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It all starts because of instant noodles.

Well. No. That's not quite accurate.

It all starts because of Shang Qinghua's bad habit of spilling instant noodles.

It all starts, to really be precise, because of Shang Qinghua's bad habit of spilling instant noodles on his laptop while he's eating and typing one-handed, trying to make his daily word count.

The fact that he uses a lot of custom macros to spit out and edit large chunks of almost-but-not-quite identical text to really amp up his chapters' word count might be partially to blame, too. Just maybe.

But really, it's easiest to say that it all starts because of instant noodles.

* * *

Shang Qinghua is typing in a frenzy, running about a thousand words behind schedule for today's update when he pokes at the keyboard to get it to activate the "heaving bosoms" macro and tips his instant noodles just a bit too far. The broth makes an alarming fizzy sound when it hits the keyboard. He flails and drops the far-too-full cup, which rolls off the desk and tries to douse the power strip under the desk.

Shang Qinghua flails for the plug, and smashes the keyboard with an elbow while he jerks the power-strip out from the wall. He's not getting electrocuted today, and he's not starting another electrical fire today, either. Explaining the first one to his father when he'd needed a place to stay for a few days for smoke remediation had been bad enough. He's not doing that again.

So maybe he's not super careful about the computer when he does this, and maybe his computer still has power because it's a laptop and the battery still kind of works. He expects to lose his draft, at worst. He'll have to churn something out of his drafts folder if that happens, and he'll get flamed to hell and back, but whatever, he's faced that before.

The fizzing sound stops when he unplugs the power strip from the wall. The weird smell, however, does not go away. Something crackles like paper crumpling, and the temperature plummets.

"How," a deep voice says, chill and menacing and entirely foreign.

Shang Qinghua looks up from the mess under his desk, grateful again that he has smooth, uncarpeted floors, and gapes.

"I --" he starts.

"How were you able to summon this one," the figure demands. It is not so much a question as a statement of disbelief.

"I --" Shang Qinhua says again. He looks at the man -- the demon? the weird stalker cosplayer? -- standing in his studio apartment, and then at his computer screen, which is flickering like it's possessed. "I don't know? I was just --"

His computer spits out about a dozen different macros at once, the editorial ones and the text-pasting ones competing to see which can move faster, and his computer turns itself off with a sad clicking sound that he's never heard it make before. Shit, he thinks. I definitely didn't save that draft.

"HOW," the figure demands, and he snaps his attention back to the -- actually -- very tall, very pale man. An ice blade materializes in his hand, black as night, and Shang Qinghua gulps. Well. That sure looks like Mobei-Jun, doesn't it.

"I don't know!" he admits. "I -- the macros -- I don't know! It was just supposed to be formatting!"

The temperature drops again, and Mobei-Jun makes a gesture that Shang Qinghua has described in his drafts enough times to recognize it instantly, even if it's never shown up in the novel itself. He's opening a portal, and he'll disappear, and -- nothing happens.

Mobei-Jun glares at Shang Qinghua again.

"Do not even think about following me," he says. His tone is arctic, impossible to deny.

Before Shang Qinghua can come up with anything to say, with any kind of reaction at all, Mobei-Jun has stormed down the short hall and out of the tiny apartment. He doesn't bother to close the door behind himself, so Shang Qinghua can see him head down the stairs, footsteps freakishly soft for someone so tall.

"My king," Shang Qinghua says, staring at the open doorway and feeling the chill lingering in the air. "It's really you."

He feels behind himself vaguely, and collapses into his desk chair. Of course he knocks over his energy drink in the process and has to scramble to keep any of it from soaking into his already-damp laptop, which he sets upside down over a spare t-shirt to let any broth drain out of the keyboard.

So maybe he should use, like, a dish towel, or something. Maybe he would, if he knew if he had any dish towels. He might, somewhere. His step-mother might have bought him some as a housewarming present, when he first moved into his own apartment after graduating from high school. He's not sure, and if she had, they'd have been more of a 'thank god you're finally out of my husband's house' present than anything else, nothing he'd have wanted to keep around.

The floor is a mess, and he mops it up with a hastily-grabbed bath towel. His mind feels like his computer screen had looked before it shut down: too much going on at once to figure any of its component parts out. He puts the empty noodle cup in the trash and the towel in the bathroom sink.

Then he hears car horns blare in the street below his apartment window.

Shit, he thinks, thoughts going suddenly crystal-clear. Shit, traffic. 

They don't have cars in Proud Immortal Demon Way. They don't have traffic, or street lights, or any vehicles that can move that fast. If that really was Mobei-Jun, there's no way he'd know to look before crossing the street, and Shang Qinghua lives on a busy street, not one of the little side-alleys where you can get away with jaywalking more often than not.

Before he can register it, Shang Qinghua is throwing himself down the stairs, racing down the five flights faster than he's ever taken them before.

My king, he thinks. Oh shit, my king, Mobei-Jun, don't be dead, don't be hit by a car, don't be smushed into the pavement like so much roadkill. 

He skids out the front door of the building and into chaos. A driver is staggering out of her car, bloody nose gushing past her fingers. Shang Qinghua glances at the front of her car, where the hood is crumpled as if it had hit a lamp-post. A meter or two away, Mobei-Jun is sprawled on his back on the asphalt. The car horns he heard appear to be coming from other impatient drivers stuck behind the two-car pileup that's behind the bleeding woman's car.

Shang Qinghua shelves all of the other cars for later, filing them as someone else's problem: they've either got insurance or they don't, and he's not getting involved. Usually he'd walk past something like this as fast as he could, lest he get dragged into the situation, get involved in something that might make his mother's new husband angry or worried about the attention Shang Qinghua had drawn to himself. Not that his step-father would be especially worried about Shang Qinghua, per se. He'd be more worried about any attention being drawn to Shang Qinhua's inconvenient existence, which the man seems to consider a blemish on his bland, picture-perfect political ambitions.

But he's not avoiding it this time. This time Shang Qinghua sprints straight into the middle of things, ducking around gaping onlookers and skidding to a stop in the middle of the street.

He drops to his knees by Mobei-Jun's side, and pauses just before touching him.

"My king," he says, voice just loud enough to be heard between the two of them. "My king, are you all right?"

Mobei-Jun opens his eyes and glares. Shang Qinghua waves his hands frantically, trying to see if Mobei-Jun is bleeding anywhere visibly, trying to remember if Mobei-Jun will bleed a weird color like the green-blooded snake-demons he put by the southern border. He thinks not. He hopes not. He's pretty sure he didn't do that. Not to his favorite character. Right?

"Can you stand?" he asks, instead.

Traffic is backing up, and he wants to get out of the way, out of the street, out of this very public space. Shang Qinghua wants to have a very determined nervous breakdown, but he can't do that here. Instead he holds out a hand to Mobei-Jun, who nods, takes his hand, and nearly hauls Shang Qinghua down on top of him. He seems unsteady on his feet for a moment. Well. He did just get hit by a car.

"This one is fine," Mobei-Jun says. His breathing is a little weird, shallow and fast. "What was that."

He doesn't appear to speak in questions, so much as flat declarations that demand a response through sheer force of will.

"My king," Shang Qinghua says, and drags him onto the sidewalk, gulping when he sees a cop pacing toward them with a determined expression on her face. "I'll explain, I promise, just -- let me do the talking?"

Mobei-Jun blinks at him, then shrugs, wincing only very, very faintly as he does so. That's bad: Shang Qinghua wrote him to be stoic. If he's wincing, he was badly hurt, wasn't he? Shit.

Shang Qinghua's explanation, that Mobei-Jun is a professional cosplayer doing a photo-shoot to promote a webnovel, seems to be just stupid enough (and just geeky enough) to start to lose the cop's interest until Shang Qinghua gets off onto a tangent and goes into far too much detail about demonic fashion norms by region. When the cop starts to look like she thinks Shang Qinghua is actually crazy, rather than just kind of harmlessly strange, he backtracks and rattles off a lot of detail about wigs and prosthetics and makeup. He veers into a pretense of absent-mindedness, emphasizing the need to be sure the photographer knows they're running late. He doesn't have his phone -- where is his phone? He asks the cop if he can text his photographer friend. After all, he says, waving his hands in a way he knows makes him look particularly vague, he doesn't want to worry anyone!

The cop frowns, then shrugs, and Shang Qinghua can all but see the moment he's dismissed as a hopeless loser. That's usually disappointing, if he's actually put in the effort to talk to someone face to face, but right now it means they're that much closer to being let go. He can feel himself relaxing slightly.

He really should have known better.

"He's the one!" The woman from before exclaims. "He walked out into the street, he walked into my car--"

Her face and hands are bloody, and Mobei-Jun glances at her calmly and then at Shang Qinghua. He looks utterly bored, and not at all like someone who has recently been hit by a car so hard the car's hood was dented. He doesn't even have road rash on his hands anymore, or any tears in his robes from being flung by the impact. He looks a little pale, but that could just be the cosplay cosmetics Shang Qinghua invented for the cop.

"The lady must be mistaken," Shang Qinghua says, thinking fast. "Wouldn't my --" he gulps, bites back my king "--my friend -- be injured, if he had been hit by your car? Did you hit your head when the airbags went off? How fast were you going?"

It's only a guess based on her bloody nose, but it appears to be a good one. The cop turns her focus onto the lady, demanding whether she knows what the city speed limits are. Shang Qinghua breathes a small sigh of relief, and squeezes Mobei-Jun's hand reassuringly. He's still holding onto it. Why is he still holding onto it? Would it be weird if he let go now? Have they been holding hands this whole time while he talked to the cop?

"Just a little longer," he says. "I'll explain, I promise."

"Mm," Mobei-Jun agrees, and doesn't move, or say anything more. He also doesn't pull his hand away from Shang Qinghua's. His hand is chill, the palm faintly clammy.

Finally, finally, finally, they're free to go.

Shang Qinghua drags Mobei-Jun back up to his apartment, where the door is still open, and he's pathetically glad no one appears to have robbed him. Not that he has much worth stealing in the tiny studio, but, well. He'd really miss his laptop, piece of shit that it is.

He drags Mobei-Jun in, shoves him into the center of the tiny apartment, slams the door shut, locks it. He points a trembling finger at the demon king who is inexplicably real, corporeal, and in his studio apartment.

"Stay there," he says. "Do not go anywhere."

Then he shuts himself in the bathroom, and he tosses the broth-soaked towel from the sink onto the floor. He puts his head under the cold water tap, and screams for a count of five.

* * *

When he comes back out, Mobei-Jun is standing exactly where Shang Qinghua left him, looking around the tiny room in what looks half like dazed astonishment and half like astonishingly judgmental scorn. 

Fair, Shang Qinghua thinks. His place is small, and dingy, and not especially tidy, and nothing like the ice palaces he's described in his unpublished drafts, or even the shitty inns in the borderlands. The safety bars on the one window to keep out burglars probably make it look more like a prison than anything else, and it smells faintly of spilled instant noodles even to Shang Qinghua's senses.

"You," Mobei-Jun says, gaze snapping to him. "Explain."

Then he staggers, and goes to one knee, face going almost translucently pale. One hand goes to the side of his back, where there does appear to be a tear in his robes.

"Shit," Shang Qinghua says. "Are you okay -- I mean, of course not, shit, you were just hit by a car, you're probably not okay."

He steps forward to help.

A black ice-blade appears in Mobei-Jun's free hand, aimed straight at Shang Qinghua.

"I said," he bites out. "Explain."

"Okay," Shang Qinghua says, gulping back a squeak. "Okay. Um. You're -- you're Mobei-Jun, right?"

The ice-blade grows longer, sharper. Mobei-Jun glares hard enough that Shang Qinghua is pretty sure he'd be pissing himself if he had managed to remember to drink anything in the last eight (or maybe twelve?) hours. So what. He was having an energy drink and noodles before this happened. That counts as hydration, right? So he got distracted writing, so sue him. It's working in his favor right now!

"You're Mobei-Jun," Shang Qinghua says again. "I'm Shang Qinghua. You -- I think you were summoned here? I -- look, I just -- can I look at your wounds? I'm not a cultivator, you could totally squish me like a bug. But -- I mean -- if that car hood was running hot or any of the engine fluids hit you at a boiling temperature, that's gonna be bad for you, ice demons don't do well with boiling temperatures! And, look -- I have a first aid kit!. Just -- let me get the first aid kit, let me disinfect anything that hasn't healed yet? You don't want an infection, and I don't know if you have immunity to the diseases here --"

The ice-blade in Mobei-Jun's hand doesn't get bigger as Shang Qinghua rambles. Shang Qinghua takes that as implicit agreement and scurries back past the galley kitchen and into the bathroom to excavate the first-aid kit from under the sink, grabbing a couple of washcloths and wetting two with cold water.

When he comes back out, Mobei-Jun is kneeling on the floor with both of his hands grabbing onto his knees as if to brace himself. The ice-blade is melting on the floor by his side. He's glaring fit to kill, but he also looks like he's only vertical by sheer force of will, and that's -- Shang Qinghua gulps. That's a really bad sign.

He tries to think of times his king has been injured this badly in the book, how he'd healed then, and comes up with, well, cold temperatures and ice-baths, and some medicinal cold springs. Shang Qinghua's got a couple of fans and a cold shower, not even a bathtub. So. He'll deal with that later.

He steps forwards and kneels a few paces before Mobei-Jun. Then he catches his eye and puts the first aid kit down on the floor between them with a soft click.

"I'm gonna tell you what everything is, okay? Then you tell me which you need, and you can apply things, or I can."

Mobei-Jun gives a small, sharp nod. Even that motion seems to pain him.

Shit, Shang Qinghua thinks.

Shang Qinghua's hands don't shake (much) as he lays out the contents of the absurdly over-stocked first-aid kit. It was a gift from his politically ambitious step-father, who believes in being over-prepared and seems to have convinced himself that a nice first-aid kit absolves him of any future responsibility for his step-son's health or even awareness of his existence.

Shang Qinghua shakes his head, and puts aside the things that aren't applicable, thoughts and medical items alike. Human painkillers won't work on an ice demon. The heating packets will do more harm than they have any right to, because he's an idiot who made ice demons weak to fire damage in a fit of video-game inspired word-vomit. He narrates the process, explaining what everything is even as he sets certain things back in the box, and Mobei-Jun's posture eases very, very slightly.

"First of all," Shang Qinghua says. "You're sweating. This is cold, it should help."

He hands over the damp washcloth, or tries to. Mobei-Jun makes no move to take it.

"Oookay," Shang Qinghua says. "Should I --"

Mobei-Jun nods, and so Shang Qinghua finds himself wiping sweat from the sculpted brow and perfect cheekbones and jawline of a fictional character who has, completely impossibly, physically manifested in his apartment and is kneeling on his floor in the tiny amount of open space between Shang Qinghua's bed and his desk.

"What's next?" Shang Qinghua asks. "I mean, you have to tell me what's wrong, something's obviously hurting you. You'd be trying to throw me through the wall to fight your way home otherwise, right?"

He smiles, wry, and a little bit sad. Mobei-Jun has always taken the direct path toward his own aims, even if he is written to act as Luo Binghe's spy-master. It's a bit of a disconnect, but the readers don't seem to care, except for Peerless Cucumber, who actually picks up on Shang Qinghua's demonic sub-plots and complains when he drops them in favor of more papapa and wife-acquisition.

"Why are you helping me?" Mobei-Jun demands.

It is phrased as a question this time, which is almost a surprise.

"Why wouldn't I?" Shang Qinghua asks, looking down at the disinfectant and gauze and chemical ice packs. "I mean, I get that demons are suspicious, but -- I mean, you ended up here because of me, I think, and I didn't warn you about cars, so it's kind of my fault you're hurt, and what kind of person would I be if I just let you keel over on my doorstep? Besides, that cop probably thinks you're my boyfriend or something, and if you die I'll have to explain a dead body and I really don't want to do that, they'll put me in prison. I'm really not cut out for prison?"

He clamps his mouth shut with an audible click.

"I'm sorry," he says after a moment. "I ramble when I'm nervous."

Mobei-Jun almost appears amused. It's nothing Shang Qinghua could put a finger on: he's still glaring, he's still frowning. But he nods very slightly.

"My dying would inconvenience you," he says. "Very well."

And he strips off his robes, down to the waist.

Shang Qinghua almost faints on the spot. Mobei-Jun's muscles are sharply defined, and his skin is marble-pale, lined with faintly blue veins. He turned very slightly to the left before bracing his hands on his thighs again, sweat standing out on his brow even though Shang Qinghua just wiped it off.

When Shang Qinghua focuses, he can see that Mobei-Jun's back and sides are bruised slightly, but that's healing already. The only visible injury is a tiny slice above his right kidney, no longer than a finger, and not visibly very deep.

And all of a sudden Shang Qinghua knows when they are -- or rather, he knows when Mobei-Jun is. Or when he was, before he arrived here.

"It's a Ling Hua dart, isn't it," he says, and goes for the tweezers and some gauze. "From Huan Hua Palace?"

Mobei-Jun stares at him.

"That entry wound is distinctive." Shang Qinghua says. (It's not. That's the whole point of the Ling Hua darts, to leave only an unremarkable slicing wound after they've entered the victim's body. But he knows all about them: he created them, didn't he?) "The dart has an anaesthetic on it, so you won't have felt it. But they open up inside you like a flower, and shred you from within. I bet the car hitting you activated it, too, you're not supposed to move that much --"

He leans forwards.

"Can I remove it?" he asks. "It's going to hurt."

Mobei-Jun nods.

"Okay," Shang Qinghua says, and thinks fast. "I think -- I can't reach it if you're sitting up. Can you -- um -- can you lie down on the bed? So I can reach?"

He feels himself flush at the suggestion. His ideal man, lying on his bed. He's injured, you idiot, he chides himself. He's down a kidney and he was hit by a fucking car.

Mobei-Jun nods, and tries to get to his feet, to no avail. Shang Qinghua half-drags him the few steps over to the bed, and, well, the less said about getting the six petals and central shaft of the dart out of Mobei-Jun's body, the better. Shang Qinghua is just glad he didn't puke. He's even more glad Mobei-Jun passed out after the first one came out.

When he finishes disinfecting the cut and taping it over with sterile gauze, he sits for a moment, staring down at the completely impossible person unconscious on his shitty mattress, at the bloody golden petal-blades that look exactly as he had imagined them. Then he blinks, forces himself to stand, and cleans up.

* * *

Some time later, Shang Qinghua is swearing at his computer. It still works, for certain definitions of working, but the macros are fucked all to hell, and he's now 3,000 words behind today's schedule. He's definitely going to have to pull from drafts for a dream interlude or a vision or something if he wants to post on time.

"Bullet points," Shang Qinghua is snapping, trying to keep his voice low. "You were supposed to be bullet points."

Mobei-Jun's breath catches.

"What did you say?" he asks. Actually asks.

Shang Qinghua turns to look over his shoulder at him.

"You're awake," he says. The computer makes a beeping noise, and the fan kicks on again. Shang Qinghua smacks it. "Just a sec," he says, turning back to the desk. He pokes a few keys to get the 'lavish description of a demonic palace' macro to start pasting in text from a randomized text generator he built a while back. "Okay," he says, and turns back to Mobei-Jun. "How are you feeling?"

"This is not a defensible position," he says, as if he thinks Shang Qinghua is incredibly dense.

"I was talking about bullet points?" Shang Qinghua says. "You know, writing? Formatting?"

He pauses, then, because the phrase he's used is literally 'the main points' and -- oh, given Mobei-Jun's martial background, he must have misinterpreted the meaning as something more like 'strategic points'.^[1] It's not like they have computers or text documents or formatting in the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way.

"Nevermind," he says, waving a hand. "It's a -- a writing thing."

Mobei-Jun does not look reassured.

"We're not in danger here," Shang Qinghua continues. "The worst thing that's gonna happen is my neighbor accidentally hotboxing us again, and he did that yesterday, so we're probably fine today."

His neighbor is kind of a jerk, but Shang Qinghua screams out his frustration in the bathroom on a pretty regular basis, so he doesn't think he really has room to complain.

Mobei-Jun just looks more confused. He hasn't tried to sit up yet, which is probably a bad sign, but the ice packs from Shang Qinghua's tiny freezer seem to have helped some. He looks less drawn, less like he's pulling on hidden reserves just to stay conscious.

"Okay," Shang Qinghua says. "First things first. You need clothes, and we need to figure out how to get you home. I have some ideas, but I have to finish this chapter first."

Mobei-Jun frowns. He looks like he wants to complain, but he just studies Shang Qinghua's face, then nods, and closes his eyes. He passes out again almost immediately.

"Well," Shang Qinghua says. "Okay."

He can't exactly bring Mobei-Jun to a hospital. He knows how badly his king was injured by the dart, and what will cure him -- time, and cold, and time -- but he's still distracted as he fights with his computer.

The Proud Immortal Demon Way update goes up on time, just barely the right length, and Shang Qinghua doesn't even bother to watch the comments start to flood in the way he usually does. Instead he hops on Taobao and orders some clothes for Mobei-Jun, picking sellers who promise fast delivery.

Maybe it's creepy that he knows Mobei-Jun's measurements off the top of his head: some of the commenters would definitely say so. But right now it's handy, because it means he doesn't have to guess, and can just pick things out like he's dressing a really huge ball-jointed doll or something. He picks black jeans and blue and black shirts, and tries not to think too hard about what he's doing when he chooses underwear and socks.

That done, Shang Qinghua looks at his bank balance, and sighs. He was already going to have to remind his father that he exists this month to make rent, after a new, very popular novel bit into his subscribers. Buying Mobei-Jun clothes just made his bank balance more pathetic. So, fuck it. He orders chopped noodles from Èleme and tosses in a couple of dishes that are good cold, things that sound like what he's imagined Northern cuisine to be like, the few times he's daydreamed about it in more detail than he's even put in his drafts.

Shang Qinghua eats at his desk, because he doesn't have another table: the apartment's just not that big. He putters on the message boards for a bit, checking comment threads for ideas, and finally admits he's going to have to sleep tonight after all, instead of pulling a second all-nighter in a row. He's only a couple of years out of college, but his body is already way pissier about going without sleep than it used to be.

He pulls a pillow and blanket out of the closet at the foot of the bed, moving quietly. Then he moves his desk chair out of the way and curls up on the floor, trying not to think too hard about how much this is paralleling the backstory he wrote about Mobei-Jun's first meeting with the mousy little An Ding Peak spy he named after himself. He falls asleep to the whirring fan he pointed at the bed, thoughts circling each other down into the dark.

* * *

Mobei-Jun is unconscious on and off for the next 36 hours. Whenever he wakes up Shang Qinghua brings him portions of the cold takeout dishes he'd ordered and keeps him supplied with glasses of chilled water. While Mobei-Jun sleeps, Shang Qinghua churns out the next two day's novel updates, wrapping up this wife-plot faster than he'd planned. He occasionally changes out the freezer-ice-packs he's packed next to Mobei-Jun and runs downstairs once to pick up the packages containing Mobei-Jun's new clothes.

He talks to his dad on the phone for just long enough to feel even worse about his life choices and his career prospects. His father doesn't mean to make him feel terrible, but the inevitable comparisons to other kids his age, to his dad's coworkers' sons' office jobs and good marriages just makes him want to scream. None of those kids got functionally ditched by both of their parents after an acrimonious divorce, he's willing to bet on that. But bringing up his mom with his dad is a fast-track to not making rent, so he nods and forces a smile, and agrees.

When he gets off the phone he writes a few very cathartic, messy murders into the plot, an assassination attempt gone wrong, and a bloody and violent monster hunt. Then he looks over at Mobei-Jun, and realizes that -- if his king is real -- everyone he's just killed in a fit of filial rage is also real, in some sense. Shang Qinghua chokes back hysterical laughter, closes his laptop, and hides in the bathroom, head on his knees, back to the chill tile of the shower corner as he counts his breathing, in and out, for what feels like a very long time.

As a distraction, he runs a huge load of laundry and hangs the new clothes to dry in the entry  that's also his galley kitchen. Then he tries not to think about what it means that he planned for a fictional character to -- what -- stay here long enough that he needs modern clothes? He laughs, a little unsteadily, makes a cup of instant noodles for dinner, and curls up on the floor under his blanket again after changing out the ice packs one more time.

Late the next morning, while Shang Qinghua is taking a break and browsing the message boards for yesterday's chapter to make notes on which bread crumbs he dropped are most popular with readers, Mobei-Jun wakes up and sits up under his own power. He looks, frankly, about as terrible as someone with his bone structure is able to look, hair lank and skin dull.

"My king," Shang Qinghua says, and something flickers across Mobei-Jun's face, an expression too swift to read. "I mean, um. You might feel better if you showered?"

Mobei-Jun looks confused, and Shang Qinghua realizes he didn't write showers into the novel. Well. That's not going to be the weirdest thing Mobei-Jun sees while he's here.

"If you can stand, I'll show you," Shang Qinghua says. "Standing under running cold water will help, don't you think?"

Mobei-Jun nods, and gets to his feet, shaky but determined. He follows Shang Qinghua into the tiny bathroom, where he strips naked, utterly without shame. That's a sight that's going to be burned into Shang Qinghua's retinas for -- well -- forever? Hopefully?

Shang Qinghua explains the shower's taps and the bottled shampoo. He leaves a towel in plain sight, along with a huge t-shirt and pair of enormous sweatpants that ought to fit well enough for now. Then he beats a hasty retreat.

The message boards provide a little more distraction while he waits for Mobei-Jun to finish cooling down and washing up. Peerless Cucumber has logged on, and his comments about the resolution of the latest wife-plot are sharp, cutting and incisive, and kind of amazingly familiar by now. He's frustrated that the plot was resolved with papapa, as if the readers would stand for anything else, and he complains about the low IQ of the wife's brother, a high-ranked snake-demon from the Southern borderlands, and the easy resolution of his intrigue sub-plot.

(The most recent wife and her brother are, in fact, distantly related to Zhuzhi-Lang's father, but that detail got cut in favor of frantic text expansion while Shang Qinghua was trying to be sure Mobei-Jun wasn't going to die from the Ling Hua dart. It's not like anyone except Peerless Cucumber will care about that kind of worldbuilding detail, anyway. Zhuzhi-Lang hasn't even appeared in the novel yet, only in the backstory, since Tianlang-Jun hasn't shown up yet either, still trapped under the mountain.)

Finally the water cuts off, and Mobei-Jun steps out of the bathroom, drying his amazingly long hair with the towel. The sweatpants are too short, exposing his pale ankles. Shang Qinghua drags his eyes away, and then up even more hastily, because the sweatpants fabric is --well -- it's thin, and it's clinging around the crotch. The shirt he set out is huge on Shang Qinghua. It fits Mobei-Jun like it's tailored for him, like it's designed to hug his pecs and show off his biceps. He looks like sex on legs, like a magazine model, like someone who has no right being in this shitty studio apartment. The demon mark glows blue on his forehead. His canines are just a little longer than a human's, and he looks distracted, almost soft, for just a moment.

"My king!" Shang Qinghua yelps, and hears his voice try to crack. "How are you feeling?"

"Better," Mobei-Jun allows. "Hungry."

He looks for a moment like he wants to say something else, then shakes his head, and goes to sit in the only other chair in the apartment, a heavy wooden thing that Shang Qinghua dragged off the street a year or so ago. It makes Shang Qinghua feel stupid sitting in it; Mobei-Jun just looks majestic, even with dripping hair and too-short sweatpants riding up his calves.

Shang Qinghua nods, feeling a little bit like a bobble-head doll, and gets to his feet, closing the computer. He's not exactly a good cook, but he can doctor leftovers like nobody's business. He puts the resulting noodle dish on a tray he found in the back of his closet with another glass of cold water and brings it all over to Mobei-Jun.

"I'll just change the sheets," he says, because clean sheets are amazing, and because it will give him something to do that isn't rudely ogle Mobei-Jun king while he eats. He's pretty sure that's rude for demons. Probably. Maybe? Maybe that's just something Luo Binghe picked up from humans.

In his peripheral vision, Mobei-Jun devours the food, drinks down the water, and then gets to his feet and stretches, improbably flexible for someone with so much muscle. Shang Qinghua focuses on cleaning the galley kitchen, because the alternative is -- what -- confessing his undying love to someone who's said a dozen words to him? Who's been unconscious for most of the time they've interacted?

He scrubs the sink clean twice. He's not sure he's ever actually cleaned the sink before. It's still kind of rusty.

Mobei-Jun finally stops, seemingly satisfied with his range of motion, and summons an ice-blade into his hand, making the same portal-forming gesture that didn't work before.

It still doesn't work.

Shang Qinghua has, despite himself, been thinking about this. Mobei-Jun can't canonically portal between dimensions: that's something only Xin Mo can do, to escape the Abyss or collapse the Human and Demon realms into each other. But he created Xin Mo, and -- weird as it is to think of it while standing in the same room as him -- he created Mobei-Jun. So maybe he can just, kind of, amp his powers up a bit? The abilities already exist in-universe, right?

Mobei-Jun is glaring at the air where the portal should have been, expression alarmingly stern.

"I have an idea," Shang Qinghua says. He almost stops talking when Mobei-Jun turns that glare on him, but forces himself to continue. "A -- ritual? A ritual. It might enable you to portal between dimensions. But it'll take some time? A day? Or two?"

Mobei-Jun stares at him, and then nods, slowly.

"What do you need for the ritual?" he asks.

"Um," Shang Qinghua thinks fast. Most rituals require either strange plants or animal parts, which really isn't an option here, or some kind of test of valor by the beneficiary. Mobei-Jun won't accept a ritual in which he has no part, even if all Shang Qinghua needs to do is write a chapter that will definitely lose him readers and make it harder to pay his rent next month. He'll do it: he'd do more than that for his favorite character. But there's no way for Mobei-Jun to help him with the writing.

Mobei-Jun arches an eyebrow at his pause.

"You can't leave this apartment," Shang Qinghua says. "You have to, um, be silent, and as still as possible?"

That's really just so he doesn't run into traffic again or distract Shang Qinghua by trying to stretch or exercise or something, but Mobei-Jun looks distinctly unimpressed. This quest is way too easy.

"I have to do the rest," Shang Qinghua admits. "It's -- it's hard to explain?"

"It involves the glowing panel," Mobei-Jun says. It's -- almost -- a question. He glances at the computer on Shang Qinghua's desk.

Shang Qinghua nods, feeling oddly relieved.

"Yeah," he says. "You can't touch it. And I have to -- um. Well. It's complicated? I might talk a lot. And I might say some really ridiculous things, and you can't ask me questions about them. Any of them."

There. That sounds more like a traditional challenge, right? Maybe?

Mobei-Jun nods again, and goes to sit in the wooden chair again, leaning back and settling in, like he's prepared to just sit there for several days. Who knows, maybe he is.

Sometime yesterday Shang Qinghua dragged the chair to the side of the bed, just behind the desk, so he could take breaks from writing and watch his king sleep. Watch over his sleep? That still sounds creepy. It's just -- it's not every day your ideal character manifests in the real world, or almost dies after being hit by a car. So Shang Qinghua was worried, okay. Sometimes he needed to sit still and just -- be sure Mobei-Jun was still breathing.

"That is acceptable," Mobei-Jun says. "When do you begin."

Shang Qinghua turns back to the computer, putting his back to the bed and the chair beside it, and realizes he's never going to be able to write with Mobei-Jun sitting right behind him. He can hear Mobei-Jun breathing. It's distracting. It makes him feel like some kind of small, helpless prey animal.

"One more thing," he adds, and points to the other side of the tiny room, at the foot of the bed. There it will be just to his left, in his peripheral vision. "Move the chair over there."

Mobei-Jun complies without a word of protest, which is weird in and of itself. Shang Qinghua takes stock of his desk: he's got half-eaten snacks and water and at least one energy drink in easy reach. He's not sure how long this will take, but his king just ate, and high-powered demons can go a long time without food.

"Get more water whenever you want," Shang Qinghua says, and gulps. "Or lie down? If you want? I'll -- I'll get started now."

Mobei-Jun doesn't move, doesn't even nod, so Shang Qinghua swallows again, and opens the laptop and boots it up. First he digs up a few of his older reconstructed drafts, from back when he was trying to recover his original outline, write down everything he could remember about human and demonic bloodlines and traditions and abilities.

The file he wants is short, with cleaner, punchier prose than he's written in at least a year. He blinks at it, a little surprised. He's known his writing has changed, in theory, but seeing the contrast like this kind of hurts. He really liked trying to write good books, but they didn't pay the bills.

"This really wasn't half bad," he says. He sighs, because he knows he's going to have to expand on it, to shove formulaic phrases into it, to watch it bloat out of shape. "Shitty, stupid author," he grouses. "Sell-out hack. The anti-fans are right, you're terrible at this."

When he takes a quick break to check on them, the forums are still complaining about how the last arc ended, but at least it was a demonic wife, so he's still in the Demon Realm, and the transition won't be quite as abrupt as it might have been.

He hasn't done a purely political intrigue side-plot in at least fifty chapters, maybe more like a hundred. It's easy enough to start up the 'demonic palace' macro and let it chug along while he outlines in his head. Xin Mo needs to dimension hop so Mobei-Jun can follow him, and when Luo Binghe sates the sword with more papapa with a favorite wife, Mobei-Jun can just, like, meditate it off, or something. Shang Qinghua won't shackle his king to a demonic ability that causes qi deviations or fuck-or-die scenarios.

It comes together more swiftly than he thought it might, though the computer is stubborn and almost surly about it.

"Fuck you," he swears at it, at one point. "I know you can spit out a description of a Tiger-Striped-Moose-Bull faster than that. I don't want a Leopard-Spotted-Moose-Bull, those are practically domesticated in the Northwest, I want a Tiger-Striped-Moose-Bull! No, wait, make it a herd, they need to run away from them, and they're huge, and ... they're sacred to someone, aren't they? The very Northeasternmost tribes worship their antler racks, so they can't risk breaking the antler points, so they can't fight them..."

He gets Luo Binghe and Ning Yingying running away from the herd, and straight into a dimensional rift. The 'weird dimensional bullshit' macro is old, but he suspects almost no one will remember the Endless Abyss wording well enough after all this time, so he sets it going. Cucumber-bro will complain, but sometimes that helps stir up the forums, get more people reading. He's gonna have to hope for more hate-readers this chapter, probably.

Some time later, he glares at the screen. "That's the wrong description entirely," he grouses. "Liu Mingyan is the only veiled wife. Well. No, but Sha Hualing doesn't count. Besides, Ning Yingying would never. Shitty, stupid macro."

He finally gives up and looks at the code, and then swears. A whole section of it has been corrupted somehow, probably when he spilled on the computer the other day. He hasn't had to run the established-wife macro since then, at least. Debugging it takes what feels like forever.

"Garbage in, garbage out," he grouses, and smacks the desk next to the laptop, then grabs for his glass of water when it wobbles. "Don't you fucking dare, you piece of shit," he swears at it, and takes a drink to lower the water level just in case.

There's a small movement in his peripheral vision, and he suddenly remembers that Mobei-Jun is here. That Mobei-Jun has been here this entire time. Mobei-Jun has been sitting completely silently, watching Shang Qinghua swear and mutter and poke at his keyboard and complain, and run off at the mouth about obscure demonic monsters and cultural habits. He resists the urge to put his head in his hands and scream. He's never going to be able to explain this.

But Mobei-Jun hasn't asked a single question. He has barely moved. He appears to be taking the ritual part of this very seriously.

The chapter finally ends with Luo Binghe and Ning Yingying trapped in a mini-abyss, and Ning Yingying injured with a poison that's slow to heal even with Luo Binghe's Heavenly Demon blood in her system. It won't be lethal -- she's too much of a fan favorite for that -- but he can put them in a bad spot this way, and leave the chapter on a cliffhanger.

When Shang Qinghua looks up with a deep sigh, he sees that it's already late afternoon.

Mobei-Jun is still sitting upright in the wooden chair, his posture stiff and unmoving. There's sweat standing on his brow, and his hands are braced on his knees.

"My king," Shang Qinghua says, and stands, going over to him. Mobei-Jun is still so tall, even seated. "You -- you're still recovering, please, go lie down."

Mobei-Jun looks at him, but doesn't say a word. He shakes his head, minutely, then glances at the computer, and back at Shang Qinghua. He almost looks curious.

"I'm not done yet," Shang Qinghua says. Right, he told Mobei-Jun to be silent and still. "I mean, not quite, but! It's a -- a resting period for the ritual. You can move, if you want. Will you go lie down, please? It would make me feel better."

Mobei-Jun looks at him, slow and long, then nods, and visibly levers himself to his feet.

"Lie on your front," Shang Qinghua instructs, ducking over to the square bit of kitchen counter, where he shoved the first aid kit. "I need to change your bandages."

Mobei-Jun doesn't say a word the whole time, doesn't make a sound, though he's bled through the gauze and his breath catches once or twice as Shang Qinghua peels the gauze aside where it's stuck. The Ling Hua dart isn't supposed to take this long to heal in the story. It's supposed to be the heat that slows things down. But in the backstory he wasn't hit by a fucking car, and the dart wasn't supposed to open up so much. So who knows how long it will take, really.

Shang Qinghua kneels by the bed and disinfects the wound while explaining everything he's about to do, bandages it all up, and puts a damp cloth over his king's nape, tucking his long hair up out of the way. He wishes he dared braid it. There's some amazing fanart that features really complicated braids.

Shang Qinghua stands up and takes a moment to look at Mobei-Jun, who has fallen asleep. His shoulders are so broad, his features so strong and fine, and Shang Qinghua is bit by a moment of shocked, almost impossible yearning.

He made this man, somehow, and he's real, and he's here. And he needs to go home.

Shang Qinghua takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and goes back to his desk to finish the rest of the arc without looking at the comments first. He knows he's going to get flamed for this, he doesn't need to read the message boards until he's done.

Finally the next chapter is finished, wrapping up this mini-arc. Luo Binghe and Ning Yingying are rescued by Mobei-Jun's previously-unrevealed dimensional teleportation portals. Their rescue is followed by the usual massacre of the guilty parties, a celebratory banquet, and comfort-papapa for Ning Yingying. That flavor of smut is a little sweeter than the usual, but it seems to land well with a sub-segment of his readership.

All in all, Mobei-Jun's part is comparatively small. But Shang Qinghua makes sure to specify that inter-dimensional teleportation portals are a closely guarded secret of the Mobei line, and that they're something Mobei-Jun has been able to do since he was young. It wouldn't do his king any good if it were a power that relied on inheriting his father's body, which he hasn't consumed yet and can't get to from here! He makes a few comparisons to Xin Mo, hinting that maybe this generational power inspired the ancient maker of the sword, but doesn't go into too much detail, in case he needs to fill in the blanks later.

It's dark when he looks up, the flickering light of his computer screen the only illumination in the room. When Shang Qinghua turns around, the light plays across Mobei-Jun's sleeping face in very much the way he'd imagined demonic qi lights to flicker.

He turns away and schedules the post to go live at the usual time. If this works, Mobei-Jun will be able to go home. He will leave Shang Qinghua here, and this will all be over. Shang Qinghua swallows, and stares blankly at the computer screen, unable to force himself to focus on the message boards or his next chapter outline.

It's ridiculous to feel like he's being abandoned. His king has responsibilities in the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way. He's not suited to this world, even if he were human, even if he wanted to stay. It's a familiar ache, in some ways. Shang Qinghua's parents have responsibilities to their new families, to their new spouses and his step-siblings. It hasn't made their absence hurt any less, but he knows how to live with it.

He's survived this long without anyone choosing to put him first. He'll survive this too.

Shang Qinghua realizes he's crying when a tear hits his laptop keyboard, and he shuts the computer hastily lest it fry anything. He pulls the blanket off the back of his desk chair, and curls up in a ball on the floor to sleep without looking back at Mobei-Jun, motionless on his bed.

Sleep is a long time coming.

* * *

When Shang Qinghua wakes, his eyes feel gummy, like he was crying in his sleep again. He scrubs his face with a corner of the blanket, hopes he doesn't look too terrible, and gets to his feet.

Mobei-Jun has opened the blackout curtains on the single window, just a handspan but enough to let in the sunlight. Though he is standing perfectly still, looking out on the traffic in the street Shang Qinghua's apartment faces, he all but radiates restlessness. The sweatpants and t-shirt look simultaneously regal and ridiculous on him, showing off sculpted muscle in a way they've never done for Shang Qinghua's skinny, soft frame.

"My king," Shang Qinghua starts.

Mobei-Jun turns, motions slow and cautious, as if he's uncertain how much he is allowed to move, unwilling to jeopardize the ritual Shang Qinghua bullshitted for him. He wasn't allowed to move too much, or speak, or ask questions, or leave the apartment, Shang Qinghua thinks. Okay. He can work with that.

"It's all right, it's done! You can speak, you can move. Um. I'd prefer you don't leave the apartment without me, because, well, cars! But we can go out? We have to wait to see if it worked properly, and I still can't answer your questions. Um."

Mobei-Jun nods.

"I would go out," he says, and turns back to the window.

"Oh," Shang Qinghua says. "I -- um. Okay! I have some clothes for you, then. They should fit? I'm going to just -- shower and get dressed? And then you can? And we can go for a walk?"

He's talking in questions again, the way he does when he's nervous. His step-mother hates that about him, even as she makes him so anxious that he has a hard time doing anything else around her.

"I'll just -- be right back," Shang Qinghua squeaks, grabs a change of clothes from the stack in his closet, and escapes into the tiny bathroom. In the mirror, he sees a skinny, soft-featured, pale boy with bags under his faintly red eyes and spiky, uneven hair that's clearly been slept on too often and washed too infrequently. He looks away, puts his clothes as far out of the way as he can, and showers in the tiled corner as fast as he can manage.

When he's done he looks a little less like he's been crying, but not much different. He's never been much to look at, Shang Qinghua knows. His mother is beautiful; his father has presence. He's not much like either of them, in the end.

He towels his hair dry a little too roughly and emerges into the tiny hallway that also serves as his galley kitchen. Mobei-Jun hasn't moved from the window, though he has opened the curtains wider, making him an almost impossibly beautiful silhouette against the light flooding in.

"Okay!" Shang Qinghua announces, dropping the towel over the back of his desk chair and rummaging for the clothes he bought for Mobei-Jun. Black jeans, a jewel-toned blue shirt with an open collar, and socks and underwear.

He holds them out.

"I know they're not like what you're accustomed to," he says, and wonders if he needs to worry about modesty taboos. "Think of it as a disguise? It's really very normal for us, here."

Mobei-Jun takes two steps and is suddenly looming over him as he looks down at the clothing.

"Mm," he says, takes the offering and steps into the bathroom, closing the door behind him this time.

Shang Qinghua tidies a little bit, gets the trash ready to take out, cleans up his desk, and is hovering at his desk chair wondering if he should read comments or not when Mobei-Jun emerges.

He looks even better than Shang Qinghua expected, and Shang Qinghua's expectations were not low.

"Okay," he squeaks, trying not to ogle Mobei-Jun too obviously. The jeans fit -- really well. Really, really well. Damn. "So we'll just -- take a walk? Um. There are a lot of cars, so just follow my lead and don't walk into traffic again?"

Mobei-Jun nods. He almost looks amused, but that must be Shang Qinghua's imagination.

"And. Um. Can you hide your demon mark? It'll draw attention?"

Apparently Shang Qinghua speaks in questions now. That's definitely going to inspire confidence. But Mobei-Jun just nods, and a moment later the blue mark fades. His forehead looks oddly empty without it.

There's a small city park not too far away, which Shang Qinghua has in mind as a destination. He doesn't go there often, because it has a playground and he knows what people think of single men who hang out near kids too often. But if the two of them walk around, that should be fine. He thinks.

Mobei-Jun follows him down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, where he weaves through pedestrians with ease. Shang Qinghua explains street lights and pedestrian signals in a low voice, trusting his king's enhanced hearing to pick it up.

He sees one of his favorite street vendors and grabs them some jianbing, paying with his phone, and then explaining that process, too. The closest he can get to electronic currency without going into credit cards and how they've kind of all agreed to pretend that digital bits and bytes are worth anything ends up being that the phone takes care of it for him, but he's not an economist, okay.

Mobei-Jun looks quizzically at Shang Qinghua's smartphone, then at the phones in everyone else's hands as they walk around, talking or paying for street food as Shang Qinghua did, but he doesn't say anything, doesn't ask any questions. He doesn't appear to dislike the jianbing, but it's impossible to say if he actually enjoys it or not. Shang Qinghua just keeps up a running commentary on the bike rental racks, the way the neighborhood has changed since he moved in, pretending he's escorting an internet friend around. He's never done that before, but he's seen people talk about what parts of their neighborhood they'd show visitors, and he's thought about it.

Mobei-Jun looks a little overwhelmed by the time they get to the small park, nearly as tense as he was when he had just been hit by the car. His gaze flicks from person to person, from movement to movement. Shang Qinghua thought maybe he'd feel better in the park, but Mobei-Jun doesn't relax. Most of the plants must not be familiar, Shang Qinghua realizes, and the people are all dressed wrong, and wow, this was probably a really bad idea, wasn't it.

"My king," he says, soft, and something makes him reach out to take Mobei-Jun's hand again.

Mobei-Jun's hand is large, and chilly, and he holds his fingers rigid in Shang Qinghua's grasp, but he doesn't pull away.

"That should be long enough for the ritual to re-set," Shang Qinghua says, because he can't say he thinks Mobei-Jun looks like he's being tortured, can he. "We can go back now, and try again?"

Mobei-Jun nods, and he doesn't look relieved, exactly, because his expression is just as stoic as ever, but something about the set of his shoulders relaxes just a little bit.

Shang Qinghua chooses side-streets to get them back to the apartment building, tracing a path that's not quite so direct, but maybe a little less overwhelming. He waves hello at the auntie who seems to always be sweeping the sidewalk or otherwise puttering in front of her family's little traditional medicine shop, and resigns himself to an interrogation about his handsome friend the next time she sees him. She'll never let this go.

Mobei-Jun only really relaxes when Shang Qinghua locks the studio door behind them.

"Those -- phones," Mobei-Jun says. "Can everyone work rituals so easily, here?" He sounds almost alarmed, which means he must be utterly terrified.

Oh, Shang Qinghua thinks. He's such an idiot!

He told Mobei-Jun he could do complicated ritual magic with his computer, and then used a smart-phone to acquire food without any visible payment, just scanning a QR code and taking breakfast and walking away. Of course his king would assume it was all some kind of human magic. Shang Qinghua just dragged an injured and magically powered-down demon through a city full of humans, all of whom looked like they took terrifying ritual objects completely for granted.

Shang Qinghua lets out a long breath.

"It's complicated?" he offers. "Not the way you think, no. Phones aren't magic, they're like really complicated clockwork. I don't know how they work, but it's not magic like you know about. No one believes in that, here. I mean, other than me, I guess."

He shrugs.

"I mean," he says. "I don't even know if the ritual we tried worked? Can you -- try to make a portal?"

Mobei-Jun blinks at him, as if he's surprised by something. Then he shakes his head, and an ice-blade appears in his hand. The gesture is familiar; the smell is the same sparky-cold sensation as when he appeared. Something hovers in the air, glimmering faintly. Mobei-Jun grimaces, and it firms up for a moment, getting more visible. Then he gasps, the ice-blade disappears, and the beginnings of the portal sputter out with an audible fizz.

Mobei-Jun doesn't go to one knee, but Shang Qinghua thinks he's only upright through sheer force of will.

"Sit down," he says, guiding Mobei-Jun into the wooden chair. "That was better than before, right? It was closer to working?"

Mobei-Jun glares at him, and the temperature plummets as if in concert with his chilly mood.

"It needs too much qi," he says. "It's impossible."

Shang Qinghua takes a deep breath.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. I'll figure it out."

It was better: it was possible, clearly. He just needs to figure out how to amp things up a little bit more. He can do this. He can definitely do this. He just needs to -- well -- to figure out how to do that, and then figure out how to work that into the novel.

So. Step one is the message boards.

Peerless Cucumber is on a tear when he logs in, complaining in even sharper terms than usual about giving such OP abilities to a side-character. Shang Qinghua might be inclined to agree, because it breaks the balance of the world, but he stopped caring about narrative balance a long time ago, when he realized he could care, or he could make rent.

He's surprised to see how many commenters think Mobei-Jun is cool. It seems like it's mostly women, but a few of the demon-plotline fans chime in too, and one even speculates about the power source for the Mobei Clan powers. He scrolls down, muttering to himself, to see Peerless Cucumber has weighed in there, too. He picked up on the parallels with Xin Mo, which no one else seems to have done, but he thinks it's the move of a lazy hack who can't find another mechanism for magic, and is laying into the commenters and the chapter with what seems like equal disdain.

"Dual cultivation isn't always the answer, bro!" Shang Qinghua exclaims. "You asshole, it's not what fixes things for Binghe every time, and it's not narratively lazy, it's a genre staple, so what the fuck else did you expect."

In his peripheral vision, Mobei-Jun goes very still. He's gone from what looked like waiting to a stillness that seems almost predatory.

"Dual cultivation," Mobei-Jun says. Oh shit, Shang Qinghua thinks. Oh, shit. 

"Um," he says, thinking fast. But, well. Peerless Cucumber is right: he powers up Xin Mo with dual cultivation all the time. And if he made Mobei-Jun's powers work in a parallel fashion, even if it's not mandatory. Well. If it just needs a boost to be more powerful?

"It might work," Mobei-Jun says

He stands up abruptly, stripping his shirts off as he rises. He has abs for miles. Shang Qinghua wants to lick them. He -- he might be about to get the chance. Shit.

"Um," Shang Qinghua says.

"Are you not willing?" Mobei-Jun asks. There's something odd in his tone, but Shang Qinghua's attention is focused on not throwing himself at those pecs, he's a little distracted, okay?

"Um," Shang Qinghua says. "I just -- yes. I just -- give me a minute? To prepare?"

And he flees to the bathroom with his phone, where he pulls up an incognito tab and does some frantic last-minute research. He's tempted to stay in there forever, but that's not a long-term plan. When he emerges, Mobei-Jun is standing where he left him, still shirtless.

"Okay," Shang Qinghua says. "Okay."

***

Half an hour and an awful lot of very sticky, drying lube later, Shang Qinghua is back in the bathroom, washing up, while Mobei-Jun sulks in the rest of the now freezing-cold apartment. The portal worked maybe a little better. Maybe. Not much. So, Shang Qinghua thinks, standing under hot water, he's lost his virginity to someone who seemed to take the whole process as a kind of mechanical puzzle. And it didn't even work.

He wasn't expecting flowers and candles for his first time. He's more practical than that. But,well. It would be nice to have been able to pretend he was more than a convenient warm body. Even for Mobei-Jun. Maybe especially for Mobei-Jun.

Shang Qinghua puts his fist in his mouth and bites back a scream. He's fine. He's perfectly fine, and he'll figure this out.

When he comes back out into the apartment, Mobei-Jun is gone, and so is Shang Qinghua's phone.

Shang Qinghua stands very still, hands tight on the towel he was using to dry his hair.

Mobei-Jun is gone.

Shang Qinghua doesn't panic. His king knows how to cross the street without being roadkill. He has a great sense of direction. He can get food. He'll be back. Right?

Shang Qinghua sits down at his desk.

He stares into space for a while. Mobei-Jun doesn't come back.

Finally he opens his laptop and starts the next chapter. They'll stay in the Demon Realm for now, just in case he needs to tweak Mobei-Jun's powers again. He writes, sets macros running, and writes more.

Mobei-Jun doesn't come back.

Shang Qinghua finally admits he's really gone some time after dark, and curls up in a blanket burrito on the bed. It still smells faintly like Mobei-Jun, like the two of them. They didn't even cuddle, earlier, but Shang Qinghua can pretend the blanket wrapped around him is someone's arms if he tries hard enough.

He's not crying when he falls asleep. He's not.

He wakes some time later to gentle hands wiping what feels like tears from his face. There's a faintly flickering blue light in the room, coming from a demon mark.

"My king," he says. His voice is rough. "You came back."

He'd left the door unlocked.

"I came back," Mobei-Jun agrees.

Then he climbs over Shang Qinghua and onto the bed.

"I'm glad," Shang Qinghua says, still groggy, only half-convinced he's not dreaming. It feels unreal enough that he doesn't flinch as he hears himself continue:  "I don't want you to leave me alone."

"Then I won't," Mobei-Jun says, and pulls Shang Qinghua into his embrace. It almost feels like a kiss is placed on the top of his head, but it's hard to say. "Go to sleep," Mobei-Jun says. "I will be here when you wake."

Shang Qinghua wakes up half on top of Mobei-Jun, who is stroking his hair with a gentleness that nearly breaks Shang Qinghua's heart with wanting. He wants to kiss Mobei-Jun. They kind of skipped that before. He wants this to be real; he wants this to be something.

"You're awake," Mobei-Jun observes. "You need food."

He seems to be taking this in stride, which is really very weird, but Shang Qinghua isn't going to make it weird. Make it weirder? Not going to ask for more, or comment on anything. He's not. If he gets kind of tangled in the blanket in his haste while getting up, well. He's always been kind of clumsy.

"I --" Shang Qinghua says, when he's gotten himself sorted out, and they've eaten, and he's had time to wake up and pretend he can think straight. "I have a few ideas? Things to try? I just --" he waves a hand vaguely. "It needs a little time."

Mobei-Jun nods.

"I will not leave you," he says. He sounds like he means it, too.

The next few days become something of a pattern: Shang Qinghua writes, and Mobei-Jun uses his phone to go out and get breakfast for them, because apparently he really likes jianbing. Shang Qinghua privately finds that completely adorable. He even talks his way through demonic court politics with Mobei-Jun a few times. His king's mind is sharp, keenly aware of the potential political implications of a leader's absence. Peerless Cucumber doesn't flame that update as badly as usual.

It's kind of nice, except that Mobei-Jun is very visibly trying not to be miserable, and just as obviously failing. He goes for long walks in the afternoons, exploring the neighborhood and getting cornered several times by the medicine-store auntie, who sends him back with small packets of powders and once even a pill bottle for his pallor. Mobei-Jun always smiles when he sees Shang Qinghua, when he comes back into the apartment. And he's just as clearly not well-suited to the modern world.

Shang Qinghua thinks about that, and about how the portal worked a little bit better, and about how Mobei-Jun's hands are so gentle when they sleep curled up against each other. He thinks about how much he likes Mobei-Jun's company, even just like this, even without sex. He likes feeling like he's precious to someone.

So Shang Qinghua writes a few paper letters one afternoon while Mobei-Jun is out, one addressed to his mother and one to his father. He writes a few details into the world, little things he wants to be sure work in his favor. He checks his bank balance and makes a few online orders. He carefully unpacks them when Mobei-Jun is out in the following afternoons, shoving them all in the back corner of the closet.

The day the last package arrives, Shang Qinghua queues two days worth of updates, and then orders food in. He's ready. He expected to be more nervous, but he just feels kind of excited.

Even if he doesn't stay with his king forever, even if he has to find his way back to the human realm, he could be a traveling seer. He could be a highly-sought-after monster expert. He could find the Thousand-Springs-Silver-Petalled flower that will bloom in several valleys over the next few years, and kickstart core formation and become a cultivator. He could do so many things that aren't slamming out terrible stallion-novel updates every day and bowing and scraping for his fans. The idea is dizzying. There's just one thing he wants to find out first, before he jumps into the unknown.

When they go to bed that night, Shang Qinghua curls up facing Mobei-Jun, instead of being the little spoon.

"My king," he says. "I --"

Words fail him.

He leans in, and presses his lips to Mobei-Jun's in a soft kiss. Mobei-Jun doesn't move to kiss him back, but he doesn't pull away either.

"You can say no," Shang Qinghua says, and apparently his words are back, pouring over each other in a flailing tumble. "And -- I -- this isn't just to power up a portal. I just -- I mean. I want to? If you want to. You don't have to. I don't want to make things weird?"

Mobei-Jun doesn't say anything, and Shang Qinghua starts to pull away.

"I'm sorry, my king," he says. "I definitely made things weird."

Mobei-Jun reels him back into a kiss, cutting him off.

"I want to," Mobei-Jun says against his lips.

Kissing is really good, actually. Mobei-Jun's teeth are kinda sharp, but he backs off when Shang Qinghua pokes at him and protests, and then they're pulling at each other's clothes, and skin on skin is a revelation in a way Shang Qinghua had never imagined.

Maybe, he thinks, as Mobei-Jun kisses down his chest, as his brain sputters and sparks in and out of being able to form thoughts. Maybe his readers had a point about his smut being bad. This is -- wow.

At some point he flails for the lube, and this time it's better -- it feels good, and Mobei-Jun bends him almost in half and kisses him the whole time. Shang Qinghua feels fizzy with how good it is, like the top of his head is going to come off. He doesn't last, and Mobei-Jun pauses until Shang Qinghua kicks at him to keep going, fucking him into the mattress until Shang Qinghua is making these embarrassing little gasping noises, until his king comes, and Shang Qinghua almost blacks out with how good it all feels.

They stay wrapped up in each other for long enough that things start to dry, and Shang Qinghua remembers sticky horror stories from his hasty internet searching, unpeels himself, and gets a cool, damp cloth. They clean up, and curl up into each other again. Despite his best intentions, Shang Qinghua falls asleep almost immediately.

When he wakes up he still feels kind of fizzy, happy about it, and then he realizes: it might have worked. It probably worked.

He shakes Mobei-Jun awake, sitting up on his knees and grinning down at him.

"My king," he says, and he can feel himself smiling fit to burst. "My king, I think -- I think we did it?"

Mobei-Jun makes a dissatisfied noise, like his step-mother's cat when he'd poke it to wake it up. He'd always gotten in trouble for that. Here and now, Mobei-Jun burrows back into the pillow.

"My king," Shang Qinghua insists. "You can go home."

Mobei-Jun opens an eye to look at him, his expression utterly unreadable, flat, half his face hidden in the pillow. He looks, what, unimpressed? Maybe he's unimpressed. He couldn't possibly look betrayed or hurt.

"I said I would not leave you," he says. "I did not lie."

Shang Qinghua takes a deep breath as his heart does a flip in his chest. He swallows back his first few responses. He swallows back his relief.

"I know," he says. "But. But what if -- what if I came with you?"

Mobei-Jun sits up, looking at Shang Qinghua with searching eyes. They're eye-to-eye with Mobei-Jun slouching a little bit and Shang Qinghua kneeling in the tangled sheets.

"I --" Shang Qinghua tries. "I don't want to stay here without you. I -- I'll miss the internet, and overnight delivery, and maybe I'll miss some music? I guess? But it sucks here, it really does. I hate scrambling to make rent, I hate this apartment, but I hate having roommates even more. I hate being worried about roaches and I hate living on instant noodles and convenience store meals and worrying about money and readers all the time."

Mobei-Jun is watching him closely.

"Maybe I'm a bad son to even think about it," Shang Qinghua says. "But my parents won't even notice I'm gone."

It feels true. It hurts. But it feels like an ache he could live with, especially if he was the one to do the leaving this time.

"Let me come with you," Shang Qinghua asks. "Please?"

Mobei-Jun reaches for him.

"Yes," he says. The smile that spreads across his face is dazzling.

They fall into each other, then, and Shang Qinghua hadn't planned on another round this morning, really, but he feels even fizzier when they're done, even happier, even more certain this will work.

They separate after, and shower, and dress. Shang Qinghua is going to miss hot showers, he thinks. He adds it to the mental list, alongside jelly cups and electricity: the scale doesn't so much as budge.

Mobei-Jun's robes aren't even creased from where they were folded in the closet all these days. Shang Qinghua's cheap cosplay outfit won't last long, but it doesn't need to: he can buy a replacement easily enough. He pulls a pack out of the closet, and takes Mobei-Jun's hand.

This time, the ice-blade appears in the blink of an eye.

This time, the portal works.

Shang Qinghua whoops in joy, and holds on tight to Mobei-Jun's hand, gripping it hard.

Together, they step into another world.

* * *

Some time later, in a studio apartment that still smells faintly of instant noodles, a beat-up laptop pings as the final chapter of Proud Immortal Demon Way updates.

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