Archive of Our Own

"I enter the court
Through the middle gate—
And my sleeve is wet with tears.

The flowers still grow
In the courtyard,
Though two springs have fled
Since last their master came.

The windows, porch, and bamboo screen
Are just as they always were,
But at the entrance to the house
Someone is missing—
You!”

"A Forsaken Garden”, Bai Juyi

(...)

The year was 2026, and the internet had learned how to hold a grudge. Shen Yuan knew this because the internet had one for him, in multiple ways.

He was thirty-nine, permanently, metaphorically and literally seated in the chair at the head of the table, and he nurtured a private, childish dream: to someday die purely out of spite just to make certain people furious. It won't be for tragedy, not for love, not even for ideology. The thought sustained him through meetings.

Spite was his motivation for everything.

He was the CEO of a company that had existed longer than he had. It lasted longer than most of his critics online, too. A sprawling Chinese enterprise with roots sunk deep into the late planned-economy era, back when “company” meant “work unit,” and profitability was an aspiration rather than a requirement. Over the decades it had survived restructuring, renaming, partial marketization, and three slogans promising efficiency. It employed tens of thousands directly and many more indirectly. Logistics arms. Manufacturing subsidiaries. A technology branch that insisted it was innovative because it owned servers.

On paper, Shen Yuan was at the top. 

In 2026, no large Chinese enterprise was truly private, no matter how often the word appeared in translated press releases. Ownership was layered: the state owned the state-owned assets, which were managed by commissions, which appointed boards, which approved executives, which smiled for photographs. The company answered upward to SASAC, sideways to local governments, and inward to the Party committee embedded in its structure like a second spine.

Shen Yuan was CEO, yes, but he was also Deputy Secretary of the internal Party committee, which meant that half his job involved not running the company and the other half involved making sure no one forgot who ultimately ran it. Strategy meetings opened with economic forecasts and closed with political study sessions. Promotions required performance metrics and the correct endorsements. Profit was important. Stability was mandatory.

Like most people who owned (or rather, operated) a big business in China, Shen Yuan was also a politician (horray!). Not the kind that gave speeches in the Great Hall of a sect, but the kind that knew which phrases to echo, which initiatives to fund, and which numbers to emphasize in quarterly reports. His survival depended less on the market than on alignment.

This was especially true because much of the company’s expansion sat inside Special Economic Zones.

SEZs were the compromise China had made with itself. They were geographic exceptions where the rules bent without quite breaking; places like Shenzhen, Xiamen, Zhuhai. In these zones, foreign investment was encouraged, labor laws were “flexible,” and experimentation was framed as patriotism. By 2026, the wild frontier days were gone, but the legacy remained: tax incentives, preferential policies, faster approvals. The SEZs were where the company partnered with foreign firms, tested new technologies, and pretended to be global.

Shen Yuan spent a great deal of time pretending.

He shook hands with overseas executives while ensuring joint ventures never crossed invisible lines. (Fucking capitalistics pigs.) He approved English-language websites that said “private enterprise” while submitting reports that said “state asset appreciation.” He listened to local officials argue for projects that would employ their relatives and labeled it “regional development.”

He tried not to think about nepotism. This was difficult, because nepotism thought about him constantly. His own career started with that.

Board members had sons who needed positions. Provincial contacts had nieces graduating with degrees in nothing particularly useful. There were always “recommendations,” always framed as trust, loyalty, or harmony. Shen Yuan told himself this was inertia. He told himself he could redirect it, minimize the damage, and keep the company functional.

(Some days he even believed it. He fucking loved his coutry, but some days were hard.)

Online, anonymous commenters called him a princeling, a bureaucrat in a suit, a parasite with a Western education and no revolutionary soul. He once got called chauvinist that made him really laugh. Shen Yuan read everything. He never responded. Spite, like capital, accrued value over time.

At night, alone in his apartment overlooking a skyline paid for by policy decisions older than him, Shen Yuan leaned back in his chair and stared at the glow of his laptop. Forums, blogs, social media… Everyone had an opinion about men like him. About China. About the future.

(Sometimes, he didn’t even know what he believed in. Was he doing the right thing? Should he retire and become a teacher, like he once wanted?) 

(Sometimes he missed someone by his side.)

He imagined dying spectacularly and inconveniently, leaving behind a mess of reports, unfinished initiatives, and furious think-pieces. He imagined the chaos of succession meetings. The discomfort of people who had relied on him as a stable interface between power and profit.

It was a small, mean dream. And well, he never claimed to be kind.

For now, he lived. He signed documents. He attended Party meetings. He balanced economic growth against political safety inside a system that did not belong to him but moved through him all the same.

The chair held. The company endured. China marched forward. And Shen Yuan, the guy in the chair, smiled thinly and kept the dream for later.

(The US was insane and needed to die quickly.)

In the early 2020s, the internet in China was already fenced in, but the fences were uneven, and there were plenty of places where the guards simply didn’t understand the power of spiteful people like him.

Censorship existed, of course. It always had. By 2026, it was no longer crude blocks and obvious shutdowns alone. Keyword filtering, domain blacklists, platform self-policing, and the quiet understanding that companies were responsible for their users. Posts vanished without explanation. Searches returned nothing where something should have been. Forums learned, through trial and error, which topics triggered sudden “maintenance.”

The rules were clear in one way only: politics was dangerous when it was direct, collective, or persistent. (Look at Hong Kong. Man, that one was a mess.) Organization was more frightening than anger. Individual venting, jokes, and absurdity were tolerated as long as they stayed fragmented, unserious, and deniable. Irony was safer than slogans. Fiction was safer than reality.

Shen Yuan understood this instinctively. He had meetings about it. He also exploited it.

The internet was chaotic in a way that would later be engineered out. Algorithms were crude. Moderation teams were underpaid. The sheer volume of content meant that enforcement relied heavily on automation and user reports. If you avoided sensitive keywords, stayed in English or mixed-language spaces, and never linked your real identity to your handle, you could survive indefinitely.

So Shen Yuan survived as a troll.

He learned to use VPNs that worked reliably well, before the arms race escalated. He posted at odd hours. He wrote in English peppered with internet slang and memes that no one would associate with a middle-aged executive trained in policy language. He never discussed real politics. He complained about fictional men. (How he liked those fictional men.)

Some of the strangest, freest corners of the internet were fandom spaces.

AO3 and dog blooded novels existed almost entirely outside the notice of Chinese regulators. It was fandom-dominated, nonprofit, unprofitable, and utterly uninterested in organizing anyone about anything real. It hosted pornography, yes, but not the kind that threatened stability. The people there were strange in specific, inward-facing ways. They argued about character motivation, not governance. They were obsessive, emotional, and deeply unserious in the eyes of the state.

To censorship systems, fandoms looked like noise. To Shen Yuan, it was a sanctuary.

In these niche spaces, the weirdest people online gathered with pride. They tagged meticulously. They wrote essays disguised as friendly content. They fought viciously over canon interpretations that meant nothing outside the room. The freedom wasn’t political, a guilty pleasure if you will.

Shen Yuan hid himself the same way everyone else did: by being louder, pettier, and more unhinged than anyone would expect from a real person with consequences.

Under the handle Peerless Cucumber, he complained relentlessly. He mocked bad writing. He praised his own taste with the confidence of someone who had never once been contradicted in a boardroom. He argued about stallions and protagonists and narrative logic with a fury that suggested deep personal injury.

(He stared at porn protagonists and felt something akin to sorrow. Was he missing something?)

No one suspected a thing.

Why would they? Peerless Cucumber was obviously unemployed, terminally online, and powered entirely by spite. He wrote long comments at 3 a.m. He had no filter. He spoke with the authority of someone who had nothing to lose. Deranged little man with authority issues.

Certainly not a CEO of a state-owned enterprise. Certainly not a Party member with a personnel file thicker than most novels. Certainly not a man who sat in meetings about online content regulation and then went home to evade it.

The irony delighted him.

He would spend the day approving internal guidelines about “healthy online discourse” and spend the night tearing apart amateur webnovels with surgical cruelty. He knew exactly how the censor’s eye moved; what it searched for, what it ignored, what it dismissed as harmless degeneracy.

And fandom, bless it, was harmless.

To summarise: Nobody knew that Peerless Cucumber was Shen Yuan. That the loudest, most annoying commenter in a tiny fandom space was also a man whose signature could shift budgets and employment numbers. That the troll laughing in the comments understood the system from the inside.

And it was very fucking funny.

Shen Yuan treasured the joke like a private relic of freedom: proof that even in a surveilled internet, anonymity could still exist through sheer, unbelievable pettiness.

Of course, seeing he was a high profile among the stupid, Shen Yuan was careful with his people.

Protection, in his world, never looked heroic. It looked like paperwork adjusted by half a sentence. It looked like audits scheduled late, reports framed as misunderstandings, numbers rounded in directions that invited fewer questions. It looked like taking responsibility loudly in public and assigning blame very quietly elsewhere.

He protected his people because chaos was inefficient. (That was what he told himself. He was not kind.)

When a subsidiary missed a compliance target, Shen Yuan didn’t escalate it. He buried it in a pilot program, labeled the discrepancy as “transitional friction,” and made sure the corrective plan was boring enough that no one would dig further. When an employee’s relative tripped a rule in a SEZ joint venture, he redirected scrutiny toward process failure rather than individual fault. When someone said something stupid online and it brushed too close to sensitive territory, Shen Yuan made a call to soften.

Warnings instead of consequences. Reassignments instead of removals. Silence instead of spectacle.

It wasn’t altruism, shut the fuck up.

It was damage controlling, since one scandal invited another. One example encouraged imitation. Shen Yuan understood this better than most because he sat on both sides of the table. He knew how quickly “harmless” could become “symbolic,” and how symbols attracted attention like blood in water.

So he dulled the edges. He made things smaller. Quieter. Easier to forget.

He told himself he did it because these people were useful, because turnover was expensive, because stability mattered more than moral clarity. He told himself that loyalty (his and theirs, anyone's) was a kind of capital. He told himself that if he didn’t intervene, someone worse would.

Which was probably true.

At night, he read harem novels on his phone, the glow reflecting faintly off glass walls and policy binders. The protagonists were invincible. Their mistakes were forgiven. Their power was clean, absolute, unchallenged by committees or ideology. Every problem resolved itself by virtue of narrative favor.

Shen Yuan scoffed at them. And scrolled up the page. 

It was comforting, in a way he refused to examine. In fiction, power was personal. Protection was visible. Gratitude was guaranteed. No one mistook damage control for mercy or self-interest for care.

He leaned back in his chair and told himself, again, that everything he did was for his own benefit. That keeping people safe kept him safe. That smoothing things over reduced his workload. That a company without scandals was a company that survived.

He did not think about the fact that some of those people slept better because of decisions they would never know he made. He did not think about the quiet relief in voices when outcomes were announced and some names were missing. He did not think about how often “harmless” was the best outcome anyone could hope for.

He read another chapter instead. The protagonist gained another admirer. Another enemy conveniently humbled. Another crisis resolved without cost.

Shen Yuan closed the phone eventually, eyes tired, expression unreadable.

It was not to say that Shen Yuan lived his life entirely on the internet. That would have been easier.

He had a family. It was an ordinary one, by certain definitions. A mother and a father who had survived enough political cycles to believe in survival of the finest. Two older brothers who had escaped early, carrying their brilliance overseas like contraband, becoming scientists whose names appeared in journals Shen Yuan did not pretend to fully understand. They traveled. They lectured. They belonged to laboratories.

And then there was meimei.

Shen Tang had been a child actress, luminous in that way only children on screen ever were. She smiled correctly. She cried on cue. She became, without trying, the pride of the family. Even after she grew older and the roles changed, the label stuck: star. Everyone spoke her name with a particular lift in the voice, as if success were contagious.

Next to them, Shen Yuan was the boring third son. The parents looked at him and thought: this one might actually have a future. Not brilliance. Not fame. A future and a job that lasted. A man who didn’t burn out spectacularly or vanish into academia or entertainment. He stayed through stability. He learned how to endure. In their eyes, that counted for something.

Shen Yuan also took care of himself, which surprised people who assumed cynicism meant neglect. (Seriously, he was not an incel.) He cultivated health the way other people cultivated connections. He ate on schedule. He exercised in controlled, efficient ways. He meditated, not because he believed in enlightenment, but because silence was cheaper than therapy and safer than drinking.

Meditation helped him not go insane.

It helped him sit with contradictions without screaming. Helped him accept that he could be sarcastic, biting, and cruel online while being relentlessly responsible offline. That he could sneer at power structures while operating one. That he could be Peerless Cucumber at night and Secretary Shen by morning, and never let the two touch.

Yes, he was cynical. Yes, he was a sarcastic bastard with a mean streak sharpened by years of observation. But he was also the only one in the family working himself to the bone in two directions at once.

His brothers published papers. His sister shone under the lights. His parents aged into quiet pride.

Shen Yuan carried a company, a political position, and an invisible online life in his pockets like concealed weapons. He made decisions that affected livelihoods by day and tore apart fictional narratives by night. He protected people who would never thank him and argued with strangers who would never matter.

He breathed. He meditated. He endured.

And somehow, he stayed whole. It was not because he was kind, or righteous, or destined for greatness, but because he learned how to compartmentalize with surgical precision.

The internet did not define him. It merely gave him a place to bleed off the pressure before returning to work.

Shen Yuan also did charity work. Anonymously, of course. He wasn’t an idiot. Public charity attracted attention, and attention attracted questions, and questions were the one thing he did not have time to manage. 

So he kept it quiet, routed through foundations that didn’t use faces, names, or ceremonial plaques. Donations arrived without fanfare. Scholarships were approved by committees that never knew why a borderline case suddenly passed. Medical bills were cleared under categories labeled miscellaneous support.

He liked to pick up strays. People, of course. Though sometimes animals too, when the opportunity presented itself and no one was watching.

He found them the way one always did: at the edges. Interns who were about to be cut loose for mistakes they didn’t quite deserve. Children from collapsing households whose grades were good but not spectacular enough to inspire sponsors. Employees whose files said “problematic” when what they really were was unlucky.

Training programs here. Quiet mentorship there. A recommendation letter that appeared at the right moment. A transfer instead of a dismissal. He framed it all as experimentation, as workforce optimization, as social responsibility aligned with policy goals.

It made him feel… functional.

At home, Shen Tang noticed. “Another one?” his meimei said one evening, leaning in the doorway while he reviewed documents that were absolutely not personal files or anything illegal like that. Her tone was amused, fond, sharp in the way only siblings could manage. “Ge, how many pets are you collecting now?”

Shen Yuan didn’t look up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She laughed, light and unbothered. “Sure. That’s what you said about the last three. And the one before that. You know, normal people adopt cats.”

“I don’t have time for cats,” he replied flatly.

“You don’t have time for people either.”

He paused at that, just long enough to be noticeable, then continued reading. “No comment.”

Shen Tang shook her head, smiling. To her, it was just another of her third brother’s strange habits; like meditation apps, terrible sleeping hours, and an inexplicable talent for remembering birthdays of people he supposedly didn’t care about.

She never asked for details. She was, after all, also a public image since childhood. Therefore, she understood boundaries better than most people twice her age. 

Shen Yuan preferred it that way.

He told himself, again, that it was practical. That stabilizing individuals reduced future problems. That investing in strays paid dividends. That a system worked better when fewer people slipped through the cracks and made noise on the way down.

He did not tell himself that he liked watching people recover. He did not name the satisfaction of seeing someone stand a little straighter after the worst had passed. He did not linger on the quiet pride of anonymity; the knowledge that no one would ever connect the outcome to him.

Shen Yuan closed another file. Approved another allocation. Sent another life nudged gently back onto a survivable path. He picked up strays and made them better. And when his meimei teased him about it, he only snorted and carried on pretending that it was nothing at all.

Naturally, the universe looked at all of this, the carefully balanced life, and decided it was far too boring to be allowed to continue.

At first, he thought it was a stroke.

The tingling began in his fingertips, intermittent and mild, like static crawling under the skin. It came and went without pattern, leaving no weakness behind. Then his breathing changed. It was like it was… unnecessary. Sometimes it grew heavy for no reason; other times it went shallow, as if his body had decided air was optional and hadn’t bothered to inform him. That part unsettled him.

He scheduled checkups. Quiet ones. Private clinics, discreet specialists, the kind that knew how not to gossip. Blood work came back pristine. Imaging showed nothing alarming. Stress, they said. Fatigue. Age catching up faster than expected.

He accepted this because it was the least disruptive explanation.

Then his vision started to improve. Shen Yuan had lived with myopia and astigmatism since adolescence. Glasses were a constant, as ordinary as breathing until, over the course of six months, they weren’t. The blur receded. The edges sharpened. One morning he realized he had read an entire report without squinting.

By the end of that half-year, he stopped wearing glasses entirely. (He kept using glasses, tho, to not be suspicious.)

Hunger followed the same trajectory. Or rather, it faded. Meals became habits rather than needs. He could skip one, then two, and feel nothing worse than mild inconvenience. Water, too. He drank because it was sensible, because dehydration was a risk factor listed on forms, not because his body demanded it.

His skin developed a faint, irritating glow. Literally, he was not joking. It was clearer and smoother. Healthier-looking than it had any right to be, considering his schedule and the fact that he did absolutely nothing to earn it. He did not do a skincare routine or use any luxury products. Just soap and hope for the best.

All in all, things were strange.

Shen Yuan noticed. He documented. He monitored himself the way he monitored everything else. He did not confide in his family. He did not panic. After all, Secretary Shen could not afford to.

Again, he was a public figure. His health was not entirely his own; it was an asset, a risk factor, a line item someone else might someday assess. So, just like everything else, panic would ripple outward and questions would follow. Because, rumors were inefficient.

And besides, he told himself, this country did not rest on his shoulders alone.

Weeeeell. Not entirely. There were other people holding it together. Entire committees, even. If he disappeared tomorrow, the government would stutter and then continue. He knew this better than anyone.

So he chose denial’s more respectable cousin: postponement. He filed the anomalies away under a big file on his brain called Later. Procrastination! He continued meditating. He continued working. He continued being a cynical, sarcastic bastard with too much responsibility and not enough sleep.

If his body was changing, then it would simply have to do so quietly. Shut up and leave me be.

Shen Yuan had spent his entire life bullshiting solemnly to things larger than himself. If his body was becoming one of them, then it could get in line and wait for its turn.

Then, everything went to shit.

It happened during a broadcast. Of course it did.

After months (years, really) of careful advocacy, phrasing softened into social harmony, proposals framed as family stability, endless drafts stripped of words that frightened the wrong people, Shen Yuan finally managed to push the proposal forward, just far enough that it crossed the line from unthinkable to ‘hey, it might be a good idea’.

Marriage rights for same-sex couples. 

(Look, I know it sounded insane, but hear me out.)

It was not for him. He was very clear on that point, even internally. He wasn’t — he wasn’t gay. But the internet had a lot of gays, and Shen Yuan quite liked them. They were funny, sharp and creative. Loud in interesting ways. They survived the same way he did: sideways, sarcastically, with spite and joy braided together.

And more importantly, it was unjust that they had to live smaller lives than necessary.

So he made it his brainchild. His desire. His political project. “Another one?”, said his meimei. That was his careful manipulation of committees, statistics, pilot regions, and phrasing that emphasized economic benefits, reduced litigation, improved household registration efficiency. Love never entered the documents. Stability did.

That made it passable.

That made him expendable.

When the time came, Shen Yuan was the one chosen to speak. He was the face with an explanation. The man to be disagreed with in public so everyone else could remain abstract. He knew what that meant. He accepted it. Someone always had to be thrown to the wolves.

The speech was broadcast nationwide.

Millions watched. Living rooms, offices, phones held at bad angles. Shen Yuan stood at the podium, composed as ever, voice even, cadence practiced. He spoke about law, society and responsibility. He spoke about how the state’s strength came not from uniformity, but from its ability to contain difference without fracturing.

Outside, the sky darkened.

At first, no one thought much of it. Summer storms were common. Then rain began to fall. It was heavy and sudden, hammering against the roof of the building. Thunder rolled, long and deep, vibrating through glass and bone.

Shen Yuan reached the end of his speech. His final sentence left his mouth. Lightning split the sky, blinding white, so close the cameras flared and several microphones cut out at once. The thunder that followed was immediate, as if the sound had been waiting for permission.

Well, in Xianxia myths, this was called a Heavenly Trial. 

A Heavenly Trial was an assessment.

The Heavens, impartial and cruel, tested whether something that should not exist dared to. Mortals who cultivated power beyond their station invited lightning as judgment. Survive, and you ascended. Fail, and you were erased so completely not even cause remained.

Trials came in stages. Lightning shaped by intent. Each strike peeled away impurity (fear, attachment, falsehood) until only truth remained.

Shen Yuan had not cultivated. He had not sought immortality. He had not prayed. He had not believed. That made him an anomaly.

The second bolt struck the building.

Glass shattered outward. Power died across several districts. The broadcast continued on emergency systems, cameras shaking, operators screaming off-mic. Shen Yuan did not move. 

The tingling in his fingers flared, racing through his limbs like rivers finding their beds. His breath stopped entirely and nothing bad happened. His heart slowed, then steadied into something deeper, heavier. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion peeled away like irrelevant annotations.

Lightning struck again. This one hit him. He did not burn. It passed through his body as if it had been waiting there all along, ripping open something old and sealed. Shen Yuan felt his name rise to the surface.

The Heavenly Trial tested his strength and his will.

It showed him everything he had done quietly. Every compromise. Every protection disguised as efficiency. Every life nudged back from the edge under the excuse of stability. It weighed his cynicism against his actions and found, much to its apparent delight, that they matched.

Shen Yuan had never claimed virtue. He had simply acted anyway.

The final bolt fell.

And instead of breaking him, the world bent. Light swallowed the podium. The cameras caught a silhouette lifting. Rain turned to steam around him. The thunder went silent, as if holding its breath.

In Xianxia myths, this was called Ascension. A mortal shed mortality. A name became a title. A function became a god.

Shen Yuan rose into the storm, expression blank with mild annoyance, suit in ruins (burned and wet), body remade by forces that had apparently decided paperwork was no longer sufficient to contain him.

Across China, millions stared at their screens as the impossible happened live. A god ascended on a political broadcast.

Somewhere between heaven and earth, Shen Yuan had one coherent thought: This is going to be such a problem.

Then the clouds parted.

And the Heavens, having made their decision, accepted him. Fucking god and all.

He arrived at the clouds’ home and almost fell out of it.

The vast, crushing, omnipresent pressure hit first. The density was enormous, as if the air itself had decided to become an ocean. Shen Yuan staggered forward one step and went down hard on his knees, the impact swallowed by white vapor that felt more solid than marble.

His heart beat wrong. Each pulse reverberated through him with an unfamiliar depth, like something much larger had taken over the task and was still calibrating. He swallowed dryly. His ears popped, sharp and painful, the sensation lagging behind reality as if his body was several seconds too mortal for the situation.

He tried to breathe. He couldn’t. There was too much of everything. Too much soundless noise, too much existence pressing in from all directions. The act of inhaling simply… failed. His lungs refused to expand against the overwhelming presence saturating the clouds.

Darkness crept at the edges of his vision.

Murmurs reached his ears but muffled, distorted, like overhearing a conversation underwater. Voices, many of them. The words refused to resolve into meaning. Shen Yuan’s hands dug into the cloud-floor on instinct, fingers trembling.

So this is how I die, he thought distantly. 

Then someone put a hand on his shoulder.

The contact sent a violent shiver through his entire body. The pressure eased instantly, drawn away as if obeying a command. Air rushed back into his lungs in a single, gasping breath that burned all the way down.

Warmth followed. It pooled first in his chest, spreading outward in slow waves, calming the frantic irregularity of his heart. Then it sank lower, deeper, settling into a point about two or three fingers’ width below his navel, buried deep within the abdomen.

Shen Yuan knew this place. It was not consciously or academically thought. Yet, his body knew it.

The lower dantian; the body’s primary reservoir of energy, the center of gravity, the anchor of balance and vitality. From there, the warmth branched upward, touching the chest (middle dantian, emotion and breath) then climbing to the forehead, behind the eyes, where thought gathered and sharpened.

Everything aligned. 

He realized, belatedly, that he had closed his eyes at some point. When he opened them, the world came into focus. 

Shen Yuan looked up.

The person standing before him looked like they had stepped out of a drama or one of the novels he liked so much. Long robes that moved as if stirred by a wind that didn’t exist. Hair dark as wet soil, bound simply with a hat. A face too composed to be human, too expressive to be carved from stone. And the ugliest mustache he ever saw.

Beautiful that man was, yes, but that wasn’t the unsettling part. He knew that man (somehow)

The figure met his gaze calmly, hand still steady on his shoulder. “Easy,” he said, voice carrying without effort, cutting cleanly through the murmurs. His hand were cold, wet and trembling. “Your body hasn’t learned how to exist here yet.”

Shen Yuan swallowed, throat finally obeying him. “… Is it too late to get back?,” he rasped.

Something like amusement flickered across the other’s face. And something else. Something akin to grief.

“This humble one is Mu Qingfang,” the person said gently as he looked into Shen Yuan’s eyes. He withdrew his hand and stepped back just enough to give Shen Yuan space, the gesture was kind without being indulgent. “This master serves as one of the Chiefs of the Medicine Hall. A god of medicine.”

Shen Yuan blinked. That’s not right, he thought automatically.

The primary god of medicine was Shénnóng (神農). He was the Divine Farmer, the Sage Emperor who tasted herbs until poison killed him, the cultural ancestor of pharmacology, acupuncture, agriculture itself. That was basic. That was mythology 101. That was —

He looked at Mu Qingfang again.

Oh.

Oh. 

Politics, of course.

Mu Qingfang caught the confusion immediately. His lips curved into a small, knowing smile, the kind that acknowledged the question without answering it. He clearly had no intention of explaining.

Shen Yuan sighed. Of course it wasn’t that simple. Of course heaven ran on committees too.

As the pressure fully receded and his internal balance stabilized, Shen Yuan’s vision sharpened abruptly and the fog thinned. The light got resolved. The clouds stopped being blinding white and became layered, structured and architectural.

He lifted his head.

And froze.

There were gods everywhere. A multitude stretching across the cloudscape. There were figures standing, seated, hovering, reclining in ways gravity had apparently agreed not to argue with. Gods and goddesses of every temperament and domain, clothed in silk and armor and robes that shimmered with restrained divinity. Some watched with open curiosity. Some with thinly veiled irritation. A few looked amused in ways that made Shen Yuan deeply uncomfortable.

All of them were looking at him.

At the little old him.

The former CEO, reluctant politician, anonymous troll, volunteer collector of strays now kneeling at the center of heaven like an improperly filed document.

He pushed himself to his feet, legs steadying with surprising ease. His body obeyed him now, aligned around that warm, stable core in his abdomen. Whatever he had become, it was at least functional.

That was something.

He straightened his ruined suit out of habit. The gesture was ridiculous. Several gods noticed. A few eyebrows lifted.

“Well,” Shen Yuan said dryly, voice carrying farther than it should have, “this is awkward.”

A ripple passed through the gathered immortals. Some murmurs and subtle reactions. Mu Qingfang’s smile deepened a fraction, as if it was an inside joke that only him knew.

Shen Yuan glanced sideways at him. “So,” he added, tone polite, professional and exhausted, “is there an orientation pamphlet, or do I just stand here and..?” He did not dare to finish the sentence.

Somewhere in the clouds, something like laughter stirred.

He had survived boardrooms. He had survived politics. He had survived the internet. He squared his shoulders and faced the heavens.

If this was another one of those things he used to do, then he would learn how it worked and bullshit through it, whether it liked it or not.

Suddenly, the crowd parted with the smooth inevitability of hierarchy asserting itself. Gods and goddesses shifted aside, clouds folding back to open a wide, respectful path. The murmurs dimmed, attention snapping into something closer to order.

A big man stepped through.

He wore elaborate robes in black and white, the colors balanced with deliberate care, threaded through with a faint silver glow that caught the light without demanding it. The kind of glow that said authority. His brows were strong, his posture relaxed but unassailable, and his eyes —

Kind. That was the first thing Shen Yuan noticed. The thought hurt his heart, like nostalgia.

The man was smiling. A perfect smile. It was polished and measured. Exactly the right degree of warmth for a public occasion. Political, Shen Yuan thought instantly, that part of him lighting up on reflex.

But then he saw it… the slight crinkle at the corners of the eyes, the micro-delay before the smile settled. The telltale signs of sincerity layered beneath the presentation. It was a good smile. Better than Shen Yuan’s, anyway.

Shen Yuan usually kept a cold face. He was far better at the black stare than at forcing warmth where it didn’t exist. Right now, he needed that face desperately, because the awkward joke he’d just landed was still hanging in the air like an unresolved agenda item.

The man stopped a short distance away, close enough to command the space without crowding it. His presence settled the atmosphere the way a chair person entering a room did.

“Greetings,” the clearly important guy said, voice calm, resonant, carrying without effort. “Welcome to Heaven.” Shen Yuan’s spine straightened automatically. “This master is Yue Qingyuan.”

Ah.

Oh.

Qing, just like the doctor.  That explained… a lot. The name carried weight the way certain surnames did in the mortal world: authority embedded in position and in narrative. Shen Yuan didn’t know why he knew that, only that some instinct newly wired into his bones recognized the structure immediately.

This wasn’t just any god. And this ‘Qing’ thing was a clue.

Shen Yuan met Yue Qingyuan’s gaze and activated his emergency professionalism, face settling into its familiar neutral chill. Internally, he was already recalibrating and reading posture, tone, hierarchy, filing away observations for later survival.

“Deputy Secretary of the internal Party committee and CEO of the Shen Industries, Shen Yuan,” he replied with a bow out of habit and then winced inwardly. Wrong title. Wrong plane of existence. He adjusted smoothly, because adaptation was his one true skill. “Formerly mortal. Newly…. god?” And that was that.

A flicker of amusement crossed Yue Qingyuan’s eyes. The smile held.

“You may dispense with mortal titles, yes,” Yue Qingyuan said kindly. “Heaven will assign you what you require in due time.”

Assign, Shen Yuan noted. Of course it would.

He inclined his head. He had negotiated with ministers and CEOs; the posture translated well enough. “I appreciate the welcome,” Shen Yuan said evenly. “Though I admit the onboarding process was somewhat abrupt.”

A few gods shifted. Someone coughed.

Yue Qingyuan’s smile softened. “Heaven can be… dramatic,” he allowed. “Your ascension was unusual.”

“That’s one word for it.”

That, finally, earned a quiet ripple of genuine laughter from somewhere in the crowd.

Yue Qingyuan gestured gently, and the clouds beneath Shen Yuan’s feet firmed further, stabilizing, as if acknowledging him at last. “You have caused quite a stir,” he continued. “A mortal ascending without cultivation, in full view of the world, during a matter of great karmic weight.”

Shen Yuan exhaled slowly. “Yes. I’m aware I’ve made several departments very unhappy.”

Yue Qingyuan looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, “Come. You should not stand alone before Heaven.”

The words were simple. Yet, the implication was not.

As Yue Qingyuan turned, the gods parted once more, forming a path not just for him, but for Shen Yuan to walk beside him. Shen Yuan followed, face composed, heart steady, lower dantian warm and grounded.

Fine, he thought grimly. If Heaven wants to play politics… He had been doing that his whole life.

With determination on Shen Yuan’s mind, Yue Qingyuan guided him away from the crowd and into the heart of Heaven.

The halls unfolded like a labyrinth designed by someone who believed eternity deserved decoration. Vast corridors arched overhead, supported by columns carved from cloudstone and white jade, their surfaces etched with flowing scripts that shimmered faintly as if still being written. The floors were polished to a mirror sheen, reflecting lantern-light and drifting motes of qi like fallen stars. Every few steps, the space opened into courtyards layered upon courtyards. The bridges of carved marble spanning nothing were beautiful and there was pavilions floating where gravity had given up the argument.

Roofs curved upward in the classical style, eaves sweeping high like the wings of cranes. Tiles of glazed gold and deep celestial blue caught the light differently depending on where one stood, never quite the same twice. Red pillars lacquered to perfection bore motifs of dragons and clouds, restrained but undeniably powerful. Incense burners the size of small houses released slow coils of fragrance that calmed the mind whether one wanted it or not.

It was opulent in the way only Heavenly architecture could be. The feng shui was probably great, he guessed. Balanced, symbolic, aggressively meaningful. Nothing was excessive without purpose. Everything existed to remind you that this place had existed before you and would continue long after.

Shen Yuan felt small.

Objectively, he was small. A short king in a ruined mortal suit walking beside someone who seemed carved to scale with the halls themselves. Yue Qingyuan did not loom deliberately, but Heaven had clearly been designed with people like him in mind. Shen Yuan’s footsteps sounded too loud, too fast, like he was trying to keep up with a rhythm he hadn’t learned yet.

Yue Qingyuan walked at an unhurried pace, adjusting subtly so Shen Yuan never fell behind.

As they moved, Yue Qingyuan began to explain. “Godhood,” he said calmly, “is not omnipotence. It is a responsibility bound by roles.” That sounded familiar enough. “A god exists because something recognizes them as necessary. A domain. A concept. A function. Worship strengthens the tie, but it does not create it from nothing. You were acknowledged before you were named.”

They passed under an archway inscribed with constellations. The stars rearranged themselves as Shen Yuan crossed the threshold.

Yue Qingyuan continued, still not very pointedly mentioning politics, Shen Yuan noted with professional appreciation. “You will be assigned a role,” he said. “This assignment is not a punishment nor a reward, have that in mind. Heaven does not waste anomalies.”

Of course it doesn’t.

“There will be documentation,” Yue Qingyuan added, gesturing to a side hall where stacks of glowing scrolls floated in orderly suspension. “Forms regarding ascension circumstances, karmic impact, domain overlap, and self-assessment of temperament. Honesty is advised. Heaven has ways of checking.”

Shen Yuan made a low, thoughtful noise. “Do I need references?”

Yue Qingyuan’s lips twitched. “Not in the mortal sense.”

They continued on. A set of doors opened soundlessly before them, revealing an office that looked alarmingly familiar except everything was carved from luminous jade and organized in three-dimensional layers that rotated slowly.

“Your worship count will fluctuate,” Yue Qingyuan said, tone still instructional. “You are not sustained by belief alone, but belief stabilizes existence. Mortals who speak your name, remember your deeds, or invoke your domain contribute to your presence. Neglect leads to dormancy, not death.”

Shen Yuan filed that away immediately.

“You will receive an initial stipend of divine qi,” Yue Qingyuan continued. “Enough to prevent collapse. Excess must be managed. Uncontrolled accumulation leads to instability.”

“Explosions?” Shen Yuan asked.

“…Yes,” Yue Qingyuan admitted with a tilt of the head.

They passed another courtyard where spirit beasts lounged lazily beside ponds of liquid light. Shen Yuan stared, then forcibly looked away. He was not going to be distracted by aesthetics. That way lay disaster. (But he really wanted to.)

“You will have a residence,” Yue Qingyuan said. “Staff, if you require them. You will also have access to the Heavenly Network, keep in mind that it is a bit… slow. Scheduled appearances are mandatory unless your domain demands otherwise.”

Ah. KPIs.

Shen Yuan nodded. “And if I fail at my role?”

Yue Qingyuan stopped. He turned, expression still gentle, still kind, but now weighted with something older and firmer. “Then Heaven will adjust,” he said. “It always does.”

Shen Yuan met his gaze, understanding perfectly.

They resumed walking.

By the time they reached the final hall with a ceiling so high it vanished into the clouds, its walls lined with doors that radiated faint authority, Shen Yuan no longer felt physically overwhelmed.

Yue Qingyuan took the largest seat.

It was not a throne, Heaven did not indulge in something so crude, but it anchored the hall all the same. Carved from layered cloudstone and pale jade, its lines were austere, functional, built for authority rather than reverence. 

Shen Yuan was guided to the center.

A single chair waited there, plain and luminous, placed deliberately inside a circular formation. No dragons. No phoenixes. No symbolic beasts carved into the arms. The message was clear: you are here to be assessed, not worshipped.

Yeah. This was intimidating.

Around him stood twelve seats arranged in a wide arc facing Yue Qingyuan. Six to the left, six to the right. The symmetry was exact, coldly intentional. As Shen Yuan sat, the seats began to fill, figures manifesting without sound, without spectacle, as if stepping in from adjacent realities.

The first seat to Yue Qingyuan’s right remained empty. That absence felt heavier than any presence.

Shen Yuan looked around and frowned. Something was off.

He could not see Guanyin. No serene Bodhisattva haloed in compassion. No Jade Emperor presiding over cosmic bureaucracy. No Queen Mother of the West with peaches of immortality. No Nezha spinning rings, no Lü Dongbin lounging like trouble in scholar’s robes.

None of the gods of mythology were here.

Instead, the figures who took the seats felt… more constrained. Their power was focused inward, disciplined, shaped by cultivation rather than belief. Their robes bore sect sigils instead of cosmic motifs. Their auras pressed like mountains rather than legends.

Sect Lords, if he was to guess it. Cultivators who had ascended. This was not Heaven as mortals remembered it.

This was Heaven as novels understood it: an administrative extension of the cultivation world, where immortals were promoted, not born; where authority flowed from strength, contribution, and alignment rather than ancient worship.

Shen Yuan realized, abruptly, why Mu Qingfang had smiled earlier and refused to explain.

Shénnóng still existed. Guanyin still existed. They simply weren’t here. This court did not govern belief or natural law. It governed cultivation, ascension, and worldline stability. Gods in the mythological sense were foundational constants. They were too vast, too abstract to sit in meetings.

These people? These were managers.

The seats filled with figures Shen Yuan did not yet know by name but understood by instinct: Sword cultivators whose presence cut the air. Strategists whose calm hid terrifying calculation. Healers whose qi felt gentle but inexhaustible. Demonic cultivators held on leashes of oaths and seals, their power permitted, but monitored.

The empty seat beside Yue Qingyuan was not for a god of myth. It was for a right hand man. A missing one.

Shen Yuan folded his hands in his lap, posture straight, expression cooling into professional neutrality. Internally, relief and dread tangled together.

Good news: he hadn’t accidentally upended all of Chinese mythology live on television.

Bad news: he had ascended into a cultivation bureaucracy.

Yue Qingyuan looked down at him, kindness still present, but now sharpened by unmistakable authority. “Shen Yuan,” he said, voice carrying cleanly through the hall, “your ascension has been acknowledged by the Heavenly Dao. This assembly convenes to determine your placement within the Immortal Administration.”

Placement. Just like a fucking job. Shen Yuan exhaled slowly. Of course, he thought. I didn’t become a god. I got promoted.

The Head of the Heaven made a gesture to a man, indicating that he was the one to talk. “Shen Yuan (沈垣, ‘deep wall / fortified boundary’),” the man who looked like a hamster said.

He stood from one of the Twelve Very Important Chairs, sleeves tucked neatly, whisker-like eyebrows twitching as a scroll unfurled in his hands. The text rearranged itself obediently, glowing faintly with heavenly script.

“Thirty-nine years old.”

One of the immortals scoffed openly.

“A babe,” said a woman draped in pink and purple silk, her voice lilting and amused. “Barely past infancy.”

The hamster-like official did not pause, as if mockery were merely atmospheric noise. “Son of Shen An (沈安, ‘peaceful depth’) and Shen Ying (沈瑛, ‘luminous jade’),” he continued evenly. “Brother of Shen Wei (沈巍, ‘lofty and imposing’), Shen Li (沈理, ‘principle’), and Shen Tang (沈棠, ‘crabapple blossom’). Married to none. Fathered to none.”

The hall absorbed the information in silence broken only by faint murmurs.

Shen Yuan sat motionless. Hearing his life reduced to clean, declarative lines felt stranger than being struck by lightning. Names he associated with voices, habits, shared meals, flattened into genealogy and status. Heaven liked things tidy.

(Was his family alright? Did they see what happened? Should he be worried?)

The official’s eyes flicked down the scroll. He looked at Shen Yuan and licked his lips. A flick of something passed through his eyes. “Cultivation background: none. Spiritual roots: unmeasured prior to ascension. Method of ascension: anomalous.”

That caused a ripple.

“Anomalous?” someone echoed.

“Televised,” another immortal added dryly. 

The hamster official nodded once and sighed. “Correct. Live mortal broadcast.” Shen Yuan exhaled slowly through his nose. “Mortal occupation,” the official read on. “Senior administrator. Chief executive. Political intermediary.” That was one way to say ‘pretty much important’.

That line landed with more weight than the rest. Several of the immortals leaned forward slightly. Administrators were rare in Heaven. Useful, yes, but seldom powerful enough to survive ascension.

“Primary traits,” the official continued. “High cognitive endurance. Advanced bureaucratic navigation. Long-term maintenance of dual identities without spiritual deviation.” A soft sound of surprise came from the left and the man smiled warmly. “Supplementary behaviors,” he added. “Anonymous charitable activity. Repeated protection of subordinates at personal karmic risk. Prolonged exposure to hostile discourse environments for emotional regulation.”

Is that…  way to say trolling? Shen Yuan closed his eyes for exactly one heartbeat. Yue Qingyuan’s gaze softened.

“Psychological profile,” the hamster official read. “Cynical. Pragmatic. Highly sarcastic. Ethical framework internally rigid, externally adaptive. Displays loyalty to individuals rather than systems.” His voice was even, but Shen Yuan can see the ‘basically a bitch’ written on the official’s eyes.

That earned a thoughtful hum from someone near the back.

The scroll rolled to its end.

The official finally looked up, meeting Shen Yuan’s eyes. “Conclusion,” he said and one hundred things were not said by him. He was hiding something. “Mortal Shen Yuan possesses no conventional cultivation merit. However, karmic accumulation is unusually dense. Dao alignment: stable. Resistance to corruption: high.” He paused. “Recommendation: classification and domain assignment pending deliberation.”

Silence fell over the hall.

Shen Yuan lifted his chin slightly, expression settling into the calm neutrality he had perfected over decades.

Good, he thought. At least Heaven reads résumés. If he was going to be filed, labeled, and shelves, then he would make sure the category was interesting. Yet… The hamster man had skipped a few things and there was a tingle in Shen Yuan’s spine saying that something was not right.

Shen Yuan folded his hands together and crossed his legs. Elegant and composed. It was the posture of someone who had survived hostile boardrooms and learned that looking unbothered was often more effective than actually being unbothered. He was kind of panicking right now.

“How does Heaven assign a domain?” he asked calmly.

The question rippled through the hall.

A beautiful man scoffed. He was lithe and tall, with long lashes that cast shadows against his cheek and a small beauty mark near the corner of one eye which was very carefully placed, as if the Dao itself had paused to consider aesthetics. His robes were immaculate, his qi sharp and refined, the kind that came from centuries of uninterrupted cultivation.

He had a white stasch on his belt along with a fan. A mourning stach? Huh.

“He’s too young,” the man said lightly, not even bothering to hide his disdain.

Shen Yuan did not look at him.

Yue Qingyuan did and then smiled. It was the same gentle, political smile as before, and just as effectively dismissive. “The Jade Emperor,” he said evenly, “as the supreme ruler of the Heavenly Domain, presides over the court and divides Heaven’s administration into various bureaus.”

As he spoke, the hall subtly responded. Suddenly, faint light tracing invisible structures in the air, outlines of systems Shen Yuan instinctively recognized.

“Civil Gods,” Yue Qingyuan continued, “oversee governance, fate alignment, mortal institutions, culture, and stability. Martial Gods manage conflict, calamity suppression, boundary defense, and enforcement of Heavenly law.” 

Shen Yuan’s fingers tightened almost imperceptibly. Functional departments, his mind supplied automatically.

“Some domains are geographical,” Yue Qingyuan went on. “Rivers. Mountains. Cities. Others are conceptual: medicine, justice, harvest, learning, transition.” He paused, then added, “Appointments are made by the celestial administration, based on alignment, karmic accumulation, demonstrated capability, and necessity.”

Necessity was not merit.

The beautiful man clicked his tongue softly. “And we’re meant to believe someone with no cultivation or martial background qualifies? It won't be dangerous to him?”

Yue Qingyuan did not even glance his way this time. “Heaven does not reward effort,” he said gently. “It allocates resources.”

That shut the scoffer up more effectively than reprimand.

Shen Yuan absorbed the explanation in silence, the warm core in his lower dantian steady and responsive. Domains. Bureaus. Assignments. Oversight. It was all painfully, comfortingly familiar.

Finally, he spoke again. “And if my alignment doesn’t match any existing bureau?”

Yue Qingyuan’s smile deepened, slightly.

“Then Heaven creates something new,” he said.

A hush fell over the hall.

Several of the immortals straightened. The hamster official’s whiskers twitched and Mu Qingfang pressed his lips together. The empty seat to Yue Qingyuan’s right seemed, suddenly, very relevant.

Shen Yuan inclined his head in acknowledgment, elegance unbroken. Of course, he thought. Even Heaven hates inefficiency. Who didn’t?

And if there was one thing Shen Yuan had always been good at, it was filling gaps no one else wanted to acknowledge existed.

“Now we will begin the assignment,” Yue Qingyuan said.

The moment the words left his mouth, the hall responded.

Light bloomed pervasive, seeping into every carved line and floating sigil. The chair beneath Shen Yuan hummed, then warmed, and a complex array unfolded across its surface, lines of light interlocking with precise, merciless logic. It wasn’t decorative. It was executable.

He recognized that instantly.

A hum rolled through the space.

Booming, vast, and somehow comforting. Like thunder heard from a safe distance, like the low vibration of servers running flawlessly in a locked room. It carried authority without malice, amusement without frivolity.

Lightning did not strike this time.

Instead, the air thrummed, a constant electrical tension that never quite discharged, a shiver that crawled across the skin and stayed there. Shen Yuan’s arms prickled as energy flowed over them, not painful. Warm, controlled, efficient.

Like computer hardware under load.

His eyes closed on instinct as the current threaded through him, mapping, measuring, integrating. His lower dantian flared, the warmth there rising upward in clean channels, syncing with something vast and external.

“Shen Yuan.” The voice spoke his name.

At once, every heavenly official rose and bowed with absolute precision, as if gravity itself had shifted direction. Shen Yuan followed a heartbeat later, because there was no option other than bowing. The pressure was violent, it was total. This was power so complete that resistance simply did not occur as a concept.

This was the Jade Emperor.

“The mortal realm has changed,” the voice continued, resonant and layered, as if spoken through countless overlapping channels. “Energy flows unseen. Knowledge moves without bodies. Personas exist without flesh.” Shen Yuan’s fingers curled slightly. “You,” the voice said, and Shen Yuan felt it see him. Every compartment, every mask, every carefully separated life. “Have walked between faces without collapse. You have governed systems you do not believe in and protected people you pretended not to care for.”

The array beneath him blazed brighter.

“Therefore,” the Jade Emperor intoned, “Heaven assigns you thus.” The air rang. “The First God of Technology, Energy and Data.” A ripple tore through the hall. “God of the Internet.” Several immortals stiffened. “God of Personas.” A sharp intake of breath. “And God of Two-Faced Lives.”

Silence fell so deep it swallowed sound itself.

Shen Yuan had the overwhelming, irrepressible urge to laugh very loudly. He bit it back, of course, with the discipline of a man who had survived press conferences and policy disasters, but the humor burned in his chest all the same, incredulous

Of course, he thought. Of course Heaven would do this to me.

Around him, whispers broke free at last.

“Oh Jade Emperor…”

“Thank you for giving us Shen Yuan…”

Relief threaded the words. Gratitude. Something dangerously close to celebration.

Shen Yuan straightened slowly, the array dissolving into him, settling, locking into place like software finally deployed. The hum never left, it embedded itself into his bones, into his qi, into the infinite invisible web now unfolding at the edges of his awareness.

He lifted his head. A god. Not of thunder or war or harvest. But of systems. Of networks. Of masks worn to survive.

Shen Yuan smiled at last. It was thin, sharp, and entirely sincere.

“Well,” he said softly, to Heaven itself, “this explains the trolls.”

So, he had a few questions. Shen Yuan asked them anyway. He had learned long ago that if he didn’t interrogate them sooner or later, they would interrogate him later.

Am I god of all technology, he wondered, or only information networks? Do I oversee the mortal internet alone, or whatever Heaven uses to move data between realms? Am I “first” because the domain is new… or because no one else survived it long enough to take the post?

The answers arrived after a long time of searching. Understanding slid into place the way an architecture diagram suddenly made sense once you saw the whole thing at once.

He was not god of all technology. He was the god of circulation. Information, intent, attention, and energy as they moved through artificial networks. Signals. Feedback loops. Personas generated and discarded. Identities constructed to survive hostile environments. The internet was simply the densest expression of it in the mortal realm.

He oversaw the mortal internet. And its equivalents.

Heaven had them too; networks of prayer, report, command, and karmic accounting. Arrays layered atop arrays. Message chains that ran through talismans, seals, mirrors, dream-threads. Before Shen Yuan, they were fragmented, handled piecemeal by clerks and minor functionaries who patched failures instead of understanding them.

Now, they had an administrator. An admin, if you will.

As for why he was first… That answer was uncomfortable. The domain was new, yes, but not untested. Attempts had been made. Minor gods assigned experimentally. Immortals promoted to oversee “information flow” or “mortal communication.”

They had failed, he found out. Some drowned in noise, consciousness shredded by unfiltered intent. Some fractured, losing the ability to distinguish self from mask, becoming hollow gods who could not anchor their own names. Others burned out under the sheer speed of it, thoughts moving faster than cultivation could stabilize. Qi deviation and shit.

No one had lasted. Until Shen Yuan.

He had already lived it. Two lives. Then three. Public figure, private administrator, anonymous troll. He had learned how to let personas exist without letting them eat him. He knew when to engage and when to disconnect. He understood that not all input deserved a response.

He had throttled himself long before Heaven ever tried.

So yes.

For now, he was the first.

And until Heaven found another being capable of surviving contradiction at that scale, he was also the only one.

That made him, unfortunately, very powerful.

Shen Yuan felt the weight of it settle, not crushing like that one at first, but heavy in the way responsibility always was. Authority without peers. A domain expanding faster than Heaven could fully model. Billions of mortal connections brushing against his awareness like static at the edge of thought.

He exhaled slowly.

Great, he thought. A single point of failure.

Somewhere above him, Heaven hummed more smoothly than they ever had before. Heaven, having finally found its admin, was not letting him go anytime soon.

And the Heavens were too good at staying quiet. Therefore, Shen Yuan learned everything later. Not in the hall, not from Yue Qingyuan, and certainly not from any official report stamped in red and gold. Heaven was very good at recording facts and very bad at explaining why they mattered.

He was the first to ascend in the last two centuries. Two hundred years. The last one had been a monk in seclusion for longer than some countries were alive. The realization sat strangely in his chest, heavier than his title had been.

He checked the records, the way one did when poking at secrets like a little bastard. The ascension registries were immaculate, their calligraphy flawless, their gaps undeniable. Names stopped appearing. Lines of succession broke. Entire bureaus showed no new blood, only rotation, reassignment, slow attrition.

No one explained it to him. Which, to Shen Yuan, was explanation enough. Though, he had suspicions.

Some ancient lore had been lost to mortals. Whether they were turned, suppressed, simplified into children’s stories and festival decorations, you can choose. Some had been deliberately banished downward, severed from Heaven and left to rot in human hands where belief could no longer sustain them.

And then there was science. Science did not pray. Science did not kneel. Science did not attribute thunder to dragons or illness to imbalance of qi. Science explained.

So, it was easy for myths to die violently. They starved like dogs.

Faith fractured into data. Wonder became curiosity, then became methodology. The world learned how things worked and once you could reproduce a miracle on command, it stopped being divine.

Ascension had always relied on alignment: belief reinforcing practice, practice reinforcing Dao. When mortals stopped believing in Heaven as an active presence, Heaven stopped receiving candidates capable of reaching it.

The ladder hadn’t been destroyed. It had simply been forgotten.

Shen Yuan understood that intimately. He had lived in a world where gods were content for memes and monsters were metaphors. Where faith existed only in niches, corners, and irony-laced spaces that pretended not to take anything seriously.

Except… The internet didn’t erase belief. It redistributed it. Obsession, attention, collective focus, these still carried weight. They just wore new names. Fandoms replaced sects. Algorithms replaced fate-reading. Viral narratives moved faster than prayers ever had.

And Shen Yuan had stood at the intersection of all of it. He suspected that was why Heaven had waited. Not for the last cultivator. But for the first person shaped by a world that no longer believed and learned how to build meaning anyway.

Two centuries without ascension.

And then Shen Yuan, dragged up mid-speech, rain-soaked and sarcastic, carrying an entire dead mythology’s worth of contradictions in his bones.

He did not feel chosen. He felt… necessary. Which, he suspected, was far more dangerous.

Shen Yuan looked out over the Heavenly networks now quietly syncing under his authority and exhaled.

“Figures,” he muttered. “Even Heaven needed an update.”

Heaven also needed to learn to mind its business. There was one thing for sure: The gods did not know what to do with him.

Gods (goddesses, immortals, officials, functionaries) beings who had known one another since the rise and fall of dynasties, since calendars were carved into bone and empires learned to rename themselves. They rotated titles, traded responsibilities, feuded, reconciled. But they did not change.

There had been no one new in two hundred years. And now there was him.

An anomaly.

A god with strange domains that did not map cleanly onto existing bureaus. A god who wore unfamiliar clothes. It was everything about clean lines, no trailing sleeves, fabrics cut for movement rather than ceremony. Hair worn without pins or crowns, practical, unadorned. No visible sect insignia. No lineage banners. No myth attached to his name.

Suspicious.

Not suspicious enough to kill on sight, but the thought passed through more than a few minds all the same. Old instincts died hard. Heaven had purged anomalies before.

But this one had been welcomed personally by the Jade Emperor. And the Jade Emperor’s words were law. 

That was the problem.

They could not test him openly. They could not challenge his legitimacy. They could not even question his appointment without questioning the structure of Heaven itself. So they did what immortals had always done when confronted with something they did not understand.

They watched.

They observed how prayer-streams rerouted when his attention brushed them. They noted how communication delays vanished, how reports that once took months began arriving in real time. They felt the subtle tightening of systems they had assumed were meant to be inefficient.

Some found it unsettling. Some found it offensive. A few, very few, felt relief.

Shen Yuan noticed all of it.

He noticed the way conversations paused when he entered a hall, then resumed half a breath too late. The way eyes lingered on his hands, his sleeves, his face, as if expecting cracks to form. He felt the careful distance, the polite courtesy that stopped just short of warmth.

He did not mind.

He had spent his mortal life like this already.

A man out of place (out of time), operating systems no one wanted to acknowledge existed, carrying authority that made people uncomfortable because it did not look like authority was supposed to look.

If anything, Heaven was familiar. So Shen Yuan inclined his head when appropriate, spoke when necessary, and otherwise kept to his work. He did not seek alliances. He did not provoke. Though, he did not reassure them.

(He was not happy here.)

The first one to truly speak to him was Mu Qingfang, oddly enough.

It figured.

If Heaven was uncertain how to approach an anomaly, it would send the physician first; someone who could diagnose before judging, observe before cutting.

They met at the Healing Pavilion, Qiān Cǎo Peak, where the air was thick with the scent of crushed herbs and warm honey. Shelves of jade and dark wood held vials of shimmering liquids, coiled roots, powdered minerals, all glowing faintly with contained qi. The place felt alive in the way only spaces devoted to preservation and restoration ever did.

Mu Qingfang had a tray set between them and a calm, steady smile on his face. He poured tea for them both, movements precise and gentle, steam curling upward like a prayer that didn’t need to be spoken aloud.

“Pardon my question, Shen Xiānshēng,” Mu Qingfang said softly. He sighed, almost embarrassed. “I find myself… confused.”

From his sleeve, he produced an object. It was sleek, rectangular, black and smooth glass framed in metal, humming faintly with a life of its own. A mortal artifact, but altered, reinforced by divine qi so that it could exist here without dissolving into dust.

A phone.

Shen Yuan stared at it.

Mu Qingfang turned it over in his hands like it was some kind of unfamiliar beast. “This master is trying to look for new healing techniques. This master heard that this could be used to reach mortals,” he admitted, “but this one is utterly confused by… technology.” He tapped the dark surface with a careful finger. It lit up. Mu Qingfang visibly flinched. “Spirits inside,” he said, voice grave. “Very reactive spirits.”

Shen Yuan took a slow breath. “…No,” he said. “No, those are not spirits.”

Mu Qingfang’s eyes sharpened with immediate interest, like a healer who had just discovered a new pathology. “Then what animates it?” he asked.

Shen Yuan reached out and took the phone from his hands. The object recognized him at once, its internal energy aligning, interface stabilizing as if it had found the correct administrator. “This,” Shen Yuan said, “is a tool for communication and information storage. It connects to a network.”

Mu Qingfang leaned forward slightly. “A network?” he repeated.

“Think of it as a… mortal meridian system,” Shen Yuan offered after a moment. “Except instead of qi, it circulates data. Images. Words. Sound. Knowledge. Belief.”

Mu Qingfang blinked, processing that. “…You mean prayers?” he asked.

“…Sure,” Shen Yuan said. “Let’s go with that.”

The doctor nodded thoughtfully, as if this explained several things at once. “And the healings?” Mu Qingfang pressed.

“People share knowledge there,” Shen Yuan said. “New treatments. New techniques. They test things. Improve them. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re brilliant. It’s… messy.”

Mu Qingfang’s expression turned quietly fascinated. “Then this device allows me to consult all of them at once?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“…That seems inefficient,” Mu Qingfang said.

Shen Yuan paused. “…That,” he replied, “is exactly why Heaven assigned me.”

Mu Qingfang smiled into his tea, calm and warm, as if the world had suddenly become much more interesting. “I see,” he said. “Then, Shen Xiānshēng… I will be asking you many questions.”

Mu Qingfang asked clever questions. Of course he did. He was a god of medicine. Curiosity was not a hobby for him; it was a professional obligation. He folded his hands into his sleeves and regarded it with the seriousness of someone studying a new disease.

“If this network circulates knowledge,” he began, “then how does it distinguish truth from error? Mortal doctors are fallible.”

“So are immortals,” Shen Yuan replied without looking up. Mu Qingfang inclined his head, accepting the correction. His breath trembled a little, like Shen Yuan had hit something that hurt. “The network doesn’t filter the truth,” Shen Yuan explained. “It filters attention. The things most people look at become more visible. Popularity is mistaken for accuracy. It’s… not ideal.”

“Then why trust it?” Mu Qingfang asked.

“You don’t,” Shen Yuan said. “You verify. Compare sources. Cross-reference. Look for patterns instead of individuals. Search for a reliable source and trace what they follow. I recommend Pub Med.”

Mu Qingfang nodded slowly, eyes thoughtful. “Then it resembles clinical practice,” he murmured. “Many observations, one conclusion.”

“Exactly.”

Mu Qingfang picked up the phone and turned it in his hands again. “And these ‘apps’,” he asked, carefully pronouncing the foreign word, “are they like sect manuals?”

Shen Yuan considered that. “Yes,” he said at last. “Except anyone can write one, and most of them are terrible.”

“Then this master will require guidance.” Mu Qingfang’s lips twitched

“Don’t worry about it,” Shen Yuan said, and took the phone back, unlocking it with a practiced flick. “You can’t just dive in. There’s too much noise. You’ll drown in misinformation before you find anything useful.”

“That has happened before,” Mu Qingfang admitted mildly. “Three separate alchemists convinced me mercury was ‘invigorating’.”

Shen Yuan paused. “…We’re definitely banning alchemists from your browsing history, then.”

Mu Qingfang leaned forward. “Browsing history?”

He sighed. “Never mind. I’ll set filters.”

Mu Qingfang watched his hands with keen interest. “This is your divine domain, then?” he asked.

“Yes. Networks, identities, the flow of things people pretend are real until they become real.”

Mu Qingfang tilted his head. “That sounds very close to placebo effect,” he noted.

Shen Yuan stared at him. “…You’re going to be my favorite person here, aren’t you.”

He smiled, it looked sad. “One more question, if you permit.”

“Go ahead.”

“If mortals can share knowledge freely, why do they still die so often from treatable illness?”

Shen Yuan’s expression flattened  Politics again. “Because knowledge existing does not mean it’s accessible. You know how it goes… Money, political barriers, distrust… the flow is blocked.”

Mu Qingfang’s gaze sharpened. “Blocked meridians lead to sickness,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” Shen Yuan replied. “At scale.”

The doctor sat back, absorbing that, tea forgotten. “Then,” Mu Qingfang said after a moment, “perhaps Heaven has been ill for two centuries.”

Shen Yuan glanced at the humming device, then back at him. “…Yeah,” he said. “That’s one way to put it.”

A paper appeared to his right. It was like a chat messege. There was even a little twit indicating that there was a notification. The scroll opened with a soft, humiliating little fwoomp. Shen Yuan didn’t even flinch. He had asked his network to give him the reason why he was the only god of the internet. Therefore, he had been waiting for Heaven to embarrass itself. 

Mu Qingfang, however, leaned forward, brows drawing together in that clinical way of his, like he had just found something very concerning inside a patient.

The paper unfurled completely on the table. A name was written in precise, careful ink. Below it, in smaller characters, a single line: Collapsed from overload. 

Mu Qingfang went very still. “…Ah,” he said.

Well, this is awkward as hell, Shen Yuan thought. Yikes.

Of course, he already knew that, but it was nice to see a name to the fact.

If Heaven had tried to assign this domain before, it meant the previous poor bastard had been given the same problem Shen Yuan had: too much noise, too much input, too much everything happening at once. The old immortals had not grown up with the internet. They didn’t have the instinct to filter, to scroll past, to ignore half of what was thrown at them.

You know, the brain rot.

It was like handing a medieval peasant a video player. They’d call it witchcraft, then die of a heart attack trying to understand it.

These guys were old as hell. They didn’t know what to do with “mpreg” or “found family.” They wouldn’t survive a single AO3 comment section. They probably thought “I will kill myself” jokes were literal threats instead of coping mechanisms.

Like a grandpa, Shen Yuan thought.

“You are not surprised.” Mu Qingfang lifted his gaze from the scroll to Shen Yuan’s face.“You were aware of this?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” Shen Yuan said.

“Then why take the post?”

Shen Yuan shrugged. “Because I already live with the noise,” he replied.

(And he could not refuse.)

That was the difference. The last god had been overwhelmed. Shen Yuan had been trained.

After the first tea meeting, Mu Qingfang became… familiar.

He arrived with a smile, with tea, with the quiet patience of someone who had already decided Shen Yuan was worth the trouble. The gods watched Shen Yuan like he was a crack in Heaven’s foundation; Mu Qingfang watched him like he was a patient still breathing.

He also gossiped. A lot. Which, Shen Yuan discovered, was the true divine function of the Medicine Hall.

“That one who scoffed at you… Liu Qingge,” Mu Qingfang would say mildly, pouring tea. “You should talk to him, you will be great friends. He is first and most important Martial God. Oversees war, disaster suppression, heavenly enforcement. Very strong. No tactics at all.”

“Sounds about right,” Shen Yuan said.

“And Shang Qinghua, the one who read your data” Mu Qingfang continued. “Civil God. He oversees lies, contracts, and money. Ascended while protecting his husband first than the prediction. Very embarrassing man.”

Shen Yuan blinked. “He what?”

“The rumor says he tripped over his own heavenly paperwork during the ascension,” Mu Qingfang clarified. “It was a miracle he survived at all.” Mu Qingfang nodded. “And Qi Qingqi, the woman who called you a ‘babe’,” he added. “Martial Goddess. Oversees poison, beauty, and what she calls ‘feminine revolution.’ Her assistant, Liu Mingyang, handles literature and propaganda. They are… effective.”

Great, Shen Yuan sighed. So Heaven has a war god, a finance god, and a radical feminist agenda. It was comforting, in a way. At least Heaven had not been entirely stagnant. Just mostly.

One day, Mu Qingfang brought Shen Yuan somewhere new where he ‘needed to do his work’.

The Heavenly Records Hall.

It was vast. Endless shelves of jade and wood and gold, scrolls stacked in perfect, ancient order, talismans sealing them shut. Every decree Heaven had ever issued. Every prayer recorded. Every disaster archived. It smelled like dust, ink, and old responsibility.

Mu Qingfang looked at it with professional despair. “Can you make this faster?” he asked.

Shen Yuan stared at the sheer, bureaucratic suffering in front of him. “…You people are still running on scroll infrastructure,” he muttered. He stepped forward and touched the nearest shelf.

The Hall responded to him. Light spread from his hand, like a system rebooting; order reorganizing itself around efficiency.

After a moment, Shen Yuan was no longer standing in the Records Hall. He started to float.

Suspended in the vast air between shelves that stretched higher than any mortal skyscraper, robes and hair drifting weightlessly. The scrolls around him trembled, then lifted, rising toward him as if drawn by an unseen gravity.

His eyes glowed.

A sharp, artificial green; cold and bright, like LED lights in the dark. Not the warm qi-luminescence of immortals, but something precise and mechanical.

One by one, the scrolls unfolded midair, their ink rearranging into lines of clean light that streamed directly into Shen Yuan’s hands. The characters didn’t vanish; they transformed; flattening, encoding, compressing.

And suddenly, Shen Yuan started typing with both hands moving through the air, fingers striking invisible keys, building structures of glowing data in front of him. Each completed “file” dissolved and reappeared elsewhere in the Hall, reformatted, archived, indexed. Scanned and saved.

He was doing it manually, because Shen Yuan did not trust Heaven yet. He would build the system himself, line by line, until he knew where every flaw could hide.

Mu Qingfang watched in silence as the old bureaucracy of Heaven was slowly turned into something harder, better, faster, stronger. 

Something sharper. Something entirely under Shen Yuan’s control.

Scrolls unlocked. Reports rerouted. Thousands of sealed documents unfolded at once, their contents cross-referenced, sorted, timestamped. Prayers that had been waiting decades for review finally moved. Error marks appeared where contradictions existed. Entire gaps in Heaven’s recordkeeping surfaced like corrupted files finally exposed.

The notification of all of that echoed through the domain of all.

Mu Qingfang stared. “…Oh,” he said softly.

Across Heaven, officials froze. Some felt relief. Some felt fear. Shen Yuan felt powerful.

One of the scrolls that floated toward him did not feel like the others. Its header read: “Qing Jing Peak Style.”

Shen Yuan paused.

That alone was strange. He had already processed ten manuals from Qing Jing Peak (whatever that meant), and all of them had been nearly identical: same stances, same breathing patterns, same language. Heaven was nothing if not redundant.

This one, however… Was different.

The paper itself was older, the ink darker. The calligraphy was wrong, too sharp in places, too hesitant in others. The language shifted halfway through, like the writer had changed dialect or intention. Even the stances illustrated in thin strokes looked… off. Not refined, not elegant, not aligned.

Just wrong.

Shen Yuan hummed under his breath and flicked a finger, sweeping the page open in front of him.

He didn’t understand much about qi or martial arts. That had never been his department. But he understood systems, and this manual read like corrupted data. Like someone had taken something stable and edited it badly, leaving mismatched parts behind.

His fingers hovered over the invisible keyboard. He should enter it. Information was information. He was done with censorship. Done hiding things from the public. If Heaven wanted to store garbage, he would store it exactly as it was. That was the point of a database.

And yet —

His chest hurt. Just… a small, physical pressure, like static building behind his ribs.

Something made him want to cry.

This wasn’t simply “outdated technique.” It was fundamentally incorrect. If he digitized it, it would become official. It would circulate through Heaven’s networks, replicate, influence. Systems took bad input and produced worse output. He knew that intimately.

Shen Yuan stared at the glowing characters for a long moment.

“…What are you hiding?” he muttered to the scroll.

The paper, of course, did not answer.

When Shen Yuan finished typing the manual, the air itself was sealed. The last stroke of light locked into place, and the Records Hall shivered softly, like a system acknowledging new data. The network stretched, adapted, and reorganized itself around the information he had just uploaded.

Across Heaven, several gods and goddesses straightened unconsciously, their awareness brushing against the newly digitized text.

Mu Qingfang’s voice came, gentle but strained. “Shen Xiānshēng.”

“Yes?” Shen Yuan replied, glancing over.

Mu Qingfang was no longer smiling. “This manual is not right.”

Shen Yuan’s fingers paused over the invisible keyboard. “…Yeah. I noticed.”

Mu Qingfang stepped closer, eyes scanning the calligraphy, the diagrams, the intent behind the text. His voice dropped. “Where did you find it?”

“Oldest layers of the archive,” Shen Yuan answered. “Early Han Dynasty.”

Mu Qingfang went very still. “…I see.”

That was all he said.

But around them, several immortals barely shifted. A tightening of shoulders. A ripple of unstable qi. The kind of reaction that came from something deeply unpleasant.

Shen Yuan noticed. Of course he did.

He looked at Mu Qingfang. “That name means something here.”

Mu Qingfang hesitated. Then, quietly: “It was written when Shen Qingqiu governed Qing Jing Peak.”

A murmur rippled through the hall.

Shen Yuan blinked. “…Oh,” he said. It meant nothing to him, beyond the fact that it clearly meant everything to Heaven. He would need to research later.

Mu Qingfang exhaled more heavily this time. He reached out and placed a hand on Shen Yuan’s shoulder. “Don’t say that name out loud,” he whispered. He paused, looking down. “There’s still grief. He was… beloved.”

Shen Yuan frowned. “Beloved? By who?”

The doctor’s gaze lifted, just briefly, toward the highest tiers of Heaven, toward the empty chair, the sealed halls, the places where power had been sitting unchanged for two centuries.

“That,” he said softly, “is the question.”

So now Shen Yuan had a mission: Find out who the fuck Shen Qingqiu was and why just saying the name made immortals twitch like he’d opened an old scar.

He retreated into his domain. It didn’t look like a palace or a peak. It looked like a 3D holograph.

An endless, floating lattice of light and pathways, like glowing highways crossing the void. Data ran through it in streams: words, diagrams, prayers, faces, rumors, unfinished thoughts. Mortal messages climbed upward, divine decrees descended, and between them all stretched a shimmering web that only he could fully perceive.

The Heavenly Network.

He reached for the mortal internet first.

Nothing answered. No legends. No cult myths. No forums, no scraps of fandom, no footnotes of history. It was like trying to google a ghost.

The internet did not know Shen Qingqiu.

Which was… interesting.

Because the Han Dynasty (汉朝) was very much real. It had ruled China from 206 BCE to 220 CE, after the collapse of the Qin. It was the era of: Imperial centralization. Confucian state doctrine. Standardized bureaucracy and recordkeeping. Expansion of trade and culture along the Silk Road. And most importantly: control over what knowledge was preserved and what was quietly erased.

If someone important had lived in that era and left no trace on the internet, it meant their history had been filtered out long before the modern age.

Which meant Heaven still had it.

Shen Yuan turned back to the Records Hall.

Scrolls drifted around him like obedient satellites as he digitized them one by one. His eyes glowed faintly green, his fingers working through invisible interfaces, parsing Heaven’s ancient data structures like a system admin forced to clean up two thousand years of corruption.

Most books under Qing Jing Peak that time were identical, clearly to use as an educational manual. But some scrolls were different. They were not official doctrine, but diaries. Students’ personal cultivation journals. Records of training, frustrations, injuries and admiration.

He opened one at random. The calligraphy was neat but rushed, like someone writing between lessons.

 “Shizun was elegant today. He corrected my stance without touching me. His voice is… very gentle. I wish to improve faster so he might praise me again.”

Another one said: “He says cultivation should be balanced, not forced. That qi must move like water, not steel. Shizun knows everything.”

And another, far older:  “They say his methods are dangerous for his body. I do not believe it. I heard he has hurt his disciple. Bullshit. Shizun loves us and his cultivation is… stagnant, but he is powerful.”

Shen Yuan paused.

“…So they loved you,” he murmured.

The diaries were all preserved, kept like a reminder.  Every single one Shen Yuan opened felt… deliberate. As if someone had taken the time to collect them by hand, one by one, and place them here like treasures. Their bindings were intact. The ink had not faded. Even the qi imprint of the writers was still there, faint and lingering, like fingerprints left in devotion.

Some pages had childish drawings. If he can be frank, there were badly sketched swords, badly drawn clouds, badly drawn versions of their teacher with flowing robes and long hair.

Others had neat cultivation notes like breathing rhythms, corrections on stance and reminders to stabilize qi

One scroll was a homework assignment, corrected in red ink.  “Balance your spiritual roots,” the annotation read in an elegant calligraphy. “Do not force what is not ready.”

Another was a test paper. The student had clearly studied it again after being corrected; the margins were full of extra notes, rewritten explanations, improvements.

Shen Yuan stared at the handwriting. “…He was kind,” he murmured. Every record said the same thing, in different ways. ‘Shen Qingqiu had been beloved.’ By his disciples, by his peak, maybe by Heaven itself.

And yet his name was forbidden in the Heavenly Court.

That alone was suspicious.

But then Shen Yuan found the last diary. It was… different. The binding was cheaper. The paper was rougher. Whoever wrote this hadn’t been wealthy, or educated, or careful. The strokes were uneven and heavy, like the writer had been pressing too hard. It was at the end of everything, like a forgotten shame. It had no name or signature.

It read less like a record, and more like a confession.

Every page was about Shen Qingqiu. Not about his cultivation. Not about ascendition. Not about life. Just him.

“Shizun wore green and white today. It suits him better than dark green. I will tell him when he smiles at me again.”

“Shizun corrected my posture. His hands are warm. I think I could die happy like this.”

“Shizun does not eat much. I will make him congee. He must take care of himself. He belongs to Qing Jing Peak. He belongs… to me.”

The entries grew more frantic.

“The others don’t understand him. They think he is too gentle. They don’t see how powerful he is. I will protect him. Even from Heaven.”

There were sketches too. They were not silly ones. Detailed ones. Shen Qingqiu’s robes. His hands. His face. His eyes. Again and again and again.

Until the last page. It was written with shaking strokes, ink blotted and smeared. “Alliance Conference.”

That was all. No explanation. No closing. No farewell. Just that phrase, like the diary had stopped mid-life.

Shen Yuan stared at it for a long moment.

“…So whatever happened,” he said quietly, “it happened there.”

So, of course, Shen Yuan digitized them all. Every last scroll. Every notebook. Every scrap of paper that carried Shen Qingqiu’s name. Even the obsessive one. (Especially the obsessive one.)

Light flowed from his fingertips like threads of qi-turned-data, each stroke translating into lines of glowing script that vanished into Heaven’s newborn network. The Records Hall trembled softly as the archive accepted the information.

Throughout Heaven, the reaction was immediate. Several immortals stiffened where they stood. A few turned sharply toward the Records Hall. Others went very, very still. They could all feel it.

The God of the Internet had read it.

In the center of the hall, Shen Yuan hovered midair, toxic green light reflecting faintly in his eyes like LEDs behind glass. The last file uploaded with a quiet chime only he could hear.

Funny.

He dropped back down to the marble floor, the glow around him dimming. Mu Qingfang was already there. His eyes were wide.

“Shen Xiānshēng,” he whispered, voice hard. “What are you doing?”

Shen Yuan blinked at him. “My job?”

Mu Qingfang took a sharp breath, glancing around as if the shelves themselves might be listening.

“You just made that information… available. To everyone.”

“Well, yeah,” Shen Yuan said. “That’s kind of the point of an archive. Information should be accessible, not locked behind old seals and paranoia.”

Mu Qingfang stepped closer, lowering his voice even further. “You don’t understand,” he said with a somber look. “Those weren’t just historical records. They were… protected.”

Shen Yuan’s brows twitched upward. “Protected by who?”

Mu Qingfang hesitated. Then, almost too quietly to hear: “By the ones who loved him.”

A ripple passed through the hall. A pressure shift, like the air itself tightening. Shen Yuan felt it brush against his domain. He felt fear, anger, something like grief, all tangled together.

“…Right,” he said slowly. “That explains the secrecy.”

Mu Qingfang looked at him like he’d just opened a sealed coffin. “You need to stop,” he said. “Before anyone notices.”

Shen Yuan tilted his head. “They already noticed.”

Mu Qingfang pressed his lips together. He stepped closer. They were close enough that their sleeves brushed, close enough that Shen Yuan could feel the faint, steady pulse of healing qi surrounding him.

“Look,” Mu Qingfang murmured. His voice was low, meant only for Shen Yuan’s ears. “I know how curious you are. And I know you don’t tolerate injustice.” A small, helpless exhale. “That’s why I like you.”

He hesitated. Then leaned in even closer, until Shen Yuan could see the worry in his eyes, sharp and unhidden.

“But you need to stop.” The words landed softly, but they were heavy. Mu Qingfang turned his head slightly, and their gazes locked. The Records Hall felt impossibly quiet, like the entire place was holding its breath. “There are things,” he said, “that are better left in the dark. For your own good.”

Shen Yuan felt the warning settle into his chest like cold iron. He wondered whether the archive wasn’t just a library but a graveyard.

Mu Qingfang’s words lingered in the air like incense smoke. Shen Yuan had lived his whole mortal life inside threats like that; corporate hierarchies, political maneuvering, carefully controlled narratives. Every time someone said ‘don’t look too closely’, it meant the exact opposite.

It meant there was something worth finding. He gave Mu Qingfang a small, dry smile. “Mu Daifu,” he said lightly, “if Heaven wanted it left in the dark, they shouldn’t have handed it to the God of the Internet and Two-Face Lifes.”

Mu Qingfang’s brows drew together. “You don’t understand what you’re stirring.”

“Yeah,” Shen Yuan replied. “That's the whole point.”

He turned back toward the endless shelves of scrolls, their seals now glowing faintly in the network’s light, like veins illuminated under skin.

Someone had been keeping history. Someone had made sure Shen Qingqiu was remembered only in whispers and grief and half-erased ink.

That wasn’t an accident. And Shen Yuan had never been very good at obeying rules. His domain hummed around him, the newly digitized network flickering with potential, waiting for instruction.

“Let’s see,” he murmured, “what Heaven tried so hard to forget.”

And he kept going.

The next step was deeper.

Shen Yuan let his domain unfurl through the Heavenly Records Hall, his awareness threading into the archive like light into water. If Heaven had rewritten something, the seams would show. Systems always left scars.

He began sorting by era, by qi signature, by seal authority. And the inconsistencies started appearing immediately. Scrolls from the same year bore completely different calligraphy hands. Mission reports referenced a Peak Lord whose name had been replaced with blank talisman space, the seal humming faintly where a name used to be.

Heaven hadn’t deleted Shen Qingqiu, at least. It had only edited him. And it had done so repeatedly.

The earlier mission logs were clear enough. Shen Qingqiu was active, precise, and apparently very competent. He oversaw dozens of assignments, traveling between sect territories like a wandering instructor.

But then, something changed. For a span of three consecutive years, his mission count surged. He was everywhere. He never seemed to stay on Qing Jing Peak for long. After those three years, the records stopped.  For the next five years, Shen Qingqiu completed no missions at all.

No reports. No travel logs. No cultivation updates. No seclusion notice. 

Nothing.

Then, five years later, he appeared again. But now, every mission record listed two participants. Shen Qingqiu and someone else. Except the second name had been scrubbed entirely, replaced with empty seal-space. Not erased like an error, but hidden like a classified identity.

After that point, the two of them were everywhere. Large campaigns. Demon hunts. Sect conferences. Regional disputes.

The only times Shen Qingqiu acted alone were for short, surgical missions; fast, efficient, almost like he was only stepping out when absolutely necessary.

Like he had someone to protect. Or someone who protected him.

Shen Yuan stared at the empty space where the second name should have been. “…That’s not right,” he murmured. “This reek of fear.”

Once Shen Yuan finished digitizing the evidence, the reaction rippled through Heaven like static. Several immortals abruptly stopped whatever they were doing. A few of the Twelve Chairs guys went rigid. 

The network knew. Good. That meant it was working.

Shen Yuan turned his attention to the other half of the problem: the blank guy. If Heaven had erased Shen Qingqiu’s partner, then anything tied to that same authority would carry the same kind of scar. He filtered the archive by redacted signatures, matching seal-void patterns against one another.

The results came back fast.

Most of them were labeled under a single category: Hostile Entity. Demon Sovereign. Domain Unknown.

Shen Yuan opened the first scroll. The name was blank. The species was blank. The age was blank. The territory was not.

An empire that spanned half the demon world. Trade routes. Demon clans. Border skirmishes. Whole regions marked as under his influence. So immortals had once acknowledged him as a geopolitical threat.

The tone of the reports was consistent. It was clearly personal. 

“Unsettling.” “Volatile.” “Cruel.” “Unnatural.” “Unfit for rule.” “A demon lord driven by rage.” One even described his aura as “capable of destabilizing divine qi.”

“Kill on sight.”

“…Okay,” Shen Yuan muttered, scrolling through. “Subtle.”

Then he noticed something else. By the time Shen Qingqiu went to those missing five years, it started to mention this same demon lord. Always as the enemy. Always as the aggressor. Always as the villain.

The Other.

Shen Yuan paused, reading one particularly dramatic account.

“…So,” he said slowly, “Apparently… this terrifying demon emperor was everywhere Shen Qingqiu was.” He leaned back, fingers tapping against his chin. “…And they were apparently working together.”

That explained the censorship and the fear. And, for some reason, that made Shen Yuan’s ears feel a little warm.

“…Wow,” he added under his breath. “A forbidden immortal alliance and a demon warlord boyfriend. Peak Lord really said ‘I contain multitudes’.”

He uploaded the data and put some commentary about how gay people were awesome. 

Across Heaven, the panic doubled.

The next day, Heaven called for him. A formal summons, stamped with the authority of the Celestial Administration, arrived directly through his domain.

Shen Yuan almost laughed. A conference. Of course. He was usually the one calling those.

He followed the pull of the summons and stepped into the great assembly hall.

It was opulent in the way only Heaven could afford to be: jade pillars carved with clouds and dragons, silk banners hanging like waterfalls of color, golden talismans glowing faintly along the walls. At the center was the circular floor where cases were heard, judged, and quietly buried.

And at the highest seat sat Yue Qingyuan. His expression was solemn and serious. The kind of face a man wore when he had already decided how this was supposed to go.

Shen Yuan recognized it instantly. Ah, he thought. One of those meetings.

To the sides of Yue Qingyuan were the twelve great seats of the Heavenly Court. Mu Qingfang was there too. He looked… terrible. Like he hadn’t slept. Like he had known something he wished he hadn’t. His usual gentle composure was gone, replaced with a tightness in his shoulders that made Shen Yuan feel, for a brief moment, guilty.

The other seats were filled with immortals Shen Yuan heard by gossip and observations, but he could read their reactions easily enough. Some were wary (Shang Qinghua). Some were annoyed (Qi Qingqi). Some looked almost angry (Liu Qingge).

And the only empty seat. The first seat to Yue Qingyuan’s right.

He took his place in the center circle, hands folded elegantly, posture perfect. If they wanted to play politics, he could play too.

“Shen Yuan,” Yue Qingyuan said, voice echoing through the chamber. “You have been… active within the Records Hall.”

Shen Yuan smiled faintly. “I was under the impression that was what you brought me here for.”

A few immortals stiffened. Mu Qingfang’s eyes closed briefly, as if in pain. Yue Qingyuan’s gaze didn’t waver.

“You have uncovered sealed historical records. You have made restricted information available through the heavenly network. You have done so without authorization.”

“…That sounds like censorship policy, not divine law,” Shen Yuan replied lightly.

The room chilled.

“You are young,” another god scoffed. “You don’t understand the consequences of disturbing certain archives.”

“Then explain them,” Shen Yuan said. That was when he leaned forward just a bit, gaze sharp and clear. “Because I don’t think Heaven is afraid of history,” he said. “I think Heaven is afraid of Shen Qingqiu's memory.”

Silence.

The kind that only came when everyone knew the name he had just said should not have been spoken.

And in the highest seat, Yue Qingyuan’s fingers tightened on the jade armrest.

“Careful,” he said quietly. “Do not say that name.”

Shen Yuan looked at the empty first chair. “…Right,” he said softly. “So he mattered, but not enough to be mentioned.”

And that was when Heaven realized it had made a mistake letting him in.

“You can’t just —” Shen Yuan made a broad, exasperated gesture with both hands, as if trying to physically push the nonsense away. “— edit history. You can’t just erase an entire existence because you didn’t like how things turned out.”

His voice echoed sharply in the marble hall.

“‘History is written by the winners,’ some idiot once said. And he’s fucking right. But that’s supposed to be a warning, not a policy.” 

Several immortals bristled. Yue Qingyuan’s face remained solemn. Still. The perfect mask of divine authority. Shen Yuan laughed under his breath. It wasn’t a nice sound.

“You don’t understand what you are saying.” Liu Qingge barked.

“You’re gods and goddesses,” he went on, voice rising. “The most powerful beings in all realms. And you’re telling me you’re afraid? Afraid of the truth? Afraid of a man you supposedly loved?” He pointed vaguely at the surrounding seats. “Shame on you. Shame on your entire government. You run Heaven like a propaganda machine, and then you act offended when someone turns on the lights.”

The network flickered faintly around him, responding to his agitation like static.

“What are you going to do with me, huh? Because I showed what was already there? Because I refused to pretend that your lies are sacred?” A pause. His eyes burned bright green. “Throw me in prison? Torture me? Silence me like you silenced him? His demon loved one?”

Mu Qingfang flinched.

Shen Yuan’s voice softened just a little, not kinder, but sharper. “You claim you loved Shen Qingqiu. And yet you distort every record of him. You erase his partner. You rewrite his peak. You make it illegal to even say his name.”

He looked up at Yue Qingyuan directly. “How is that love?”

Silence. 

Shen Yuan’s breath was coming faster now, like he had just climbed a mountain instead of shouted at Heaven. “Power has fried your brains,” he muttered. “You’re supposed to be better than this. You’re Heaven. You’re the example. And you’re just… the same as the systems below.”

He rubbed at his temple, tired and irritated with everything. “…Fuck you, honestly.” He exhaled, long and shaky, and finally sagged back into himself.

“…Okay,” he added quietly. “Maybe I’m overdoing it.”

But no one laughed.

And the first empty chair at Yue Qingyuan’s right seemed to hum with a silence all its own.

The silence after Shen Yuan’s words stretched, taut and shimmering. Then, somewhere among the gathered immortals, someone whispered —

“He sounds like him.”

It wasn’t loud. But in a hall like this, it didn’t have to be.

Yue Qingyuan’s gaze shifted. A flicker, a sharp movement of his eyes toward the speaker. He said nothing, but the air itself seemed to tighten, like the Court was bracing for a name no one dared to say.

Shen Yuan caught the change instantly. Oh, he thought. So I hit something real.

Yue Qingyuan exhaled, long and tired, and dragged a hand down his face. “…Xiao Jiu,” he murmured under his breath, the name slipping out like a prayer he had no right to say.

The hall froze.

Liu Qingge stilled mid-motion. His jaw was set tight, eyes sharp with anger. “Shen Qingqiu would be ashamed,” he said coldly, “to be erased from history like this. I always disliked that decision and you know it.”

Yue Qingyuan let out a short, hollow laugh. “No,” he replied. “He wouldn’t like it.” His gaze flicked to the empty first chair at his right. “He would be furious for what we did to his husband.”

A ripple passed through the twelve seated gods, it smelled like shared guilt.

Mu Qingfang stood there, hands folded inside his sleeves, lips pressed thin and pale. He looked like he was holding his own heart in place.

“Speak, Mu Shidi,” Yue Qingyuan said, his voice sharp now. “You have something to say.”

Mu Qingfang swallowed. His voice, when it came, was low and strained. “In Heaven, we follow the cycle of rebirth and karmic return. A soul does not end when the body does. It is refined through suffering, through virtue, through its attachments. Those who die with strong intent are often… drawn back.” He glanced at Shen Yuan. “When Shen Yuan ascended, this master examined the structure of his spiritual core. His qi channels. His karmic residue.” A beat. “…They are identical to Shen Qingqiu’s.”

The chamber went utterly silent.

Shang Qinghua sigh like there was a mountain on his chest. He passed bis hands through his face.

Liu Qingge’s face went white. “What,” he said flatly, “does that mean.”

Mu Qingfang took a breath, steadying himself. “This Mu Daifu has reason to believe…” His eyes closed briefly, as if bracing for the weight of his own words. “…that Shen Yuan is the reincarnation of Shen Qingqiu.”

Even the banners in the hall stopped moving.

Yue Qingyuan’s hand tightened on the armrest of the jade throne.

“…So Heaven erased him…,” Shang Qinghua said slowly, “and then he came back anyway.”

Mu Qingfang looked at him, something between sorrow and relief crossing his face. “Yes,” he said softly. “That is how karma works.”

The empty chair hummed.

And Heaven realized the past had not stayed buried at all.

“God of Two-Faced Lives,” Shen Yuan muttered under his breath.

Yeah. That tracked.

He stood in the middle of Heaven’s court, surrounded by beings who had existed longer than most human civilizations, and somehow the part that unsettled him the most wasn’t the politics or the censorship.

It was the implication that he had already lived once.

Shen Yuan had always considered himself an atheist. Death, in his view, was a hard stop. A clean ending. You died, you were gone, and the world moved on without you.

Except…. He was here… standing in a divine bureaucracy. Here, he was listening to a god of medicine calmly inform him that his soul had a previous version.

So maybe the Buddhists had a point after all. Maybe karma wasn’t just moral accounting, it was data persistence. A soul looped like a bad GIF on Twitter.

…Great, Shen Yuan thought. Turns out reincarnation is just cloud storage for the human spirit. 

His hands tightened in his sleeves. If he had been Shen Qingqiu once, then what did that make him now? Was he still himself, or was he just… a patch update? Who was he, really? The CEO? The politician? The sarcastic internet troll?

Or the man Heaven had loved enough to erase?

And worse…  Who was he supposed to be to the one Heaven called his husband?

His domain pulsed faintly around him, the living network of Heaven responding to his thoughts like a heartbeat.

Two-faced lives. Maybe the Jade Emperor hadn’t been joking. Maybe Shen Yuan had been living as two people for a lot longer than he thought, the idea of eternity felt less like power and more like a burden.

“Xiao Jiu,” Yue Qingyuan murmured. The name fell soft and trembling, like something fragile he had carried for centuries.

Then, in a blink, he was there standing directly in front of Shen Yuan. Before Shen Yuan could step back, Yue Qingyuan lifted a hand and gently cupped his cheek, as if reassuring himself that this wasn’t a dream.

The contact made Shen Yuan’s breath hitch. For half a heartbeat, he didn’t move. Then he snarled. He turned his face sharply to the side, breaking the touch, eyes flashing.

“Don’t,” he said through clenched teeth. “Do not call me that.” The hall inhaled as one. “That’s not mine name.” Yue Qingyuan’s hand fell back to his side, fingers curling in the empty air. His expression tightened, like he had expected this rejection, but it still hurt. Shen Yuan’s voice has become colder now. “I’m not him,” he said. “I don’t care what your karmic charts say. That man’s life is gone. Whatever he was, whatever he loved, whatever he lost — it’s not mine.”

The silence stretched.

Then, quietly, from somewhere in the rows of immortals:  “He really is just like Shen Qingqiu.”

A few others nodded. Soft sighs, like wind through leaves. 

Yue Qingyuan closed his eyes briefly. “…Yes,” he said under his breath. “He really is.”

Because Heaven hadn’t just lost Shen Qingqiu. It had lost the chance to make things right. And now he was standing here again, just not forgiving.

Shen Yuan felt cornered.

The pressure in the Heavenly Court was different from mortal politics. There, at least, he could play the game. Here, he was the game.

He wasn’t the one asking questions anymore. He was the anomaly everyone was staring at, weighing, remembering. And it terrified him.

He would not normally snap at Yue Qingyuan. He even liked him. The man had been nothing but gentle, composed, almost kind. But if the things Mu Qingfang said were true, if Shen Yuan had once been Shen Qingqiu, then that kindness was built on something ugly.

On erasure. On betrayal. On whatever had happened to the man Heaven refused to name.

His husband, Shen Yuan thought, and the word lodged in his throat like glass.

He wasn’t even gay. Was he? Fuck.

His temples throbbed.

If he had lived before, if he had loved before, then who was he now? And why did Heaven look at him like he had returned from the dead just to judge them?

He wished that he could at least remember the name of the one they had taken from him. That felt like something important.

“I need some time,” Shen Yuan said at last.

Shen Yuan did what he did best.

He ran.

Before anyone could respond, his form dissolved. Static rippled across the floor, bright and stuttering, like a broken transmission. Light folded inward on itself, toxic green and humming.

Then he was gone.

One blink he was in the Heavenly Court, drowning in ancient guilt and divine expectation. The next, he was standing in front of a familiar door painted a soft, chipped pink.

His sister’s room.

He pushed it open and stepped inside like a man returning from war. The space was… chaos. (The comforting kind.)

Clothes were draped over the back of a chair, half-folded, half-forgotten. A hairbrush sat abandoned on the desk, still tangled with strands of dark hair. The vanity mirror was cluttered with little glass bottles of perfume, cheap lip glosses, and sticky notes written in looping, hurried handwriting.

A couple of old drama posters hung crooked on the wall. Shen Tang’s smiling face looking down at him in glittering costume, frozen in some heroic pose. There were stuffed animals piled in the corner, their fabric worn from years of being hugged and tossed aside.

It smelled like her. Sweet, floral, unmistakably human.

Shen Yuan exhaled, tension slipping out of his shoulders.

After Heaven’s endless marble halls and polished jade floors, this room felt impossibly small, impossibly imperfect and safe. Here, nothing had been edited out of existence. Here, nothing had been erased.

The blankets on her bed were rumpled. A notebook lay open on the floor, full of doodles and scribbled lines. Even the curtains looked like they had been drawn without care, letting sunlight spill in at odd angles.

Warm. Alive.

Shen Yuan dropped onto the edge of her bed, running a hand through his hair.

“Tang'er,” he muttered. “I'm home.”

Heaven waited for him to be a god. In here, he could just be a man trying not to fall apart.

There was a noise in the far end of the apartment.

Shen Yuan heard it immediately, of course he did. His domain stretched through every wire, every vibration, every tiny electrical signal in the building. The footsteps were familiar.

Still, he didn’t move.

The door burst open.

A split second later, something cold and stinging sprayed directly into his face. Pepper spray. Shen Yuan blinked. It didn’t exactly hurt, being a god had its perks, but it did make his eyes water a little out of reflex.

“STALKER!” Shen Tang shrieked, voice high and furious.

“Meimei,” Shen Yuan wheezed, laughing through the tears. “It’s me! San-ge!”

She froze. Then she let out the loudest gasp he had ever heard in his life and hurled herself straight into his arms.

They were the same height, something Shen Yuan had always found deeply unfair. He’d inherited their mother’s smaller frame and softer features, while Shen Tang had taken after their father entirely. Taller, sharper, and currently wearing heels that made her look like she could step on him with righteous authority.

“San-ge!” she cried again, but this time it was all relief. “Where the hell have you been, you bastard? Do you know how worried we were? Mom fainted, Da ge and Er ge flew back from their research projects, and — what the hell was that thing on stage?!”

She pulled back just enough to look at him, hands still gripping his sleeves like he might vanish again.

Then the rant started. Words poured out of her like a flood about family updates, panic, accusations, dramatic retellings of events, all at once.

Apparently their parents had gone into full crisis mode, his brothers had nearly started a national incident trying to figure out what happened. The media had been insufferable (that he knew, since it was his domain). And Shen Tang herself had considered breaking into the sky personally if he didn’t come home.

Shen Yuan let her talk, arms still loosely around her shoulders. The world felt real again. Messy. Loud. Familiar.

“…Yeah,” he thought, holding her a little tighter.

This was the kind of chaos he understood.

Shen Tang stepped back once she ran out of breath. Her hands slid slowly from his sleeves, and she just… stared at him.

Her voice dropped. “You look different.”

Shen Yuan frowned and turned toward the mirror on the wall. He didn’t recognize the man looking back.

His hair had grown long, falling in dark, smooth to his shoulders, like some wandering cultivator from a cheap webnovel. It caught the light faintly, threaded with a soft green shimmer, as if the qi in his body had decided to show off.

His eyes were worse. They glowed an unmistakable, toxic neon green, sharp and bright like LED lights behind glass. Not human. Not natural. The kind of color you only got in fantasy dramas and high-budget CGI.

His skin looked flawless, almost luminous, like it had been rendered instead of grown.

Even his old glasses sat differently now, resting on his nose like an accessory, the lenses faintly iridescent as if they were filtering more than just light.

And his clothes…

“…Wow,” Shen Yuan muttered. “I look like I fell face-first into a bad AO3 xianxia AU.”

He was wearing something that could only be described as a modern hanfu designed by an overenthusiastic cyberpunk engineer. The base was traditional: long, flowing robes in layered silks, tied at the waist with a dark sash embroidered in fine silver thread.

But woven into the fabric were thin, glowing circuit patterns, pulsing faintly with the rhythm of his domain. Lines of light traced the edges of his sleeves and hem, like the clothing itself was part of the network.

Metal clasps held the layers together at his shoulders, sleek and polished, etched with tiny runes that flickered when he moved. A translucent overcoat fell from his back like a cape of light, its edges glitching softly like holograms struggling to stabilize.

The whole thing looked expensive.

Powerful.

And very, very not normal.

He didn’t even realize he started to look like them. He never once looked in the mirror.

Shen Yuan stared at himself for a long moment. “…Yeah,” he said quietly. “That tracks too.”

Behind him, Shen Tang blinked. “…You look like you could smite someone with Wi-Fi,” she offered.

“…Please don’t tell Heaven that,” he replied.

“Heaven?” Shen Tang asked, her voice suddenly very small. “Is that where you’ve been?”

Shen Yuan sighed and dragged a hand down his face, slipping his glasses off and rubbing at his eyes. “Yeah.”

Her brows knit together. “Like… those novels you used to read?”

“…Yeah.” She stared at him. Then her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Like a very shocked goldfish. Shen Yuan couldn’t help it, he laughed. “Wow,” he said. “You’re taking this way better than the actual gods did.”

Shen Tang made a helpless sound, like her brain was buffering. “So you just — what? Ascended? Got hit by lightning? Became a god?” she asked, gesturing vaguely at his glowing outfit, his glowing eyes, his whole glowing existence.

“Something like that,” Shen Yuan replied. “It was very dramatic. Lots of thunder. Extremely inconvenient.”

She blinked at him again. “…San ge,” she said slowly, “you look like the final boss of the internet.”

“…Rude,” he said.

“…Accurate,” she added.

He laughed again, softer this time, and leaned back against her desk, feeling like maybe he could actually breathe.

“The memes are insane,” Shen Tang said at last. “Half the internet is celebrating you, and the other half is losing their minds. Some homophobic idiots are saying God hates the gays because He had smite you.”

Shen Yuan scoffed. “Please. There’s gay marriage in China now and they can't do anything about it.”

She nodded. “They were too scared to take it back,” she said dryly. Then she glanced at him, hesitated, and her ears went pink. “So… do you have someone? Is that why you made that law?”

Shen Yuan opened his mouth, ready to say something ridiculous and flamboyant; something like ‘this one’s for the gays’, like Lady Gaga would say at the Grammys.

But the words died on his tongue. Because there was someone. A husband. A demon lord. Powerful. Terrifying. And somehow, the thought of him made Shen Yuan’s chest ache in a way he couldn’t explain.

He swallowed and looked at his sister. “What do you think?” he said quietly.

Shen Tang studied him for a moment, her smirk softening into something gentler. “I think Mama and Baba would really like to see you again,” she said. “They’d want to congratulate you. Their son, a god.” Then she nudged him with her shoulder, grinning. “I thought I was going to be the family’s big star, and you just went and outdid me.”

Shen Yuan laughed, but it sounded thinner than before. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess I did.”

For a moment, Shen Yuan just looked at her.

At the way her eyeliner was slightly smudged, at the chipped polish on her nails, at the faint scent of her perfume that still clung to the room like home.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her until now. Something in his chest tightened, too fragile. Before he could overthink it, he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her.

Shen Tang made a startled noise. “Hey — what’s this for?”

“Just,” he murmured into her shoulder, holding her a little tighter. “I missed you.”

She went still for half a second. Then she hugged him back just as fiercely, like she was afraid he might vanish again.

“Idiot,” she said, her voice wobbling despite the insult. “You scared us half to death.”

“Yeah,” Shen Yuan replied softly. “I know.”

The static in his head quieted.

The endless stream of voices fell away. No posts, no likes, no reposts. No flashing gifs, no arguments spiraling into the void. No strange mortal humor or screaming fandom wars. No electricity humming through his veins, no data pouring through his hands.

For once, the network went silent.

He was not a god. He was not a domain.

He was only Shen Yuan. The third son, standing in his sister’s messy room, breathing the same air 

After a phone call (and the crying, and the crying after the crying) Shen Yuan found himself back where he belonged: sitting on the floor of his sister’s living room, surrounded by tea cups and red-eyed faces.

His father had cried so hard he nearly threw up. His mother kept dabbing at her eyes. Shen Tang still had a grip on his sleeve, as if he might vanish again if she let go.

“So,” Shen Wei said, voice hoarse but already back to his usual brand of unhelpful. “Heaven wants to turn you into Shen Qingqiu.”

“That’s… what they’re saying,” Shen Yuan admitted.

Shen Wei nodded once, solemn. “Burn their library.”

“…That’s not helpful.”

“It’s extremely helpful,” Shen Wei replied. “If the truth is in there and they’re scared of it, you burn the whole thing down and see what screams.”

Shen Li, who was the only one with a functioning sense of reason, adjusted his glasses and asked quietly, “Can you refuse godhood? Or is this mandatory divine conscription?”

“I don’t know,” Shen Yuan said. “They didn’t exactly hand me an opt-out form when I asked.”

“Oh, darling,” his father sobbed, taking a shaky sip of tea. “If they try to rewrite your soul, we’ll impeach them.”

“Can you impeach Heaven?” Shen Yuan asked.

His father looked offended. “We can impeach anyone.”

“They haven’t impeached Trump yet.”

“That’s because they are americans.”

“Maybe a plebiscite?” his mother suggested weakly. “We can vote on it.”

Shen Yuan covered his face. “…I’m the god of the internet, and my family’s solution is democracy.”

Shen Tang patted his shoulder. “You have Wi-Fi. You have leverage.”

“We could make an online petition,” Shen Yuan offered, rubbing his temples. “Since I technically control… everything.”

“That is the stupidest idea you’ve ever had, San Di,” Shen Wei said flatly.

“…I literally am the internet.”

“Exactly. No one trusts the guy who runs the internet.” Shen Tang huffed.

Shen Wei leaned forward suddenly, eyes bright with the thrill of a terrible plan. “Alright. I’ve got it. We kill Yue Qingyuan.”

Shen Tang let out a shrill, hysterical laugh. “San Ge just told us he’s the strongest man in Heaven.”

“Nothing beats the power of friendship,” Shen Wei replied.

“A big sword can,” Shen Tang shot back.

“That’s still technically friendship if you stab together,” he argued.

Shen Li, who had been silently thinking with his eyes closed like a proper strategist, finally spoke. “We should find Shen Qingqiu’s husband.”

The room went quiet.

“…Right,” Shen Yuan said slowly. “Because the demon lord who got erased from Heaven’s records sounds like a perfectly stable ally.”

“He might be the only one who doesn’t want Heaven to rewrite you,” Shen Li continued calmly. “If anyone would be angry about what they did, it’s him.”

“…He might also take one look at me and decide I am Shen Qingqiu,” Shen Yuan muttered.

His mother sniffed, still clutching her tea. “He was erased too. And we don’t even know what happened to Shen Qingqiu after.”

A pause.

“…Yeah,” Shen Yuan said. “That’s the terrifying part.” He sighed, rubbing his temples. “How does one even search for a husband when Heaven erased him from the records and there’s nothing about him online?”

“Did you try the internet?” Shen Tang asked.

“I can’t stress this enough,” Shen Yuan snapped. “I am the internet. Were you not listening to anything I said?”

Shen Li calmly tapped his index finger against his teacup. “You’re not just the god of the internet. You’re the god of data. That means you can trace the effect of what was erased, you know? The patterns. Things like mission reports that suddenly required dual confirmation. Records around that Alliance Conference. Spiritual signatures left in talismans. Demonic qi from old battles. Don’t look for the name… look for the gap.”

His mother nodded thoughtfully. “Or search for qi resonance. Everyone leaves a frequency behind.”

“Check with the civil gods,” his father added. “That Shang Qinghua fellow, you said he is the god of contracts and money. If offerings were rerouted, he’d know.”

“He is also the god of lies.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“I have a better idea,” Shen Wei declared, leaning forward with manic enthusiasm. “The underworld! They have karmic ledgers, soul migrations, demon realm registries. If Heaven tried to erase someone, the cycle of rebirth would have a record. And if that fails, just search for what Heaven blocks. Follow the censorship. The truth always hides where they’re afraid you’ll look.”

Shen Tang clasped her hands. “That’s so romantic… Imagine going to hell to look for your loved one. Just like Orpheus and Ophelia.”

“…You mean Eurydice,” Shen Yuan muttered.

“Yeah, that one.”

The siblings snorted at the same time.

“The problem is…” Shen Yuan said after some time, glancing around at his family. “I already checked the blank spaces for the husband.” With a flick of his wrist, a holographic projection unfolded in the middle of the room. Lines of glowing text, diagrams of qi signatures, fragments of divine reports. “This is everything I found about the demon lord,” he explained. “He’s powerful. A ruler of some kind.”

“Ooooh, you rascal,” Shen Tang whistled.

Shen Wei made a scandalized noise. “San Di has a type now, huh?”

Shen Yuan ignored them. “He’s listed as a rising demonic emperor,” he continued. “Appeared out of nowhere, destabilized half the border regions, and then —” he gestured vaguely, “— fucked everything up.”

That earned a round of snorts and laughter.

“Yes, yes, very funny,” Shen Yuan muttered. “The guy pops into existence, ruins the balance of three realms, somehow goes into missions together with Shen Qingqiu and then Heaven just… deletes him. That’s all I could find in the public divine records.” He tapped the projection, and it shimmered, showing only gaps and redacted seals. “Which means,” he said, quieter now, “if I want the truth, I’m going to have to dig somewhere they really don’t want me to.”

“So, we have two options,” Shen Tang declared, crossing her arms.

“We?” Shen Yuan snorted. “Since when are you part of divine political espionage?”

Shen Tang ignored him with the grace of someone who had grown up being the favorite child. “We either go to Shang Qinghua… or we go to the Underworld.”

Shen Li looked thoughtful. “What do we actually know about the Underworld?”

Shen Yuan leaned back against the couch, fingers steepled. This, at least, was something he understood. “In mythology,” he began, “the Underworld isn’t just one hell. It’s a whole bureaucracy. Called Dìyù (地獄), the Earth Prison. A layered system of courts and judges where souls are evaluated, punished, purified, and sent back into the cycle of rebirth.”

“Like an afterlife courthouse,” Shen Tang said.

“Exactly. But with more torture.” He waved his hand, and another hologram unfolded, this one full of ancient seals and names. “At the top of the system is Yánluó Wáng (閻羅王), the King of Hell. He’s one of the Ten Yama Kings who rule the ten courts of judgment. Each court handles different sins, karmic debts, and reincarnation orders.”

“Ten kings?” Shen Wei blinked. “Why ten?”

“Because if you’re going to run an eternal punishment realm, you might as well delegate.” Shen Yuan flicked the hologram again, revealing other divine administrators. “Then there’s Dìzàng Púsà (地藏菩薩), the Bodhisattva who oversees mercy in the Underworld. He’s the one who vowed not to achieve enlightenment until all hells are empty. So if Heaven tried to erase someone’s existence from the karmic cycle, he would absolutely know.”

His mother’s eyes widened. “That sounds like someone we want on our side.”

“Yes,” Shen Yuan agreed. “Very powerful. Very kind. Very difficult to bullshit.”

“You would know.”

“Shut up.”

“Anyone else?” Shen Li asked.

“Oh, plenty.” Shen Yuan’s expression sharpened. “There’s also Hēi Wúcháng (黑無常) and Bái Wúcháng (白無常), the Black and White Impermanence. They’re basically the Underworld’s… soul police. They escort spirits from the mortal world to judgment.”

Shen Wei perked up. “Finally. Someone with a useful job title.”

“And most importantly,” Shen Yuan said, lowering his voice, “there’s the Book of Life and Death (生死簿). It records every single soul’s lifespan, fate, karmic record, and reincarnation.” He let that sink in. “If Heaven erased the demon lord from Heaven’s archives,” Shen Yuan finished, “the Underworld is the one place that would still have his true name.”

Silence fell.

“Therefore… I’m going to Hell,” Shen Yuan replied after that awkward pause.

"We are going to Hell,” Shen Tang corrected. “As a family.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Shen Yuan shot back. “I’m a god. You’re mortal. You are not going to Hell.”

“Can we not curse at the table?” their father asked weakly.

“We’re sitting on the floor,” Shen Wei pointed out. “And San Di is literally a god.”

“God or not,” their father insisted, “she’s still your sister.”

Their mother sighed, exhausted. “Go talk to Shang Qinghua first. Then you can go to Hell.” She took a deep breath, already regretting every life choice that led here. “Try not to be radical about this.”

Shen Yuan stared at her. “…You’re telling me not to be radical,” he said, “about Heaven erasing my husband from existence.”

“Yes,” she replied firmly. “Because you always make things worse when you’re emotional.”

“…That’s fair.”

After too many hugs, a few stolen kisses to the top of his sister and mother’s head, and enough food packed by the house staff to sustain a small army, Shen Yuan finally left home.

He took the bag and new clothes that weren’t too cyberpunk. He also took a photograph of his family. It was proof that something in the world was still real.

Then he went hunting.

He followed what he understood best. Money. The Heavenly domain had a smell. It was a hint of old parchment, incense, dust, but underneath all that: coin, sweat, and the anxious rot of secrets. Shen Yuan tracked it like a bloodhound.

He was not a fighter. He preferred silence, mediation, and not getting stabbed. But when necessary, he knew how to be vicious.

He stepped into Shang Qinghua’s records office like a shadow sliding under a door. A sharp iron fan unfolded in his hand, his weapon of choice. It was elegant and lethal, the kind of thing a man like Shen Yuan would carry.

Shang Qinghua looked up.

They were the same height. Unfortunately for Shang Qinghua, Shen Yuan was wearing boots with heels. His sister’s favorite intimidation tactic. It worked.

He cornered the civil god against a wall of scrolls, fan pressed lightly against the man’s throat.

Shang Qinghua whimpered.

“Now,” Shen Yuan said calmly, “I have a very simple question.” The fan’s edge glinted. “If Heaven erased someone from the worship channels, where did the offerings go?”

Shang Qinghua swallowed.

Shen Yuan tilted his head. “…And also,” he added, voice softer and somehow more dangerous, “can gods die?” Because he was about to find out.

“Cu– Cucumber-xiong… my bro,” Shang Qinghua whispered, voice thin as paper.

Shen Yuan froze. His anger sharpened instantly, cutting into something deeper than rage. A shiver ran down his spine. “…How do you know that name?” Shen Yuan asked, low and dangerous.

Shang Qinghua swallowed hard. “ I — we’re friends!”

“We have never spoken to each other,” Shen Yuan snapped.

He drove his knee into Shang Qinghua’s stomach. The civil god doubled over with a breathless oof, wheezing and clutching at his robes.

“M-me and Shen Qingqiu were friends!” Shang Qinghua gasped. “I swear!”

That made the pressure in Shen Yuan’s chest spike. The static in his veins buzzed. “That doesn’t explain,” Shen Yuan said, voice trembling with fury, “how you know my username.”

Shang Qinghua looked at him with wide, terrified eyes. Because the truth was already there, hovering between them. And Shen Yuan was starting to realize: If Shang Qinghua knew Peerless Cucumber… Then maybe Heaven had known all along.

As if reading his mind, Shang Qinghua denied with his head, shaking it frantically. His breathing grew more like a mouse caught in a trap. “No, no, no,” he wheezed, tears gathering in his eyes. “Nobody knows that name. Only me.”

That was a relief.

Shen Yuan’s grip tightened on the fan. “So you did know from the beginning and chose not to say anything,” he growled.

Shang Qinghua’s shoulders trembled. “I knew you wouldn’t know me. You… You're a new person now. I have no right to claim you.”

“You literally just said we were friends,” Shen Yuan pointed out, though he finally stepped back.

His chest still hurt, but not as sharply.

Shang Qinghua let out a weak, breathless laugh. “You were about to decapitate me. I needed you curious, not murderous.”

“Well,” Shen Yuan scoffed, “color me surprised by your sudden display of rational thought. It seems you can do more than beg for your life and swear loyalty after all.”

For a moment, something unreadable passed through Shang Qinghua’s eyes. Then he smiled, closing them softly. “Yeah,” he murmured. “This old dog is always learning.”

Shen Yuan dragged a hand through his hair. “Man,” he said, exhaling. “I am so confused right now.”

Shang Qinghua let out a slightly hysterical giggle. “Don’t worry. You only have a few millennia to get used to godhood drama. You think this is bad? You should see the shit I have to manage. Gods don’t get wiser with time, they get worse every century. I know it, since I'm a merchant, basically a servant.”

Shen Yuan smirked faintly and bluffed: “There’s a black market in Heaven. And you’re running it.”

He groaned, but he was smiling. “You haven’t even been here a year and you’ve already figured me out.”

“You’re the god of lies and money,” Shen Yuan said dryly. “And I’m not an idiot.”

Shang Qinghua’s expression softened for a moment, something almost fond flickered there. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You’re not.” Then, louder, with a crooked grin: “You can be a bastard and a prissy bitch —”

“Hey!” Shen Yuan protested.

“— but you are not an idiot.”

They laughed together. That was a brief, fragile pause of shared absurdity.

Then Shen Yuan sighed, slipping the fan back into his belt. He rolled his shoulders, eyes closing as if steadying himself. “You know where my husband is, then,” he said.

The air in the room shifted. Electricity hummed around him, lifting his hair like static before a storm.

Shang Qinghua’s smile faded. He exhaled slowly. “There’s not much I can say,” he admitted. “I signed a contract. It binds directly to my core; no loopholes, no half-truths. The god of lies… is forbidden from telling the truth.”

“When?” Shen Yuan demanded.

“A long time ago,” Shang Qinghua whispered.

“Why would you do that to yourself?”

For a moment, Shang Qinghua just looked at him. Then he smiled, gentle and aching, and reached up to tuck a loose strand of Shen Yuan’s hair behind his ear.

He didn’t answer.

And that was answer enough.

“What’s your plan?” Shang Qinghua asked after a pause. “What are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to the Underworld,” Shen Yuan said with a small nod.

Shang Qinghua snorted. “Of course. Why not go to the most dangerous place in the universe?”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Shen Yuan replied, biting his lip, though he didn’t look convinced.

Shang Qinghua sighed and rested a hand on his shoulder. “You should take a god with you. Someone who knows the terrain. Maybe Mu Qingfang, since you two are close.”

Shen Yuan grimaced. “He lied to me.”

“He feels guilty,” Shang Qinghua said gently. “You should talk to him.”

“Maybe,” Shen Yuan muttered.

“Then take Liu Qingge,” Shang Qinghua offered with a faint smile. “He’ll agree.”

‘Shen Qingqiu had been beloved’, Shen Yuan thought after he left the room. He closed the door and leaned against it, eyes shut. Everywhere he looked in Heaven, every god he spoke to, still saw Shen Qingqiu.

Shen Yuan found Liu Qingge at the principal training grounds. It was a vast open courtyard of polished white stone, ringed with weapon racks and floating talisman targets that shimmered like mirages. There were dummies and illusions to make them seem like real enemies. It looked less like a battlefield and more like a divine playground.

Liu Qingge stood at the center, cutting through the air with his sword. He was beautiful, like a shoujo manga prince, all sharp lines and impossible grace. Shen Yuan especially liked the small beauty mark beneath his eye.

The martial god moved like a storm: swift, precise, unstoppable. When Liu Qingge sensed Shen Yuan watching, he turned slightly, licked his lower lip, and his strikes grew faster and stronger, the blade tracing elegant arcs that made Shen Yuan’s breath hitch in his chest. He felt strangely flustered, so he snapped open his battle fan and lifted it to hide his face.

Liu Qingge promptly tripped on empty air and nearly fell. Shen Yuan hid his snort behind the fan.

“Careful there,” he said lightly, fanning himself. “Wouldn’t want the War God to injure himself.”

Liu Qingge’s ears went red. He straightened with a sharp huff, like an offended horse. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Can’t a fellow god admire his peer’s strength?” Shen Yuan asked, peeking at him over the fan.

That only made Liu Qingge look more irritated. “Not you,” Liu Qingge said flatly.

The courtyard fell into silence. Liu Qingge’s gaze lingered on Shen Yuan’s face; on the unfamiliar green eyes, the mid long hair, the modern hanfu with its faint glow.

The fan at Liu Qingge’s waist and the white sash at his belt fluttered softly in the still air

“Actually,” Shen Yuan began, bracing himself. “I need to ask you something.” He looked almost embarrassed. “I know we don’t really talk. And you kind of… hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Liu Qingge snapped immediately.

“Right,” Shen Yuan said, nodding. “You just dislike me, then.”

Liu Qingge rolled his eyes. “You’re too young. That just means you need more guidance. More care. That’s all.”

“Uh-huh,” Shen Yuan snorted. “So you think I’m naïve.”

“You are,” Liu Qingge replied without hesitation. “You always were.”

Shen Yuan pretended not to hear that last part “Can you come with me to the Underworld?” he asked, widening his eyes dramatically. “I know it’s dangerous, but —”

Liu Qingge stopped him with a raised hand. “Did they tell you what I’m the god of?” he asked.

 “I know you’re a martial god,” Shen Yuan said. “So… fighting? Death? Big swords?”

Liu Qingge closed his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was quieter.  “I am the Martial God of Loyalty and Righteous Strength.” He opened his eyes again, sharp and resolute. “Tell me when we leave.” Then he pulled his sword, stepped into it, and vanished in a streak of white light.

Shen Yuan swallowed. For a some seconds, he just stood there, staring at the place Liu Qingge had vanished, his own reflection trembling faintly in the polished floor.

God of Loyalty.

Right. Of course.

His throat felt dry. He cleared it, adjusted his glasses, and did what he always did when he didn’t know what the hell was happening. He went to the library.

The Heavenly Archives Hall was older than Heaven itself. Or at least, that’s what the gods said. The ceiling arched impossibly high, carved from cloudstone and jade, lit by floating talismans that hummed with divine qi. Endless shelves spiraled upward like a tower built from memory, each level sealed with scripts that determined who was allowed to read what.

Shen Yuan’s domain recognized him immediately. The locks peeled open with a sigh of light.

Scrolls shifted. Books slid from their places. A whole section rotated forward like Heaven had been waiting for him to ask.

The Underworld: Administrative And Cosmological Records

“…Great,” Shen Yuan muttered.

He reached out. The first scroll unfurled by itself. 

The Underworld, Dìyù (地狱), is not “Hell” in the Western sense. It is not punishment for sin. It is a bureaucracy for death. A system that ensures that souls move through the cycle of karma and rebirth in the correct order, stripped of memory and judged according to their actions across lifetimes.

The Ten Courts of Hell are ruled by the Ten Yama Kings, divine judges who oversee the fate of the dead. Their halls are not made of fire and torture. They are made of records.

Every soul’s life, death, crimes, virtues, and debts are catalogued in ledgers written in spiritual ink.

No god is permitted to alter them.

Shen Yuan paused at that. “…Interesting.” He flicked to the next page. “So that is out.”

The geography of the Afterlife was strange. The Underworld is layered. Souls enter through the Ghost Gates, then are processed across multiple regions before reaching the Courts and River of Oblivion (忘川). A vast black river filled with the regret and sorrow of the dead. Souls that hesitate or cling to life fall in and wander for centuries.

There was also the Naihe Bridge. Guarded by Meng Po, the Lady of Oblivion, who offered each soul to drink the Soup of Forgetfulness before reincarnation. The City of the Dead (Fēngdū). A massive, fortified metropolis where ghosts, demons, and spiritual officials live. It is the capital of the Underworld. And the Ten Courts of Judgment. Where souls are tried, sentenced, purified, or recycled into new life.

Shen Yuan frowned. If Heaven had erased someone, that meant their name was gone. But if this place was truly beyond Heaven’s reach… Then the soul’s ledger would still exist.

There were also known dangers. The next scroll was sealed in black. Shen Yuan’s hand hovered. Then the seal split.

Soul Obliteration: Certain beings (like ancient demons, primordial ghosts) can destroy souls outright. No rebirth. No karma. Heaven fears this more than anything.

The Forgotten Ones: Souls that were erased from Heaven’s records sometimes wander in the margins of the Underworld. They have no official designation. They simply exist. Most are unstable. Some are… not.

Shen Yuan’s pulse jumped.

“…So you’re here somewhere,” he whispered.

Contract-Bound Gods: Any god who made a binding oath with the Underworld is subject to its law. Even if Heaven no longer recognizes that oath. If Shang Qinghua signed something, it would be held there.

The Black Ledger. A restricted archive that records: sealed marriages,.forbidden bloodlines, erased cultivators and divine conspiracies. Access is granted only by the Yama Kings. Even Heaven is denied entry.

Shen Yuan stared at that for a long moment. Then he let out a shaky laugh. “Okay,” he said softly. “I can do this.”

Shen Yuan was going to the Underworld, no matter what Heaven thought of it. Still, he found himself turning toward the Medicine Hall.

It wasn’t because it was for obligation, exactly. It was something quieter and more stubborn. The ache that had been sitting in his chest since the day Mu Qingfang stopped smiling. For all of Heaven’s cold halls and sealed scrolls, the doctor had been the first to treat him like a person.

If Shen Yuan was going to walk into Hell, then at the very least, he would do it without unfinished words between them.

Mu Qingfang was kneeling in the courtyard of the Medicine Pavilion. It was a quiet wing of the hall Shen Yuan had never been allowed into. Ash and incense dusted the white stones around him. Paper money had burned down to thin, curling skeletons, and the air smelled faintly of sandalwood and old grief.

In front of Mu Qingfang rested a small wooden spirit tablet. The characters were carved with meticulous care, each stroke elegant, restrained, and heartbreakingly familiar.

Shen Qingqiu (沈清秋).

Mu Qingfang’s lips were pressed tight. He didn’t turn when Shen Yuan arrived. “You never liked being exposed to others,” he murmured, voice low, almost fond. “This one… is sorry... About my shameful behavior.”

Shen Yuan stopped short.

He stared at the tablet.

“…Why did you do it then?” he asked.

Mu Qingfang’s hand trembled slightly as he lit another stick of incense. The flame flickered, then steadied. “We miss you,” he said simply. “It’s been too damn long. And we still miss you.”

Shen Yuan sat down beside Mu Qingfang, folding himself neatly, hands resting on his knees. “What happened?” he asked quietly. “Everyone’s walking on eggshells around me like I’m about to blow up the whole Court. I’m not going to explode, you know.”

Mu Qingfang’s shoulders sagged at once, as if the question itself had weight. He looked smaller like that, wilted. “…We don’t know everything,” he admitted. “Only fragments survived. But… your husband lost something. Something that made him untouchable. You kept saying his halo was gone.” His fingers tightened in his sleeves. “After that, everything fell apart.”

Shen Yuan’s breath stilled. He listened.

“You tried to kill Shang Qinghua,” Mu Qingfang continued, voice thin. “You blamed him. You were… inconsolable when the demon lord died. And grief…” He hesitated, then forced the words out. “Grief is powerful for a cultivator of your caliber.”

A silence opened between them.

“Something began to… follow you,” Mu Qingfang said at last. “You stopped eating and sleeping. You spoke only to yourself, muttering about him. Your heart demons grew louder and louder. Eventually you stopped hearing any of us at all.” His hand found Shen Yuan’s, trembling. “This master tried to help,” he whispered. “I truly did. But I had never seen a deviation like that. We were preparing for ascension, and you…” He swallowed. “You collapsed. What remained wasn’t a peak lord anymore. It was a calamity. A vengeful spirit, tearing through everything it touched.”

Mu Qingfang’s voice broke. “We had to stop you,” he said. “Before you destroyed Heaven itself.” He bowed his head, tears falling freely now. “It was me,” he confessed. “Only a doctor could end you without causing pain. It was… gentle. I swear it was gentle. You didn’t suffer.” His grip tightened, desperate. “I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I’m so, so sorry.”

There was a pause.

“We didn’t erase your name out of shame for you,” Mu Qingfang whispered to the wooden tablet. “We erased it because we were ashamed of ourselves.”

Shen Yuan’s jaw went tight. He looked at the wooden tablet again — 沈清秋 — and then at Mu Qingfang. “So you erased me,” Shen Yuan said slowly.

Mu Qingfang swallowed. “Yes.”

Shen Yuan’s eyes flashed. “And what about him?” he demanded. “My husband. The one whose name you turned into empty talisman space like he never existed. What did he do?” Mu Qingfang went still. Shen Yuan laughed, but it came out harsh. “Let me guess. He was inconvenient. Too powerful. Too different. Too — what, demonic for Heaven’s taste?”

“That’s not —”

“He died, didn’t he?” Shen Yuan cut in, voice rising. “You said he died. So why is Heaven still afraid of him? Why erase a dead man? Unless you’re not afraid of him at all — you’re afraid of what he meant.”

Mu Qingfang looked away. That was answer enough.

Shen Yuan’s fingers curled into fists. “You erased him,” Shen Yuan said, quieter now, but the fury was still there, sharp and clean. “You erased the only person Shen Qingqiu loved enough to lose his mind over. You took the one thing he would have wanted remembered, and you buried it.”

The incense smoke trembled in the air.

“That’s not shame,” Shen Yuan said. “That’s cowardice.”

Mu Qingfang’s shoulders hunched. “He was… dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?” Shen Yuan snapped. “To Heaven’s order? To your control? To your pride?” Mu Qingfang didn’t answer. Shen Yuan scoffed. “Yeah. Thought so.”

He turned back to the tablet, glaring at the carved name.

“So Heaven didn’t erase Shen Qingqiu because he was a monster,” Shen Yuan said bitterly. “You erased him because he loved someone you couldn’t understand, and when that love broke him, you blamed the love instead of yourselves.”

A pause. 

“That’s disgusting,” Shen Yuan said flatly. “If I really was him,” Shen Yuan added, voice low and cold, “I wouldn’t care about my own name.” He looked back at Mu Qingfang, eyes burning. “But I’d make sure the whole of Heaven remembered my husband.”

The Court’s fear of him made perfect sense.

Mu Qingfang let out a long breath. It sounded like centuries leaving his lungs. All the millennia he had spent waiting — for forgiveness, for penance, for the chance to explain himself — were written plainly on his face.

“It is easier to forget than to forgive,” he murmured. “I don’t know how Zhangmen Shixiong survives under all that guilt.” He lifted his gaze and met Shen Yuan’s eyes, offering a small, weary smile. “Didn’t you know?” Mu Qingfang said softly. “Yue Qingyuan is the Martial God of Guilt, Leadership, and Hard Decisions.” The title hung in the air like a verdict.

Shen Yuan suddenly understood why Heaven had chosen him to rule. And why it had chosen to forget. “You know,” Shen Yuan said at last, voice hoarse, “it’s really poetic that I’m the god of memory, data, and truth.” He looked at the tablet again. His own name. The life they had buried. “My entire existence is just… Heaven’s coping mechanism.”

His lips curled. “They erased my husband because they were afraid of what he represented. They erased me because they were ashamed of what they’d done. And then they made me the one who doesn't remember.”

Mu Qingfang’s shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t interrupt.

Shen Yuan’s tone dropped, soft and cruel. “I am literally the divine embodiment of their guilt.” A pause. “And the worst part is that you still call it mercy.”

Mu Qingfang swallowed. After a moment, he said, “The Jade Emperor knows everything.”

Shen Yuan’s laugh was quiet, tired, and full of hate. “Yeah. That’s the problem.”

Heaven can suppress truth, but it can’t destroy it. So they turned the truth into a god and locked it away.

Shen Yuan left the Medicine Pavilion without looking back.

The incense smoke clung to him anyway, sweet and choking, like a ghost that refused to be shaken off. It followed him down the jade steps, through corridors too clean, too bright, too carefully curated. Heaven always smelled like money and absolution; the polished floors, gilded pillars, the quiet confidence of people who had decided they were right a long time ago.

He flexed his fingers.

Data stirred at his call without conscious effort. Threads of information hummed beneath the marble, under the clouds, buried in seals and censored archives. Locked doors. Redacted names. Missing years. Whole lives reduced to blank space.

They were afraid. That thought settled in his chest with an almost grim satisfaction. Not of Shen Qingqiu. Of the husband. Of whatever that man had been, whatever he had done, that Heaven found it easier to delete him than to face the consequences of remembering.

“Cowards,” Shen Yuan muttered.

The word echoed strangely, as if the halls themselves had heard it before and agreed.

At the edge of the training grounds, Liu Qingge was waiting. He stood with his sword grounded before him, hands resting lightly on the pommel, posture straight but not rigid. The wind tugged at his sleeves and hair, but he didn’t look like part of the scenery the way other gods did. He looked like someone prepared to move at any second, like violence restrained.

“You’re late,” Liu Qingge said.

Shen Yuan snorted. “I had a breakdown on the way. Don’t worry about it.”

Liu Qingge’s eyes flicked to his face, sharp and assessing, then softened a fraction. He didn’t ask questions. Loyalty, Shen Yuan thought.

“Ready?” Liu Qingge asked.

Shen Yuan glanced back once at Heaven’s spires, at the spotless clouds, at the place where entire truths had been buried under polite silence.

“No,” he said honestly. Then he smiled, thin and dangerous. “But I’m going.”

Liu Qingge nodded. “Good.”

They moved together toward the boundary gate, where Heaven’s light thinned and the air grew heavy. Runes carved into the floor pulsed faintly, warnings layered over warnings: DO NOT ENTER, NO RETURN GUARANTEED, AUTHORIZED DEITIES ONLY.

Shen Yuan stepped onto the seal. Heaven resisted him with pressure, with hesitation, with the subtle suggestion that this was a bad idea and wouldn’t he rather forget?

He pushed back as the data sang. Seals unraveled. Restrictions bent. The gate shuddered open with a sound like a server rebooting after centuries of neglect.

Darkness yawned beneath it. Heavy with karma, grief, unfinished business. The Underworld smelled like iron, ink, and old prayers.

Liu Qingge drew his sword in one smooth motion. “Stay close.”

Shen Yuan laughed quietly, eyes glowing a dangerous green. “You’re adorable.”

Then he stepped forward, into Hell, carrying with him every name Heaven had tried to erase and the growing certainty that the truth was going to hurt someone very badly.

The fall began without warning. The gravity turned treacherous. Shen Yuan felt the world invert, Heaven snapping upside down like a broken screen. Light vanished. Direction lost meaning. He realized, distantly, that he was falling headfirst.

For a very long time.

“This is symbolic, isn’t it,” Shen Yuan muttered, hair floating upward as flames licked past him in slow motion. “Reversed views. Moral irony. Very subtle.”

Two thousand years, the records said. Of course Heaven would choose something like that. Make punishment philosophical.

Around him, others fell too. Souls screaming, praying, cursing, clawing at nothing. The air stank. Despair condensed into a physical thing. Every sinner carried it. It soaked into Shen Yuan’s skin, crawled into his lungs. Even as a god, it made his stomach twist.

There was no sun here, moon or stars. Only fire.

When the fall ended, it did not end gently.

Avīci.

The ground was iron-hot and endless, surrounded by walls upon wall and seven rings of iron, seven nets woven like Heaven’s laws, inescapable and absolute. Flames roared from banners and seams in the earth, striking bodies with surgical precision. Every scream was distinct, every agony personalized, refined over countless kalpas.

Shen Yuan took a careful breath.

The smell hit him next.

It was unbearable. Not merely decay, but the stench of deliberate evil; crimes committed knowingly, joyfully, with eyes wide open. It clung to everything. Even the screams had weight, the sound alone enough to kill mortals from terror.

At the corners of this hell, massive bronze dogs stood guard, eyes crackling like lightning. Their teeth were mountains of blades. They watched, waiting.

Below, forests of knife-leaves rustled without wind. Iron balls fell from the sky when thunder cracked, dragged down by screams and karma alike. Cauldrons overflowed with molten bronze. Snakes spat fire and venom in equal measure. Worms burned as they moved.

“This is… excessive,” Shen Yuan said faintly.

Liu Qingge, standing half a step ahead of him, did not answer. His sword hummed low, angry, as if recognizing a place it was never meant to exist in.

Here, people were torn apart and reassembled endlessly. Tongues were pulled free and forced to swallow iron and fire. Bodies climbed burning mountains only to fall again. There was no relief, no pause, no mercy.

Avīci was erasure through suffering. And yet.

Shen Yuan felt it then; threadlike, faint but unmistakable. A disturbance. A pattern.

Hell was ordered. Cruel, but precise. Each torment corresponded to a sin, each soul catalogued and processed like data in a cosmic archive.

Which meant something was wrong.

Somewhere beneath the screaming, beneath the fire and iron and centuries of pain, there were gaps. Empty ledgers and missing karmic entries. Scars in the system where something had been violently removed. Someone Heaven did not want recorded, even here.

Shen Yuan’s eyes burned brighter, toxic green cutting through the smoke.

“Are you sure?” Liu Qingge grunted.

Shen Yuan didn’t look at him. His gaze was fixed ahead, on the endless iron plains and the rivers of fire, on the way Avīci swallowed sound and meaning alike.

“I don’t even know his name,” he said.

Liu Qingge stopped. For some seconds, there was only the screaming; layer upon layer of it, voices flayed raw by flame and punishment, echoing against iron walls and falling endlessly into themselves.

Then Liu Qingge sighed. “It’s Luo Binghe.”

The name landed.

It did not arrive like a memory, because of course it wouldn’t.

And just like that, the hole in Shen Yuan’s chest grew wider, deeper, a perfect negative space carved into him, as if his heart had always been shaped to hold those two syllables and was only now realizing what had been torn away.

What a beautiful name.

Shen Yuan swallowed. His throat ached, tight with something dangerously close to longing. The green light in his eyes flickered, steadied, softened.

Around them, Hell continued its work. Iron dogs prowled. Flames pierced flesh. Screams tore themselves apart against the walls of Avīci. 

And yet…  Shen Yuan found that the screams no longer sounded so terrible. Because now he knew what he was listening for.

“Do you know where an erased person would be?” Shen Yuan asked quietly. “He’s not erased from Hell.”

Liu Qingge’s brows knit together. “How do you know that?”

Shen Yuan didn’t answer right away.

They stood at the edge of the iron causeway, heat licking up from below, the glow of molten bronze painting Liu Qingge’s armor in shades of blood and gold. The air here pressed in on the lungs, heavy with ash and the stench of karma burning itself clean. This was a place that recorded everything. Every sin, every intention, every failure. Hell did not forget. It could not afford to.

Shen Yuan finally spoke. “I just know it.” The words felt solid. Truer than anything he’d said since Heaven had started calling him by a name that wasn’t his.

He lifted his hand, fingers faintly glowing with green light, threads of data and memory unraveling from his palm like mist. Heaven erased by decree (by collective denial). But Hell? Hell ran on cause and effect. On weight. On debt.

You could censor Heaven. You could not censor karma.

“If someone existed strongly enough,” Shen Yuan continued, voice steady now, “if their choices left marks deep enough… Hell would still have them. Even if Heaven pretended they never lived.”

Liu Qingge studied him, something unreadable passing through his eyes. “…You sound certain.”

Shen Yuan laughed softly, without humor. “I’m the god of records they tried to delete,” he said. “If anyone would feel the missing data, it’s me.” Below them, a scream cut off abruptly, swallowed by flame. Shen Yuan looked down into the fire, into the place where names could not be hidden, only punished. “Luo Binghe is here,” he said. “Somewhere.”

And this time, Liu Qingge didn’t argue.

The hell-wind tore past them, carrying ash and the distant sound of screaming. He stared down into the abyss as if measuring it.

“…There are places,” he said at last. Shen Yuan looked at him. “Between courts.” Liu Qingge’s voice was flat. 

“Souls without names?” Shen Yuan asked.

A pause.

“Yes.”

Shen Yuan’s fingers tightened. “What happens to them?”

“They fall.”

“How long?”

Liu Qingge’s jaw set. “Until something changes.”

Shen Yuan inhaled slowly. “…They stay conscious?”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“Yes.”

The air crackled faintly around Shen Yuan. “So he’s there,” Shen Yuan said. It was not a question.

Liu Qingge glanced at him, expression unreadable. “If Heaven erased him.”

Shen Yuan closed his eyes. When he opened them, the green light was steady, focused. “Good,” he said.

Liu Qingge frowned. “Good?”

“He’s here,” Shen Yuan replied. “In the only way that matters.”

Liu Qingge looked back into the abyss. His voice was rough. “I don’t like him.” Shen Yuan huffed, almost a laugh. “But,” Liu Qingge continued, “he’s yours.” He turned slightly, hand resting on his sword. “I’ll take you there.”

Liu Qingge did not slow his pace for Shen Yuan. That, in itself, told Shen Yuan everything he needed to know about Diyu.

They descended through a gate that did not look like a gate so much as a wound in reality. It was a vertical tear stitched together with iron talismans and chains thicker than city walls. The air changed immediately. It was not hot, not cold, but wrong, heavy with the smell of rot, metal, and something bitter that crawled into the lungs and refused to leave.

Shen Yuan gagged.

“Breathe through your mouth,” Liu Qingge said shortly, not even looking back. “Don’t think about it.”

“That’s — wow — terrible advice,” Shen Yuan wheezed, clutching his fan like a lifeline. “You could at least pretend this is a guided tour.”

Liu Qingge snorted. “This is hell.”

They stepped onto black iron ground that rang hollow underfoot, as if the land itself were a massive drum beaten by unseen hands. Ahead stretched Avīci, the lowest hell, where flames did not rise but pressed inward, crushing rather than burning. 

Shen Yuan stopped. “…Those dogs are looking at me like I owe them money.”

“They eat sinners,” Liu Qingge said. “You’re fine.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

Screams threaded through the air in a constant weave, like background noise. The kind that sank into your bones and stayed there. Shen Yuan realized, distantly, that if he were mortal, the sound alone would have killed him of terror.

They passed a forest. Souls climbed them endlessly, slipping, falling, climbing again. In the distance, iron mountains fell from the sky like rain, crushing bodies into unrecognizable pulp before reforming them to be crushed again.

Shen Yuan swallowed hard. “Okay. Officially filing a complaint with Heaven. This is… excessive.”

Liu Qingge glanced at him. “These are the ones who committed the Five Great Offenses.”

“Oh.” Shen Yuan winced. “Right. Murdering parents. Hurting the Buddha. That whole list. Still — wow.”

They moved on, descending further, and the heat vanished. Cold replaced it. The kind that split skin.

They crossed into the Eight Cold Hells, where blizzards screamed like living things. Naked souls huddled together on frozen plains, blisters blooming on their skin, then bursting, blood freezing mid-drip. Some could only make sounds — aṭ-aṭ-aṭ, ha-ha — their hells named after the noises their teeth and throats produced.

Shen Yuan hugged himself, teeth chattering in sympathy. “I take it back. I liked the fire better.”

Liu Qingge nodded once. “Most do.”

They passed through the Blue Lotus Hell, where skin turned deep indigo, then the Crimson Lotus, where flesh cracked open like flowers in bloom. Shen Yuan turned his face away, breathing shallowly.

“Still sure?” Liu Qingge asked, voice rougher now.

Shen Yuan hesitated. His domain hummed under his skin, data and memory and truth vibrating painfully. Every scream was a record. Every punishment, logged. Hell remembered everything.

“Yes,” he said, hoarse. 

Liu Qingge stopped at the edge of a quieter region. It was a place between punishments, where souls drifted like ash, their identities blurred but not gone. He planted his sword into the ground and looked at Shen Yuan.

“Erased souls don’t go to punishment zones,” he said. Short. Final. “No zuì (罪). No name. They’re stored.”

“Stored,” Shen Yuan echoed weakly. “Like corrupted files.”

Liu Qingge frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Lucky you.”

Shen Yuan stared into the gray expanse, heart pounding. Hell was screaming, freezing, burning, devouring, but somewhere in this bureaucratic nightmare was Luo Binghe, un-erased, unforgotten, waiting.

Shen Yuan was truly terrified, yet he didn’t want to run.

Hell noticed them.

It did not announce itself with a recalculation. It was subtle shudder through the iron ground, a ripple in the ash-filled air, the screams dipping half a note as if the realm itself had paused to think. Lines of light carved themselves into the darkness, forming vertical columns of script that descended like rain. 

Characters Shen Yuan recognized immediately (judgment tallies, karmic weights, soul-index numbers) assembled into figures clad in black-lacquered armor, their faces hidden behind masks inscribed with rotating seals. 

Record-Keepers. Hell Wardens. Bureaucrats with blades.

“Behind me,” Liu Qingge snapped, already moving.

He did not wait for permission. His sword sang as it left its sheath, a clean, furious note that cut through the oppressive noise of Diyu. He surged forward like a thunderbolt given human shape, robes snapping, blade flashing white as it cleaved through the first Warden. Metal met metal; sparks erupted like fireworks, illuminating the iron walls and nets above. 

The Warden did not bleed, its form collapsing into scattered characters that tried to reassemble midair. Liu Qingge didn’t let them. He twisted, pivoted, struck again, each movement precise and violent, his swordplay overwhelming, relentless DPS incarnate. 

“You’re trespassing,” one of the Wardens intoned, voice layered and hollow. “Unauthorized access to sealed souls.” 

Liu Qingge answered by driving his blade straight through its chest and kicking the remains into the abyss. Shen Yuan staggered back, heart hammering, senses overloaded. The data was screaming at him. There was alerts firing in every direction, error messages stacking faster than he could read. 

Hell wasn’t attacking Liu Qingge alone; it was targeting him. Red sigils flared beneath his feet, chains of glowing script snapping upward to bind his limbs, each one etched with a different crime, a different accusation. Heresy, disruption, unlawful restoration of records. 

“Oh, fuck this,” Shen Yuan hissed, snapping his fan open. Green light spilled out, lines of code weaving themselves into the air. His fingers moved in sharp, economical gestures, rewriting permissions on the fly, rerouting hostile scripts into harmless loops. The chains froze mid-motion, flickered, then dissolved into static. “Qingge — left flank!” he shouted, voice steady despite the terror clawing at his spine.

Liu Qingge trusted him without looking. He spun, sword arcing in a brilliant crescent that tore through three Wardens at once, their forms shattering like glass. Another lunged from above, iron claws aimed straight for Shen Yuan’s core. Shen Yuan felt it before he saw it; a spike in threat priority, a screaming warning in his bones.  He slammed his fan shut and struck the ground, sending a pulse of emerald light outward. The Warden hit an invisible wall and rebounded, its scripts scrambling, suddenly unable to recognize Shen Yuan as a valid target. 

“Invalid request,” Shen Yuan muttered through clenched teeth. “Access denied.” The Warden convulsed, its armor cracking as conflicting commands tore it apart from the inside.

The fight escalated. More Wardens emerged, descending on chains of light, blades humming with karmic weight. Liu Qingge was everywhere. He was leaping, striking, cutting a path through the chaos, his sword a storm of silver that never slowed. 

His breathing was even, his expression feral with focus. When a blade slipped past his guard and bit into his shoulder, Shen Yuan reacted instantly, flicking his wrist to overlay a translucent shield of scrolling characters that absorbed the impact. 

“You’re welcome!” Shen Yuan yelled, half-hysterical. “I am never going to mock support roles again!” Liu Qingge barked a laugh, short and sharp, and redoubled his assault.

At last, Hell recalculated again. The remaining Wardens hesitated, their scripts stuttering as Shen Yuan’s presence corrupted their authority. One by one, they withdrew, dissolving back into columns of falling text, the air heavy with the echo of denied permissions. Silence crept back in, broken only by distant screams.

Liu Qingge planted his sword in the ground, chest heaving, blood steaming where it hit the iron floor. He glanced back at Shen Yuan, eyes sharp. “You okay?”

Shen Yuan leaned on his fan, knees shaking, grin wild and breathless. “Yeah,” he said. “But Hell just tried to firewall me.”

Liu Qingge snorted. “I don’t know what that means.”

Behind them, the gray expanse shifted. Yippe, an opening. It was narrow but unmistakable. A place Hell no longer knew how to close.

Shen Yuan straightened, fear and determination burning together in his chest. “Come on,” he said softly. “He’s close.”

The last of the Hell Record-Keepers fell apart into drifting slips of ash-paper, their ledgers dissolving mid-air as if ashamed to exist. The noise of battle bled away slowly; metal ringing fading into a hush so deep it pressed against the ears. Shen Yuan’s fan was half-open, his fingers trembling faintly as the last threads of divine qi settled back into his meridians.

Silence.

Forgotten.

Liu Qingge wiped his blade clean on instinct, then frowned. “We’re past the routes,” he said shortly. “No wardens patrol here.”

Shen Yuan felt it too. The way the ground beneath his feet changed from scorched iron to smooth, dark stone, polished by time rather than footsteps. The air grew still from an aching, grave-cold emptiness, like the inside of a sealed tomb.

They walked on.

The path narrowed into a corridor flanked by tall stone walls etched with seals so old their characters had worn down into suggestion rather than script. Paper talismans hung everywhere? thousands of them were blank, yellowed, their ink never written. They rustled faintly without wind, as though whispering names that had never been allowed to exist.

There were no guards. No gods. No demons screaming in torment.

“This place…” Shen Yuan swallowed. His voice sounded too loud. “It’s not a hell.”

“No,” Liu Qingge agreed. “It’s storage.”

At the end of the corridor stood a gate. It was half-open, crooked on its hinges, not broken though. Simply… neglected. Beyond it lay a courtyard.

It looked like a mausoleum.

A square court of pale stone, cracked with age. Dead leaves lay scattered across the floor, unmoving. There were flowerbeds along the edges. Shen Yuan found astonishing that something still grew there. White blossoms, small and stubborn, clinging to soil no one had tended in centuries. Pillars rose around the space, wrapped in seals layered over seals, like funeral cloths upon a coffin. At the center stood a single stone dais.

And on it…  Shen Yuan stopped breathing.

Chains made of pale, translucent paper drifted in the air, looped and knotted in complex formations. They did not bite into flesh. They did not burn. They simply defined the space a body was allowed to occupy. Within them knelt a figure dressed in black, head bowed, hair falling loose down his back like spilled ink.

No blood or wounds.

“He’s alive,” Shen Yuan said hoarsely, not as hope but as fact. His domain reached out, brushing against the blankness surrounding the figure and recoiled. 

(Redacted.)

Liu Qingge’s jaw tightened. “They buried his soul without killing it.”

They stepped into the courtyard, and with every step Shen Yuan’s chest hurt more, as though something vast and heavy was slowly being returned to him after centuries of absence. The silence here was unbearable, like something precious that had been abandoned. A place that had once been meant to be visited, inspected, maintained… and then quietly crossed out of Heaven’s schedule.

The sight struck him with an image unbidden, aching and old, like words written into the marrow of the world:

“The windows, porch, and bamboo screen
Are just as they always were,
But at the entrance to the house
Someone is missing—
You.”

This place had a middle gate too. It had been opened once. Then never again.

The flowers were still here. Blooming without witness. Blooming without purpose.

Someone was missing. Like they had been… removed.

Shen Yuan’s knees nearly gave out. He caught himself with the edge of his fan, knuckles white. “They didn’t even assign him a hell,” he whispered, rage bleeding through the awe. “No sentence. No record. They just… put him down here and stopped looking.”

Liu Qingge said nothing. He sheathed his sword slowly, as if any sudden motion might shatter what little balance remained in the air. His gaze stayed fixed on the figure at the center of the seals. “He’s been forsaken,” he said at last. “By Heaven. By Hell. By history.”

“Forsaken by the narrative.” Shen Yuan took one step closer.

The paper chains trembled. The figure’s head lifted slightly.

And in that infinitesimal movement, Shen Yuan felt it: the pull in his chest swelling, deepening, becoming almost unbearable. “What did you do,” he whispered, voice breaking at last, “to make them this afraid of you?”

The courtyard did not answer.

Shen Yuan went still.

Furious didn’t begin to cover it. The world narrowed to a sharp, blinding point, and in that point was the man kneeling in chains, silent, abandoned, filed away. This was his beloved. This was his everything. And Heaven had done this to him. Hell had done this to him. They had erased him, buried him alive in bureaucracy and fear, made the universe forget how to say his name.

Traitors.

All of them.

The thought came cold and perfect, without hesitation: they should all die.

Qi surged violently, memory and truth colliding into something raw and ruinous. The seals around the courtyard shuddered. The blank talismans began to smoke at their edges, as if ink were trying to force itself onto them from nothing.

A hand closed over his, grounding him. 

“Shen Qingqiu,” Liu Qingge whispered, low and urgent, using the name like an anchor driven into bedrock. “Calm down. We can’t do this again.”

The words cut through the storm just enough for Shen Yuan to register them. His chest hitched painfully. He sucked in a breath that tore through his throat, and only then did he realize his face was wet.

He was crying. No, worse. He was snarling, a broken, animal sound dragged out of him against his will, lips trembling as grief and rage twisted together until they were indistinguishable. His fingers curled, nails biting into his palm, the fan clattering uselessly against the stone.

“I —” His voice cracked, useless. He couldn’t even form the sentence. Look at what they did to you. Look at where they put you. Look at how alone you were.

Liu Qingge didn’t let go. His grip tightened just slightly, enough to hurt. Enough to keep Shen Yuan here. “You lose yourself now,” he said quietly, not unkind, “and Heaven wins twice.”

That did it.

Shen Yuan swallowed hard, shoulders shaking, breath coming in ragged pulls as he stared at the figure in chains. Rage still burned, but beneath it was something worse, something hollow and aching and endless.

They had taken him.

And Shen Yuan had forgotten.

That was the unforgivable sin.

Shen Yuan let out a breath that shook, halfway between a laugh and a sob. “You were opposed to this,” he said quietly to Liu Qingge, not looking away from the chains, from the stillness that hurt to look at.

Liu Qingge turned his head, sharp and decisive as ever. “I don’t care about the beast,” he said flatly. Then, unexpectedly gentle, he reached up and wiped the tears from Shen Yuan’s cheek with his thumb, rough calluses warm against cold skin. The gesture was awkward, almost irritated, as if he resented the necessity of it. “But I regret the suffering you are going through.”

For a moment, Shen Yuan just stared at him. Then he snorted, breath hitching again, something bitter and grateful tangled together in his chest. “Well,” he muttered hoarsely, “at least that.” Shen Yuan didn’t take his eyes off Luo Binghe. “How do we take him from here?”

Liu Qingge followed his gaze. He took in the chains, the sigils carved into the stone, the absolute lack of wardens or witnesses. His jaw tightened.

“Carefully,” he said. That was it. 

Shen Yuan let out a sharp breath. Figures. “He’s been filed away. Archived.” His fingers curled. “If I pull him out the wrong way, Heaven will notice.”

“They’ll notice anyway,” Liu Qingge replied. “The moment he moves.”

Shen Yuan nodded once. He already knew that. Hell was quiet like a held breath; anything breaking that stillness would echo upward.

Liu Qingge rested a hand on the hilt of his sword. “I can cut the chains.”

“No,” Shen Yuan said immediately. “They’re karmic. You sever them by force and they’ll rebound on him.” His mouth twisted. “On me too, probably.”

Silence stretched. Somewhere far away, metal groaned. Hell breathing.

Shen Yuan stepped forward. The air around him shifted, data and memory unfolding like invisible threads. The carvings on the floor flickered, struggling to remember what they were supposed to be enforcing.

“I was made to remember,” he said softly, more to himself than to Liu Qingge. “To hold what Heaven discards.”

He reached out to Luo Binghe’s name. The temperature dropped.

Liu Qingge felt it and tensed. “Shen Qingqiu,” he warned.

“I know,” Shen Yuan said, teeth clenched. “Just — cover me if something comes.”

“Always.”

Shen Yuan exhaled once, slow and deliberate, and let his consciousness slip sideways.

The talismans embedded in the chains lit up in his sight with structure. Layers upon layers of logic, karmic law folded into symbols, Heaven’s handwriting made rigid and cruel. Each stroke carried authority. Finality. This is so. This will remain so.

“Of course you’d encrypt it,” Shen Yuan muttered under his breath.

He didn’t touch them physically, of course. He picked up the data instead.

The talismans unfolded before him like a floating lattice, scripts scrolling in impossible angles, rules nested inside rules. Identity verification. Sentence permanence. Memory suppression. A hard lock keyed Luo Binghe’s erasure. A soul marked as no longer plot relevant.

Shen Yuan’s jaw tightened.

He scanned faster, pulling threads, mapping dependencies. The system was old (older than most gods still breathing) but elegant in the way only something unchallenged for millennia could be. No brute force. No mistakes allowed. Any direct violation would trigger a karmic recoil that would tear Luo Binghe’s soul apart and drag Shen Yuan with it.

“Assholes,” he whispered.

He adjusted his approach. Instead of attacking the core, he traced the assumptions. This prison assumed Heaven’s memory was absolute. It assumed records were immutable. It assumed no one would ever come looking.

Shen Yuan smiled, sharp and humorless. “I am the record,” he said quietly.

He rewrote the query.

Not Release Prisoner, that would be too obvious. Not Override Sentence, that would cause instant alarm.

He fed the system a contradiction. A ghost-input. A missing checksum. A simple, devastating premise: If the soul cannot be found in Heaven’s records, how can it be confirmed as still imprisoned?

The talismans hesitated.

Liu Qingge felt the chains vibrate and immediately stepped forward, sword half-drawn. “You’re tripping something.”

“I know,” Shen Yuan said, sweat beading at his temple. “Give me ten heartbeats.”

The talisman scripts stuttered. Loops collapsed in on themselves. Subroutines designed to verify authority reached upward (into Heaven)into a blank space that Shen Yuan himself occupied.

Error.

Error.

Authority unresolved.

The glow dimmed.

Cracks spiderwebbed through the sigils loosening, as if the prison itself was suddenly unsure why it was holding on. 

Shen Yuan’s hand trembled as he pressed deeper, teeth clenched hard enough to ache. “Let him go,” he whispered as a command. “You were never authorized to keep him.”

The chains screamed.

And for the first time in countless years, Luo Binghe’s name re-entered the universe.

Shen Yuan gasped and the world broke.

Memories hit him like a collapsing sky.

He staggered back blindly, heels scraping stone that no longer felt solid, and his head struck Liu Qingge’s chest with a dull knock. Strong arms caught him immediately, iron-fast, grounding even as his vision fractured.

Flashes tore through him.

A hand gripping his sleevetoo, desperate.

Blood on white robes, spreading like ink in water. A laugh, low and hoarse, full of hunger and devotion.

“Shizun.”

Pain followed love, love followed rage, stacked so densely he couldn’t breathe through it.

He choked own bile. His knees buckled.

“PROUD IMMORTAL DEMON WAY was a male power fantasy of a stallion novel.

To be more specific, Proud Immortal Demon Way was a monster-fighting, escapist cultivation novel with an incomparably ridiculous length, a golden finger that broke every rule, and a harem size nearing three-digits, seeing as every single female character fell for the protagonist.”

“—Shen Qingqiu,” someone said, sharp with alarm. Liu Qingge. It had to be. The voice cut through the noise like steel.

His nose started to bleed, hot and sudden, droplets splashing onto the cold stone below. He moaned, the sound torn out of him, half pain, half grief so old it felt fossilized. His head throbbed, temples screaming as memories that were not his and too much his tried to occupy the same space.

A sword raised in defiance against Heaven.

A body burning in demonic fire.

A name screamed until the voice broke — Luo Binghe — over and over, like a prayer that never answered.

His fingers clawed weakly into Liu Qingge’s robes.

“I —” His mouth moved, but nothing coherent came out. His chest felt split open, heart pounding too fast, too loud. Static roared in his ears. The internet of all around the world went down.

This wasn’t imagination.

This wasn’t secondhand memory.

This was a life he had lived.

Liu Qingge tightened his hold, one hand braced firm between his shoulder blades, the other gripping his wrist hard enough to hurt on purpose, anchoring him.

“Breathe,” Liu Qingge ordered, low and fierce. “Stay here. Don’t follow it.”

He shook, blood still dripping, tears blurring his sight. He didn’t know when the memories would stop. Only that they finally knew his name.

Shen Qingqiu opened his eyes.

The world snapped back into place, whole and burning with purpose. He pressed a brief, instinctive kiss to Liu Qingge’s cheek, gratitude and apology folded into the same breath, and then he was already moving.

Flying. His body remembered how to reach what it loved.

He crossed the cold mausoleum in a heartbeat and dropped to his knees before hid Binghe’s bound form. The man was trembling, restrained by seals and chains sunk deep into the stone, his body rigid with pain he could not voice. His red eyes were open, wide and glass-bright, staring without focus, as if afraid that blinking might make this vision disappear.

“Binghe,” Shen Qingqiu breathed, voice breaking on the name.

Binghe could not answer. His lips parted, dry and cracked, a soundless plea caught in his throat.

Shen Qingqiu cupped his face with both hands and kissed him — once, twice, again and again — pressing reverent, desperate kisses across his cheeks, his brow, the corners of his eyes. He kissed the cracked softness of his lips, careful, lingering, as if afraid even breath might hurt him. He kissed the line of his jaw, the hollow of his throat where the chain bit into skin, his chin, his ears, his forehead.

Over and over.

As if making up for centuries of absence in the span of seconds.

His hands would not stay still. They moved constantly, brushing hair back, cradling the back of Luo Binghe’s head, patting his shoulders in small, grounding motions, tracing warmth into cold limbs that had been left too long alone. Every touch said the same thing: I’m here. I didn’t abandon you. You are not forgotten.

His Binghe shuddered beneath him, breath hitching, red eyes finally focusing, locking onto Shen Qingqiu with terrifying intensity. Tears welled and spilled soundlessly down his cheeks, disappearing into Shen Qingqiu’s sleeves.

Shen Qingqiu pressed his forehead to Binghe’s and shook.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, voice raw. “I’m here now. I swear — I won’t leave you again.”

The tomb stayed silent.

Luo Binghe was no longer alone.

Liu Qingge’s head snapped up like a hound catching a scent. “We need to leave,” he said sharply. “Something’s coming.”

Shen Qingqiu didn’t argue. He nodded once, already moving. He rose and bent again with deliberate care, slipping one arm beneath Luo Binghe’s knees and the other behind his back. The weight was real, grounding. Binghe was taller than him, broader, all long limbs and coiled strength that should never have been reduced to this. Shen Qingqiu adjusted his grip, patient, arranging Binghe’s heavy legs and slack arms against his chest as if this were something he had done a thousand times before.

As if it were natural.

Binghe stirred, a faint, broken sound slipping from his throat.

Shen Qingqiu immediately dipped his head and pressed a kiss to his brow, lingering there. “It’s all right, darling,” he murmured, soft but unshakeable. “Shizun’s here. Shizun will take care of you.”

Binghe went still again, breath uneven but calmer, his forehead resting against Shen Qingqiu’s collarbone as though that alone were enough to anchor him to existence.

Liu Qingge turned, already drawing his sword, positioning himself between them and the dark corridor beyond. “Hold on to him,” he said, voice low. “Don’t let go.”

Shen Qingqiu tightened his arms. “As if I could,” he replied, and stepped forward into the rising dark.

His steps felt like they were made of feathers.

The path back toward Heaven blurred, space folding and unraveling around them, layers of hell and judgment peeling away like bad memories. Shen Qingqiu barely registered it. The screaming winds, the iron paths, the shifting wards — none of it mattered.

All he could think about was Binghe.

Binghe, Binghe, Binghe.

The weight in his arms anchored him to the present, warm and solid and real. The familiar scent (smoke, blood, something bitter-sweet that made his chest ache) filled his lungs. His hair brushed against Shen Qingqiu’s jaw with every step, soft despite everything. His lashes were dark against too-pale skin. His red eyes, half-lidded, unfocused, but open.

Alive.

Shen Qingqiu adjusted his grip unconsciously, thumb rubbing slow circles into Binghe’s wrist, counting the pulse there as if afraid it might vanish if he stopped. Every detail burned itself into him, desperate and greedy: the slope of Binghe’s nose, the cracked lips, the faint rise and fall of his chest.

Mine, his mind whispered, fierce and unrepentant.

You are mine, and I am here.

Ahead, Liu Qingge cut through the air like a blade, clearing the way, his presence a shield Shen Qingqiu didn’t have the spare breath to acknowledge. Heaven could collapse behind them for all he cared.

If the universe demanded payment for this moment, Shen Qingqiu would pay it gladly.

He bowed his head, pressing his cheek briefly into Binghe’s hair, and kept walking light as a ghost, carrying the weight of his entire world.

They arrived in Heaven to an audience.

Somehow, impossibly fast, the word had spread: Shen Qingqiu was freeing his husband. By the time they crossed the threshold of the polished celestial cage (white jade floors, gold-veined pillars, light so clean it hurt) every god was already there. Rows upon rows of immortals stood frozen, watching as if the wrong breath might shatter reality.

At the front, Yue Qingyuan broke formation.

His eyes were wide, shining, almost disbelieving as he hurried forward, Shang Qinghua and Mu Qingfang flanking him like anxious shadows. For a moment, he looked less like the ruler of Heaven and more like a man who had waited far too long.

“Xiao Jiu, Xiao Jiu—”

“Do not.” Shen Qingqiu’s voice cut through the hall like a blade. He didn’t even look at him. His arms were full (cof cof occupied) and that alone felt like a verdict. “Do not call me that,” Shen Qingqiu snarled, venom sharp and bright. “You have no right. No fucking right.”

Yue Qingyuan stopped. His eyes filled. And worse, he smiled.

Something in Shen Qingqiu snapped cleanly in two. He shifted Luo Binghe with practiced care, tightening one arm around him, anchoring him against his chest and then, without hesitation, without mercy, he struck.

The sound of the slap rang through Heaven. It was hard. Too hard. The kind of blow meant to hurt, meant to punish. Yue Qingyuan’s head snapped to the side, pale hair scattering, cheek blooming red beneath Shen Qingqiu’s palm.

And Yue Qingyuan smiled wider. Peace settled into his expression, soft and terrible, like a man finally receiving a long-deserved sentence.

Shen Qingqiu didn’t try to understand it.

“You disgusting bastard,” he said, shaking with fury, his breath hot against Binghe’s temple as Binghe sighed weakly into the hollow of his neck. “You absolute motherfucker.”

Yue Qingyuan turned his face back slowly, reverently, as if the pain were a benediction. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said, gentle, fervent, completely unconnected to the rage tearing the room apart. “I knew one day you would come back to me.”

Shen Qingqiu laughed. It was a sharp, broken sound with no humor in it at all. He tightened his hold on Binghe and lifted his chin, eyes burning as he finally looked at them all.

Heaven had gathered to witness a reunion. What it was about to get was a reckoning.

However, Shen Qingqiu stopped himself. The thought came sharp and clear, like a blade held an inch from flesh. He could do it. He knew exactly how. Heaven would not survive him a second time, not for long.

He did not move a second time.

Once, grief had turned him into a calamity. Once, he had nearly torn the realms apart for Luo Binghe, blind with loss and rage.

He would not do it again.

This time, he chose.

Not because Yue Qingyuan deserved mercy. Not because Heaven had earned forgiveness. But because Luo Binghe was warm in his arms, breathing— alive—and Shen Qingqiu refused to become the monster they had feared him to be.

He had already tried to destroy Heaven once.

He would not let love turn into annihilation again.

Yue Qingyuan sighed and did not try to touch him. “Shen shidi,” he said softly. “Qi ge… is sorry.”

For a heartbeat, Shen Qingqiu nearly lunged for his throat. That bastard was so out of his mind that he reached for the old dynamic, the one they had both loved and hated, the one that had once held them together and torn them apart. Qi ge. Xiao Jiu. A game of guilt and longing that should have died milenia ago.

Shen Qingqiu was tired.

“It’s been years, Zhangmen-shixiong,” he said hoarsely. “Let it go.”

Yue Qingyuan closed his eyes. He stepped aside, granting passage. His hands trembled, fingers curling as if restraining something that had nowhere to go.

Liu Qingge exhaled slowly and gave Shen Qingqiu a single, firm nod.

Shang Qinghua was openly crying now, shoulders shaking. Mu Qingfang lowered his head, unable to meet anyone’s gaze.

In Shen Qingqiu’s arms, Luo Binghe stirred. His red eyes lifted, unfocused but alert, sweeping over the assembled gods and goddesses. A soft sound left his throat; half a hum, half a breath. He tried to speak.

Nothing came.

Shen Qingqiu felt it like a knife. “Mu shidi,” he said. Mu Qingfang looked up instantly. “If you are truly sorry,” Shen Qingqiu continued, voice steady despite the storm beneath it, “if you truly regret what you did, then you will oversee my husband’s recovery. Personally.”

Mu Qingfang did not hesitate. He bowed deeply, lower than protocol required, lower than dignity demanded. “Of course,” he said. “Shen shixiong.”

Heaven waited.

It waited the way a patient waits for a diagnosis it already suspects, the way a criminal waits for a verdict that has been postponed too long. The jade floors gleamed. The clouds held their breath. The banners did not stir.

Shen Qingqiu stood at the center of the Heavenly Court with Luo Binghe in his arms, and Heaven did not dare ask him to put the demon lord down.

Luo Binghe was light in a way that hurt. Fragile, though there was still power coiled inside him, something vast and old and furious; starved. Like a fire kept buried under ash for too long. His breathing was shallow, uneven, his lashes dark against skin that had forgotten warmth.

Mu Qingfang approached slowly, sleeves tucked close to his body, posture bowed, as a doctor approaching a wound he had once failed to save.

“Shen shixiong,” he said quietly. His voice trembled. “May this one…?”

Shen Qingqiu did not answer immediately. His arms tightened around Luo Binghe by a fraction, instinctive, possessive. Then he nodded once.

Mu Qingfang exhaled as if he had been holding his breath for centuries.

He worked carefully, methodically. Talismans were placed along Luo Binghe’s meridians. Healing qi flowed warm and steady, honey-sweet and medicinal. The chains were gone, but the marks they had left ran deeper than flesh. Mu Qingfang swallowed hard when he felt them; scars burned directly into the soul.

“This will take time,” he said at last. “He will recover. But slowly.”

Shen Qingqiu inclined his head. “That’s fine.”

Time, at least, was something he finally had.

Heaven was very quiet after that.

Not the peaceful kind of quiet, not the cultivated stillness of immortals holding their breath. It was the kind of silence that follows a scream so loud it ruptures something internal, leaving everyone stunned by the fact that the world is still standing.

Shen Qingqiu did not wait for permission.

He adjusted Luo Binghe’s weight in his arms with habitual care, fingers instinctively brushing his pulse, his hair, the back of his neck. They were small, grounding touches, as if to reassure both of them that this was real, that this time Heaven would not wake him up from it.

“Stand aside,” Shen Qingqiu said.

No one moved.

Yue Qingyuan swallowed. His hands clenched, then loosened. He knew that tone. He had heard it once before, long ago, right before everything went wrong.

“Xiao —” he began, and stopped himself.

Shen Qingqiu laughed. It was soft. It was sharp. “Don’t,” he said. “You already took enough from me while calling me that.”

He walked forward anyway.

The Heavenly Archive rose before them, rows upon rows of jade slips and floating talismans, names and deeds and eras recorded in perfect, merciless clarity. This was the heart of Heaven’s authority.

Records.

Every immortal present felt the pressure, the shift, the unmistakable hum of a domain awakening.

Shen Qingqiu stopped before the central pillar. He opened his fan and rhe air changed.

Light fractured into lines, into symbols, into data; threads of information unraveling and reweaving at his fingertips. Names appeared and vanished. Dates flickered. Truth, raw and unfiltered, bled through the polished lie Heaven had been telling itself for millennia.

Yue Qingyuan remained several steps back. He did not approach. He did not speak. His hands were clasped tightly in front of him, knuckles pale, shoulders rigid with restraint. The smile he wore was gone. What remained was something quieter. Worse.

Guilt that had learned how to endure.

Shang Qinghua wept openly, wiping his face with his sleeves and failing at it completely. Liu Qingge stood at Shen Qingqiu’s side like a drawn blade, hand near his sword, daring Heaven to test the limits of its mercy.

When Mu Qingfang finished, Shen Qingqiu adjusted his hold and turned slowly to face the court.

“Shen Qingqiu,” Yue Qingyuan said hoarsely, “what are you doing?”

Shen Qingqiu didn’t look at him.

“I am correcting an error,” he said mildly.

The pillar shuddered. A name appeared. Luo Binghe. Not hidden. Not coded. Not buried in footnotes or sealed under divine authority. It burned into the record like a wound forced open.

And then everything else followed.

The erasure unraveled.

The censored years bled back into existence: Heaven’s deliberations, the fear, the decision to forget rather than face what they had done. The calculations. The votes. The cold logic that said it was easier to remove a man than to confront the consequences of loving him.

Gasps rippled through the gathered gods. Some cried out. Some turned away.

Shen Qingqiu kept going.

“You don’t get absolution,” he said calmly, voice carrying through the hall. “You don’t get to call it necessity or order.”

The record expanded, projecting itself across the sky above Heaven itself. Every god. Every immortal. Every lesser spirit. They all saw it.

They saw Luo Binghe’s sentence. They saw Shen Qingqiu’s collapse. They saw the lie Heaven had chosen.

“This,” Shen Qingqiu said, finally turning, eyes cold and bright and merciless, “is not erased.”

The pillar sealed. The truth remained.Permanent. Immutable. Public.

Silence fell again. Shen Qingqiu closed his fan. Only then did he look down. Luo Binghe’s eyes were open. Red. Lucid, for the first time. He couldn’t speak yet. His throat still bore the scars of divine punishment.

But he looked at Shen Qingqiu. And Shen Qingqiu smiled. It was small and exhausted. Devastatingly gentle.

“I know,” he whispered. “I know.”

Ahead of him, there was no redemption, no forgiveness, no clean ending. There was only the long, difficult work of healing something Heaven had tried to pretend never existed.

Luo Binghe’s existence did not return in full. Not yet. But where there had once been nothing, there was now a scar.

And scars, at least, proved something had been there.

“…Shizun,” Luo Binghe rasped.

The word hit Heaven like a fault line.

Shen Qingqiu exhaled, a sound halfway between a sob and a laugh, and pressed his forehead to Luo Binghe’s. 

Then Shen Qingqiu lifted his head.

“Listen carefully,” he said. His voice was not loud. It did not need to be. “This master is not reclaiming my old seat.” A ripple moved through the court. “This master will not be allowing you to pretend this was a tragedy that simply… happened.”

His gaze swept the assembled gods and goddesses. Civil and martial. Old dynasties and newer blood. All of them witnesses. All of them complicit.

“You erased him,” Shen Qingqiu said, nodding slightly toward Luo Binghe. “You erased me. You erased the parts of the story that made you uncomfortable. You aresed love. My love. And you called it mercy.” His smile was thin and sharp as broken glass. “My domain exists because of that choice.”

Shen Qingqiu adjusted his hold on Luo Binghe, who had drifted back into a healing sleep, one hand fisted weakly in Shen Qingqiu’s sleeve.

“I will remain,” Shen Qingqiu said. “But not as what I was.” He turned, already walking away. “Heaven does not get to forget this,” he added over his shoulder. “If you try again, I will end you.”

A pause.

“That is mercy,” he said softly. “Learn the difference.”

He turned away from Heaven and no one tried to stop him. Behind him, the gods stood beneath a sky that now remembered. And Shen Qingqiu walked on anyway. Because this time, the record would not forget. And neither would he.

Shen Qingqiu did not look back.

He had someone to bring home.