Chapter Text
"Oi, hack Author. What do you mean Shen Qingqiu was the secret disciple of a demonic cultivator? Where was the build up for that nugget of gold? It's not like the guy wasn't shitty enough but really? Demonic Cultivation? We'd surely had seen even a hint of him using that before now right?"
- Peerless Cucumber
‘Fuck!’ was the only word that made it through Shen Qingqiu’s mind as Cheng Luan’s blade glanced by his head.
The quiet stillness he had been cultivating in had long since been irreversibly broken as his shidi once again swung at him with a cry. Shen Qingqiu barely side stepped said moron’s attempt to remove one of his arms, bringing up Xiu Ya to parry and divert the strike.
Liu Qingge you fuckin-
He couldn’t finish cursing out the man as another blow came down, jolting his arm as he parried it again. There was no tactics to Liu Qingge’s fighting by this point, the qi deviation had sunk in its claws deep into his mind. Simply propelling him onwards to attack and attack and destroy. It was probably the only reason that despite having no golden core yet, Shen Qingqiu was able to keep pace. Still, he wasn’t a match, and the peak lord knew it.
Throwing a kick into Liu Qingge’s knee gave Shen Qingqiu some time to reshape his thoughts into something that wasn’t just cursing. Okay. What were his options?
Run and get help? The brute would cut him down the moment he tried to flee, so that was out.
Try to calm the qi deviation? Yeah right. The strain of the fight was pushing him to the edge of one himself and if he succumbed before Liu Qingge was calmed, they’d both be fucked.
Cheng Luan sparked off the rock as Liu Qingge threw a punch that half landed sending Shen Qingqiu staggering back, head reeling. His lungs felt heavy as inside qi scrambled through his meridians, unevenly alternating too thin and too much.
Options. Options. What were his damn options!?
Shen Qingqiu failed to dodge a kick to his side, that sent him sprawling into the next chamber. The cold rock feeling unforgivingly hot against the fresh bruises. Liu Qingge didn’t give him a chance to recover, slashing down and down, again and again at his prone form. Xiu Ya took each of the blows as Shen Qingqiu tried to shuffle back across the stone floor, a few ribs most likely broken.
The brute stalked him closer, not once letting up on his blows. Luckily he wasn’t changing the angle but each was ladened with enough qi to kill. Blow and blow and blow and blow and Shen Qingqiu’s arm was knocked down from its guard.
Just as he realised his defence was broken, the next blow came down. It swung to the right, away from his body. There was a moment of clarity in Liu Qingge’s eyes.
“Sh-shidi?” Shen Qingqiu rasped. The clarity gave way to shock, and fresh blood flowed out of all seven apertures on the brute’s face covering the dried tracks already there.
Liu Qingge spasmed and stumbled further away with a scream.
Coughing blood with each breath, he shook his head.
“Shidi, you are having a qi deviation! Try to ease your breathing, it’ll help calm your qi.” Shen Qingqiu tried, repeating what Mu Qingfang and his predecessor has repeated to him far too often.
Liu Qingge wasn’t listening. He slashed as nothing, sending bright sword intent crashing into the wall, peppering both of them in loose shrapnel.
“Liu Qingge!” Shen Qingqiu tried again, sitting up as his ribs screamed murder.
“No! I- no. Not even you. No. I protect. I can’t – kill.” The brute wasn’t talking sense, another wave of sword intent carved up the wall. A pathetic sob worked its way out his mouth. “I can’t stop myself.”
He sounded so lost. So scared. So, unlike his normal arrogantly self-assured moronic self. It stunned Shen Qingqiu. Though not as much as his next actions did.
Hands shaking, the air roiling with qi, Liu Qingge switched his hold on Cheng Luan and aimed the blade at his chest.
No. No. No No No No What was that idiot thinking! HE WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO REACH HIM IN TIME. Everything in Shen Qingqiu’s head screamed as time slowed and his vision narrowed to Cheng Luan’s tip thrusting towards its master’s chest. No. Stop. STOP. STOP!
An instinct tickled the edge of Shen Qingqiu’s mind. A half-forgotten piece of muscle memory long left unused. He gripped it like Buddha’s spider’s thread.
A hand, his hand shot up and hauled, not on the air or stone but down into Liu Qingge’s flesh, the yin of his blood and bones itself.
Liu Qingge’s arm wrenched back from its path with a sickening crack as the man screamed again.
“If you die, I’ll fucking kill you!” Shen Qingqiu screamed in reply, ordering Xiu Ya’s spirit onwards to tackle Cheng Luan from the broken arm, before he matched it wrestling the thrashing Liu Qingge to the stone floor.
Liu Qingge’s moment of clarity had passed. He thrashed wildly underneath Shen Qingqiu’s thighs. His qi was still eating him up and passing calmed qi to redirect it was even less of an option now. Righteous cultivators couldn’t clean yin qi from their system. Half of the topmost deadly plants and cultivated poisons relied on this fact. Shen Qingqiu’s system still thrummed with the stuff from breaking his shidi’s arm. Feeding qi to Liu Qingge now, even if Shen Qingqiu could calm down, would be a death sentence.
Like pulling on the spider thread had freed something deeply buried inside him, a memory surfaced.
A cruel arrogant laugh. “Ha, you know nothing. The kid can’t qi deviate when he has no qi left to deviate!” The feeling of hands on his back.
Shen Qingqiu shuddered. Guess that was an option.
Passing qi was easy. You let it out slower and gentler than you did with attacks. Taking qi was almost as easy when you knew how to do it. But… but it was illegal for a reason. Meridians were never meant to not have qi flowing inside them, pushing them open from within. They weren’t built to be sucked inwards like a person trying to get the last drop of water from a leather skin. Pulling them inwards like that made cracks and splinters, made blockages and twists. It broke whoever you took from.
Shen Qingqiu knew this far too well. But if it saved the stupid brute’s life then….
Liu Qingge's right arm was a mangled mess up close. But his left was still whole and flailing uselessly. The flailing became less useless when Shen Qingqiu made to pin it down. Liu Qingge had up to that point been distracted by the pain of a freshly broken arm but now, with a new target to focus his rage on to, he quickly became more coordinated.
With a grunt, he flipped the pair, rattling his shixiong’s ribs once more. His left hand quickly found his attacker’s throat. It squeezed before being dragged off by both hands to Shen Qingqiu’s shoulder instead. A willing compromise as his grip dug in deep, bruising down to the bone. Shen Qingqiu held the wrist tightly to keep Liu Qingge’s hand in place.
Blood dripped from his shidi’s nose and mouth onto his face as Shen Qingqiu’s spare hand ripped at what remained of the man’s under shirt. He was able to part the obstructing garment. Above him his shidi swayed, looking like he might vomit or tear Shen Qingqiu’s throat out with his teeth in equal measure. Not wanting to wait for either of these options, Shen Qingqiu’s hand splayed out over Liu Qingge’s Lower Dantian.
“This is going to hurt.” He muttered to the man above him and pulled.
The flood of qi up his arm was as roiling and as violent as its owner who screamed over him. He could feel it attacking and burning every edge of his meridians, finding every poorly healed crack and splitting them open. Shen Qingqiu vomited blood but didn’t stop. Digging his finger into where he held his shidi’s arm to his shoulder, he checked his pulse as he pulled more once again.
The free wave of qi crashed through his system with little regard to what it found in its way. Bulldozing open whatever stood in its path as Shen Qingqiu screamed along with his martial brother.
Nearly there, he was nearly there. The pulse of qi around Liu Qingge’s body was thinning, the deviation having its strength sapped away till it could be corralled back into order by the brute’s own body’s natural abilities.
So close, Shen Qingqiu thought as black spots crowded his vision.
Just a little further. He thought as the brute he was trying to save’s own qi tore him apart inside.
He pulled once again, and the deviation simpered out to nothing within Liu Qingge’s now sleeping body.
He’d live. Good. That was good.
The black spots became larger as Shen Qingqiu’s body numbed out from the pain, everything felt both too cold and too hot. He couldn’t move. Blood pooled in his throat, nearly drowning him.
It was fine. His lungs weren’t responding so he couldn’t breathe anyway.
The last thing Shen Qingqiu saw was Liu Qingge; dirty, bloodied and breathing softly as he drooled into his shixiong’s shoulder asleep on top of his chest.
Then there was darkness.
It was night when Shen Qingqiu awoke.
He choked in breath like a drowning man. The weight of Liu Qingge was still passed out on top of him. Everything felt cold. Every limb numbed out and weak. Dully Shen Qingqiu rolled his head over towards the centre of the room.
The chamber had had a hole through the ceiling which during the day let in plenty of sunlight and fresh air, now that light was nowhere to be found. The entire room was a confusing sea of pitch blackness.
Voice dry and strained, Shen Qingqiu called out into the darkness.
“Xiu Ya?”
A glow in the direction of his feet answered him. The blade lay over Cheng Luan’s still form.
“Here.”
There was a clink and a scrape as the spirit blade half-dragged half-flew weakly to its master’s side.
Turning inwards, Shen Qingqiu, starting from his lower dantian, slowly circulated his qi outwards to his right hand. The weight of the brute had cut the blood circulation from the limb leaving it tingly as he extracted it from inbetween them. Not even mentioning the mess his meridians currently were. Weakly he gripped Xiu Ya, using the sword to drag himself into a sitting position.
Liu Qingge bonelessly flopped into his lap as he did, still unconscious.
Never had Shen Qingqiu been so glad for the LingXi caves’ natural balance of qi. It would have been far too easy for a spirit cave for righteous cultivators to have been strongly Yang leaning. Bright, airy, warm, active, but the LingXi caves naturally tempered this with its sheltered chambers of cool rock deep under the earth whilst so near the sky. Sitting and absorbing the qi around him for a moment, Shen Qingqiu’s finger drifted to his shidi’s pulse point. Weak but flowing cleanly. He sighed in relief. A complete moron.
Again, Shen Qingqiu slowly circulated out qi to his legs and, with Xiu Ya’s help, was able to get to his feet. There had been a pool in this chamber. He eventually found it. With nothing but Xiu Ya’s glow to light the room, the dark water acted as a perfect mirror. He looked ghastly. Pale with blood splatter across his face. Manipulating Liu Qingge’s blood had torn open his upper dantian, leaving a stream of blood to flow down between his brows and down his nose. Clear evidence of his crimes. He couldn’t let anyone see him like this.
He quickly smudged the remaining blood from the wound into the cinnabar dot he wore on his forehead, then set about clean the rest of his face and ears. His hair was a mess, but he wasn’t going to bother fixing that. Clean faced and looking a bit more human, Shen Qingqiu stumbled back to Liu Qingge. He was shivering. Made sense. The caves must be colder at night and with little qi and in his underclothes the great war god of Bai Zhan was in danger of catching hypothermia.
Slouching off his outer robe, Shen Qingqiu wrapped his shidi in it loosely before hauling him over one shoulder like a sack of rice. He could have carried him more gracefully but like this Liu Qingge was less likely to fall should the strength in his Shixiong’s arms fail him.
Still wobbly under the weight, Shen Qingqiu dropped Xiu Ya who came to float just off the ground. Stepping on, Shen Qingqiu carefully flew out of the LingXi caves.
Night shift on Qian Cao was generally, on average, most would say, quieter than the day shifts. A lull in new arrivals could be felt as the sect found increased difficulty in injuring themselves in their sleep. The wards had even slowed down by this late at night. It was a time practically perfect for taking it easy.
Hu Luobu had lucked out getting reception night shift. It was nice. Cool air and a stunning view. Qian Cao was designed that almost all the main emergency rooms and clinics were on a large flat plaza. In the middle of the plaza rose the central building. It towered over everything. An impossible feat of architecture until you remembered that the mountain top was not actually flat but had been built out to look so. Up the inside of the central building climbed the rest of the mountain’s peak clothed by buildings and dormitories clinging for dear life like the limpets Hu Luobu’s father used to scrape off boats.
The plaza was wide and open with easy access from all four of the connecting rainbow bridges. Each gave off an iridescent glow in the misty night air as the lamps for An Ding and Bai Zhan shone haloed in the distance on the other side. If you stared hard enough, you might even notice the subtle shifts in the air surrounding each peak as the barrier arrays filtered the harmless mist from the less harmless mountain gales.
Hu Luobu kicked back in his seat, breathed in the moist air and then let out a startled cry when what looked like a bloodstained ghost came out the mist. Leaping to his feet he realised with mounting horror that the ghost was carrying someone and that it wasn’t a ghost at all.
Face like a fierce corpse’s, Shen-shibo marched into the reception and, before Hu Luobu had risen from his greeting, roughly deposited who he was carrying. The blood and dirt made them hard to recognise at first but oh shit that was Lui-shishu.
Hu Luobu quickly activated an emergency call talisman before taking the god of war’s pulse, thankful to find it, though worried at its faintness. Dai Yao appeared not moments later and took over monitoring, gently passing qi to do an internal examination.
“What happened, Shibo?” Dai Yao asked, frowning at what she found.
“He had a qi deviation whilst we were in the LingXi caves.” Shen-shibo’s voice sounded thin. “I knocked him out.”
Dai Yao nodded as she took this in. “Hu-shidi, go wake Shizun and Zhen-shijie.”
Hu Luobu gave a quick bow to his shijie and disappeared from sight.
“Shizhi, this master will be returning to his peak. Please inform my shidi that I will be along in the morning to check on the brute.”
Dai Yao glanced up. “Shizun will want to see you when he arrives.”
“He shall but not now.” With a note of finality Shen Qingqiu left. By the time, Hu Luobu returned with their Shijie and Shizun, he was long gone.