Work Text:
For a long time after recovering his memories of his first life, Shang Qinghua was scared to write anything even marginally creative. What if he was creating another world for this shitty System to throw him into after he bit the dust in this one, huh? What if Shang Qinghua was forced to become the author of his own series of inescapable hells, forever, a cycle of Samsara so shitty and tropey and slapdash nobody could escape it, especially not the hack author?
So, yeah, for many years, Shang Qinghua stubbornly avoided the little itchy place in his brain that went “you know, here’s an idea.” And like, not gonna lie, that kind of sucked, because his brain kept itching and itching. Creativity wasn’t exactly opt-in and opt-out, you know? In his past life, Airplane Shooting At the Sky could slam out 10,000 words in a day! The words were inside his head whether or not he had a keyboard or a whetstone handy. He’d be sitting in a Peak Lord meeting and his brain would start clawing at the inside of his skull with boredom, teased with the certain knowledge that if Shang Qinghua only picked up a pen, the boredom would all go away…And then, like, enough time passed in his second world that Shang Qinghua thought….well, it’s not like it’ll hurt anything if he just wrote RPF, right? Proud Immortal Demon Way already existed, and it wasn’t like Shang Qinghua had any power over it anymore. If he did, would he be living like this? Being abused by his king and his shidis and shixiongs alike? No way.
Eventually Shang Qinghua started scratching the brain itch, just a little bit, just when he could afford the extra time. He’d sit down at his desk and let backstory just pour out of him, scenes and plots and ideas that couldn’t go anywhere because the story was already posted, right? Published in a special 3d world-changing edition. This was art for art’s sake. Non canon extras. Most but not all of it was smut, obviously. What! He liked writing smut! He was good at it! If he hadn’t been good at it, how would he have amassed an audience big enough to pay for his shitty apartment for all those years, huh?
And since for once this author was only writing for himself, most of the smut focused on his actual favorite character, not the protagonist (RIP to Cucumber-bro’s asshole, but honestly Shang Qinghua didn’t want to think too much about what they got up to. He would always love his most famous son in theory, but in reality…ah, there was something off-putting about him? It wasn’t just that he was pants-shittingly scary. Lots of people in this world were pants-shittingly scary. It was the crazy eyes.) So, yeah, mostly he wrote smut about Mobei Jun.
Shang Qinghua had a lot of inspiration for this particular source of creative writing. For one thing, there were Mobei Jun’s pecs, which he constantly had out, showing off both his amazing body and the fact that he was totally resistant to cold, and could have his tits out in a blizzard while everyone else suffered. For another thing, there were Mobei Jun’s biceps, spotted less frequently than the pecs but beloved in Shang Qinghua’s memory, and the heady implication of Mobei Jun’s powerful thighs and fat ass under his robes. He’d glimpsed both over the years, while attending his king in baths and under various kinds of medical duress, and even those little glimpses kept him warm at night. Shang Qinghua had never seen Mobei Jun’s dick, but you know what, that was okay! Writing had to come from a place of curiosity and imagination as well as a place of admiration and devotion, you know? He devoted a lot of words to imagining Mobei Jun’s dick.
He also had a lot of inspiration for the kind of sex Mobei Jun got up to, because Mobei Jun obviously fucked, like, a lot. He was a demon lord in a world Shang Qinghua had personally filled to the brim with sexcapades! Obviously Mobei Jun was constantly fucking. When Shang Qinghua was a disciple and in the early days of being a double agent Peak Lord, he didn’t hear much about that kind of thing, because it’s not like his king was ever one to kiss and tell (or really just—to tell. His king didn’t ever really tell him much.) But after Shang Qinghua got found out and then evacuated to the Northern Palace…yeah. He saw some stuff.
Here was an incomplete list of the people Shang Qinghua had collected evidence of having fucked his king over the years:
- The Saintess of the Crystal Lizard Clan. Shang Qinghua hadn’t actually seen her leaving his king’s bed, but he was still pretty sure about that one, because she’d wrapped her long icy tail around Mobei Jun’s neck when they said goodbye, and he was pretty sure the tip of her tail had actually snuck into his king’s plunging neckline to tweak at his nipple, not that his tsundere king so much as twitched. Also there was the part where Mobei Jun put his big hands around her neck and stuck his tongue down her throat in farewell. That was also a good tell.
- At least three minor princesses from the Emerald Ice Cavern Clan, consecutively, not at the same time. That caused a couple outraged murder attempts Shang Qinghua had to help clean up later.
- Two of the prettier household maids. Shang Qinghua had obviously followed up on that one, because hey, if he was going to be a functional advisor to his king, he had to know if the staff were being abused (or, you know, abused beyond the way Shang Qinghua was routinely abused, with too much bullshit work and the occasional beating.) That was how you figured out if the staff could be suborned into helping carry out assassination plotlines! Also it made Shang Qinghua sick to think about! But—yeah, that’s not how it went down. He got very reliable reports that both of the maids were extremely enthusiastic participants, and were eager to repeat the experience. Shang Qinghua switched his brain over from worrying about assassination plotlines to worrying about how careful his king was about not creating bastard kids they’d have to deal with later.
- Sha Hualing. (Shang Qinghua’s spiky girl!!! That one hurt, weirdly. But he also wrote some really amazing and outlandish porn about it, probably because he already knew how a typical Sha Hualing sex scene went, although the porn turned out more like a harem catfight than your typical Hualing/Bingge scene. Sha Hualing sauntered out of Mobei Jun’s bedchamber with deep claw marks all down her back and her outer thighs, which anyone could see because she continued to favor outfits made of ribbons, and when his king also left the bedchamber, he had a black eye, a split lip, and an expression Shang Qinghua could only describe as “smug.”)
- The third prince from the Western Inlet Sea. Yeah, that one surprised Shang Qinghua, too. Apparently everyone was a little bent in this world. That inspired Shang Qinghua’s absolute favorite smut scene yet, though.
- So, yeah, after finding out about the third prince, Shang Qinghua did some more interviews with the palace staff, and found out about three footmen and two guards and one of Shang Qinghua’s own clerks (!!!!!!!!!) who’d all also reported having had extremely satisfying experiences with his king over the years. His own clerk!!!!!!!
- Truly just. A lot of prostitutes. Shang Qinghua had been left to fend for himself in the common room of many a brothel while his king fucked away the effects of sex pollen or a cursed object or a bad mood or whatever.
- Speaking of cursed objects, there was that time with Mobei Jun’s captain of the guard. That one actually happened almost in front of Shang Qinghua, because his king had dragged him along on a mission to retrieve a special amulet from a haunted tomb deep in the Emerald Ice Mountains, and obviously the amulet had a fuck or die protection on it, because probably this was a leftover wife plot that Shang Qinghua had forgotten about. As soon as it activated and Shang Qinghua explained what was happening, Mobei Jun looked coldly between him and the captain of the guard, jerked his chin at the captain of the guard, and the two of them went behind the open tomb and started stripping, and Shang Qinghua squatted miserably by the door and tried his best to keep alert to any new dangers while also stuffing his fingers in his ears and trying not to see or hear anything.
Yeah. Shang Qinghua’s king? Kind of filled in a lot of the gaps left by Bingmei in a world built for Bingge. Which made him kind of a slut, in Shang Qinghua’s view—not that he was judging! He didn’t have a lot of room to judge! He’d come up with all the scenarios that wound up with Mobei Jun needing the powers of a healing pussy or dual cultivation or safe passage via dick or whatever himself. It’s just—it did sometimes occur to him that in this world where his ideal man was easy, like, so easy, almost everyone in the North had had a spin at this point—Shang Qinghua himself never ended up on the menu.
It’s not like his king never had the opportunity. There had been so many opportunities, especially when they were younger‚ bro! His king was always showing up with injuries that required Shang Qinghua to kneel in front of him and bandage his bare (perfect! muscular!) thighs, or shoving Shang Qinghua up against walls and demanding he ‘attend’ to him. His king used to sleep in Shang Qinghua’s bed, when Shang Qinghua lived on An Ding Peak. But without fail, that meant Shang Qinghua slept on the floor, or huddled in a chair in his study all night resentfully writing erotic friendfiction about the beautiful man currently stealing Shang Qinghua’s mattress. But yeah, Mobei Jun never once invited him to bonetown, not even after the shitshow of his ascension ceremony, when it really felt like they’d rounded a corner in their relationship.
So obviously Shang Qinghua had a lot of frustration to work out, and he worked it out in, like, hundreds of sex scenes, written feverishly in his private journals—a huge stack by now, which he obviously kept under lock and key and a LOT of “do not fucking notice me” talismans—and sometimes, if he wasn’t careful, on the back of mission reports for his king or requisition requests for Cang Qiong that he’d then have to crumple up and redo. He wasn’t just writing about what he thought his king was really getting up to with half the North plus Sha Hualing, either. He wrote plenty of stuff about his king pleasuring himself alone, wringing every last drop of tension out of his massive pillar, thinking about—Shang Qinghua couldn’t really say. It was always so hard to tell what his king was thinking. Thinking about stuff that everyone liked, then. Hot mouths, tense thighs, clever hands. That was kind of Shang Qinghua’s favorite genre of handmade smut, which was a little pathetic. Just Mobei Jun squeezing his eyes shut and making himself come.
You may be asking yourself: didn’t Shang Qinghua ever write about his king fucking him, in all those years? But the answer to that was…obviously not. Shang Qinghua never stooped to the self-insert trope, not once in a million words of Proud Immortal Demon Way, and he wasn’t about to stoop to that now. Especially not since the few times he’d tried over the years, it stopped making him feel creative and loose and ambiently horny, the way a good smut writing session should go, and just started making him feel sad.
Like. You devote your life to your ideal man, and—you spend a lot of time with him, you know! It’s not like the only thing Shang Qinghua’s king did was fuck.
Mobei Jun was also a huge asshole with a mean sense of humor, and that manifested in a lot of shit at Shang Qinghua’s expense, but also in a lot of little sideways glances and curled lips and the rare cackle of laughter at things Shang Qinghua said, usually making fun of other people. (He had a whole other tally in his head of times he’d managed to make Mobei Jun laugh. A lot of it involved making fun of Luo Binghe and his house with only one cup, which only ever happened when Shang Qinghua was too distracted to notice what his mouth was doing, since obviously he didn’t have a death wish.) Mobei Jun hung out in Shang Qinghua’s office and ate his melon seeds and sat on his desk and messed up his organizational system and demanded that Shang Qinghua come with him to court and on hunts and to all kinds of environments where Shang Qinghua really wasn’t suited, and—you know, sometimes Shang Qinghua really thought they were friends. Sometimes they played weiqi in Mobei Jun’s rooms and got drunk on expensive wine, if there wasn’t other stuff going on. That was the kind of thing that friends would do. When Mobei Jun started showing up with bowls of sticky, floury, completely inedible hand-pulled noodles, Shang Qinghua thought they were maybe definitely friends.
(His king wouldn’t leave until Shang Qinghua choked down a bite. Shang Qinghua attempted to sing the dish’s praises after the first bowl, but then Mobei Jun stood there expectantly, like he wasn’t going to leave until Shang Qinghua finished the bowl, and Shang Qinghua thought might actually be sick if he had to do that, so after a ten-minute standoff where Shang Qinghua went on a rapidfire monologue, searching for excuses that would let either himself or Mobei Jun leave without Shang Qinghua finishing the noodles, and Mobei Jun flatly refusing to leave until Shang Qinghua finished the noodles, Shang Qinghua finally threw up his hands and said “My king!! You try a bite.” Mobei Jun tried a bite, spit it out, gave Shang Qinghua an extremely bitter stare, and then stormed away with his jaw set. They’d repeated more or less this exact scene like. Five times now. Shang Qinghua thought it was nice that at least Mobei Jun was trying.)
So, Shang Qinghua obviously thought his king was the perfect man, and he really wanted to fuck him, and he also thought maybe Mobei Jun was the best friend he had in this world, which was a weird thing to think. His king’s only real competition was Cucumber Bro, and it’s not like Shang Qinghua hung out with Cucumber Bro every day. His king was the first thing Shang Qinghua thought about when he woke up, and the last thing he thought about when he fell asleep, and he’d been getting off to erotica about his king fucking other people since before he knew his king was a real person, and—there was a word for feeling like that about someone, maybe excepting the erotica part, but Shang Qinghua wasn’t quite pathetic enough to think it.
Anyway, anyway, anyway. That’s all a long way of saying that Shang Qinghua ended up in this horrifying situation honestly, or at least as honestly as a shady little pervert like him could.
The horrifying situation: after a long hard week at work, Shang Qinghua was feeling a little pent up, and like maybe he deserved a little treat, especially since his king was making him go on a stupid ceremonial hunt with their visitors from the Silver Firefly Clan tomorrow, and he knew that was going to be miserable. They’d gotten better at planning for human attendees since Shang Qinghua first moved to the North, but it still wasn’t comfortable! So the night before his ordeal, Shang Qinghua drank a couple glasses of wine after dinner, locked his door, and popped open his super secret spank bank to find something really good.
He wound up with one of his favorites: Journal Number Twenty-Seven, which was an extended fantasy about his king engaged in a similar night of self-pleasure. It took place in the Ice Palace, on an average night, and it was obvious wish fulfillment, because instead of snapping his fingers and causing a lover to fall through an Abyssal rift directly into his bed, the way Shang Qinghua assumed he did in reality when he was horny, porn Mobei Jun got out a jar of salve and started fingering himself. And it was crazy hot. Look, see for yourself:
Sweat glistened on the taut skin of Mobei’s stomach as he closed his eyes and stroked over his tight hole with one massive forefinger, the touches uncharacteristically delicate, drawing little circles. The lover he wanted would be gentle, he thought, or at least hesitant at first. He bit his lip, bringing an azure blush to the porcelain skin, midnight hair spilling over his powerful shoulders. He thought of what he wanted, what he would do with a hesitant lover, and shoved the finger inside himself. His thighs twitched around his hand, cock rigid but untouched, rocking up into nothing.
It was pathetic, Mobei thought, to want like this. His finger grazed a spark of lightning inside him every time he rocked his hips, short huffs of air his only outward admission of the curling want inside him. He closed his eyes, imagining the familiar face, how it would look red with desire. Please, he thought, and pulled his finger all the way out—the lover he imagined was mercurial, unpredictable, selfish—please. He plunged back in with two fingers, mouth working in a silent snarl, his toes curling against the bedspread, his nipples tightened to sharp points in the frozen air.
Some of Shang Qinghua’s best work, right? His king silently begging while fucking himself on his own fingers, jeez! It went on like that for a while, Mobei Jun angry and frustrated and horny and fucking himself into a blinding orgasm without ever touching his cock. It got Shang Qinghua off in about five minutes every time.
So that particular night, he feverishly jacked himself off while rereading the part where Mobei Jun gets onto his hands and knees to fuck his own hand, just for the relief of feeling his heavy cock swing against the force of gravity. Shang Qinghua came ungracefully into a handkerchief (someone really should invent the tissue, huh,) he’d had held at the ready, feeling shivery and still sort of turned on after he came down from the orgasm. He tossed the scrunched up handkerchief somewhere in the direction of his dirty clothes—RIP to the laundry, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know for absolute sure that they’d seen worse—and then slid his hand back into his sleep pants to cup his cock as it softened, even as he read through the rest of the story. He wouldn’t be able to go again so fast, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have, like, artistic appreciation for the story’s cumshot, which happened later.
He fell asleep like that, with one of his private journals propped on his chest and one of his hands down his pants—and for once, that’s how he stayed, all night long, until early the next morning when he woke to the ripping sound of an Abyssal portal being torn open in his bedroom.
Shang Qinghua opened his eyes, adrenaline already going, and realized three things all at once:
- SOMEONE IN HIS ROOM WAKE UP FIGHT FLIGHT FREEZE EMERGENCY, PLUS SOMETHING WAS ON HIS CHEST AND HE COULDN’T BREATHE.
- Oh, it’s just his king, no need for alarm.
- HIS HAND WAS STILL CUPPING HIS DICK, AND NOW HE HAD MORNING WOOD.
He shrieked, tried to fling himself up to sitting with both hands up in the air like Mobei Jun had pointed a gun at him, and in the process kind of hurled the journal directly at his king’s face. As he hurled it, the creased and bedraggled notice-me-not talisman he’d stuck onto the book’s cover when he made it, some three years back, fluttered gently off the journal to the ground.
“M-my king,” Shang Qinghua said, heart hammering and hammering in his chest. “How can this servant be of a-assistance?”
Mobei Jun was scowling at him. He’d caught the book Shang Qinghua had thrown at him, because of course he did, he had perfect reflexes—and was holding it between his forefinger and thumb, like it was something dirty. Which, oh shit, it was.
“Uh,” Shang Qinghua said, now utterly panicked. Opening that book to basically any page would be extremely incriminating! “Uh, my king, haha, shouldn’t have to touch that book. I can take it back now!”
“Why,” Mobei Jun said flatly. “Is it dangerous?”
“Not, not dangerous,” Shang Qinghua said, struggling out of his blankets and up to standing. Thank god the panic had at least killed his erection. “Just, aha, not, not for my king’s eyes.”
Mobei Jun looked at the book in his own hand, then back at Shang Qinghua. It had a blank title, being a journal, so Shang Qinghua had helpfully filled it in with: NUMBER TWENTY-SEVEN, since he did roughly keep the journals in chronological order of Mobei Jun’s life and affairs. “This is your handwriting.” There was definite judgment in his tone.
“Well,” Shang Qinghua said. “It is. But it’s nothing important!”
“Nothing important,” Mobei Jun said, narrowing his eyes. “But not for this king’s eyes.”
“N-no. But there are many unimportant things not for my king’s eyes! Uh, reports on the state of the plumbing! Laundry records! Orders for new shipments of soaps!”
“And it is orders for shipments of soaps,” his king said with quiet malice, “that distracts my advisor so profoundly that he misses the departure of the Sapphire Ice Hunt.”
Shang Qinghua twitched. “I did? Oh shit, my king—my minions were supposed to wake me up! I’m so sorry about that, just let me, ah—” he went to take the book from his king with one hand while trying to finger-comb his hair out with the other at the same time. His king held the book up over Shang Qinghua’s head, like a school bully. “My—this servant is sorry, but we’re already late!”
“So get dressed.”
And like. The truth was that if Mobei Jun wanted to look at the journal, there was nothing Shang Qinghua could really do to stop him. “My kingggg,” he whined, and Mobei Jun’s eyes glinted. Yeah, he knew damn well this was porn. It’s just that Mobei Jun undoubtedly thought it was normal porn, not porn about Mobei Jun quietly fingering himself while clenching his jaw and thinking about—someone he couldn’t have. The person he was missing, since in all the years where Mobei Jun had been a massive ho-bag, he’d never gotten married or even taken a regular mistress, preferring brief affairs to extended ones. Yeah, fuck, way to add insult to injury.
“You,” his king said, with a mean half smile, “are already late.”
So Shang Qinghua turned miserably around and fumbled for the nearest set of clean robes. Which meant that his back was turned to his king when he heard the distinctive snick of the book being opened. Shang Qinghua closed his eyes, his face heating up with shame.
Silence.
There was the sound of a page being folded, and another unfolded. Shang Qinghua finished pulling on his robes, settled his belt into place. Another page turned. He reached for his guan, hands trembling a little. He may as well be murdered while fully dressed. He took a deep breath, and turned around.
His king was reading the porn with a deep furrow between his brows. He looked…upset. Shit, fuck. That was worse than him being mad, way worse! Shang Qinghua was used to his king being mad! But obviously it upset and disgusted him that his loyal servant would stoop so low, that Shang Qinghua would think about him in this way. Shang Qinghua’s stomach tightened miserably.
“My king,” he whispered, and Mobei Jun finally looked up. Yeah, that was a bad face. The last time he saw Mobei Jun make that face, it was when Shang Qinghua pinched his cheeks and told him to fuck off after the Ascension. Shit, he was that offended?
“You wrote this.”
Shang Qinghua dropped immediately to his knees. “This servant begs for mercy!”
He would have said a lot more, but Mobei Jun waved him sharply silent. “You,” he said, and tightened his jaw. “Tell me how you knew this.”
Shang Qinghua blinked up at him. “What?”
“This,” Mobei Jun said dangerously, and snapped the book shut. “What—were you spying on me?”
“Uh,” Shang Qinghua said. The hair on his arms was standing up. “N-no?”
“How did you know what I was thinking,” Mobei Jun demanded, and oh, he looked genuinely freaked out, Shang Qinghua could tell by the lines around his mouth.
“I didn’t!” Shang Qinghua said, his stomach sinking. System, what the fuck!
Bonus Pack: “The Erotic Life of Mobei Jun” unlocked!
No, what! What bonus content! Those were non-canonical extras, System, oh my god—had the System been incorporating Shang Qinghua’s smut into the story this whole fucking time? His life was flashing before his eyes!
User 001 has worked hard! Obviously this System would not allow premium exclusive bonus content to go to waste. Keep it up!
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Shang Qinghua thought viciously. Important things should be said three times! He slashed the window away agitatedly, and Mobei Jun flinched. His king! His OP king! Flinched! Shang Qinghua reached frantically for an explanation.
“My king, I only—I was—I was making it up!”
Mobei Jun stepped in frighteningly fast, and Shang Qinghua scrambled back, still on his knees, until his king had him pressed into the wall, one hand gripping Shang Qinghua’s chin, the other pressing the book to Shang Qinghua’s throat like a weapon. “Tell me the truth,” he demanded, his eyes dark and wide, and—betrayed.
This could be it, Shang Qinghua realized with a horrible swoop of his stomach. He and his king had come back from a lot—from Shang Qinghua running away, from Mobei Jun beating him up all the time, from years of misunderstandings and bad behavior. From that rock Shang Qinghua picked up on the side of the road all those years ago. But could they come back from—what did this even look like from Mobei Jun’s point of view? Like Shang Qinghua knew his innermost private thoughts, his most private and vulnerable moments, and wrote porn about it? How evil that must seem, how careless and callous and invasive, how OP, how little regard it showed for Mobei Jun as a person Shang Qinghua supposedly cared about, and how—how true it was, honestly. Mobei Jun was watching him with dark eyes. Shang Qinghua swallowed.
“My king,” he said, heart in his throat. “I—I have been keeping a secret from you for a long time.”
“Tell me.”
“Sometimes,” Airplane Shooting At the Sky said, halting a little as he tried to find the words. “When I write things down, they come true.”
Mobei Jun glared furiously at him. “You are a prophet?”
“Yeah,” Shang Qinghua said, and flinched automatically, waiting for the System to blare an alarm. Nothing. “Maybe. Something—something like that, my king.”
Mobei Jun let go of him and took a step back, although he didn’t let go of the book. A muscle visibly leapt in his jaw.
“Haven’t you ever wondered,” Shang Qinghua said desperately, “How I knew things I couldn’t know? Did you really think Cang Qiong Mountain kept tabs on what your older brother’s plans were, back then? My king, I’m good, but I’m not that good.”
Mobei Jun nodded, jaw still working. “You have been lying to me a long time. As long as I’ve known you.”
“Not lying! Nothing I’ve ever told you has been—my king, would you have believed me, if I’d told you when we met?”
A long silence. Mobei Jun wasn’t looking at him. Eventually he stiffly shook his head no.
“Then please,” Shang Qinghua begged, “please know that I had no choice, and I’ve always done my best to serve you well. ”
Mobei Jun looked down at the book in his hands. “These prophecies. Do you control when they arrive?”
“No,” Shang Qinghua said immediately, hoping to avoid accidentally convincing his king that he could sit down, write a short story, and know everything there was to know about the world. “No, my king. The prophecies don’t even come true, half the time. And that book there, I—I didn’t even think that, uh, was a prophecy.”
Mobei Jun’s hands visibly tightened on the book. “What did you think it was?”
Shang Qinghua gulped. “I. Uh. M-my king, you—you can’t get mad at me if I say.”
Mobei Jun immediately looked up and glared at him, as good as saying what are you talking about, idiot, I’m already mad at you.
“Hah,” Shang Qinghua said weakly, and dragged a hand over his face. God, he was shaky with adrenaline. “Okay, yeah, fair point, my king. My king is—uh. Familiar with. Yellow books?”
Mobei Jun gave him an incredulous are you fucking serious look.
“And surely my king also knows of…literature such as…Regret of Chunshan? Inspired by, uh, by admiration for real heroic..figures?” That got him a slow, derisive blink. “This is, um. This misguided servant thought—and I never would have shown it to anyone! Not a soul! But. Uh. Yeah, just, I wrote it just for my own, uh, private reading.”
Mobei Jun was staring at him, and this time Shang Qinghua couldn't read his expression at all. “I thought you didn’t lie.”
Shang Qinghua didn’t know what to say to that. “I,” he said. “I’m not lying.” For once he really wasn’t.
Mobei Jun wasn't blinking. Abruptly, he said, “The hunt is canceled. I do not need you today.”
“Okay, my king,” Shang Qinghua said.
Between one breath and the next, his king vanished, sliding from one shadow to another.
Shang Qinghua slid down to the floor, still trembling.
*
That…was a bad day. Shang Qinghua spent most of it digging up his porn, with the firm intention to burn it all, but the revelation that (all of it? most of it?) was real outtakes from Mobei Jun’s sex life proved to be deeply distracting. This was his treasured spank bank! He had favorite scenes in there for particular moods and cravings! And it was (all?) fucking real? Even the one where Sha Hualing fucked him with an icicle replica of Mobei Jun’s own pillar? He wound up rereading a lot of it, torn between anger at the System, arousal he couldn’t really help, squirming guilt at invading Mobei Jun’s privacy all over again, and a ravenous curiosity to try and understand this person who was so important to him a little better.
He spent most of the day reading, and the picture it painted for him read all in one big go like that was….really different from the one he’d gotten when he thought he was just writing some guilt-free erotica to scratch an itch.
The Mobei Jun in Shang Qinghua’s journals was sexually promiscuous, yes, but half the sex scenes ended in death threats or assassination attempts or less direct attempts to politically maneuver him, and most of the other half were just…transactional. Emotionally empty. There were a lot of sexy knives being pressed to throats, a lot of snarling and teeth pressed to pulses and a lot of frankly terrifying unnegotiated demon kink or whatever. In porn, this was nice and dangerous and exciting. Knowing it was (mostly?) reality for the man who was actually Shang Qinghua’s best friend made him unreasonably upset. Sure, sometimes his king apparently hooked up with friends—he liked Sha Hualing, he liked the captain of his guard—and he did seem to have lots of fun with them, and with a decent number of the prostitutes he knew, but. So much of the sex wasn’t safe, and even when Mobei Jun was clearly enjoying himself, it was obvious to Shang Qinghua that he didn’t really trust any of his partners. Shang Qinghua couldn’t find a single scene in a hundred yellow books where Mobei Jun’s guard was truly down around another person.
Instead, the most vulnerable scenes were the solo scenes, where Mobei Jun got himself off and—wistfully, that was the word, when you read them all together—wistfully thought about a nameless lover he wanted but couldn’t have.
It’s possible Shang Qinghua cried a few times reading all that, or else his eyes just felt raw from reading all day without stopping.
His king came back that night, through the door and not a portal this time. He surveyed the scene: Shang Qinghua sitting between stacks of journals, his eyes red. He closed the door.
“I was going to burn them,” Shang Qinghua said, gesturing at the roaring fireplace.
Mobei Jun knelt down beside him on the floor. “These are all…?”
“Almost all about you,” Shang Qinghua agreed. (Except for the ones that were about Liu Qingge. He wasn’t about to bring that up.) “I’ve been writing a really long time.”
Mobei Jun picked one up. It was the one where the third prince from the Western Inlet sea got railed immediately after a successful Black Sky Leopard hunt. He turned it over in his hands. “I don’t understand.”
“Yeah,” Shang Qinghua said. His back hurt. Oh, and his knees. “Yeah, I don’t think I understand either. The uh. Prophecies are. Really unreliable. I don’t know why it would, um. Tell me all this, instead of something…useful. I’m sorry, my king.”
“Not that,” Mobei Jun said, and Shang Qinghua looked up at him. “I don’t understand…why you would write about me.”
Most of the time, now, when Shang Qinghua looked at Mobei Jun, he saw his boss and sort-of friend. But every now and then he got a little mental splitscreen, and he also saw the character he’d written on the page, the imaginary person who was violent without being funny, cool without being awkward, a cardboard cutout of a person. The king who would someday kill Shang Qinghua. His ideal man. What a joke.
“Is it so surprising,” Shang Qinghua said softly, looking down at his hands. It was bad enough the System was forcing him to admit to this humiliating crush, but he actually had to do it surrounded by literally hundreds of volumes of his own peeping tom glimpses into his crush’s sex life.
“Yes,” Mobei Jun said emphatically. Shang Qinghua looked up. Mobei Jun looked…furious. “Yes, it is surprising. Why would Qinghua write stories about this king and reject the reality?”
Shang Qinghua blinked. He blinked again. “I…what?”
Mobei Jun snarled quietly, and dropped the book back on the stack.
“I’ve never rejected you????” Shang Qinghua could hear his voice getting dangerously pitchy, which was good, it was going with the feverish goosebumps rippling up and down his arms. His king looked stubbornly back at him, impossibly beautiful in the firelight. Well, he was always impossibly beautiful. “I think I would remember that!”
“The Emerald Ice Mountains.”
“You picked Captain Huang!” Shang Qinghua protested, but now that he was playing the memory back in his head, he remembered—he’d recognized the amulet, he’d yelled out what effect it had, and Mobei Jun took a step towards him—and Shang Qinghua had instinctively flinched back, so instead Mobei Jun nodded grimly at Captain Huang.
“The Western Inlet Sea Clan wedding.”
Shang Qinghua had no idea what he meant. They’d gone to the wedding, they’d partied, Shang Qinghua left early to avoid getting skewered or stomped on once the party really got going, and the next morning he’d woken up to find a furious prince outside his king’s bedchamber, having been laid and then left. Except—his king had followed Shang Qinghua out of the banquet when he left, hadn’t he? He’d put his hand on Shang Qinghua’s arm, he’d said something about…about seeing him back to his rooms. Shang Qinghua barely remembers what he’d replied at this point, just that he had to reassure his king over and over again that he wasn’t really drunk, that he’d be all right alone, and his king should go back in and have fun. He was starting to feel sick.
Mobei Jun was clearly watching the realization dawn on his face, because once it clocked, Mobei Jun bared his teeth at him. “The Black Moon Rhinocerus Python Hunt, the Crystal Lizard Clan visit.”
“Okay,” Shang Qinghua said, humiliation curdling in his belly. “I get it, okay!” How many times had his king shown up in Shang Qinghua’s bed? How many times had Shang Qinghua yelped and scrambled away and resentfully gone to sleep on the floor?
Mobei Jun looked at the piles of books. “In all these many volumes written for Qinghua’s pleasure,” he said bitterly, “Qinghua never thought to wonder how I felt about him?”
“No,” Shang Qinghua whispered.
Mobei Jun nodded. It was a perfectly stiff, stonefaced nod, but it still kind of broke Shang Qinghua’s heart. What did Mobei Jun even think? That Shang Qinghua lusted after his body but was repulsed by the rest of him? “Fine. Burn the books tonight, and we will not speak of this again.”
He got to his feet, and Shang Qinghua lurched up after him. His heart hurt, physically, in his chest. “My king,” he said desperately. “My king, please.”
Mobei Jun’s arms crossed. “What.”
“I didn’t know,” Shang Qinghua burst out. “I didn’t know any of it! I didn’t know what I was writing was prophecy, and I didn’t know you had ever looked twice at me, and I didn’t know you’d—my king, if I thought you wanted me, even for an hour, you must. You have to know. You have to know I’d say yes.”
Mobei Jun looked at him without any expression at all, and a thousand shameful recriminations occurred to Shang Qinghua all at once—sure, his king had at one time propositioned him, but all those examples were from years ago, and his king clearly didn’t feel that way anymore, or, or even if he’d felt that way this morning, there was no way he could feel it tonight, now that he knew what a freak Shang Qinghua actually was, what a little pervert, what a hack, nothing after all but a dirty old man. Humiliation curdled in his gut.
“Also I’m sorry,” Shang Qinghua said, his throat hurting with how much he meant it. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to hurt you, or, or spy on you, or m-make my feelings your problem. My king.” He thought about the guarded, suspicious man in the books, the man who had never once trusted a lover enough to fall asleep in their arms. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
Mobei Jun looked at him. “No,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I know,” he whispered.
“You should have told me about the prophecies.”
“My king already knows why I couldn’t.”
Mobei Jun made an impatient, almost agitated gesture. “Not back then. But—later. After the Ascension. You should have told me.”
Shang Qinghua didn’t know he could, literally. He thought the System would have stopped him. “I,” he said helplessly. “I’ve been—I had to hide it for a very long time, my king, from, uh, from everyone, not just you, and—I didn’t think I could.”
Mobei Jun’s head jerked in a nod. “You didn’t trust me.” It wasn’t a question.
“I didn’t trust anyone,” Shang Qinghua protested.
“You wouldn’t have told me today, if I hadn’t found the book,” Mobei Jun countered, which was inarguably true. “You don’t trust me.”
“No,” Shang Qinghua said, his eyes stinging for some stupid reason, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “No, my king, I do trust you.” He hadn’t really been afraid Mobei Jun would murder him. It had been a long time since he’d been afraid of that.
Mobei Jun kicked the nearest stack of books, and it cascaded noisily to the floor, making Shang Qinghua flinch up to standing, a flimsy sea of porn at his feet. “I don’t believe you,” Mobei Jun said flatly.
“What do you want me to say?” Shang Qinghua said rapidly, scrubbing at his wet cheeks with the heels of both hands. “How can I prove it to you?”
Mobei Jun said nothing, which was as good as saying you can’t.
“But I have to,” Shang Qinghua said, and watched as a look of unmistakable hurt crossed his aloof, unavailable ice king’s face. “Please, please let me prove it to you.”
Mobei Jun took a deep, slow breath. “Burn these.”
Shang Qinghua picked up the nearest book and threw it into the fire. They both watched it curl up and shudder into flames. Shang Qinghua picked up another book and fed it to the fire. Mobei Jun sat down. Shang Qinghua burned another book. It was going to take a long time.
Another three books burned before his king spoke again.
“You will burn them all.”
“I promise, my king,” Shang Qinghua said thickly. It hurt a little to burn his own writing, but not as much as knowing he had hurt Mobei Jun.
His king nodded, stood, and left him.
*
Things were different after that.
Mobei Jun didn’t fire him, the way Shang Qinghua had sort of kind of worried about a little bit. He didn’t start abusing him again, either, and he didn’t banish him from the North or send him on a really shitty mission that would probably get him killed. He didn’t even check to make sure Shang Qinghua really had burned all the porn books. He just stopped coming over to hang out in Shang Qinghua’s office when he didn’t have a work-related excuse, and he stopped stealing Shang Qinghua’s melon seeds, and he stopped dragging Shang Qinghua to events where it really didn’t make sense to bring a fragile human advisor along. There definitely weren’t any more noodle bowls.
Shang Qinghua was miserable, obviously. Betrayed by his shitty writing, yet again. You think a guy would learn.
“It’s your own fault,” Cucumber Bro said mercilessly when Shang Qinghua crawled up to Qing Jing Peak to complain, and to eat the snacks the protagonist had left out for his shizun. “You haven’t learned to stop fucking writing yet? What’s wrong with you?”
“But I have to,” Shang Qinghua whined, his head flat on the table with despair. This put him at eye level with the snack plate, so he ate another mung bean cake. “I’m a writer, dude! It’s what I do! I can’t just turn it off! I’d go totally crazy!”
Cucumber Bro hit him with his fan. Shang Qinghua didn’t even try to duck, and the resulting thwack apparently made Cucumber Bro pause. “Well,” he said, obviously uncomfortable. “Well, why don’t you write something that absolutely couldn’t be harmful, next time?”
Shang Qinghua threw his hands up in the air. “I thought that’s what I was doing! Contextless smut! How could that harm anybody!”
“Normally I’d claw out your eyes for that,” Cucumber Bro said icily, “since your smut scenes literally killed me once, but honestly I think you’ve answered your own damn question.”
Shang Qinghua wilted back down to the table. “Bro, what do I even do.”
“Well,” Cucumber Bro said. “I doubt you could do much harm by writing about other people’s characters. And it’s not really fanfiction if it could become part of a franchise, so there’s no shame in writing a, a Batman story or something.”
Shang Qinghua lifted his head up, incredulous. “I meant about my king.”
Cucumber Bro went red. “You should have said so.”
“I’ll write Batman fanfic for you if you want Batman fanfic, though.”
“Fuck you.”
“Which Batman character do you most want to fuck, bro? I don’t do commissions but for you I’ll make an exception.”
“Fuck off, you horrible little shitweasel, I’m trying to help you!”
“Yeah,” Shang Qinghua said, levity dropping away again. “I know. So. Any ideas?”
“Talk to him?” Cucumber Bro at least looked a little guilty when he said it, like he knew exactly how useless that would be.
They looked bleakly at each other for a few beats.
Cucumber Bro rubbed his temples. “Look. What do you even want from him, at this point? It sounds like he’s just…acting like a normal boss, right now. A pretty good boss, as demon kings go. Is that seriously such a problem?”
“Yes! Oh my god!”
“Okay. Why?”
“Because,” Shang Qinghua snapped, and then had no idea what to say next. Because he wanted Mobei Jun to come bother him while he was working. Because he wanted to eat shitty noodles while complaining to his king about his day. Because he’d been loyal, goddammit, actually loyal, for almost twenty years of political intrigue and backstabbing and assassination attempts and the freaking plot, and it had been shitty and hard almost the whole time, and the only part of it that was nice was the way his king’s shoulders relaxed whenever it was just the two of them hanging out in a room, and the thought that it would never happen again made him want to cry and also kick a brick wall.
“Okay,” Cucumber Bro said diplomatically, after a long and fraught silence. “Well, it sounds like the problem is that he knows you don’t trust him. Maybe just let him know you trust him?”
“How,” Shang Qinghua asked, and bitterly ate the final mung bean cake. “I already live in the Ice Palace, bro, the only human in a sea of demons who could all kill me without raising a finger. How am I supposed to be more vulnerable than that?”
“I don’t know,” Cucumber Bro said, apparently having reached the end of his patience. “Think for yourself, Airplane.”
Shang Qinghua didn’t know.
Cucumber Bro sighed. “You want me to ask Binghe for more snacks?”
“Yes, please.”
He went back to the North discouraged, with a stomachache.
He and his king only had two real conversations in that whole week. Well, calling them conversations was generous. The first time, his king asked for a report on the bandit problem on the Eastern Road, and after Shang Qinghua was done rattling off an update, his king said abruptly: “Is a prophecy why you said you would serve me for the rest of my life?”
Shang Qinghua’s tongue went numb in his mouth. “Um,” he said.
Mobei Jun looked expressionlessly back at him.
“Yes,” he said, reluctantly.
“You said the prophecies were not always right. Explain.”
“Yeah,” Shang Qinghua said. “Uh, so—so, calling them prophecies might be a little misleading.” Mobei Jun started to look mad again, so he hastily added: “Not that it’s totally wrong, either, my king! It’s just that, uh, it’s less like certain knowledge of the future, and more like, uh, visions from another world. One exactly like ours, but—different.” He poked nervously at the system, but all he got was User 001 is still in the middle of Bonus Pack: The Erotic Life of Mobei Jun! Would User 001 like to quit? Fuck you, Shang Qinghua thought, and X’d out. “So—I knew what would happen in the future in that other world, but many things have, uh, turned out differently here from there. It’s less like knowing our exact future and more like—knowing a strong maybe, my king.”
Mobei Jun was frowning again. “What was different?”
“Oh, lots of things, my king. Uh—Junshang had a harem of hundreds of women.”
Mobei Jun twitched, which for him was sort of like shouting what the fuck.
“And Cu—ah. Consort Shen was dead. That’s just one small difference. Really the visions didn’t mean much.”
Mobei Jun didn’t say anything. Then he asked stiffly if there was still a bandit problem on the Western Road, and they left the conversation behind.
The second time was when Shang Qinghua came to his king to get him to stamp the royal seal on all of Shang Qinghua’s official correspondence. Normally he just borrowed it and brought it back when he remembered, because really Mobei Jun wrote very few of his own letters anymore, but things were weird enough this week that he didn’t quite dare. Instead he brought a huge stack of letters to his king’s office and stamped them all as fast as he could on the edge of Mobei Jun’s desk.
His king let him do it in awkward silence for almost the whole stack, and then he said, “In the other world, what fate befell Shang Qinghua?”
Shang Qinghua dropped the royal seal, then had to drop to his knees and crawl around on the floor to look for where it had rolled under a chair. He babbled stupid shit as he looked, trying to buy time, stuff like “Ah, oh, so sorry, my king, so clumsy, this is a priceless jewel of your house and I just knocked it onto the floor like it was nothing, just kill me except please don’t, aha, oh my god it’s dusty down here, I’m really going to make the laundresses earn their keep today, I swear I didn’t break it, my king, it’s okay,” a nervous prattle that he knew damn well wasn’t going to distract Mobei Jun for a second.
Mobei Jun looked very grim when he finally came up with the seal.
“My king,” he said, carefully resting the royal seal on the desk, then taking a deep breath. “It’s really not important anymore.”
Mobei Jun narrowed his eyes, which meant something like did I ask if it was important?
Shang Qinghua counted backwards from five. “Okay,” he said. “Uh. The other Shang Qinghua is dead, my king. He’s been dead for, ah—five years now? I think?”
“Who killed him.”
God, Shang Qinghua wished he hadn’t asked that. “Uh,” he said desperately. “You’re not even going to ask if it was an accident? People do die in this world from accidents, you know!”
Mobei Jun looked furious with him. “Tell me who.”
“My king,” Shang Qinghua said, a plaintive note coming into his voice without his permission. He really wanted to lie. He was sure lying would provide the best possible outcome, here. He’d promised Mobei Jun he wasn’t going to lie anymore. He wanted to trust Mobei Jun, and he wanted Mobei Jun to trust him. “Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said reluctantly, “In the other world, which is not our world, and which I’m really not at all worried about anymore, my king, the person who killed Shang Qinghua was…well. It was Mobei Jun.”
Mobei Jun said nothing for a long moment. Then, very quietly, he said: “Get out.”
Shang Qinghua got out, fast as he could go, but not fast enough to avoid hearing the sounds of his king smashing everything breakable in his office. Yeah, that was. Not a good day.
Mobei Jun was normal the next day, if by “normal” you meant “avoiding Shang Qinghua” again.
At the end of the week, Mobei Jun went on the rescheduled Sapphire Ice Hunt without Shang Qinghua, and came back with the bodies of five monstrous beasts that Shang Qinghua regretted ever having made up. Normally this would result in Mobei Jun dumping one or more of them in Shang Qinghua’s lap at an extremely inconvenient time, like at his desk while he worked on something delicate, or when he was in bed and likely to scream very loudly. This time he didn’t, simply dropping them in the Palace courtyard when the hunting party rode back in through an Abyssal tear. Shang Qinghua made arrangements for the bodies to be skinned and the heads mounted in the Great Hall regardless, the way he always did.
There was a feast in honor of the hunters, of course. The flesh of the Fire-Breathing Ice Leopard was a delicacy. Shang Qinghua had it all ready for his king, six menus planned out in advance depending on what his king brought back on the hunt, twelve different seating charts depending on whether anyone died before they made it back, the really good wine brought up from the cellars, and five to ten new ideas about a potential trade agreement to put in the ear of the secretary from the Crystal Lizard Clan, who Shang Qinghua thought might actually be the one calling the shots here, not the Saintess who rode out with Mobei Jun. He was good at his actual job, if nothing else.
“Fine,” Mobei Jun said brusquely when Shang Qinghua presented him with the final version, a few hours before the feast. There was still blood on his face from the hunt, a delicate smear of red along his jaw. Shang Qinghua ached to wipe it away. “Anything else?”
“No, my king,” Shang Qinghua said. Then, because he wasn’t apparently needed for anything else, not even to be an admiring ear while Mobei Jun told him about all the things he’d killed, he bowed and left.
The feast was fine. The Crystal Lizard Clan Saintess praised Mobei Jun’s prowess on the hunt, and Mobei Jun’s retainers praised the Crystal Lizard Clan’s retainers, and Mobei Jun said “It was well done” when referring to the Crystal Lizard Saintess’s killing, which was high praise from him. Shang Qinghua hung out in the background, making sure everyone’s wine glasses were filled but not too often, checking in with the cooks and eventually cornering the Crystal Lizard Clan secretary. The conversation went well.
When the feast wound down, Mobei Jun got up, and then Crystal Lizard Clan Saintess got up too, smiling coyly as the two of them headed towards the doors. It was normal, it was so normal. Of course his king wasn’t going to stop sleeping with people just because he knew Shang Qinghua wanted to fuck him now. He’d watched his king leave to hook up with dozens of people over the years. It had never felt like eating dog food before. Shang Qinghua was standing at the back of the room, which meant his king and his king’s—side piece? fuck buddy?—were going to walk right past him on their way out of the hall. Shang Qinghua forced a customer service smile onto his face, a bitter lump of jealousy settling into his stomach like a rock.
Of course his king stopped right by the doors, the Saintess leaning into his arm.
“Shang Qinghua,” Mobei Jun said, glaring at him.
“My king?”
There was a pause, as if Mobei Jun was waiting for something. Shang Qinghua didn’t know what it could be. He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek to avoid saying anything stupid.
“You will attend me in the morning,” Mobei Jun said finally. He sounded pissed off, which didn’t even make sense. He was the one with a beautiful demon practically plastered against his side.
“Of course, my king,” Shang Qinghua ground out.
Mobei Jun’s mouth twitched unhappily, and then he left to go rail a gorgeous woman with a prehensile tail. (A prehensile tail that Shang Qinghua’s dirtier readers had really loved in another life, which frankly felt like adding insult to injury.)
Shang Qinghua went back to his rooms and laid in bed replaying all the porn he’d ever written about Mobei Jun and the Crystal Lizard Clan Saintess in his head. They’d fucked, what, three times before, over the years? Unless there had been encounters Shang Qinghua didn’t write about, which was totally possible. The sex was always really good, and she had only tried to kill his king afterward the first time. They would probably be a good match. He wound up being too upset to even jerk off, just pawing uselessly at himself for a while before crying a little bit into his pillow.
In the morning, he got up early, screamed into his hands, then got dressed and made a to-do list before trudging miserably over to his king’s quarters.
The Saintess was gone, which was a small blessing. A very small blessing.
His king was only wearing his innermost robe, and that only very tenuously draped over him. He was lounging in the bed like a big predatory cat, and the fucking robe was slipped open to show a distressing amount of muscular thigh. There was a love bite on his inner thigh, right where the big tendon split it in half, purple and obscene. Shang Qinghua couldn’t help looking at it, then forced himself to look away, up somewhere over Mobei Jun’s shoulder.
“What can this servant do for you, my king?” he asked, hoping he sounded normal.
“Answers.”
“Okay,” Shang Qinghua said, bracing himself. Maybe Mobei Jun would want to know his own character’s fate, in that other world. He’d probably be disappointed to learn that the original goods never married. Maybe he’d like to know that he was originally supposed to outlive Luo Binghe and become the next Demon Emperor? But that’s definitely not how things were shaping up to look in this world, so maybe not…
“What do you want?”
Shang Qinghua didn’t understand the question. He blinked, then blinked again, looking down from the corner of the ceiling he’d been focusing on to Mobei Jun’s face, which was gravely serious. “My king?”
Mobei Jun looked impatient, obviously not wanting to repeat himself. The robe had shifted a little, so now the hickey was hidden but a gap had appeared to show off the pale skin of his other thigh, covered in delicate whorls of soft black hair.
“I—I heard you,” Shang Qinghua said, biting his lip and looking back up at the corner. “This servant just doesn’t, ah…understand my king’s meaning.”
“Do you want me to release you from my service and go back to your sect?”
“No,” Shang Qinghua yelped, horrified into looking back down at Mobei Jun. “No, no, absolutely not!” Mobei Jun couldn’t fire him! He really, really couldn’t—he might think he could, but if Shang Qinghua left, his entire palace would cease functioning in about a week. Shang Qinghua wasn’t disposable!
“No,” Mobei Jun agreed, gazing at him intently. “Shang Qinghua is not disposable. What do you want?”
“Nothing!” Shang Qinghua burst out, shaky with adrenaline. He didn’t want to leave! He liked his job! He liked his quarters, he liked the stupid Ice Palace, he liked his king. “I don’t want anything, my king! What I have is already good!”
Mobei Jun made a frustrated sound. “Qinghua, I am asking you.”
“I’m,” Shang Qinghua said, and stopped, grinding the heels of his palms into his eyeballs. He started pacing in front of the bed, to buy himself time to find words. “I want everything to go back to normal. I like normal, my king! Don’t you like normal?” Embarrassingly, his voice broke a little bit.
“You want things to go back to where they were before,” Mobei Jun clarified, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Forced into service by fate and the fear of death.”
“No!” Shang Qinghua protested vehemently. “That—that might be how it started, but that’s not how things are now, my king! You know that!”
“Fine,” Mobei Jun said, and got up off the bed, looming over him. “So you want to be my servant and advisor forever, never seeking a higher position.”
“What would I do with a higher position?” Shang Qinghua gestured wildly at his frail human self, and then at the Demon Realm around them. “I said I was going to serve you for the rest of my life!”
Mobei Jun caught him by the shoulders, implacable as a vice. He looked furious. “You told me that was a false prophecy.”
“Yes, yes, fine, originally, a little bit,” Shang Qinghua said, so desperate for Mobei Jun to get it that he kind of automatically reached up and grabbed his king’s elbows for emphasis. “But I meant it, my king. You’re asking me what I want, right? What we’ve been doing. That’s what I want.”
Mobei Jun’s hands tightened on his shoulders, claws pinpricking into his skin through his robes. “So nothing will change,” he said hoarsely. “You will—continue to watch me take others to my bed, and you will remain alone.”
Shang Qinghua’s throat was hurting again. “If that’s what my king wants.”
Mobei Jun shook him hard enough that Shang Qinghua only kept his footing by clinging on to his forearms. “I am asking what you want,” Mobei Jun snarled.
“I want you,” Shang Qinghua shrieked.
Mobei Jun’s eyes widened.
“Obviously I want you, you absolute child!!!! What did you think the millions of words of porn about you was for, eh??? I told you I wanted you! I fucking told you!!” Shang Qinghua was shouting in his king’s face, maybe because he was dizzy from being shaken, maybe because the words themselves were making him feel dizzier and dizzier as they tore out of his chest. “I want to stay with you for the rest of my life!!!! Holy shit, don’t you know that I’ll take whatever I can fucking get by now?”
He had more to say, but it was sort of crushed by Mobei Jun’s mouth, as his king grabbed his head in one massive hand, angled him up, and kissed him. Shang Qinghua sobbed with relief, wrapped his arms around his king’s waist, and kissed him back.
You might not think it would be romantic, being carried back into somebody else’s sex sheets and kissed until you couldn’t breathe anymore by a beautiful demoness’s sloppy seconds. You’d be wrong. Shang Qinghua’s heart really couldn’t take it, shock and joy boiling up in his ribcage until he felt like he was going to burst. He tried to vent the feeling out by climbing on top of his king and grinding down into him while Mobei Jun held onto his hips and rocked underneath him, like riding a very sexy roller coaster.
“What do you, ah, what do you want,” Shang Qinghua said at a certain point, a little wobbly because Mobei Jun was biting his neck, little electric nips of teeth that were driving him absolutely crazy.
“The same,” Mobei Jun said into his skin.
“Huh?” Shang Qinghua asked, because his brain had been spinning like a top, weighing options like “get fucked immediately” and “top his king because according to the porn (!!!) his king really likes it,” and “wriggle down and get his mouth on that jumbo-sized popsicle right the fuck now.”
“I want Qinghua to stay with me the rest of my life,” Mobei Jun said seriously, and holy fucking shit, he was going to kill Shang Qinghua after all.
“My kingggggg,” Shang Qinghua whined, and Mobei Jun smiled into his wet neck like the malevolent asshole he was, and then he flipped Shang Qinghua over, and they were off to the races for real.
In the end, their first time wasn’t anything fancy. Not like the scenes he’d written for Mobei Jun and various lovers over the years, which tended towards the kinky and athletic. Mobei Jun just got his hand around both of them, a crazy wonderful shocking contrast between Shang Qinghua’s natural heat and Mobei Jun’s natural chill, and Shang Qinghua clutched his king close and babbled nonsense in his face while Mobei Jun jerked them both to completion.
Shang Qinghua came first, shuddering against Mobei Jun’s beautifully hairy chest, then lying there limp and exhausted while his king got himself the rest of the way there with tight, fast strokes. “Nice work, my king,” Shang Qinghua said inanely, so sex-drunk he was slurring his words a little bit. “You’re good at that, huh? So good, my king is so good at everything he does.”
Mobei Jun grunted a little, maybe a reply but maybe not, but cute either way. “My king is so cute,” Shang Qinghua mumbled. His head was pressed to Mobei Jun’s chest, and he could hear his heartbeat pounding and pounding, even as his hand worked faster. “So cute, getting himself off for me.” Idly he reached down and traced his fingers through the puddle of his own cooling jizz left on Mobei Jun’s lower belly, rubbing it into the tense skin. “I love it so much, fuck. Why haven’t we been doing this for years?”
Mobei Jun gasped without sound, stiffened, and shot a fountain of weirdly cool jizz all over Shang Qinghua’s hand and his own belly. Shang Qinghua kept petting his stomach while his king worked himself through the aftershocks, keeping an inane, pointless commentary up as well: his king had beautiful cum, his king was so gorgeous like this, his king was so messy, but Shang Qinghua loved messy, messy was good, messy was the best.
Eventually Mobei Jun hauled him up and kissed him quiet again. “Just a, mm,” Shang Qinghua said into his king’s mouth, pulling away in spite of the unhappy sound Mobei Jun made. “Just a second, my king.”
Shang Qinghua picked up the nearest item of clothing he could find—his own inner robe, oops. He really needed to bribe someone into inventing the tissue—and wiped them both down, spending extra time on Mobei Jun’s stomach and thighs.
“Come here,” Mobei Jun said petulantly, and Shang Qinghua tossed the robe onto the floor and crawled back up his king’s body. Mobei Jun wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and Shang Qinghua kind of wiggled into the perfect position, head on Mobei Jun’s chest, one of his legs squeezed between his king’s thighs, blankets pulled up over Shang Qinghua’s shoulders but not Mobei Jun’s torso, leaving him exposed to the cold air. Mobei Jun reached up and stroked a big hand over Shang Qinghua’s hair. “G’me a second,” Shang Qinghua said, eyes sliding closed. “I can go again, just. Just a second, my king.”
He woke up hours later with the cold knowledge that he’d slept through his alarm and he was going to be late for work. The light was wrong, and it wasn’t a weekend, and anyway he felt too good, well rested and sated and happy! He remembered where he was a second later, Mobei Jun still wrapped up around him. Oh shit, still, though! There was stuff Shang Qinghua had been supposed to do today! Meetings to attend! Letters to send! Work that waited for no man! Why hadn’t his king woken him up sooner!
He rolled around in his king’s arms to complain about exactly that, but it turned out there was no use. Mobei Jun was dead to the world, arm still slung around Shang Qinghua’s waist, fast asleep. His king’s hair was a mess, and his face was totally slack and kind of stupid looking. There were definite bags under his closed eyes, and he was drooling a little bit. Shang Qinghua’s heart threatened to boil over again. He vented the feeling by gently pressing a kiss to Mobei Jun’s chin, the easiest part of him to reach.
Mobei Jun made a wordless complaining noise, and tightened his grip on Shang Qinghua’s waist.
“Shh,” Shang Qinghua said soothingly, and dropped another kiss to Mobei Jun’s collarbone. “Go back to sleep, my king.” Mobei Jun made a half-asleep snuffling sound, and Shang Qinghua resettled in his arms, his idiot heart still panging in his chest, as if Shang Qinghua didn't already know how lucky he was. “I’m not going anywhere.”