Chapter Text
Luo Binghe observed Liu Mingyan’s face as his eyes fluttered open from sleep. He gazed at her arched brows, her perfect skin, and the flutter of her eyelashes as he choked on his own blood. The hilt of her knife was buried halfway through his windpipe. Before betrayal or any other emotion came over him, experience and muscle memory prevailed. Sluggishly he tossed her off,
“Luo Binghe,” she called out angrily, desperately. But of course he couldn’t answer. He was healing slowly, too slowly. His hand came to hold his own throat, hoping to stem the blood flow. Before she could lunge at him he paralyzed her body with blood parasites she had consumed during their wedding. She looked afraid, where was this fear when she was bleeding him out like a prize stag in the woods just seconds ago? He called Xin Mo to the hand that wasn’t keeping him alive, and with a practiced motion tossed her through a rift that would lead to the locked dungeons with a blast of Qi.
He could feel his chest heaving, blood dripping from his mouth onto the floor as he struggled to remove what felt like poison from his veins, a feat considering he was mostly immune to just about everything.
As waited to breathe again, hoping his throat would heal before he expired and in the hours that would follow where he unfolded the cause of this newest conspiracy he couldn't help but think that his life and efforts amounted to nothing but a joke played out for the amusement of the Heavens. His efforts were nothing in the eyes of those he had done his best to protect. His entire life—from crawling his way out of the gutters of the small town he grew up in by the Luo River, from being saved only by the kindness of a woman whose life was dependent on the scraps given to her by her wealthy employers, his mother’s hands ever-calloused from scrubbing filth and sweat from the clothing of those too ignorant to realize how much work it took to keep their lives comfortable—his entire life was spent working his way into a position where no one could leave him stranded, begging on the street for a bowl of congee, and for what?
He wouldn’t say he’d ever grown into a life of satisfaction, but at least he’d been safe from the poverty of his youth. He could say that , at least, with confidence. Every night he fell asleep feeling the cold comfort that if nothing else he would never be that boy again, never be left to the frail uncertainty of the world with nothing but the clothing on his back and a frail human body, not yet come into its heritage, subject to biting cold and hunger.
He'd scrapped together power, wealth, and status, paid dues to those who came to his side early, and rewarded loyalty as he went. He’d been by most definitions of the word: a good husband, a good ruler, though perhaps not always a good man — clinging to his grudges like a miser to their coin or a beggar their food.
So what if he crushed every righteous cultivation Sect under his heel? They were recuperating slowly in the new landscape, despite their belief that he was unaware of their existence. It wasn’t even the first time the Realms had been joined as one, this was just the most recent instance. He was sure, in a few centuries, that some eventual new order would separate the Realms once more. Ironically, perhaps he would have been the one to do so, but his power base was primarily Demonic and the wives who came from the Demon Realm made up a large and powerful contingent who, in combination with those under his direct rule in his earliest expansions, made a compelling argument for a merge despite the effect on the Human Realm.
The Demon Realm, after much infighting, had been left bereft of skilled tradesmen or even farmers, gaining most of their sustenance from raids, meat, and cannibalism. To his knowledge, the original architects of the Demon Palaces had long since died without heirs or perhaps it was their heirs who died without heirs. Either way, what was he to do as a young man newly come into power, simultaneously inheriting a Realm of immense military power with its equally sizable squalor but expand it? The luxurious Palaces and buildings that once belonged to nobility were the leftovers of a wealthier regime that had long since decayed. When he inherited his throne the Realm he ruled was one atrophying under his very feet.
Sha Hualing, in particular, had pushed for easier access to the Human Realm, citing a lack of grain in the Southern Lands.
It wasn’t like he didn’t know subsequent raids on the Human Realm would occur, rife with pillaging and other injustices that would be heaped on humanity. He needed that arable land where acid rain hadn’t swept into rich black soil and poisoned everything but the most tenacious of weeds to shut the mouths of his constituents and eventually, with access to farmland and full bellies, they achieved some kind of balance. Humans and Demons managed to live together in the border villages, trading their skills and learning from each other, somewhat peacefully if resentfully.
For the most part the races stayed away from each other, but Binghe could say that humans now had access to rare demonic meats, pelts, and spiritual plants while lower class demons could learn more complex trades, skills long lost in the Demon Realm, by paying human tradesmen in some way, shape or form. The largest city in the Demonic South now had a market that sold more than pillaged goods and roughly sewn cloth while the wealthiest Human Cities remained practically untouched by the Realm merge.
He’d done his best to minimize the acquisition of human slaves from poorer villages and his people knew his opinions on either race claiming superiority. However it was a long blood-filled process that took immense care to manage, care he didn’t always have time for. It was also a process that would continue as long as he lived and inevitably far after that.
And for what? Endless meetings and careful bartering? Balancing an Empire first on the edge of a knife and then on a small piece of solid ground he cultivated to grow into something sturdier? All of that only for the people who’d known him since before his voice deepened and he grew into full manhood to let him know that it wasn’t enough?
Hadn’t he avenged Liu Mingyan’s brother’s death? Hadn’t he avenged Liu Mingyan’s brother’s death?
Hadn’t he given Ning Ying Ying every respect, made her his first wife despite the fact that others were more powerful and more comely than her?
Despite the fact that his childhood was spent with her saccharine voice egging on the worst of Ming Fan’s behavior?
Perhaps it would surprise their peers on Qing Jing, if they still lived, to know that he was aware of the effect of her words but what could he do or say to prevent them when she was the only one who snuck him food and medicine?
When she taught him to read?
How dare he even think to be choosy with who cared for him despite her privileged obliviousness?
He hadn’t had the right to decide what shape his kindness came in. Like a dog with no owner, he had to settle for scraps and be grateful, and he had been. He swallowed any injustice and artfully beautified Ning Ying Ying’s cruelty. Carefully, like a historian he revised the past and turned her every action into sainthood, made a goddess from a teenage girl, turned helpless anger into worship until even he almost believed it… until his nostalgia tasted sweet in his mouth instead of bitter.
At least she was better than Liu Mingyan who had passed him being bullied a number of times before he fought that demon on the bridge. She too had been turned into a myth. He told himself that hadn’t been worthy of her notice, not affection but notice, before he earned it, that her indifference was par for the course and in Cang Qiong it was. It was why Ning Ying Ying’s mercy could be sweet, and in turn Shen Qingqiu’s violence made Liu Mingyan’s indifference feel like a blessing.
Hadn’t he given Sha Hualing her father’s lands and allowed her to run rampant as she pleased, even to the detriment of his other wives? Hadn’t he allowed her to be a General in his army? She was admired, respected, and well positioned with her own fief, something few of his wives had.
Furthermore, hadn’t he left the dowries of all of his wives, save for very few occasions untouched and gifted them more than they brought more often than not? Hadn’t he allowed them to maintain their roles if they so wished: as priestesses, healers, seamstresses, or allowed them to retreat into the bowers of the Palace as they wished? He’d given them every freedom he could while maintaining balance. Hadn’t he recalled their important celebrations, the most important of their likes, and been attentive when his time permitted?
It was a harem, not a romance played out on a stage where two lovers met and swore they’d be in love for all of time.
Everyone had their position, everyone knew what they were getting into and yet… it hadn’t been enough.
Luo Binghe hadn’t been enough . And wasn’t that the tale of his life?
The conspiracy as he uncovered it was this: Ning Ying Ying, Sha Hualing, and Liu Mingyan along with about a quarter of his wives worked together to have him murdered in his own Palace.
It had been a slow process of poisoning. Wives he assumed were at odds had worked in tandem to expose him to different elements that would be harmless alone but together would lead to weakness and a heavier sleep that would overtake him as though he were dead.
His survival came down to the fact that one of the herbs in Qiu Haitang’s incense had been swapped out by an unscrupulous vendor. A cheaper duplicate of the Blood Rain Poppy seeds offered in their place, an effortless additional profit for the one pocketing the difference. So Luo Binghe had awoken instead of dying ignobly in bed, his existence continuing forward by chance and someone else’s greed.
Liu Mingyan told him that she and Ning Ying Ying felt like the human cultivation sects were necessary to protect the more vulnerable humans and to keep the demons in check; that there needed to be more oversight for demons in the human Realm, that he simply wasn’t providing.
He could recall in perfect detail Liu Mingyan’s face as she told him, “My brother would be shamed if I did nothing while humanity suffered. I have a duty to the people and while our time together was important it would be dishonorable of me to do nothing while demons roam the lands savaging human settlements with little to no recourse”.
Ning Ying Ying stared at him bashfully as Liu Mingyan spoke, gracefully dabbing a silk handkerchief to wipe the few tears that trickled down the corner of her eyes.
Liu Mingyan paused and steeled her gaze, “I have tried. I have done my duty and I have failed. I will accept any punishment for that failure but Ying Ying should be absolved, she had little to do with this and was pressured into silence”.
As Mingyan took the blame, Ying Ying softly interjected, “You can’t say that Mingyan, I knew what I was doing. I knew”.
Ning Ying Ying took a deep breath before accusing him, “A’Luo…you’ve become cruel and unyielding. You don’t listen to your people…or…or your wives anymore. You aren’t the boy I married”.
“I’m not sure you ever were,” Ning Ying Ying added, looking lost.
Ying Ying was partial to a pale yellow silk that came from a particularly venomous Human Faced Spider off-shoot. She clasped her hands like a little girl, flush with excitement, whenever he brought her skeins of it. A roll would feed a merchant family for three years.
Liu Mingyan’s gray eyes gazed at him like chips of ice, imperiously taking in his measure but washed with a tinge of fear she couldn’t quite disguise, as she informed him of their reasoning. She startled only when he broke into hysterical laughter and left them in their prison cell but did not call for him to stop, turning instead to comfort Ning Ying Ying. Sha Hualing was simpler in that she wanted his power and saw nothing wrong in this latest murder attempt.
Stupid, how stupid was he to ever give even an ounce of trust to anyone?
Did they think his days were enjoyable? That he simply reaped the benefits with no consequence? He knew they couldn’t possibly believe that; Liu Mingyan and Sha Hualing in particular helped him with order, they guarded and built his kingdom with him… and yet…
Looking at his lands, he ordered one of the lesser demons to open the prison doors that housed the most involved of his wives, and decided that everything he worked for wasn’t worth a single incense stick of time anymore.
Palming the hilt of Xin Mo he made a cut in the air and stepped forward.
Luo Binghe’s face was placid as he decided to give his wives exactly what they seemed to want from him.
…
His journey through various inhabitable worlds was useful and in many ways meditative. For one, he was able to observe versions of himself as he made the same mistakes over and over again. Usually he’d come upon himself marrying a new bride or deflowering a virgin on some field. Or watch how a younger version of himself fought, desperate for his life. In some worlds he saw his parents, and wasn’t that a fun surprise. Tianlang-jun and Su Xiyan, were alive and happy, and those he watched a little longer.
Sometimes he was born to them, sometimes they miscarried the child he would likely be, and sometimes he wasn’t born at all. Sometimes he had siblings. Little brothers and sisters, older ones, and so on. Cousins. Family.
Rarely, he’d find a world where he’d been killed, or sealed or some such equivalent but those were few and far in-between.
Rarer still, he’d find worlds where he seemed happy, truly happy and content with his life. Even in the world wherein he had a family of some kind, he’d watch versions of himself stare at their brides with achingly familiar smiles, the ones carefully constructed to appeal to the woman in front of him. He’d watch Luo Binghe compete with his or her siblings over anything and everything, often in the dark. What was Tianlang-jun after all, but an Emperor with a throne to inherit? And what were siblings in but obstacles one had to topple in order to rule?
He saw himself grow from a young boy who played with his “siblings” to a young man who happily ensured that his older brother fell in battle. Or to his own blade, to someone else’s, to poison, to the woman his sibling had warming their bed upon Luo Binghe’s request.
The times he seemed happiest were always with who or what he had started to name as the False Shizun. He wasn’t, as Luo Binghe first assumed, Shen Qingqiu. He was something other, a lonely ghost or an accidental ritual gone wrong: something that certainly wasn’t Shen Jiu. Wasn’t it an ache in his chest that felt like an arrow when he learned that the False Shizun was not Shen Qingqiu? Wasn’t it a breath of air he didn’t even know he wanted so used to permanent suffocation he no longer remembered its relief? He’d learned much about Shen Jiu in his observations, about his suffering. Nothing he cared to recall in much detail. A wretched beginning deserved a wretched end, but this False Shizun…
The False Shizun, the Sweet Shizun, the smart, lovely, and utterly confused Shizun who replaced the pile of detritus he once served tea to, was a delight to watch and deserved infinitely more of his attention.
Usually, he’d observe the False Shizun’s growing relationship with his younger self in those scenarios with aching jealousy but he’d learned to be patient. One angry False Shizun telling him Luo Binghe wasn’t his husband had been enough for him, and more than that, Luo Binghe was no one’s substitute. Not even his own.
What he needed was to learn more about False Shizun.
So he did.
Every time he wanted to rush in and replace the brat who received head-pats and care, and throw aside the sniveling child who managed to weasel his way into cooking False Shizun’s meals, but he knew better. Shizun loved the Binghe in front of him and replacing the little bastard would feel hollow, or rather it wouldn’t be enough. He had spent centuries living with not feeling like he was enough, not having been enough, not getting enough attention in the ways he wanted it to settle for some cheap copy’s scraps.
Instead, he began to observe the man in the hopes of finding out where he came from. He wanted his own Shizun, a Shizun who never met a different Binghe, one that would be his and his alone. To do that he needed to know where False Shizun came from and intercept him before he was stuck looking at Shen Qingqiu’s face for all of eternity.
It took a while but eventually he uncovered a suggestion of coercion in the moments where he was unable to perceive the False Shizun, and longer still to uncover why. Some strange parasitic entity had attached itself to the False Shizun, bringing him to Luo Binghe’s world—which was a kindness—but holding him to Shen Jiu’s role, which was an unacceptable cruelty.
Xin Mo, he found, was useful for absorbing not only Yin energy but absorbing the parasite that called itself the “System”. It became a pleasurable pastime to root them out and watch as False Shizun after False Shizun broke down in tears and clung to their respective Binghe. Soft, sweet, Shizun, who always revealed, eventually if not immediately, that he was once named Shen Yuan. Who told his Binghe that he came from another world entirely. One where Binghe’s world was a book.
A book that very often read like Binghe’s own life writ large and yet still, he somehow loved Binghe? Knew of his worst behavior and saw it as nothing but the actions of a hurt young boy? Sometimes the book was about a different Luo Binghe, one of the ones with siblings, but it was always Binghe and it was always the same. A’Yuan loved him before he ever saw him, loved him no matter what his actions or his past.
Moments like that left Binghe grinding his back teeth in agony. How cruel of his own world to have denied him such a Shizun? Why did he have to be one of the Binghes who clearly lost when it came to this crucial aspect of life? Luck failed them all. Why did he seem to be undeserving of a soulmate brought to him like a rabbit to a trap? A ready-made meal? Instead he was left to glut himself on women made of salt water, the more he drank the thirstier he felt.
Thankfully he could make it right. Absorbing multiple “Systems” had left Binghe with a strange understanding of the universe. He could see an outline of an echoing web of interconnected worlds and narratives. “Systems” that vaguely exchanged energy and sent some back to larger spots that felt like multiple suns in his mind, that then spewed out more “Systems” which would be sent to worlds that were graying slightly for whatever reason in an attempt to brighten them. Binghe didn’t fully understand this strange ecosystem but he knew that he was both within it and a “System” of sorts himself.
Both a player in this game and a maker.
He could work with this. He knew he could. He’d worked with less, and made himself an Emperor.
…
Shen Yuan covered a yawn with a delicately embroidered silk fan. He’d been the one to painstakingly stitch the plum blossoms fluttering in a non-existent wind on its surface. He liked to think he was pretty good at embroidery. Life without the internet meant he threw himself into the lessons his parents in this world provided for him. Entertainment for him was now crafting or making music, maybe reading some travel diaries if he could get his hands on them.
His nails and fingertips were dyed a gradient flush pink with balsam by the maids as was the custom in the place he found himself. He wasn’t sure of the historical accuracy but the effect was pretty, pale flesh fading into pink, like the petals of a flower.
A’Tan scuttled in with a bucket filled with ice, her strong forearms peeking out from her sleeves as she chattered in his direction, “Young miss, A’Tan brought more ice for your room. Luo-shizi had a crate sent over for the household. Young Miss has such a thoughtful match and he’s so handsome too. Truly, a couple so fine has never been ordained before, the Heavens—”
“A’Tan,” Shen Yuan interrupted.
“A’Tan will fan Young Miss,” A’Tan redirected, stopping her flurry of praise towards Shen Yuan’s fiance.
She gently took a different fan, a larger paper one, and gently waved it over Shen Yuan as he stretched out on the luo-han bed by the window.
A’Tan was a hard worker, indentured to their house as she was. She was treated kindly as Shen Yuan’s head maid and zealously guarded her position. In return, Shen Yuan turned a blind eye to the squabbles of the maids provided they caused him no trouble. Thankfully, A’Tan ruled with an iron fist so there weren't many.
He also turned a blind eye to the fact that Luo Binghe, his fiance, had been bribing her for years. None of Shen Yuan’s belongings went missing or were replaced by inferior goods, his baths were always heated, his clothing immaculate, his yellow books smuggled in without complaint, alongside any sw eets he wanted to try that his parents explicitly forbade.
When he was eight, A'Tan had been the one to drag a weeping woman away when he was frozen by the sight. He never knew what to do when they started beginning on their knees. The woman had been one of a series of maids caught skimming from his allowance, seeking to excuse their actions by wailing about the unfairness of their lives, the needs of their families, and their poverty. Despite what he'd seen as a treasured young Miss in this lifetime, he wasn't used to watching someone literally prostrate themselves, rolling disgracefully at his feet. He did not know where A’Tan took her, what she told the other maids later, or how any of it was dealt with but not one maid had tried such a trick again after that incident. In his cowardice he never asked, he didn’t think he’d like the answer.
A’Tan was good at making sure problems like that either never happened or went away immediately so he didn’t mind the extra money she was likely getting from Luo Binghe to speak of him fondly or to pass his letters to Shen Yuan.
He’d been the Shen Yuan of this world since he was five, a choice made by the “System”.
The “System” that kidnapped him told him he was to serve as a love interest in this world and a series of others in order to gain the energy to start a new life in a chosen world. It mournfully informed him that his own world was inaccessible due to the fact that he’d already finished his life there and the world would reject him if he attempted to go back in the same role. His original world had already, to the best of his understanding, “logged” his death and unless he chose to start over in a new identity or perhaps as a ghost he’d be kicked out. He was offered other worlds that were “just like” his old one, one loophole being the ability for him to slip into a different Shen Yuan’s body just as he died, but he was holding out for something xianxia themed given that the thought of snatching a body from a different version of him turned his stomach. That new family wouldn't even be his family, they’d just be strangers with the same faces.
When panicked about stealing a body and a life, he was comforted with the notion that there was no “Shen Yuan” per se in any of these worlds that he was and would be occupying. He wasn’t being stuffed into a new body with its own history. There were minor notes about his personality but the System was careful to ensure that he didn’t really have close loved ones he had to lie to. What he occupied was a role that should have been but never was. Blank possibilities that the system tweaked so he could take the role and play it. In a different timeline there was a different honored Young Miss who was born to the literary Shen Family, but in this one, technically, the Shen’s would have only had two sons and no Young Miss.
By some happenstance the role of honored Young Miss was blank which messed with the narrative, or something like that, so Shen Yuan was pulled in to fill in the gap, the System crooning over how submissive and breedable Shen Yuan was. How perfect he’d be for the role. He was informed that the original Young Miss had belonged to a mysterious third gender that was desirable in his new world and all that meant to him was that below his cock and balls he now had the requisite parts one usually expected a baby to come out of, and that he was effectively treated like a woman from a noble family in a web novel set in ancient China.
At least he had A’Tan with him.
…
At eleven Shen Yuan had been taken aside by his mother. Her sharp nails were not exactly digging, but pressing insistently against his shoulder as she calmly informed him that he’d be marrying Duke Luo. A prosperous match to a boy two years older than this body.
“Don’t embarrass the family Shen Yuan,” She ordered.
Shen Yuan nodded demurely and replied, “Of course A’Niang,” because what else was he to do? He’d become accustomed to the reality that he’d be married off. If the match was truly heinous he’d settle on his secondary plans of running away which were, quite frankly, a last ditch effort. The world outside was cruel and lawless and he was vulnerable in ways he wouldn’t have been in his original world. He could make ice, he knew a few recipes that would likely be novel, but anything he took out to “bargain” would be given to his mother’s “proper” sons and he’d still be required to marry. Bribing servants at age eleven was asking to be ripped off or have his actions reported. He simply didn’t have connections to the outside world or shops in hand that he could work through, his mother holding a tight fist on the household budget.
The life of a respected first wife of a noble family could be tenable depending on the candidate. Marriage or possible starvation and slavery. Marriage as possible starvation or slavery. He’d have much to consider in the next coming years. He’d watched his own mother run her household and be satisfied with his father who had concubines but respected his wife and thought if he could replicate something like it, a relationship of respect not romance, he could make things work.
Two weeks later he sat in front of a curly haired boy with pink cheeks and tried to stop the eye-twitch that developed every time the boy’s name was mentioned.
Mostly, their parents were the one’s speaking but Shen Yuan watched the boy in front of him who kept looking away every time they locked eyes. His hands trembled as he picked up his chopsticks and put food in Shen Yuan’s place.
“I-it’s Binghe’s honor to meet Miss Shen,” he stuttered.
The pit in Shen Yuan’s stomach that had developed since he’d learned of circumstances at age five settled and he carefully ate Binghe’s offering of meat floss.
“The honor is all mine,” he replied.
“No! I mean….I mean I am skilled in the four arts and my family owns many, much, a lot of, land and shops so you’ll want for nothing as, as - “.
Shen Yuan lifted one long sleeve to quietly laugh behind it. Yes, he thought, everything would be fine.
…
The System was sure he’d be able to fulfill the role in what he was quickly suspecting was a danmei novel and “kindly” had him appear at a younger age in this world to allow him to adapt.
It was a pretty standard transmigration plot-line and his System was relatively easy going if not for its constant insistence that really, he was great for the role of playing a perfect wife and that the reason he, of all people, had been chosen was exactly that.
He may have cursed the System out for its assumptions. He had been pretty sure he was a straight man. Like, eventually if he lived in his original world he’d probably have married a wife…or not but then he’d just be the single Uncle. He hadn’t really thought about it much but being another man’s wife had never crossed his mind.
The cursing may have also been because the System kept assuring him that his “delicate virginal flower” would bring him such pleasure and that he’d been given the “advantage” of a body built to be railed by an obscenely large cock.
He informed the System that there were more options between stallion protagonist and submissive and breedable! He could have probably handled, like, one wife as a mediocre scholar. He could have been a respected man of the house, a third son of middling income and leisure as he had been in his original life. Suspiciously, he felt that the System response to that was laughter but he couldn’t prove it.
“You’ll like this better,” the disembodied voice in his head assured him, and who was he to argue, after all?
Five year old him had a week of tantrums straight and a good two weeks of heavy blushing every time he had to use the chamberpot before he adjusted to having both his regular set and something extra down under. If he was a scholar he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this bullshit.
Luckily, his “parents” or rather the nanny assumed he missed his brothers or something and bribed him with sweets.
The System clearly had some kind of glitch but here he was, playing love interest to a male lead that was ripped off from Proud Immortal Demon Way’s Luo Binghe. There wasn’t even a name change to disguise it.
In retrospect, after spending a good decade as a “Young Miss” he appreciated that the System was sensible enough to plan for him. He may have known a touch of calligraphy but not enough to use it every day for correspondence, let alone the rules that governed his behavior. Despite what many a transmigration novel said, learning how to behave in a different social context with different cues was not easy, and acting “modern” wasn’t cute or charming—it was disgraceful. Starting at 5 was much easier than he had to start as a teen or adult.
He could have done without the old crones droning about how he was meant to be subservient to his husband and then to his sons but he liked to think he had a pretty good grasp on acting like a demure lady, an exemplar of the good breeding and careful rearing found in a higher class family. His role was easy as a whole. He was meant to sit and look pretty and then… and then…get married to Luo Binghe.
Luo Binghe was apparently a common protagonist or he was in someone’s fanfiction, he really couldn’t tell; the writing would probably improve if it was fanfiction.
What he did know was that his honored fiance was currently pretty good to him.
He was two years older than Shen Yuan and doting in word and action, often bringing Shen Yuan sweets and hairpins, sliding interesting travel diaries and rare music scores to A’Tan to pass to him.
They were childhood sweethearts of sorts—which made Shen Yuan feel like an old pervert on multiple occasions—but he didn’t choose to be married to Luo Binghe, he was pretty much thrust into this life with no internet, a million different rules, new plumbing, none of which he ever expected to be dealing with. Sometimes he felt bad for being such an old monster in the body of a child, he felt predatory for being Binghe’s intended but…
Picking at the plum blossoms on his fan while A’Tan cooled him down, he glanced at the ice bucket and smiled.
It wasn't all terrible.
At least he had A’Tan.