Chapter Text
Spring was the worst season in this world, and for once, the reason had nothing to do with sex. It had everything to do with a young Shang Qinghua, who had invented it in a desperate bid to climb up the tortuously corporate ladder of An Ding peak. The then An Ding Peak Lord had been very impressed by his disciple's addition to the checks and balances of the sect: auditing season.
These days, Shang Qinghua, the present An Ding Peak Lord, was far past the point of combing through ledgers himself – that honor went to his bleary eyed disciples! – but he still had to at least read through a summary of the findings. Not that there were many, this year. The sect was too busy attacking demons (well, one in particular) and mourning Shen Qingqiu.
It was so boring that Xian Shu’s request to triple their supply of paper, ink, and brushes stood out. The auditing disciple had noted that the senior disciples had claimed it was for ‘writing practice’ since the peak had recently developed a taste for ‘fine literature’.
Thankfully his little disciples’ heads were too full of numbers and cutthroat maneuvering to get distracted by a pretty face! The disciple had included a sheaf of discarded papers ‘just in case Shizun wished to follow up’ on that very suspicious statement. Efficiency!
Nosy, he immediately began flipping through the papers, skimming the surprisingly saucy content with a growing smirk. The pages were riddled with typos and crooked lines, but still readable. Ah, to be young and writing pages of shitty porn for no payoff again! If they were all copying what seemed like a full book of porn for each other, that explained why they needed more writing supplies, though the extent of the request seemed disproportionate for the number of girls on the peak.
He kept skimming it until he got to a moment between passionate bouts of anatomically improbable sex, a quiet, domestic scene in an isolated cottage.
Wait a minute.
Oh my god, these kids were writing porn about their martial uncle and the demon emperor! Holy shit!
Shang Qinghua was still cackling like a hyena when Mobei-jun teleported into his office.
“What is so funny,” Mobei-jun demanded as Shang Qinghua fumbled through his usual obeisances through poorly muffled laughter.
“My martial nieces are writing porn about the emperor and Shen Qingqiu!” Shang Qinghua gasped out. “Oh man, that guy’s gonna burst a blood vessel when he hears about this.”
“The emperor will not care,” Mobei-jun replied, staring at him like he was stupid.
“Not him,” Shang Qinghua said. “Shen Qingqiu.”
“He is dead.”
The peak lord smiled nervously. “Of course, of course, you’re right as ever, my king. I just meant, haha, he’s probably rolling in his grave right now.”
Mobei-jun further furrowed his brow. “You do not perform soul calming rituals at this sect?”
Shang Qinghua flapped his hands and turned back to his papers, talking all the while. When all else fails, overwhelm them with information! “We do, just a bad joke, my king! No ghosts here! If he was a ghost, don’t you think the emperor would have found him by now? No escaping his glorious reach, long may he reign! Anyways, what can this servant do for his king..?”
Shang Qinghua kept thinking about it, since it was just so fucking funny. He thought about it while he was going over other paperwork, while he was doing his king’s dirty work, while he was, for the first time in a while, visiting Cucumber-bro’s growing spot.
It took a lot of work to get out this far! Plus, there wasn’t anything to do after he had dumped the fertilizer onto the haphazardly marked seedbeds, months ago. So he was just here, thinking of the rant that Cucumber-bro would have had about this.
“Who the fuck wrote this garbage? All my unbearable mooning over Luo Binghe was completely platonic! Unrealistic! And their teaset miraculously disappeared when they fucked on the table! Of course an author in this world takes after you and your ten million plot holes, you hack!”
Haha. What a vicious, pedantic little dude.
Shang Qinghua was honestly surprised the guy wasn’t clawing his way out of the dirt right now, fueled by apoplectic levels of rage that transcended the veil between life and death. It was a misty memory now, but he remembered in his first life the comments that Cucumber-bro left felt like could crawl out of his computer and strangle them if he looked at them for too long. And then they kind of did!
He kicked at the dirt of one of the spots, which was budding with new grass. The wind whipped his robes around his ankles. It was too quiet out here.
Qi Qingqi loomed over him, arms crossed beneath her chest. “Shang Qinghua. My hallmasters have told me that their students have nothing to write with, and it is your fault.”
Show no fear. Show no fear. “Really, that’s weird! Xian Shu was approved for their regular shipments, so maybe you need to check your storehouses? Things get misplaced all the time, and I know from experience that it’s usually just lazy disciples who didn’t want to lug their stuff the rest of the way, haha!” He feebly twitched one corner of his mouth upwards as his palms began to sweat.
“We received the regular shipments. I’m told that demand has increased, but our requests for more supplies were not approved by your peak, which is why I’m wasting your and my time talking about it with you.”
He sighed gustily and raised his eyes to the heavens. “Ah, supply requests aren’t really my thing! They probably just haven’t gotten around to it yet. This is a busy season for us at An Ding, you know. I’ll look into it when I have time.”
“I’ll expect an update next meeting, then.”
Shang Qinghua’s propped up smile fell as the Xian Shu Peak Lord walked away from him. So the kids sicked their mom on him? What the fuck. Was she in on the porn copying ring, and that’s why they can be so brazen about it? Did they think he didn’t know what they were writing with their sinful, sinful hands?
Ignoring their request was just him telling them to be a little more covert, using the subtle pressure of bureaucracy! But if those Xian Shu brats thought they could bully him into funding their expansive porn stashes (and seriously, how many volumes did each girl possibly need, for that big of an increase in demand?), they had another thing coming.
And that thing?
Was more bureaucracy.
The next meeting was at the conclusion of the audit season, which meant it was time for Shang Qinghua to announce the summary of his findings to a room full of half-conscious cultivators. He always dreaded it, but not this time. This time, he had something juicy, and he knew just when to announce it.
At the end of his proceedings, everyone’s eyes had taken on a decidedly vacant sheen, and one Peak Lord even looked asleep. That was when Shang Qinghua mentally rubbed his hands together and physically wiped the sweat off on his robes, and announced, “Finally, after learning of Xian Shu’s excessive resource usage the past few months, this master has officially placed the peak under sanction.”
Shang Qinghua might as well have set off a string of firecrackers in the room; all of the eyes in the room opened and swung to the Xian Shu Peak Lord. An Ding had never actually used its power to place sanctions, no matter what smudges they discovered in a peak’s books. To use it now, in a word, was--
“Outrageous!” Qi Qingqi spat out, white with fury. She slammed her hands on the table and pushed herself upright as she began defending herself. Shang Qinghua’s smile twitched as his eyes darted around the table, other peak lords looking away.
After a moment, Yue Qingyuan mechanically raised his hand, eyes still distant despite the rest of the peak lords perking up. “Calm yourself,” he said to Qi Qingqi. She subsided, still seething. “I’m sure you have an explanation for this,” he told Shang Qinghua.
He nodded tightly, heart racing from Qi Qingqi’s outburst. “I’ve summarized my findings here.” That’s right, assholes! He made handouts! You can ignore me, but you can’t ignore the facts!
Qi Qingqi’s precocious brats had consumed more writing supplies than any other peak, including peaks which cultivated through writing. They had also been requesting drastically more usage of Cang Qiong’s communal messaging birds. Finally, despite no increase in night hunts or exports, Xian Shu’s treasuries had steadily been accruing more wealth. Lacking an explanation, An Ding feared the source of these metrics may be due to something nefarious.
“Treason?!” Qi Qingqi roared. “You would dare accuse my disciples of working against this sect? They would never, not in a million years! These numbers,” She crumbled the piece of paper into a ball, “mean nothing, you paranoid paper pusher.”
Shang Qinghua cowered away from her as she stormed towards him, but she passed him for the door.
“Where are you going?” one Peak Lord called out to her.
She stopped and glared at the room. “The mailroom. I’m proving you all wrong right now.”
Shang Qinghua swallowed, watching as the Peak Lords gazed at each other and tacitly agreed to follow her into the mailroom. This had snowballed, fast. He had thought that Qi Qingqi would investigate on her own, and handle everything privately, not… not…
Soon, all eleven of them were crammed into the relatively small mail room, where Qi Qingqi had ordered everyone who had already been there to stay where they were as she stalked into the room, including two extremely unlucky Xian Shu disciples.
“You there,” she barked, then consciously softened her tone when they cowered away from her. “Ahem. Now, girls, I know this may be sudden, but I need to see the packages you’re sending out.”
“Begging for the Peak Master’s understanding, but these unworthy disciples are sending p-private letters to a close f-family member.” The answering disciple spoke quiet and fast, face beet red as she stared down at her shoes.
Qi Qingqi winced, but steeled herself. “I’m sorry, girls, but these are dire circumstances. I promise that I will be the only one who reads the contents of your letters, and I will not judge you for their contents. It will be forgotten the moment that it leaves my hands, I swear it to you.”
The two abruptly dropped to the floor in a kowtow. “Please, Peak Master!” Frustrated tears leaked from their eyes as they wailed.
“Don’t worry, girls. Everything will be fine.” Her tone was gentle, but there was a wariness building in her eyes as she saw their desperation. Watching them cower on the floor, she beckoned the mail head, who held a stack of three thick packages. She plucked one off the top and ripped open the wrapping to reveal a crudely bound sheaf of papers, raising a brow as she read the title page. Some of the tension dropped from her body as she saw what seemed to be a cute little novel from her beloved head disciple.
Shang Qinghua, on the other hand, became impossibly more tense. He hadn’t wanted it to happen like this! He looked frantically between the young girls, still on the floor, and the lofty woman at the head of it. When it seemed that Qi Qingqi was gearing up to read the novel then and there, he desperately said, “That seems quite thick! Perhaps we should let you read that in private?”
“No, I won’t have anyone walking away while entertaining any semblance of suspicion towards my peak,” she said distractedly as she paged through the book. She kept her face decidedly neutral, wanting to keep the confidence of the disciples in her peak, but wow, it was bad.
Qi Qingqi flipped through the pages of porn, keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. At first, all seemed normal—that is, for bad porn that she badly wanted to forget as soon as possible—but when she got to the filler pages, it was immediately obvious what this was.
Her face turned white, then grey, then red.
“What is this, you unfilial children?” she shouted, slamming the book closed. “You dare write this disrespectful garbage about your deceased martial uncle? You dare send this drivel somewhere outside this peak? Do not speak,” she warned them when it seemed like they were about to pipe up. “Mail head, where were these to be sent?”
The mail head proffered the address register. Qi Qingqi scanned them furiously and went deadly calm as she inhaled sharply through her nose. “Sect Leader, this master can confirm that these girls have not committed treason, but their behavior is nonetheless unacceptable. This master submits her peak to the sanction imposed by Shang Qinghua and asks to be dismissed to punish these shameful disciples privately.”
But it was too late.
As soon as Qi Qingqi had blurted out “deceased martial uncle”, Yue Qingyuan had already picked up one of the books and begun flipping through it. At Qi Qingqi’s request, he looked up from the book, lips bone white and jaw clenched. The disciples bowing on the floor shut their eyes and visibly regretted the day they were born.
His brow smoothed and he smiled at them kindly. It was not comforting to anyone in the room. “This sect leader appreciates Peak Lord Qi’s desire to quickly and quietly resolve this matter but fears that the resolution may be more efficiently brought about through the coordination of multiple peaks. I would appreciate your and Peak Lord Shang’s presence in my office tomorrow morning.”
Qi Qingqi stalked through the gated entrance of her peak, two cowed disciples dragging themselves behind her. She hunted down a hallmaster and without breaking her stride, snapped, “Call a meeting and get every single disciple on this peak to the Great Pavilion.”
“In the middle of lunch? Shall I ring the alarm, Peak Lord?” she asked, hurrying after her.
“This is no martial emergency, merely one of curriculum,” Qi Qingqi spat out. “Treat it with urgency. I expect every girl to be there within fifteen minutes.”
“What about the ones on our other peaks?” the hallmaster cried out, stumbling over her skirts.
Qi Qingqi settled her with a firm hand to her elbow. She stared seriously into the other woman’s eyes. “Every girl. I must find out how deep the rot goes.”
Soon after, the Great Pavilion was awash with the whispers of tens of young girls.
“…do you think they finally killed that demon?” one asked another.
“I bet it’s something juicy. They locked the peak’s gates after we got in,” she said, mind racing with possibilities. “Do you think it’s something we can put in the next edition?”
The first girl giggled. “I hope so!” Then, a little more unsurely, “You don’t think they found out about..?”
The Peak Lord strode out from the direction of the gatehouse and onto the raised platform at the head of the pavilion, smiling coolly as she always did.
“No way they found out. Besides, we’re not doing anything wrong, just…”
“Enjoying fine literature,” they said in unison, smiling at each other conspiratorially before turning their attention to their master.
“Good evening, girls,” Peak Lord Qi said warmly, her resonant voice carrying easily without shouting. “My apologies for interrupting your meals. Hopefully you’ll all be able to return to them shortly. I just have an announcement to make.
“I spoke to Peak Lord Shang about Xian Shu’s supply requests, and I managed to persuade him that they were necessary for our fine literary scholars. You may look forward to receiving them within the month.” A great cheer went up from the group as they began to envision their profitable futures. “Teacher, isn’t this wonderful news?” she asked a woman next to her, the teacher of their poetry class.
“Yes, wonderful,” the teacher agreed after a pause, sneaking a confused look at the other teachers on the platform. “My students have been showing a keen interest in self-practice these days, and I suppose they will be getting a great deal more if we want to use up all that paper.”
“Indeed,” Peak Lord Qi replied, clapping her on the back before turning back to the crowd. “I must confess, I find myself quite embarrassed not to have known of my students’ new interest in literature. I could not answer a single one of Peak Lord Shang’s queries on where the paper was going. Tell me, teacher, do Xian Shu’s students focus more on transcription, analysis, or original composition?”
“Our class prides itself on having a mixture of both, but we have been working on original compositions lately,” the teacher replied unsurely, knowing the Peak Lord must already be familiar with her curriculum. “As for the paper, I may have an explanation. The girls are perfectionists; I think every student in my classes must go through a dozen or more drafts alone.”
Peak Lord Qi’s smile twisted, and an instinctive tension began to wind its way through the crowd. “Every student, hmm? Would any of her students care to share a snippet of their original composition?”
Liu Mingyan, standing at the front of the crowd, saluted the Peak Lord and volunteered herself, a sheep stumbling into the slaughterhouse.
Peak Lord Qi let her drone on for a bit before she held up her hand, smile evaporating off her face and leaving it stony. “Enough of that. Why don’t you tell me about this?” And she reached into her sleeve and pulled out The Resentment of Chunshan.