milling about, pursuing their daily business. Shopping, chatting, scolding children. Shen Qingqiu's 'daily business' anymore was always so high-strung; he had none of this humdrum, everyday sort of matter to pursue.
“I wonder whether anyone else survived.”
After all, even before Liu Mingyan’s abrupt arrival, they were seeing was a fairly steady stream of survivors from that timeline. Including, somewhere, Luo Binghe.
Still, more survivors from that first timeline would make his resolution to have a zero-fatality runthrough much more challenging, because he would feel obligated to rescue everyone from both.
And who counts as ‘everyone,’ anyway? he wondered. Civilians as well as cultivators? Did I…resolve to save the world? Two worlds??
There was such a thing as getting too ambitious. At least he had Liu Qingge on his side. That was a man built for saving multiple worlds, even if he did the novel-world equivalent of shoving a knife in an electrical outlet every day just purely out of instinct.
They soon reached the inn, where Shen Qingqiu was deeply relieved to learn that Liu Mingyan was resting and not available to receive visitors. He really did hope she was alright, but he also did not think it sounded very fun to have a conversation with two people trapped in one body. Until they figured out how to help her, there would be plenty of opportunities to visit that particular circus, so he was quite happy to go and visit Qi Qingqi while Liu Qingge went off and did whatever surly tasks Liu Qingge had to do.
Unsurprisingly, Qi Qingqi was overwhelmed with worry about her disciple, and had various theories about what had happened to her.
“I don’t believe it is demonic possession,” Shen Qingqiu said carefully after listening to her for a time. “Liu Qingge has said he’s seen no signs of that.”
“Neither have I,” Qi Qingqi said grumpily. “But I don’t know what else to make of all this.”
Neither did Shen Qingqiu, even though he had a much better idea of the basics of the situation. He didn’t know how they were going to separate the two Liu Mingyans out again, or even (frighteningly) how he was going to explain the second one’s presence to Qi Qingqi without her simply assuming he, too, had been possessed.
Or just heavily concussed. That would at least not demand any explanation, given how often he trained with Liu Qingge.
Since he could not give a satisfactory explanation for anything, and since even commiserating would feel indecently dishonest, he settled for giving a rousing shixiong-y speech about how Qi Qingqi needed to keep her own strength up if she was going to support her disciple, etc. etc. etc. He then dragged her downstairs to get some food and a change of air. If he couldn’t fix, he could at least distract! He was a certified expert in this field, having distracted himself so thoroughly from his own first life that he’d left it altogether. This was an ascension of a sort, and he felt duty-bound to share his wisdom with his shimei.
He built up a wall of meaningless blather so high even Liu Qingge and Luo Binghe would have a difficult time scaling it.
“Liu Qingge told me I was right today,” he announced to Qi Qingqi, rather grandly, as they were finishing up their meal.
“Mhm,” Qi Qingqi said without looking up from her nearly empty bowl. “And is that all Liu Qingge told you lately?”
This puzzled Shen Qingqiu.
“No. We talk a lot, so he tells me a lot.” Well, as much as one could talk with Liu Qingge, anyway. He wasn’t silent by any means, but he was often...brief. “But he doesn’t often tell me I’m right.” He took another few bites of his food, chewing somewhat mechanically, and afterwards said, slowly, “What do you mean by it, Qi-shimei?”
He couldn’t have said why he asked, exactly. It had something to do with the long-suffering look she’d sometimes directed at him on this outing. Particularly when Liu Qingge had come up in conversation. 'Is that all Liu Qingge told you lately?' What the hell did that mean? Was there something Liu Qingge should have told him? Surely all the apocalyptic cards were already in play.
She directed one of those looks at him, and then said, “What should I mean by it?”
“You’re the one who said it.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Listen. I trust Liu Qingge. He’s not hiding anything from me.” He would have loved to be able to say that it was not even Liu Qingge’s nature to hide, except that Liu Qingge had been hiding several significant things from all the inhabitants of this world for years now. It was true that it wasn’t his nature—it was some part System-enforced secrecy and some part natural disinclination to make everyone around him think he was spouting nonsense—but Shen Qingqiu still didn’t think he could say it with a straight face even after all his own practice with dissembling.
(A sudden urge to punch the System in its nonexistent face for making the world’s most straightforward man lie reared up in Shen Qingqiu. He set it aside for later use, since the System was still off enjoying a nice vacation while the local Luo Binghe suffered in the Endless Abyss.)
“He’s my shidi,” Shen Qingqiu went on, feeling inexplicably defensive all of a sudden. Thinking about the System had been a mistake; it had riled him up.
Qi Qingqi landed a look of exhausted ridicule on him, squarely and deftly as a strike to the jaw.
“Yes, he is.”
Somehow this appeal to sect-ly union had not done the trick, which Shen Qingqiu could not understand. This Qi Qingqi didn’t even know about the illicit activities of another shidi, Shang Qinghua.
So, he bravely sallied forth once more.
“He’s my friend,” he said.
“Yes,” Qi Qingqi said, nodding exaggeratedly. “Your friend.”
Somehow, without ever setting foot in the modern world Shen Qingqiu hailed from, Qi Qingqi had perfected the look of ‘I am not being paid enough for this’ workers sometimes employed before directing an angry customer to management. Shen Qingqiu supposed some things were universal. Inter-universal, even.
“I’m not trying to make you mistrust him, Shen Qingqiu. I think you can trust him to do much more than admit when you’re right.” She set her cup down and looked at him levelly. “What were you right about? It sounds like a grand occasion and it should be marked properly.”
Shen Qingqiu bristled.
“I am right all of the time.”
Her eyebrows rose, and then she smiled in the way she sometimes did when about to absolutely destroy him in a board game.
“We’ll revisit this conversation later, and when you admit that you were wrong, you’ll owe me three hundred spirit stones.”
“You’ll owe me when you admit that you were wrong.”
“We’ll see.
He had the uneasy feeling, as they finished off their meal, that while he had done all that to try to distract Qi Qingqi, that she had succeeded in distracting him, instead.
Pity that he didn’t know what from.
* * *
Liu Mingyan spent the next several days sleeping like the dead—but she really was sleeping, as far as any of the three Peak Lords could tell. Qi Qingqi found the town’s very best and finest medical practitioner, who could find nothing wrong with Liu Mingyan except for the injuries that were already healing. One day she woke up just long enough to dozily assure her Shizun that ‘we’re alright,’ and to mutter something about a conference. Qi Qingqi declared her delirious with pain; Liu Qingge expressed privately to Shen Qingqiu that he thought the two Liu Mingyans were in some sort of power struggle.
Shen Qingqiu hoped it was less martial than that. Liu Mingyan was a good, sensible disciple. Maybe they were just peacefully negotiating.
It made for a very tense and uneasy few days, with both Liu Qingge and Qi Qingqi being little-disposed to conversation or to Shen Qingqiu’s general silliness. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t feeling overly silly himself, with the other two looking so grim. He made sure to shuffle his fellow Peak Lords around—to the dining hall to eat, to their rooms to sleep, occasionally even outside to squint hatefully at the sky—but apart from that he didn’t really know what to do with himself. He liked Liu Mingyan, but he wasn’t her Shizun, or her brother. He felt like a small side character in someone else’s tragedy, and while this was hugely preferable to having a starring role, he also felt quite useless.
Apart from that, Shen Qingqiu mostly passed his time in his own room at the inn, gnawing on his lip and staring out the window at the tear in the sky and trying to convince himself it wasn’t getting bigger.
This particular sword had been dangling over his neck for quite some while, now, but it was different to be able to actually see it. At least it wasn’t screaming, most of the time. It had wailed and shrieked when Liu Qingge had been trying to climb into the damned thing, but apart from that it just sat up there quietly and grinned down at the world like a malevolent god.
Shen Qingqiu occasionally made a rude gesture back, but wasn’t sure what else to do.
On the third day after Shen Qingqiu’s return, he woke during the dim grey time around sunup, before the colourful fanfare of the sunrise but after the rich darkness of the night was bleaching away. As someone who had never been particularly geared towards hard work and diligence, it was unusual for him to wake so early, and for a few muzzy moments he wasn’t sure what had roused him.
Then he heard the steady sound of footsteps coming from beyond the wall of his room. A bolt of anger struck through Shen Qingqiu first—Aha! Sneaking out to mess around with the sky again??—but that didn’t even last long enough for Shen Qingqiu to notice the healthy strain of worry mixed in with it. He realized the next moment that Liu Qingge was not sneaking off along the hall; he was moving back and forth across his own room, again and again.
Pacing, before the sun had even risen.
Anger was replaced with vaguer, more familiar grumpiness. Shen Qingqiu got out of bed, slipped out into the hall, and knocked crisply on Liu Qingge’s door.
The footsteps paused. The door opened to reveal Shen Qingqiu’s very favourite shidi, looking at him with the dull eyes of someone who had not slept.
“Good morning, Liu-shidi,” Shen Qingqiu said brightly. “Decided to get an early start on the day, did we? If you have so much energy, why not go and train?”
Shen Qingqiu thought he might have seen something like disbelief flash in Liu Qingge’s eyes, but it was gone as quickly as it had come.
“To avoid another lecture.”
“What? What lecture? I—oh. My lecture.”
He supposed he could see that. If he’d gone to hustle Liu Qingge to a morning meal and found him not in his room, he really would have assumed he’d gone off to poke the sky in its big leering eyeball.
“So you could have let me know, first,” Shen Qingqiu said. Liu Qingge just looked at him tiredly.
“You were sleeping.”
And, indeed, Shen Qingqiu would not have liked this any better if he’d been woken up even earlier just so he could receive notes on Liu Qingge's schedule.
Well.
In that case, Shen Qingqiu could see the problem.
The sky was cracking open; Liu Qingge’s sister was suffering in ways they did not know how to do anything about; and Liu Qingge had been made to sit quietly and wait for reinforcements.
No wonder he was unhappy.
Liu Qingge was not someone he could pat on the head and console, and he was not likely enjoy attempts to pep him up with humour. He certainly could not be hugged. That aside, he wasn’t sad—he was stifled, like a wild wolf stuffed into a crate. No matter how many packing peanuts or pillows you cushioned him with, it wasn’t going to make him any happier. He wanted out.
And in this particular case, Shen Qingqiu couldn’t even commiserate with him, because in this particular case, Shen Qingqiu had been the one to wedge him into the crate himself. He had demanded Liu Qingge stay put, and Liu Qingge…had listened to him.
It didn’t seem quite right, but he couldn’t define why. He couldn’t have overpowered Liu Qingge—couldn't have forced him to stay here. But he’d invoked a promise, and Liu Qingge had held to his word.
Well, he had always been very honourable. Terribly honourable.
“Let’s go and take a look at the sky, shidi,” Shen Qingqiu said. When Liu Qingge narrowed his eyes a little, he added: “I’m here this time! Nothing could possibly go wrong.”
“…Nothing ever goes wrong around you,” Liu Qingge said blandly. “You’re very right.”
Shen Qingqiu supposed he could allow him that point.
They asked the inn staff to let Qi Qingqi know where they’d gone, when she woke, and then the two of them set off up the mountain. Shen Qingqiu watched while Liu Qingge demonstrated the test with the rock. He listened politely while Liu Qingge stated his opinion that if he could hold his form together, he could direct his own movements through the breach, and thereby break through into another timeline, to punch whoever needed punching and rescue whoever needed rescuing.
(He didn’t put it like that, but his explanations were always terse and Shen Qingqiu annotated them in an automated sort of way as they went by.)
Finally, Liu Qingge lifted one arm and fed it to the snatching nothingness.
It was even worse to watch it happening than it was to arrive with the horrible thing already half-complete—to watch as little bits and pieces of him were whisked away into nothing.
And to watch the way Liu Qingge’s expression didn’t change at all.
Until, suddenly, it did. There was a distant rumble through the breach, like far-off thunder, and all those little specks of Liu Qingge were snatched deeper into the yawning chaos. Liu Qingge’s frown went from the habitual placeholder expression to something more severe as he watched his limb scatter into nothingness.
“Liu Qingge,” said Shen Qingqiu, with the kind of pristine calm that only ever appeared before an absolute shitstorm of panic. “Where is the rest of your arm?”
Liu Qingge was still just frowning into the tear.
“Call it back,” said Shen Qingqiu, with that same tranquility, like a sheet of smooth ice beneath which some tremendous aquatic monster was slithering.
“Trying,” Liu Qingge said. Shen Qingqiu blinked.
Liu Qingge did not have to try to do anything. He’d never tried to do anything in his life. Liu Qingge just went out and accomplished things, start to finish. He didn’t try; he simply did.
(Shen Qingqiu was sure there was a line in a movie about this, and would also swear that he was shrinking and turning green and sprouting pointy ears, but he didn’t have the time for that right now. He was busy becoming hysterical.)
Actually, he’d been wrong; Liu Qingge had tried to do something once before, and it had taken a while before he’d succeeded. That thing had retrieving Shen Qingqiu’s dead body from Huan Hua Palace. Five years he’d spent fighting Luo Binghe, before he’d gotten that corpse out of there with Shen Qingqiu’s help.
Five years.
Five years.
Five years.
Oh. Shit. There had been another one, too. He’d tried to save Shen Qingqiu outside of Huan Hua Palace, months and months after that previous little visit there. And he’d failed, and Shen Qingqiu had died, and then Liu Qingge had followed him.
And that first fatal qi deviation—the one that had taken place in the other version of this story, the one with the original Shen Qingqiu.
Somewhere deep in Shen Qingqiu’s consciousness, beneath the building panic, some mathematics occurred. They were complex in form, contorted as they were around his unwillingness or inability to acknowledge certain variables, but in the end they boiled themselves down to something legible, which looked more or less like this:
Liu Qingge – Shen Yuan = failure.
And failure, in two out of three cases, meant death.
Shen Qingqiu’s consciousness then became one long wailing siren of ‘nooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooopenoooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooope.’ That really just fucking tore it.
He launched himself up towards the tear, intending to—what? To gather up all the little grains of Liu-Qingge-dust sprinkling the convulsing void?
Whatever he’d intended to do, he didn’t do it. The breach flayed away his fingertips with a burst of pain so incredible that he would have curled up into a ball and dropped right back to earth, if he’d been able.
He wasn’t, because Liu Qingge was in the way. Instead he wound up wrapped around Liu Qingge’s upper torso like a koala trying to weather a forest fire in the upper canopy. Liu Qingge responded to this with a grunt. This formally made him the most composed person on the scene, because the tear was screaming, and Shen Qingqiu was fairly certain that he was screaming, too.
“It’s coming back,” Liu Qingge said, and Shen Qingqiu looked. Liu Qingge’s arm was indeed more complete than it had been; the two of them were getting farther from the gap as he pulled away when he could, inch by inch.
Finally the whole thing was clear, and everything seemed to be in the right order—no backwards thumbs, no sleeve woven into the fabric of the flesh—but Shen Qingqiu was not in a trusting mood.
“Let me see—let me see.” He snatched at Liu Qingge’s arm, prodding and squeezing and rubbing at it to see that it was real and complete.
And he found that in addition to being real and complete, it was also…warm. And, while certainly well-defined with firm muscle, surprisingly soft.
And…flesh. Not marble.
He came to this scientific conclusion while he was fussing about with Liu Qingge’s hand as if he mistrusted the joints. Only at that moment did it occur to him that there was anything strange about massaging the meat of Liu Qingge’s palm.
Meat. Meat??? Why is it called ‘meat,’ anyway? It’s a fucking human hand—am I supposed to take a bite out of it???
The panic had by now completely ebbed, and left behind it a thick, lumpy crust of weirdness.
He looked at Liu Qingge, who had been passing his time by pretending to be a brick wall.
“That is an arm,” Shen Qingqiu said, with all the solemn gravity of a doctor providing a prognosis to a worried patient.
“Oh,” said Liu Qingge, which really was the kindest possible thing he could have said, given the circumstances.
“I wasn’t going to bite it.”
??????????????????????????????????????????????????? said Shen Qingqiu’s innermost thoughts and Liu Qingge’s expression at the same time.
Some things you could not recover from and simply had to pretend had never happened. Shen Qingqiu patted Liu Qingge’s shoulder crisply. He was still coiled quite tightly around Liu Qingge, bodily, and needed to find a way to change that situation without making it weird(er).
“Well done, shidi. Now, ah, we should…”
Liu Qingge didn’t interrupt him, but his attention shifted. Shen Qingqiu looked where he was looking and found, standing on the ledge below, a familiar figure.
It was Yue Qingyuan, staring upwards with a look on his face Shen Qingqiu had never seen there before. At first he thought that fathomless look was directed at him and Liu Qingge, and he would have completely understood that, given the ridiculous show they were putting on. But he didn’t think so; Yue Qingyuan was looking past them. Shen Qingqiu couldn't even have begun to explain his expression. It was this absolute bleakness, like he was watching the world end right in front of him.
And like he wasn’t even surprised.