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Mobei-jun was missing. 

This, in itself, was not unusual. Mobei-jun went missing all the time. He rarely informed Shang Qinghua where he was going, when he would return, or whether “returning” was even on the table. His king was just as likely to materialize at his side every day for a fortnight as he was to vanish for an entire season without explanation. 

If Shang Qinghua had to categorize it—and he often did, because categorizing things made them less frightening—he would say Mobei-jun was aggressively schedule-averse. 

Still, he was starting to get worried. 

Just a bit.

Back when Shang Qinghua was still a peak lord— before the you betrayed us by selling secrets to the demon race for years how could you debacle—he’d handled these disappearances by not handling them at all. If he put any brain power towards worrying when Mobei-jun would show up, he would have had no brain power left to focus on the avalanche of tasks that demanded his attention.  

Now, however, his title was gone, his sect ties severed, and his days were filled with the cold churn of northern winds and demons who watched him with open suspicion. Here, within the borders of Mobe-jun’s own dominion, the disappearances had grown shorter. Entire seasons no longer slipped by without a trace; at most, a week would pass before he reappeared as abruptly as he had left.

Those brief absences did mean more work, but it was still a narrower burden than before. He was no longer juggling peak lorddom and treachery, no longer splitting himself between sect affairs, secret intelligence, and the careful siphoning of information northward. 

Ultimately, there was significantly more time to think. Unfortunately, he was using it.

A standard day in his life over the last few months went something like this:

• Wake up.
• Stare at the ceiling of a demon fortress
• Contemplate the consequences of his life choices.
• Get dressed.
• Think about how much easier this would be if Mobei-jun were here to undress him instead.
• Regret that thought immediately.
• Get extremely distracted by that thought anyway.
• Experience approximately twenty minutes of unparalleled shame.
• Breakfast
• Attempt to run a kingdom he had never, at any point in his life, applied to manage.
• Put out three separate assassination attempts before lunch
• Lunch
• Steal glances at his king whenever he thinks no one is looking (everyone is looking; demons have excellent peripheral vision).
• Experience physiological crisis in the middle of a strategy meeting because Mobei-jun just shifted his weight and the stupid fur mantle slid half an inch and now there’s chest.
• Excuse himself 
• Agonize 
• Pace
• Give in faster than last time
• Straight jerk it 
• Come so hard his vision whites out and immediately hate himself
• Wash his hands 
• Return to the great hall looking approximately composed.
• Endure the rest of the afternoon.
• Dinner
• Watch Mobei-jun methodically dismantle whatever unfortunate beast ended up on the table tonight 
• Steal more glances now that the day’s official business is done and the great hall has emptied to just the two of them
• Accept the piece of meat Mobei-jun suddenly tears off and drops onto his plate without ceremony, because refusing would be suicide and also because some pathetic part of him wants to hoard these scraps of attention
• Eventually get dismissed
• Trudge back through freezing halls
• Collapse onto the too-large bed
• Lie on his back staring at the same damn ceiling he woke up to.
• Attempt to sleep 
• Fail to sleep 
• Indulge in mortifying, self-inflicted fantasies that would earn him a thousand years of mockery if anyone ever found out.
• Wonder, not for the first time, why he keeps doing this to himself.
• Feel empty 
• Feel hollow 
• Fall asleep to the sound of his own too-loud heartbeat and the distant howl of northern wind.

And so it goes. 

Shang Qinghua was, above all else, a creature of habit. He acclimated quickly— to danger, to humiliation, to the ever-looming shadow of a demon king at his shoulder. Once a pattern sank its claws into him, he clung to it like a lifeline. He didn’t dwell on the uglier parts of those patterns, like the occasional beatings that came with serving Mobei-jun. Those he shoved into a dusty corner of his mind, locked away where they couldn’t claw at him.

…In any case, his rhythm was shattered.

Most of the daily machinery still turned: the shame, the ceiling-staring. But without the real thing to steal glances at, he was left feeding on thinner fantasies that never quite satisfied. His mental reserves—his pathetic, carefully hoarded spank bank—was never as good as the real thing. 

Dinner was the loneliest fracture of all. Without Mobei-jun seated across from him, the great hall turned stupidly hollow, and Shang Qinghua found himself staring far too often at the empty space where his king should have been.

So, yes, he was worried. 

The worry, once acknowledged, refused to be neatly packed away again. For several days Shang Qinghua attempted to ignore it out of sheer stubborn habit.

Unfortunately, the problem with telling yourself not to worry was that it required discipline. Shang Qinghua possessed many skills, but emotional discipline had never been among them. By the thirty-fifth day, the worry had fermented into something sour.

Which was how he found himself wandering the fortress corridors under the thin pretense of conducting inspections. 

The northern fortress was a maze of ice-bitten stone and cavernous halls, built less with human comfort in mind than with the practicalities of housing extremely large, extremely temperamental demons. His breath still fogged faintly as he walked.

The demons passed him in ones and twos. A few nodded at him stiffly, more simply watched. The traitor human who somehow ended up managing half their administrative disasters was still a curiosity at best and a tolerated liability at worst.

“Ah,” Shang Qinghua said lightly, intercepting a broad-shouldered demon carrying a bundle of something that looked unpleasantly like bones. “You wouldn’t happen to know where His Majesty has gone, would you?”

The demon blinked at him with flat red eyes.

“His Majesty goes where he pleases.”

“Yes, I’m aware, thank you,” Shang Qinghua said. “I was thinking perhaps somewhere more specific.”

There was a long pause. Then, with the unmistakable air of someone who couldn't care less if they tried, the demon shrugged and resumed walking.

Shang Qinghua watched him go. 

He continued to work his way inward: the armory (nothing), the training yards (a few snickers, no answers), the outer gate guards (actual insults at this point), the lesser halls where advisors and vassals lurked. Every response was the same flavor of dismissive. No one knew. No one cared

By the time he reached the great hall again, his feet ached from pacing stone corridors, and the cold had seeped so deep into his bones he could feel it in his teeth. The throne at the head of the hall stared back at him, mocking in its vacancy.

Shang Qinghua stood there for a long minute, staring at the empty seat as though sheer willpower might summon Mobei-jun back into it. Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened.

He turned on his heel and trudged toward his rooms.

The corridors seemed longer every time he walked them lately, his boots scraping against stone worn smooth by centuries of demon tread. By the time he reached his door, the ache in his legs had migrated upward, settling into a dull throb behind his eyes.

He pushed the heavy wood open with his shoulder. The hinges gave their usual low groan. He stepped inside, shut the door behind him with more force than necessary, and let the latch fall.

Shang Qinghua exhaled, watching the breath cloud and dissipate. He peeled off the outermost layer of his robes as he crossed the room, letting them drop where they fell. The furs on the bed were still rumpled from last night’s failed attempt at sleep.

He had made it roughly halfway across the room when something prickled at the back of his awareness. A feeling at the nape of his neck. The sense of being watched.

Shang Qinghua stopped.

He stood there for a moment, staring blankly at the bed as his brain attempted to process the feeling in the least catastrophic way possible. Assassination attempt was, unfortunately, always high on the list of possibilities. The northern demons had grown less enthusiastic about killing him over the months, but less enthusiastic was not the same thing as entirely disinterested.

Slowly, very carefully, he turned his head.

His desk sat against the far wall, half buried under a precarious tower of scrolls. The chair tucked behind it was occupied.

Shang Qinghua blinked. Perched squarely on the seat of the chair was a small white creature.

For several long seconds, the two of them simply stared at each other.

The creature looked vaguely weasel-like, long and sleek with dense snow-pale fur that seemed almost luminous in the brazier’s dim light. Its body was compact but muscular, its blue tipped tail thick and plush where it curled neatly around its paws. The ears were small and sharply pointed. Its eyes were an unsettling icy blue. Not the bright glassy blue of some mountain animals, but a colder shade entirely. The color of deep frost. The color of winter sky.

They were fixed directly on him.

“…Hello?”

The creature did not respond. It remained perched on the chair with perfect stillness, head tilted just slightly as it regarded him with a level of concentration that felt wildly disproportionate. 

Shang Qinghua squinted at it. Slowly, he glanced toward the door behind him. It was still closed, no obvious signs of forced entry.

He looked back at the creature. It was still there, still staring.

“…Okay,” Shang Qinghua said carefully.

He lifted one hand and rubbed his eyes, pressing the heel of his palm into them until bright sparks flared across his vision. When he lowered his hand again and blinked the blur away—

The creature remained exactly where it had been.

“…Right,” Shang Qinghua said after a moment. “Maybe I’ve finally lost it and this is a hallucination.”

The creature’s expression did not change. Which, admittedly, was not very informative. It was a stoat. Its range of facial expressions was probably limited.

Still. 

They continued staring at each other across the cold room. 

“Well,” Shang Qinghua sighed after a long moment. “if you’re a hallucination, at least you’re a cute one.”

The stoat’s tail flicked once against the chair, the movement predatory in a way that had nothing to do with its modest size. Somehow Shang Qinghua had the absurd impression that the little beast had just evaluated him and found the results disappointing. 

If anything, the creature looked faintly… haughty.

“Okay,” Shang Qinghua said slowly, taking a cautious step forward. “As cute as you are, I’m fairly certain demon fortresses are not a natural stoat habitat. Don’t take this personally, but I’m pretty sure the correct course of action here is to release you back into the wild before someone decides you’re tonight’s stew.”

The stoat’s ears twitched. Shang Qinghua took one final step forward and reached out. The moment his fingers closed around the creature’s middle, it twisted with startling speed and sank its tiny teeth into the side of his index finger.

“OW—!”

He jerked his hand back so fast his boots made a squeaking noise against the stone. The stoat sat back on its haunches, perfectly balanced, as though it had never moved at all.

Shang Qinghua clutched his hand to his chest.

“What the hell, man?!”

The stoat huffed, a short, sharp exhale through the nose that sounded suspiciously like exasperation.

“You bit me!”

The stoat huffed again. 

“What? You don’t wanna go outside?”

The only response was another huff.

“Okay,” Shang Qinghua said wearily. “I’m going to need a little more clarification here. Is that a ‘yes, please release me into the snow’ huff, or a ‘no, absolutely not’ huff?”

The stoat said nothing, because it was a stoat, but it continued watching him with unnerving intensity.

Shang Qinghua sighed.

“Look, even if you’re opposed to the whole ‘return to the wilderness’ concept, you can’t stay here! This is my room. My one small corner of this frozen wasteland. I never had pets growing up—too busy jumping between houses—and I’m really, really not good with animals! I couldn’t even keep my Sims alive. Not that you would know what a Sim is. Point is, you would be way way better off somewhere else!”

The stoat’s expression remained unchanged, but the tail flicked again. Shang Qinghua took that as encouragement.

“Right,” he said. “So let’s try this again. Gently this time.”

He reached forward carefully, aiming to scoop the creature up with both hands.

The stoat’s reaction was instantaneous, it snapped toward his fingers with impressive enthusiasm. This time, Shang Qinghua managed to yank his hands away before the teeth connected.

“Hey!”

The creature settled back into its regal perch, tail curled neatly around paws again. Shang Qinghua stared at it, affronted.

“Come on, man!” he said. “I’m trying to be reasonable here!”

The stoat turned its face away. It did so with such unmistakable dignity that for a moment Shang Qinghua was vaguely offended. The creature’s narrow muzzle angled toward the far wall, as if the entire conversation had ceased to interest it.

He stared at the back of its head.

“…Seriously?”

Shang Qinghua rubbed his bitten finger, eyeing the tiny punctures with growing suspicion.

“I don’t even know what to do with you,” he muttered. “Do demon vets exist? Is that a thing? Or are you wild? Because if you’re wild, I feel like biting strangers is a bad sign. Actually, biting strangers is generally frowned upon regardless of domestication status.”

There was no response. Just the quiet crackle of the brazier and the distant wind.

“Are you someone’s pet?” he demanded. “Because if you are, this whole situation just got a lot more complicated. Am I about to get rabies? You bit me earlier! Twice! Well—once and a half. The second time was a warning shot. Still counts.” 

He held up his injured finger accusingly. The stoat did not even look at him.

Shang Qinghua’s shoulders slumped.

He had spent the entire day marching through a fortress full of hostile demons, freezing stone corridors, and unhelpful conversations that all led back to the same empty throne. Now he was standing in the middle of his room arguing with a weasel that clearly thought it was above such things.

Something in his chest tightened unpleasantly.

“You know what?” Shang Qinghua said suddenly, throwing up his hands. “Fine. Be that way.”

The stoat did not turn around.

“Stay on the chair, ignore me, judge me silently from your lofty perch—I don’t care anymore. I really don’t have time to deal with this right now.” he continued, the words coming faster now that they had started. “My king is already missing, everything sucks, the entire fortress is one bad day away from deciding I’m more useful as fertilizer than administrator, and I’m already teetering right on the brink of losing what little composure I have left. So congratulations, demon stoat, you’ve officially been promoted to ‘problem I’m too tired to solve.’ Enjoy the chair.”

He didn’t wait to see whether the stoat would dignify that with another huff. Instead, he turned sharply away from the desk and crossed the remaining distance to the bed in three tired steps. The furs rustled as he dropped down onto the edge, elbows braced on his knees. He dragged both hands through his hair, before pressing his palms against his eyes as though he could physically shove the day out of his skull.

The room settled back into quiet. For a while he simply stayed there, breathing slowly, the cold air brushing against the back of his neck while the brazier crackled faintly somewhere behind him. Gradually, the knot in his chest loosened. Shang Qinghua let out a long breath and lowered his hands.

There was something small and white sitting near his boots. He blinked down.

The stoat had left the chair.

It now stood at his feet, its long body gathered neatly on the stone floor as it looked up at him. Up close, the creature’s eyes were even stranger than he had first realized. For a moment neither of them moved. Shang Qinghua sighed and rubbed the back of his neck.

“…Sorry,” he said.

The stoat’s whiskers twitched.

“I didn’t mean to raise my voice,” he added. “You’re just some little guy who wandered into the wrong room. That’s not your fault.”

The stoat’s whiskers twitched again, sharper this time.

Shang Qinghua squinted down at it. The little beast’s icy-blue eyes narrowed in what could only be described as offense.

“…What?” he muttered. “You’re mad at me now?”

The stoat held his gaze for one long, judgmental beat. It gave a single, deliberate flick of its thick tail and launched itself upward in a smooth, silent arc.

Shang Qinghua flinched on instinct, half-expecting another bite, but the creature landed lightly on the edge of the bed instead. It padded two precise steps across the furs and sat down right beside his thigh, back straight, paws neatly tucked, tail wrapped around itself like a stole.

Shang Qinghua stared at it again.

For a moment he entertained the exhausted suspicion that this might still be a hallucination after all, some strange byproduct of thirty-five days of increasingly unproductive yearning. Unfortunately, his finger still hurt where the creature had bitten him, which felt like fairly compelling evidence against that theory.

He let out a long breath.

“…Fine,” he said. “I guess you can stay here for tonight.”

The stoat did not so much as blink in acknowledgment. It merely held his gaze for one final second, as though this was the only sensible conclusion he could have arrived at, then turned away with an air of complete self-possession.

“Oh, good,” Shang Qinghua muttered. “I’m glad we agree.”

The creature made its way across the bed with the same quiet assurance it had shown in every other part of this bizarre encounter, stepping over the folds of fur. It reached the pillow nearest the head of the bed, climbed onto it in one neat motion, and began to circle.

It folded itself neatly down into the center of the pillow, body curling into a compact shape against the linen. Its tail tucked close. Its head remained lifted, waiting.

Shang Qinghua looked at the little curled shape, then at the empty expanse of furs around it, then back at the stoat.

He was too tired to examine anything further. Too tired to question why a random demon fortress animal had apparently elected him as its personal caretaker. 

Too tired, period.

“…Whatever,” he muttered, mostly to the ceiling. “Deal with it in the morning.”

He kicked off his boots, shed the last layers without ceremony, and crawled under the heavy furs.

Whether satisfied by the promise or merely finished supervising him, the stoat at last lowered its head onto the pillow. Its eyes slipped half-shut, though Shang Qinghua had the distinct impression it remained more aware than asleep.

He watched it for one moment longer, and then let his own eyes close.

---

Shang Qinghua woke to the familiar ache in his shoulders from sleeping tense, the low crackle of the brazier reduced to embers, and, unexpectedly, a small, warm weight somewhere to his right.

He cracked one eye open.

The stoat was exactly where it had been when he fell asleep: curled on the pillow in a pristine white knot, breathing slow and even. Its tail was draped over its nose like it was trying to block out the faint light creeping through the high, narrow window slits.

Shang Qinghua stared at it for several long seconds.

“…You’re still here,” he said aloud.

The stoat did not deign to wake for such an obvious statement. One ear flicked, dismissively, then stilled again. 

Shang Qinghua sat up carefully, half-expecting the creature to bolt now that daylight had arrived and the novelty of his bedroom had worn off. It didn’t. It simply opened one icy-blue eye, regarded him with faint, regal disapproval, and then closed it again.

Shang Qinghua rubbed his face hard enough to leave red marks. “Fine. You do you.”

He dressed, layered furs over robes against the bone-deep cold that never quite left these rooms, and paused at the door with his hand on the latch. The stoat had not moved. He looked back at the small white shape on his pillow, at the rumpled furs around it, at the way it seemed to have claimed the space.

“Stay out of trouble,” he muttered, “And don’t chew anything important.”

No response.

He left.

The morning disappeared beneath the usual avalanche. A dispute in the lower storehouses over missing rations. Two separate requests for authorization to move patrols near the eastern ridge. One messenger from a border outpost with a report full of missing details. An argument between mid-ranking demons that began over territory maps and ended, somehow, with one of them trying to bite the other’s ear off in the middle of a corridor.

Shang Qinghua spent the first half of the day putting out fires both literal and administrative, which was, depressingly, business as usual. 

By the time the lunch hour rolled around, his stomach was loud enough to draw stares. He returned to his rooms with a tray balanced in both hands: steamed buns, a bowl of thin congee, pickled vegetables, and a generous slab of rare-roasted beast meat, still faintly steaming.

He shouldered the door open. The stoat was still on the pillow.

“…Damn,” he said softly. “I really thought you’d be gone by now.”

The stoat lifted its head, blinked at him, then lowered its head again as though the observation was beneath comment. Shang Qinghua set the tray on the low table with a quiet clink and stared at the small white creature for another long moment.

“You’re committed to this whole ‘squatting in my room’ thing, huh?” Shang Qinghua sighed. He divided the meal in half, tearing the meat with careful fingers and setting one generous piece on the tray in front of the stoat. “Here. Don’t say I never do anything for you.”

The creature regarded the offering for a single, considering second. It rose slowly, before coming down from the pillow with liquid grace. It landed lightly on the bed, and began to eat.

Shang Qinghua balanced his own bowl in one hand and watched between bites of congee.

The stoat ignored everything on the plate except the meat. When a shred of vegetable clung to one piece, it paused only long enough to nose the offending greenery aside with crisp disdain before continuing. It stripped the meat clean, leaving the thin edge of fat and gristle untouched on the edge of the tray, then sat back on its haunches and looked at him again. Expectant.

Shang Qinghua snorted softly. “Yeah, should’ve known. Carnivorous little asshole. Of course you only want the good stuff.” He tore off another small chunk from his own half and set it down. “Fine. More meat next time. I’ll raid the kitchens properly.”

The stoat leaned forward and began eating again with a satisfied huff.

 Shang Qinghua picked at the rest of his lunch without much appetite. The bowl of congee sat heavy in his hand. After a moment he set it down and stared at the empty space across from him.

“…It’s actually kind of nice,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “Having someone to share with. My king’s been gone so long the great hall feels stupidly big at meals.”

The stoat stopped mid-bite.

Its head came up slowly. Those frost-blue eyes fixed on him with sudden, unnerving intensity. It didn’t move.

Shang Qinghua blinked. “What?”

There was no response. 

He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly self-conscious. “Uh. Right. My king. Mobei-jun. He’s… the king here in the North. You should know that, as one of his subjects. He’s missing right now. Which really sucks. I mean—I enjoy not getting thrown into walls as often, don’t get me wrong—but I still miss him. Does that make me crazy?”

The question slipped out before he really thought about it. The moment it was in the air, Shang Qinghua became acutely aware of the fact that he had just asked a stoat for reassurance.

The stoat continued to stare at him. Shang Qinghua stared back.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a quiet voice pointed out that this was, in fact, a new personal low. He had spoken to animals before, mostly in the tone one used when attempting to shoo them out of inconvenient places, but sitting on his own bed and earnestly explaining his emotional situation to a carnivorous little freeloader felt like a different category of life choice entirely.

Still, the room was quiet. The stoat was watching him. And Shang Qinghua had never been particularly good at leaving things unsaid once he’d started.

He looked down at the tray for a moment before continuing.

“I just hope he’s okay,” he said after a beat. “He disappears all the time. But this time it’s been… long. Longer than usual. And I keep thinking—what if something actually got him? What if he’s hurt somewhere, or—or worse? And I’m just sitting here managing supply requisitions like an idiot instead of… I don’t know. Doing something.”

The stoat did not move.

“He’s not very nice to me. My king. You’ve probably picked up on that already. But I still want to be around him all the time,” Shang Qinghua went on, his voice dropping into the absent rhythm it took when he forgot anyone, or anything, was listening. “Doesn’t really matter what he’s doing. Sitting there. Glowering. Murdering. Whatever. I’d still rather be nearby.”

He paused, glancing at the stoat again. The stoat remained very still, those pale eyes fixed on him.

“How pathetic does that make me?”

There was, unsurprisingly, no answer.

The silence stretched just long enough for Shang Qinghua to feel mildly ridiculous again, but by that point the words had already started moving.

“I know he doesn’t actually like me,” he continued. “He mostly keeps me around for the spying and the paperwork and whatever else he finds—”

The bite came fast enough to cut him off mid-sentence.

“OW—fuck!”

Shang Qinghua jerked his hand back instinctively, nearly knocking over the tray in the process. A bright bead of blood welled up immediately. He stared at it, then at the stoat, mouth open in betrayed outrage.

“What the hell was that one for?!”

The creature sat back on its haunches again, tail lashing once in sharp, agitated arcs. Its ears were flat against its skull, and those icy eyes were blazing with something that looked dangerously close to rage. It opened its narrow muzzle and let out a series of short, high chirps.

Shang Qinghua cradled his bleeding hand against his chest and stared.

“I don’t speak stoat,” he said faintly.

The stoat gave one last aggrieved chirp and turned its face away, as though the entire conversation had just become beneath it again. But its tail kept twitching, betraying the agitation it was trying so hard to conceal.

“…What?” Shang Qinghua said after a moment, baffled. “You don’t like my pathetic whining or something? Or do you just enjoy hurting me? Is that it?”

The stoat did not turn back. Its ears remained pinned, its tail still flicking sharply against the bedspread like a metronome.

Shang Qinghua squinted at it, then huffed softly under his breath. “Man. You’re just like my king.”

That got a reaction. The stoat’s head snapped back toward him so quickly the motion was almost a blur. Those frost-blue eyes locked onto his face again. For a moment it looked genuinely furious.

Then the expression—if one could call it that—shifted into something stranger. The anger seemed to collide headlong with a different, less certain emotion. The stoat stared at him, ears lifting a fraction as though it had abruptly lost the thread of whatever indignation had fueled the earlier outburst.

Shang Qinghua blinked at it.

“…What?”

The stoat’s gaze dropped to his hand.  More specifically, to the finger he was still holding against his chest, where the thin line of blood had begun to smear faintly along his skin.

The creature stepped forward.

Shang Qinghua instinctively leaned back as the stoat approached across the bed, shoulders pressing against the bedpost. “Whoa, hey—hold on. We just established that you bite.”

The stoat paused. It lifted its head and looked at him.

The look was… unimpressed. A flat, steady stare that seemed to convey that Shang Qinghua was overreacting.

“Okay,” he said weakly, lowering his voice. “But if you bite me again, we’re going to have a serious conversation! I mean it!”

The stoat did not dignify that with a response, it simply continued forward.

Shang Qinghua watched it approach with wary suspicion, his injured hand still held awkwardly against his chest. The small white form padded the last few careful steps across the rumpled furs and climbed, without hesitation, directly into his lap. The weight was negligible, barely more than a warm, living scarf, but the sudden proximity made his breath catch anyway.

The stoat ignored him.

Its attention had already returned to the small wound on his finger. It leaned forward, whiskers brushing lightly against his skin as it inspected the bead of blood that had begun to smear along the knuckle. Then, with brisk efficiency, it extended its tongue and began to lick the injury clean.

The sensation was quick and warm, the tiny tongue rasping gently over the cut as the stoat tidied the blood away with meticulous focus.

“…Aww,” Shang Qinghua breathed, the sound slipping out soft and involuntary.

The stoat paused mid-lick. One icy-blue eye flicked upward, regarding him with clear, unmistakable judgment.

Shang Qinghua’s fond little smile faltered as a belated, far more sensible thought finally crawled its way through the haze of exhaustion and unexpected tenderness.

“Wait,” he said slowly. “Wait, wait, wait. Are you… is this a tasting thing? Like, are you just sampling the merchandise before you decide which part of me to eat first?”

The stoat lifted its head fully now. It stared at him for one long, flat second, expression so profoundly unimpressed it might as well have been rolling its eyes. It twisted its body and flicked its thick, plush tail upward in a single, precise arc. The blue tip caught him square across the cheek.

Shang Qinghua blinked in surprise, then let out a startled laugh, the sound slipping free before he could stop it. 

“Alright, alright,” he said, shaking his head. “Message received.”

The stoat had already resettled in his lap, its body tucked neatly against the folds of his robes as if nothing unusual had occurred. Shang Qinghua looked down at it for a moment, his amusement fading into something softer and more thoughtful.

“You know,” he said after a beat, “I probably shouldn’t keep calling you ‘hey you’ or ‘carnivorous little asshole.’ That feels… rude.”

The stoat regarded him.

“And impractical,” he added. “Especially if you’re planning on sticking around.”

Shang Qinghua tipped his head slightly, studying the small white creature in his lap. Up close like this, he could see hints of fine darker streaks running through the blue tip of its tail.

“…Shouldn’t I give you a name?” he mused aloud. “I mean, I feel weird just talking at you like this. Do you have a name?”

The stoat made a short, dismissive huff.

Shang Qinghua raised his eyebrows. “I’ll take that as a no. Alright then. Let’s see….”

The stoat watched him with growing suspicion. 

“What about—Frostie? Frostie-jun?” Shang Qinghua offered cautiously.

The reaction was immediate. The stoat’s ears flattened, its body tensing in a way that suggested he had come within a hair’s breadth of being bitten again.

“Okay! Wow. Alright, not Frostie.”

Shang Qinghua squinted down at it, thinking. Naming things had, historically, not been one of his most respected skills. Entire sections of his creative legacy had been mocked for being too literal, too clunky, too embarrassingly on-the-nose. At the time he’d defended himself on the grounds that clarity was a virtue. 

Still, he could do better than Frostie. Probably.

“…What about,” he said slowly. “Snowcloud-jun?”

The stoat did not even bother with a warning huff this time. Its thick tail lashed up in a swift white arc and caught him smartly across the mouth.

Shang Qinghua sputtered. “Hey!”

The stoat sat there afterward with infuriating composure, as if tail-slapping him was not only justified but necessary.

Shang Qinghua let out a long breath through his nose, then flopped his head lightly against the bedpost behind him. “Man. If Cucumber Bro were here, I bet you two would get along great.”

That thought lingered for half a second longer than it should have. Shen Qingqiu—Cucumber Bro, whichever version of him currently occupied the role of smug peanut gallery inside Shang Qinghua’s head—would, in fact, have found this entire situation hysterical. He would have said something cutting and accurate about Shang Qinghua’s inability to do anything with dignity, then probably stolen the stoat outright by offering better food and superior judgment. 

Too bad he was dead. 

Temporarily dead, that is. 

Shang Qinghua huffed, then looked down again.

The stoat was still watch him, now with wary expectation. The kind one might reserve for a man who had already suggested Frostie-jun.

“Okay,” Shang Qinghua said, more to himself than to the stoat. “Let me think for a second.”

He studied the creature in his lap properly this time instead of reaching for the first obvious descriptor. The white fur, yes, and the icy eyes, obviously, and the blue tipped tail, and the fact that it had somehow made itself at home in his room. But there was also something strangely elegant about it beneath all the biting and judgment. Something delicate and sharp and cold in a way that felt less like snow and more like the thin skin of ice over deep water.

His gaze drifted to the window slits, where pale northern light filtered in over the stone. Then back to the stoat.

“White Frost Stoat of Lingering Ice,” Shang Qinghua said aloud. 

The stoat regarded him.

“…Or Ling-jun for short,” he added brightly.

The stoat’s expression shifted into something faintly dubious. The ears twitched. The tail gave a single slow flick against his robes. But this time it did not lash out.

The silence stretched for a moment longer. Shang Qinghua let out a small, satisfied breath and leaned back against the bedpost.

“Well,” he said, glancing down at the small white creature settled in his lap, “I’ll take that as a win.”

---

The next few days slipped into a quiet, almost domestic rhythm Shang Qinghua never would have imagined for himself. Each morning began the same way: he woke to find a small white shape still curled on the pillow beside him, or draped somewhere across the furs in a loose spill of snow-pale limbs, breathing slow and even. Ling-jun never vanished at dawn the way Shang Qinghua kept half-expecting. Instead, the stoat would crack open one frost-blue eye, regard him with faint displeasure, and then settle again as if his waking were a minor inconvenience at best.

He started bringing food back from every meal, dividing the portions with increasing care. Ling-jun’s preferences never wavered; anything that wasn’t meat was treated with open disdain. Before long Shang Qinghua had fallen into the habit of talking to it while he ate, recounting the latest disasters of fortress life as though the creature might actually understand.

The stoat listened, or at least appeared to, ears occasionally flicking at particularly ridiculous details. Once, when Shang Qinghua reached out absently to scratch behind those small pointed ears while rambling about patrol rotations, the creature actually allowed it. A slow blink and a faint, almost imperceptible lean into the touch. Shang Qinghua froze for a full five seconds afterward, hand still hovering in midair, convinced he’d imagined the moment. But the stoat had simply resettled on the pillow and closed its eyes, as though granting permission for future petitions.

Having the little beast around all the time did change things in ways he hadn’t quite braced for—and by “things,” well, he mostly meant his evening wind-down schedule, which had previously featured a very reliable, very shameful finale.

The first night he’d tried—very discreetly, under the furs, telling himself the stoat was asleep—he’d just undone his robes before he felt the unmistakable prickle of being watched. He’d cracked one eye open to find Ling-jun sitting bolt upright, head tilted, looking at him intently. 

He’d given up immediately. 

So the old routine quietly died, replaced by longer evenings of staring at the ceiling while the ache built like a slowly tightening spring. It was almost a relief, in the most twisted possible way. The constant low-grade horniness gave him something concrete to be miserable about besides the giant Mobei-jun-shaped hole in every room. At least this problem had a face (a very small, very haughty face) he could glare at accusingly. 

Still, the thirty-fifth day became the thirty-eighth, then the fortieth, and the worry that had once been sour began to fester into something moldy and damp and rotten

On the morning he finally decided to do something about it, the sky outside the narrow window slits was a pale gray.  

Shang Qinghua finished fastening the last clasp of his outer robes and glanced over his shoulder. Ling-jun was on the bed, perched neatly in the center of the furs, paws tucked beneath its chest. The creature watched him with the same cool attentiveness it brought to everything.

Shang Qinghua sighed.

“Alright,” he said, bracing his hands on his hips. “We need to talk.”

Shang Qinghua paced once across the room, then back again. “So. I’ve been thinking. And I’ve come to the extremely responsible conclusion that sitting here doing paperwork while my king has been missing for over a month is… maybe not my best look.”

The stoat’s whiskers twitched faintly.

“Yes, I know,” Shang Qinghua continued. “Technically speaking, my job is the paperwork. I’m very good at paperwork. I’m arguably the best paperwork-doer this kingdom has ever had. But there are limits.”

He stopped in front of the bed. Ling-jun tilted its head slightly.

“I’m going to look for him,” Shang Qinghua said. “I’ll leave you food, enough to last a while. You’re clearly very capable of taking care of yourself. Honestly, you’ve probably survived worse places than this fortress.”

The stoat’s whiskers twitched. Shang Qinghua hesitated, then exhaled slowly.

“I can’t just sit here anymore,” he admitte. “Every day I keep thinking maybe he’ll walk back through the gates. Maybe he’ll just appear behind me in the great hall like nothing happened and throw me through a wall for good measure.”

A small, helpless smile tugged briefly at the corner of his mouth before fading.

“But if he doesn’t… if something actually happened to him… I can’t just sit here and do nothing. He’s kind of the most important person in the world to me. So. You know. I should probably go make sure he’s not dead.” 

For a moment the room was very still.

Ling-jun stood.

One moment the stoat was tucked neatly into the furs; the next it had risen to its paws, stretching lightly before hopping down from the bed.

“Hey,” Shang Qinghua said automatically as the small white shape padded toward him across the stone floor. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Ling-jun didn’t break stride. Its pawfalls were silent, too quiet for Shang Qinghua to trust them entirely. The stoat’s tail flicked with the slightest hint of impatience as it continued forward, eyes trained ahead, unaffected by the human’s concern.

“No, you can’t come with me,” Shang Qinghua said quickly, though his voice faltered in its urgency. “It’s not safe. I’m going out there, and you…” He trailed off, unsure how to finish the sentence without sounding ridiculous. “Look, I’m not taking you along for a trip into danger, alright?”

Ling-jun didn’t respond. It simply padded onward, the rhythm of its steps mocking Shang Qinghua’s futile attempts to reason with it. The creature’s stubbornness was almost impressive, but it also made his chest tighten with frustration.

“I’m serious,” Shang Qinghua pressed, voice dropping into something almost pleading. “I don’t even know where I’m going yet. The North is huge and most of it wants to eat anything that moves. You’re tiny. And bitey. And I’m not exactly equipped to protect anything right now.”

Ling-jun huffed, a short, sharp sound through the nose that managed to convey more disdain than most demons could pack into an entire sentence.

 Shang Qinghua stared down at the retreating tail.

For a moment he considered simply shutting the door and leaving the stubborn little creature behind. That was, objectively speaking, the most sensible solution. Ling-jun would survive. It had clearly survived long before wandering into Shang Qinghua’s room.

Unfortunately, the stoat had already made it three steps closer to the door and showed absolutely no sign of stopping.

Shang Qinghua could already see how this would go. He would leave. The stoat would follow. He would try to chase it off. It would bite him. Eventually they would both end up halfway across the tundra anyway, except now Shang Qinghua would also be bleeding.

He sighed.

“…Fine,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “Fine. You want to be difficult? Fine. But if you're coming, you’re going up here.” 

Shang Qinghua moved toward the stoat, who stopped for a moment to look up at him. Ignoring the quiet challenge in those icy blue eyes, Shang Qinghua crouched, offering a hand.

“Don’t bite me,” he warned, his voice low and serious. 

Ling-jun gave a small huff of disdain, as though thoroughly unimpressed at his feeble attempts at negotiation. Without hesitation, it darted upward with a sudden burst of speed, leaping into Shang Qinghua’s arms. The soft weight of the stoat settled comfortably around his neck, its paws gently adjusting to the curve of his collarbone, tail curling snugly against his throat like a living scarf.

Shang Qinghua exhaled in relief, lifting his hands to adjust the stoat so that it was comfortably draped over him. “We’re staying out of trouble, understood?”

Ling-jun’s sharp eyes regarded him for a long moment. Then, as if dismissing his words entirely, it flicked its tail once in lazy defiance, and settled into its perch.

Shang Qinghua adjusted the fall of his outer robes and pushed open the door. 

The fortress air bit sharper here, but the stoat seemed unbothered—its body relaxed against the curve of his neck, breath steady and even, tail draped in a loose, possessive coil down the front of his robes.

He kept his pace measured, deliberately casual. The corridors narrowed, then widened again into the long vaulted passage that led to the outer gates. More than a few demons glanced his way. Shang Qinghua kept his gaze forward and pretended not to notice.

The outer gates of the fortress were guarded by two enormous demons whose names Shang Qinghua could never quite pin down. Both straightened slightly when he approached, their attention sharpening the way predators did when something mildly interesting wandered into range.

One of them leaned on his spear and squinted.

“Well, well,” the demon drawled. “Look who’s out early.”

Shang Qinghua forced a polite smile.“Good morning.”

The demon’s gaze slid over him in a slow, assessing sweep, lingering on the bundle of white fur around his neck before sliding lower. Ling-jun’s body tightened almost imperceptibly, the warmth along his collarbone sharpening into a coil of tension.

“What’s that?” the second guard asked, curiosity sharpening his voice.

“A stoat,” Shang Qinghua answered shortly.

The first demon barked a short laugh. “Looks more like a rat.”

“Human accessories are getting strange these days.” the second added. 

Shang Qinghua stepped forward to pass between them, hoping very much that the conversation would end there.

It did not.

“Where are you headed, human?” the first guard asked lazily.

“Out.”

“Out where?”

Shang Qinghua paused, then offered the most honest answer he had. “To look for His Majesty.”

The reaction was immediate. The second guard snorted outright, while the first tipped his head back with a low chuckle.

“Look for him?” the demon echoed. “What, you think our king needs your help to find his way home?”

“He probably just got bored and needed a change of pace,” the other said with a grin that showed too many teeth. His gaze slid down Shang Qinghua again, this time with less idle curiosity and more pointed amusement. “Wouldn’t be the first time a king got tired of his toys.”

The words landed lightly, tossed out with the casual cruelty of someone who did not expect them to matter. Shang Qinghua felt something small and tight twist in his chest anyway. He kept his expression carefully neutral.

“His Majesty has responsibilities,” he said mildly. “As do I.”

“Oh, sure,” the demon said. “Responsibilities.”

The other leaned closer, lowering his voice. “If he’s tired of you, little scribe, you could always come play with us instead. We’re not picky.” 

Shang Qinghua opened his mouth to deflect—some rote deflection about duties, about not being worth the trouble—when a low, vicious hiss cut through the air.

Ling-jun’s head lifted, ears pinned flat, lips peeled back from needle-sharp teeth in a snarl that promised far more damage than its modest size should allow.

The guards blinked at the sudden hostility coming from the creature. 

“What the hell is wrong with your rat?” one of them demanded, leaning back a fraction as Ling-jun’s hiss sharpened. His yellow eyes flicked between Shang Qinghua’s face and the bristling white shape at his throat. 

The second guard bared his teeth in uneasy laughter. “Maybe it doesn’t like sharing.”

“Does it bite?”

Shang Qinghua, who had very recent and extremely relevant experience with that exact question, decided this was an excellent moment to disengage.

“Sorry! Sorry!” he said quickly, lifting both hands in an apologetic gesture that jostled the stoat slightly. “Didn’t mean to cause any trouble. We’ll just—yes—be on our way.”

He didn’t wait for permission. He ducked his head in a shallow bow that was more reflex than respect and hurried forward, boots scraping against the packed snow just beyond the gate threshold. The wind hit him full in the face, but he welcomed the sting. It gave him something else to focus on besides the heat crawling up the back of his neck.

Behind him, the guards’ chuckling followed.

Shang Qinghua kept walking, faster than dignity strictly allowed, until the gate’s shadow fell away and the open tundra stretched pale and endless before him. Only then did he slow, breath fogging in quick, uneven clouds.

Ling-jun had twisted halfway around his shoulders during the retreat. The stoat’s narrow muzzle was still pointed backward, ears flat, eyes locked on the receding figures at the gate with an intensity that could have frozen blood. Its tail lashed in short, sharp movements against the front of Shang Qinghua’s robes.

Shang Qinghua followed its line of sight and sighed.

“Hey,” he murmured, voice soft enough that the wind almost stole it. “Come on now. They’re gone.”

Ling-jun did not look convinced.

Shang Qinghua rubbed lightly between the stoat’s shoulders in what he hoped was a calming gesture and continued walking, boots crunching softly over the thin crust of snow.

“They were just being… demons,” he said quietly. “It’s what they do. Poke at weak spots until something bleeds. It’s not like they said anything that wasn’t true. My king barely tolerates me on a good day. He’d probably be furious if he knew I’d abandoned the ledgers to wander the tundra like some lovesick fool.”

The stoat did not move. Shang Qinghua glanced sideways, frowning slightly.

Ling-jun had stopped glaring at the fortress now, but the tension had not left its body. The frost-blue eyes were no longer fixed on the gate, they were fixed on him.

Shang Qinghua blinked.

“…What?” he asked.

The stoat continued to watch him with unsettling intensity.

Shang Qinghua shifted his shoulders a little under the scrutiny. He cleared his throat into the wind, the sound small and swallowed almost immediately by the vast, indifferent white around them. The stoat didn’t even twitch an ear in acknowledgment; it just kept staring at him with those calm, expectant eyes that made him feel like he was being gently but inexorably dissected.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Well. Since we’re out here now, I should probably tell you what to look for. You know, so you can help me spot him if he’s… somewhere.” He gestured vaguely at the endless tundra. “Not that I expect you to track scents or anything. You’re not a hound. But still. Teamwork. All that.”

The stoat gave a single, slow blink. Shang Qinghua took that as encouragement. 

“My king is…” He trailed off briefly, more because the words arrived all at once than because he did not know what to say. “He’s hard to miss, honestly. Very tall, for one thing. Taller than most demons, and that’s already a fairly unreasonable category of person to begin with. If you see someone built like a mountain, that’s a good first clue.”

Shang Qinghua adjusted the strap of the small satchel at his side and kept walking, boots crunching softly through the thin crust of snow.

“Dark hair—longer than most demons bother with. He doesn’t bother tying it back either. Which I think is considered improper, by human standards, but it looks good like that. Really good.” He caught himself, cheeks warming despite the cold. “I mean—distinctive. Very distinctive. You’d recognize him from a distance.”

Ling-jun’s whiskers twitched once.

“His face is… sharp. All angles. High cheekbones, jaw that could probably cut ice. Eyes the same color as yours, actually. That sort of pale, icy blue. when he looks at you it’s like staring into the heart of a glacier. Very unfair, really. A person shouldn’t be allowed to look at someone like that. It’s excessive”

The stoat shifted fractionally against his neck, paws flexing once against the fabric of his robe as though settling in to listen more comfortably.

“And his hands. Have I mentioned the hands? Because they deserve their own paragraph. Big. Callused. When he tears a chunk of roasted beast apart at dinner, and then just… drops a piece onto my plate, like I’m a stray dog he’s decided to tolerate… I have to sit there and pretend my entire nervous system isn’t short-circuiting. I want those hands around my throat. Not even in a sex way—okay, yes, exactly in a sex way. I want him to squeeze me just hard enough that I can feel my pulse against his palm and know that if he wanted to, he could end me. And then not do it. Obviously.”

His breathing had gone uneven. He didn’t notice.

“The voice,” he went on, words tumbling faster now, “low enough that it vibrates through your ribs. Especially when he’s angry, that rough-edged growl that makes every demon in the room flinch. I’ve gotten hard in the middle of budget meetings just from the way he says ‘enough.’ One word. One fucking word. And I’m already imagining him saying it while he’s got me bent over the throne.”

He stopped walking entirely.

The tundra stretched silent and indifferent around them. Wind moaned low across the snow. Shang Qinghua stood there, face burning so hot he was surprised the snowflakes didn’t melt on contact, chest heaving like he’d just run a marathon instead of monologuing filth at a stoat.

Ling-jun seemed eerily attentive around his neck. The small head had turned fully toward him; frost-blue eyes locked on Shang Qinghua’s profile with an intensity that felt almost physical. The thick tail, previously draped so casually, had curled a fraction tighter around the side of his throat

Shang Qinghua swallowed hard. 

“It’s just,” he said, more quietly now, “he’s so… much. Everything about him is a little too much. Too sharp, too strong, too beautiful, too terrifying. You look at him and it’s like standing too close to the edge of something enormous. You know you should step back, and instead your brain goes, wow, incredible, maybe let’s get even closer.”

He laughed under his breath, embarrassed by the honesty of it.

“Which, to be fair, is more or less what I did.”

Ling-jun’s paw flexed against his collarbone. Shang Qinghua glanced down at him, caught by the movement, and found the stoat still watching , as though every word were being weighed and filed away somewhere.

The look made a fresh wave of awkwardness wash through him.

“…Anyway,” he said, clearing his throat and trying for practicality again, though the effort was somewhat undermined by everything that had just come out of his mouth. “The important part is that if you see a terrifyingly beautiful demon that’s probably him.” He hesitated, then added with rueful sincerity, “Or possibly not. The North does have a type.”

A single, amused huff stirred the hair at his temple.

---

The North was very large.

This was a fact Shang Qinghua had technically known before leaving the fortress, but like many facts he had known in theory, it turned out to be significantly more real when experienced firsthand.

They walked for three days without finding so much as a useful rumor.

The land stretched outward in pale ridges of snow and dark rock, broken only occasionally by the crooked silhouettes of demon settlements clinging stubbornly to the landscape. Each time they came across one, Shang Qinghua would trudge in with Ling-jun still draped around his shoulders, ask his questions as politely as possible, and receive the same answer in a dozen different tones of irritation, boredom, or vague amusement.

No one had seen the king. No one knew where he had gone.

No one offered directions. No one offered sympathy.

A few offered crude suggestions about warming beds, but Ling-jun’s hiss had grown sharper with each repetition, and Shang Qinghua had learned to walk away before the stoat could escalate from warning to actual bloodshed. 

When night fell, they made do with whatever shelter the terrain offered. Once it had been a narrow overhang in the stone. Another night they had found a shallow cave.

The routine settled quickly, in the way routines always did.

Shang Qinghua would build small, careful fires with the dry tinder he carried, boil snow for thin tea, divide whatever dried meat or travel rations he had scavenged, and offer the best portions to the stoat first. Ling-jun accepted, eating with precise bites before curling against Shang Qinghua’s chest beneath the shared furs.

Sleep came in fits. The stoat always ended up tucked beneath his chin or draped across his throat, small ribs rising and falling in perfect counterpoint to Shang Qinghua’s own uneven breathing.  He never moved the creature away. The warmth was too small, too precious, too much like the only thing keeping the cold from settling permanently into his bones.

On the seventh morning, or perhaps the eighth; time had begun to smear at the edges, Shang Qinghua woke to find the stoat already awake and watching him with the now familiar intensity. Frost clung to the tips of its whiskers. Outside the shallow cave mouth, the sky had gone from pale gray to a bruised silver that promised more snow.

Shang Qinghua sat up slowly, wincing at the stiffness in his shoulders, and reached to stroke once along the curve of white fur at his throat.

“Morning, Your Haughtiness,” he murmured. “Ready for another day of walking in circles and being mocked by strangers?”

Ling-jun huffed and butted its head lightly against his jaw before resettling in its accustomed perch.

Shang Qinghua exhaled through his nose, watching his breath cloud and dissipate. He packed their meager belongings, shouldered the satchel, and stepped back out into the wind.

They walked for hours. The landscape offered no variation. Shang Qinghua’s legs ached, his nose was numb, and the constant low throb of worry had settled so deep into his chest it felt like part of his heartbeat.

Eventually he began to speak again. 

“You know,” he said, voice muffled slightly by the scarf wound around his lower face, “there is… theoretically… a place that might help us. Or at least there should be. ”

The stoat’s whiskers twitched.

“I don’t remember the exact coordinates—I mean, why would I? It was chapter four hundred and something. I was on my third pot of coffee in twenty-four hours. I think it’s called the Cavern of the Luminous Heart’s Reflection. Or wait—no. Wait. Was it the Grotto of Sincere Yearning? No,” he muttered. “That one might have been for a different arc. The one with the celestial carp.”

He squinted against the blowing snow, trying to dredge the memory from the sludge of half-forgotten chapters.

“Right. It was the Cave of the Unerring Heart-Mirror. Yeah. That’s the one. Inside the cave there’s a pool. Or maybe a stream. Something watery. The point is that when you look into it, it shows you the person your heart most desires. Like, where they are. At the moment.” 

Ling-jun remained silent, but its gaze sharpened, frost-blue eyes narrowing in that way that always made Shang Qinghua feel as though every half-formed thought in his head had been laid out on a dissection table for merciless review.

He trudged onward through the snow, boots crunching softly with each step, brain already spiraling down a far more self critical path. 

Yes, the Cave of the Unerring Heart-Mirror had been a cheap device. He had known it was cheap even while typing it. But coming up with fresh plot points for six hundred wives was like trying to invent new colors after the spectrum had already been exhausted. Sometimes you just reached into the recycling bin of tropes. Sometimes characters got separated. Sometimes they wandered dramatically across half a continent in pursuit of fate, love, or revenge. Sometimes a stubborn heroine absolutely refused to acknowledge that the person she most longed to find was the male lead until a conveniently mystical body of water literally showed her his face. 

Plot problems required plot solutions.

At the time, the cave had felt like a reasonable compromise between narrative elegance and the rapidly approaching deadline for chapter four hundred and something. 

He squinted into the wind, trying to remember more details through the fog. 

If he recalled correctly, that particular heroine had been one of the proud types—number one hundred and seventy, maybe?  The one who kept swearing she felt nothing for Luo Binghe even as she kept mysteriously ending up in his path. She’d gotten separated from the group during some contrived avalanche sequence (he’d been particularly proud of that avalanche at the time; it had felt cinematic), wandered alone for three chapters of internal monologue about duty and how she definitely did not miss the stupid beautiful demon lord with the stupid beautiful face, and then—bam—stumbled into the cave. 

One look into the glowing pool and her own reflection had dissolved into an image of Binghe standing in the snow looking for her, expression so raw it cracked something inside her carefully constructed armor. Cue tears, reluctant self-realization, tearful reunion, and the inevitable dual cultivation scene that spiked the comment section for a week.

Of course, Shang Qinghua was also fairly certain he had reused the exact same cave not long afterward. His mouth twisted slightly beneath the scarf.

Wife number two hundred and one—or was it two hundred and two?—the one cursed to look like a wrinkled old crone, She’d jumped into the pool in a fit of despair, thinking it would drown her shame, only for the water to strip the curse away layer by layer until she emerged a stunning young cultivator whose beauty rivaled moonlight on fresh snow, and immediately tackled Luo Binghe onto the nearest surface. 

Shang Qinghua winced faintly at the memory. The “wicked old crone,” if he remembered correctly, had mostly been described as having a few wrinkles and a few silver strands in her otherwise lustrous black hair.

By Proud Immortal Demon Way standards, that had apparently qualified as tragically hideous.

The wind tugged at his scarf as he walked, and he felt a small, lingering flush of embarrassment creep up his neck.

I’m sorry, women, he thought solemnly, the apology directed vaguely upward at the bruised silver sky as though the collective female readership of Proud Immortal Demon Way might somehow hear it across dimensions. I was twenty-five and desperate and the algorithm rewarded word count over subtlety. Forgive me.

“Well,” he said aloud at last, the word puffing out in a small cloud of white breath. “Anyways. Since I haven’t exactly been pining after anyone else for the past decade or so. I’m fairly confident that when we get there and look into the water, the person it shows me will be my king.”

Ling-jun’s ear twitched faintly against his collar.

“Of course,” Shang Qinghua continued,  “the exact location might still take a few days to pin down. You get so caught up in making the prose sound pretty that you forget to write down anything useful like actual coordinates. Or even a decent landmark beyond ‘somewhere past the falls nestled in the shadowed embrace of ancient glaciers’. 

Ling-jun blinked slowly up at him, frost-blue eyes half-lidded but attentive. Shang Qinghua huffed quietly through his scarf.

“Well,” he said, reaching up to scratch lightly along the stoat’s back, “at least I have you.”

Ling-jun shifted slightly closer against the warmth of his neck, tail curling more comfortably down the front of his robes.

Shang Qinghua smiled faintly and kept walking.

---

A few days later the landscape began to change.

At first Shang Qinghua thought it was just fatigue playing tricks on him. The North had a way of repeating itself—snow, rock, wind, and then more snow—and after long enough the eye started inventing variation just to stay sane. But this time the terrain genuinely shifted. The ground sloped upward into a long ridge of ice-veined stone, and beyond it the land folded into a shallow basin where the wind seemed oddly subdued.

Shang Qinghua slowed as he crested the ridge, boots crunching softly over the frozen crust. Ling-jun lifted its head from the comfortable coil at his collar, eyes narrowing as it surveyed the terrain ahead.

“Well,” Shang Qinghua murmured, breath fogging through the scarf wound around his face, “this looks promising.”

The basin was ringed by pale cliffs worn smooth by centuries of wind. At their base, half-hidden behind a tumble of ice-dark rock, was a narrow opening that might easily have been mistaken for nothing more than a deep shadow if you didn’t know what to look for.

Shang Qinghua felt something in his chest give a small, hopeful lurch.

“That… actually might be it.”

Ling-jun shifted on his shoulders, claws pricking lightly through the layers of fabric as the stoat leaned forward to peer more intently at the cave mouth.

Shang Qinghua huffed out a quiet breath.  “I’m just as surprised as you are.”

The cave itself was deeper than it first appeared. The narrow entrance widened gradually into a chamber of smooth, pale stone where the wind could no longer reach. The air inside held a strange stillness, and it made every sound feel slightly too loud.

Shang Qinghua stepped carefully across the damp rock floor, the echo of his boots carrying through the space. The faint light filtering in from the entrance was enough to illuminate the interior.

The pool lay at the far end of the cavern.

It was exactly as he half-remembered it: a smooth basin of water set into the stone like a polished mirror. The surface was unnaturally still, clear enough to catch and hold the dim light from the cave mouth overhead.

Shang Qinghua stopped a few paces away. 

“That has to be it.”

Ling-jun’s tail gave a slow, deliberate flick against the front of Shang Qinghua’s robes.

He unwound the scarf from his face as he approached, the cloth damp where his breath had gathered. His heart had begun to beat faster, though he couldn’t quite decide whether the feeling was anticipation or nerves. He would finally get to see Mobei-jun again—even if it was just a glimpse in the water. 

He knelt slowly at the edge of the pool. For a moment he just stared.

The surface remained perfectly still, dark and glassy. His own reflection looked back at him—pale from the cold, hair wind-tangled, eyes shadowed by too many nights of broken sleep. Ling-jun’s white shape draped across his shoulders was visible as well, the stoat’s narrow muzzle peeking into the reflection near his collar.

Shang Qinghua leaned a little closer.

Nothing changed. 

“Okay,” he said. “That’s not how this is supposed to work.”

Ling-jun’s tail flicked again against his neck.

Shang Qinghua shifted his weight, peering more intently into the water as though the image might resolve itself if he stared long enough. The reflection remained stubbornly unchanged, just him and the stoat perched around his shoulders.

Shang Qinghua blinked.

“…Huh.”

He sat back on his heels, frowning down at the pool with growing suspicion.

“Maybe it needs… activation?” he suggested aloud. “A chant? A drop of blood? Those always help.”

Ling-jun offered no response. Shang Qinghua leaned forward again, examining the water from a slightly different angle.

Still just him. And the stoat.

He tilted his head.

The reflection tilted its head.

“…No,” Shang Qinghua said after a moment. “…No, that can’t be right.”

Slowly, he straightened, one hand coming up to rub at his temple.

“Okay,” he said, voice gaining a thin thread of disbelief. “Let’s walk through this logically.”

The stoat regarded him from his shoulder with calm, frost-blue attention. 

“That thing is supposed to show you the person your heart desires most.”

Shang Qinghua looked back at the pool. His reflection stared right back.

“…Am I in love with myself?”

Ling-jun fixed him with a long, silent stare. 

“Don’t get me wrong,” Shang Qinghua continued, waving one hand vaguely in the direction of the water, “I’m very flattered by my own subconscious, self love and all that, but this does feel like it might indicate a deeper psychological issue.”

The stoat huffed quietly. Shang Qinghua frowned again at the pool.

“Unless,” he said slowly, “this thing is broken. Because the correct answer should be Mobei-jun.”

The silence in the cave stretched thin and taut, broken only by the faint, irregular drip of water somewhere deeper in the stone.

Ling-jun shifted against his collarbone

Shang Qinghua barely registered the movement at first. He was still staring down at the pool with mounting irritation, as if the water might eventually grow embarrassed under such scrutiny and correct its behavior. 

A moment later he felt a light pressure at the edge of his ear.

“—Ow,” Shang Qinghua said automatically, jerking his head a little. “Hey.”

It wasn’t really a bite. More of a firm, deliberate nip. 

Shang Qinghua rubbed his ear and glanced sideways at the stoat. “What?”

Ling-jun leaned forward again, peering past him toward the pool. The small white head tilted slightly, as though trying to direct his gaze.

Shang Qinghua followed the motion back to the water.

The reflection stared up at them both with the same stubborn clarity as before.

“…What?” Shang Qinghua said again, more helplessly this time. “What are you trying to tell me? That I’m an idiot? Because—message received. I already knew that.”

Ling-jun huffed, short and sharp, then butted its narrow muzzle against his cheek in a quick, insistent push. The gesture was so unlike its usual regal reserve that Shang Qinghua froze.

“…You want me to look again?”

The stoat gave a single, deliberate blink.

Shang Qinghua sighed and leaned forward once more, obedient despite himself. The reflection hadn’t changed. Still just the two of them. Still no Mobei-jun.

“See? Same problem. Unless the universe has decided my greatest longing is now a stoat who bites me when I’m in crisis”

Ling-jun’s tail lashed again, harder this time. It made another small, frustrated sound and nosed at Shang Qinghua’s jaw with growing impatience.

“I don’t know what you want from me!” Shang Qinghua said, though his voice had begun to fray at the edges. “I really thought this would work. The cave is right. The pool is right. It’s exactly how I vaguely remember describing it. I dragged us across half the damn North for this. I thought—I really thought—if I could just see him, even from a distance, even if he was halfway across the continent looking furious and perfect and completely uninterested in being found, at least I’d know he was alive. At least I’d know where to keep walking.”

Shang Qinghua’s shoulders sagged.

“Curse me and my stupid writing,” he muttered.

The words tumbled out in a tired rush now, the frustration that had been building for days finally finding a target.

“I couldn’t even make the stupid pond perform its intended use as a magic locator thing. What kind of author does that?! I mean, seriously—if the core mechanic doesn’t work, what the hell is the point of the scene?”

Ling-jun’s head snapped toward him. Shang Qinghua continued, oblivious.

“Fuck knows how it’s also supposed to function as a curse-breaking pool,” he went on irritably, waving one hand at the water. “The whole premise was that the water heals anything! Shows anything!! Breaks any spell! Fixes it all! And now it won’t even show me the one person I’ve spent years quietly losing my mind over. Curse me and my lazy worldbuilding. Couldn’t even make the pond function as advertised. What a joke.”

Ling-jun went very still.

For a heartbeat the stoat simply stared at him, eyes widening until they seemed almost luminous in the dim cave light. 

Without any hesitation or warning it launched itself forward.

Ling-jun’s paws pushed off Shang Qinghua’s shoulder, body arcing through the air, white fur flashing like snow caught in sunlight. It hit the surface of the pool with barely a splash, disappearing beneath the glassy water in an instant.

Shang Qinghua’s brain short-circuited.

“LING-JUN—NO!!!”

The shout echoed off the stone walls, raw and panicked. He lunged without thinking, robes tangling, hands scrabbling at the edge of the pool as he threw himself after the stoat.

The water was shockingly cold—deeper than it looked, darker, pulling at him like it had been waiting. He plunged in it, arms sweeping blindly through the icy dark, lungs seizing on the first involuntary gasp. His thoughts scattered, and the world collapsed into nothing but churning water and the frantic need to breathe.

Something moved in the water behind him.

Before he could twist around, strong hands closed around his waist, hauling him backward. Shang Qinghua broke the surface in a violent cough, water streaming from his hair and robes, chest heaving as the cold air stabbed into his lungs. The hands did not release him; instead they lifted him bodily out of the pool and deposited him onto the smooth stone shore, as though he weighed nothing at all.

He coughed again, bracing both hands against the ground as water spilled from his sleeves. His chest burned. His teeth were already beginning to chatter from the cold.

For a few seconds he could do nothing but breathe. A shadow fell across him.

Shang Qinghua dragged in one more ragged breath and lifted his head. A tall figure stood at the edge of the pool, dark hair hanging loose and damp around sharp, familiar features. Water glistened along the high cheekbones, the strong line of his jaw, the column of his throat. Pale blue eyes regarded him from beneath straight brows. 

“My king,” Shang Qinghua whispered. The words came out cracked and small, barely audible over the drip of water and the echo of his own ragged breathing.

For a long moment neither of them moved. Shang Qinghua stared up at him, chest rising and falling too fast, too hard, as though his body had forgotten how to process oxygen. Joy crashed through him like a breaking wave. He was alive. He was here. 

Then the thought of Ling-jun sliced through the haze.

Shang Qinghua’s eyes went wide.

“My king!” he yelped suddenly.

Before Mobei-jun could react, Shang Qinghua scrambled to his feet in a wild, dripping flurry of limbs and immediately turned back toward the pool.

“We have to save Ling-jun!”

He lunged forward. He did not get very far.

A hand caught the back of his robe.

“No—no, wait—” He staggered, hands outstretched. “Ling-jun—he’s still in there, we have to—”

“Qinghua.”

The voice was low and steady. Shang Qinghua twisted around, still trying to crane his neck toward the pool.

“My king, the stoat—he jumped in after I said the water could break curses—he’s tiny, he’s probably drowning—”

“Qinghua.”

This time the name carried a quiet weight that finally made him still. Shang Qinghua looked up, eyes wide and pleading, water clinging to his lashes in dark spikes.

“Please. He’s just a little thing. Surely you wouldn’t—surely you’re not cruel enough to let something so small die right in front of us. Not when we could—”

Mobei-jun’s expression did not change.

“There is no Ling-jun.”

Shang Qinghua stared at him in disbelief.

“You don’t know that,” he shot back at once, twisting harder against the restraining grip. “Maybe he’s still alive! We have to get him out. Maybe he’s fine—maybe stoats can swim? ”

His voice faltered just enough for his own uncertainty to catch up with him.

“Can stoats swim?” he demanded, mostly of the air. “Or am I thinking of otters? Is that just otters? I don’t know enough about water-adjacent mammals for this. But he’s tough, he’s—”

“Qinghua.”

Mobei-jun’s hand shifted from the back of his robe to his shoulder. He used the hold to turn Shang Qinghua fully toward him, forcing him to stop craning toward the pool and actually look.

“There is no Ling-jun,” he repeated, each word calm and deliberate. “Because I was Ling-jun.”

For a heartbeat, the cave was silent.

Water dripped from the ends of their sleeves onto the stone. Somewhere deeper inside the cavern, a single drop struck the pool with a soft, distant sound.

“…Hah?”

Mobei-jun regarded him with grave steadiness.

“The stoat,” Mobei-jun said. “Was me.”

Something inside Shang Qinghua made a soundless, catastrophic snapping noise.

He did not move at all. His face remained perfectly blank, almost peaceful. Then his pupils widened.

The world reordered itself all at once.

It broke apart and reassembled in jagged, humiliating shards that cut him on the way down. Every strange look, every well-timed bite, every huff of offense, every moment of uncanny understanding over the last several days rushed back through him in one catastrophic wave. The shape curled on his pillow. The warm body draped at his throat each night. The unwavering attention whenever he spoke too much and said far more than he meant to say. The patient, dreadful listening.

Shang Qinghua went very still. Somewhere in the middle of that stillness, his mouth fell open.

“What.” 

Mobei-jun stood before him, water still tracing slow paths down the severe lines of his face. He did not flinch under the scrutiny

“How?” Sahng Qinghua asked, the sound cracking in the middle. “How were you—what do you mean you were the stoat?!”

Heat flooded his face so fast it hurt. His knees threatened to give out again. He took an instinctive step backward—only for his heel to catch on wet stone. He would have gone down if Mobei-jun hadn’t moved first.

One large hand caught his elbow, steadying. The other rose to cup the side of his face. Thumb pressing gently but firmly against his cheekbone, fingers splayed along his jaw. The touch was warm against chilled skin, grounding in a way that made Shang Qinghua’s breath hitch. 

“I was cursed,” Mobei-jun said quietly. “During the rebellion at Black Ice Ridge. One of the southern tribes. It forced the shift. Small form. I could not break it alone. I came to Qinghua because I knew he would be able to fix it.”

For one terrible moment Shang Qinghua simply stood there in Mobei-jun’s grip, dripping water onto the stone floor, while the full implications of what had just been revealed continued to unfold inside his mind. His ears burned. His scalp burned. Every inch of skin that wasn’t already numb from the cold felt like it had been dipped in boiling oil. He could feel the exact moment his brain rebooted and promptly crashed again.

His king had trusted him.

That thought lodged itself somewhere behind his ribs and twisted.

Mobei-jun had been cursed. Had sought him out. Had come all the way to the fortress in that ridiculous little body because he believed Shang Qinghua would know how to fix it.

And what had Shang Qinghua done with that trust?

His brain helpfully supplied the answer in a rapid, mortifying montage. Several of those memories involved him talking far too much. Several involved him confessing things that had lived quietly in his chest for years. A distressing number involved him being extremely, catastrophically, hornily aware of Mobei-jun’s hands.

He could feel the color climbing higher along his neck.

Oh god.

Oh gods.

His king had been listening.

His king had heard the part about wanting those big hands around his throat, about wanting to be pinned and growled at and—

Shang Qinghua’s mouth opened.

“My king, I am so sorry,” he blurted. The words came out in a rush so fast they nearly tripped over each other. “I didn’t know—I mean obviously I didn’t know, because if I had known I would never have—well, I still might have talked, but definitely not like that—and I didn’t mean to say all of those things, I mean, I did mean them but I never intended you to hear them—” 

His voice climbed another unfortunate pitch.

“And if I made you uncomfortable, my king, I deeply apologize, and I completely understand if you wish to throw me into a wall about it later because honestly I deserve it. I’ll never mention any of it again, I swear, I’ll pretend it never happened, I’ll—”

“Qinghua.”

Shang Qinghua kept talking.

“I swear I wasn’t trying to be inappropriate, it was just that the stoat looked like it understood things and then everything started coming out and I couldn’t stop—”

A large hand lifted slightly, the thumb pressing more firmly against his cheek. The simple gesture halted Shang Qinghua mid-apology.

“This king does not require an apology.”

Shang Qinghua blinked. Water dripped from his hair onto Mobei-jun’s wrist. Neither of them moved to wipe it away.

“I—” he tried again. 

Mobei-jun’s pale eyes held his without flinching.

“This king cares for Qinghua as well.”

Even the distant drip of water seemed to pause, as though the entire frozen North had collectively held its breath. Shang Qinghua’s mouth worked soundlessly for several seconds. His brain made a valiant but doomed attempt to parse the sentence.

“…What.”

Mobei-jun’s brow furrowed the tiniest fraction. It was the first hesitation Shang Qinghua had seen from him since this entire conversation began, and the sight of it was strange enough that it briefly cut through the static in Shang Qinghua’s skull.

Mobei-jun was not a man who hesitated often.

“I do not keep Qinghua because he is useful.”

The admission came out rough. Mobei-jun’s hand on Shang Qinghua’s face tightened just enough to keep him from looking away.

“All the things Qinghua believes… are incorrect.”

Shang Qinghua stared at him. His expression had gone strangely blank, not because he felt blank, but because the sheer volume of feeling moving through him at once had temporarily exceeded the limits of visible human reaction. Mortification was still there, burning hot and relentless under his skin. So was disbelief. So was a wild, dangerous thread of hope he did not dare touch directly.

Slowly, almost mechanically, Shang Qinghua lifted one dripping hand. His fingers trembled only slightly as he pressed the back of them to Mobei-jun’s forehead.

Cool skin. Slightly damp from the pool, but no fever. No clamminess. Just the familiar, solid temperature of someone who ran colder than most humans anyway.

Shang Qinghua frowned.

“…Are you sick?” he asked, voice small and uncertain. “My king, are you—did the curse leave some kind of lingering brain fog?”

Mobei-jun’s brow creased faintly.

“This king feels fine.”

Shang Qinghua’s hand dropped. He stared a moment longer, then seized Mobei-jun’s wrist in both hands and began tugging him toward the pool.

“Okay. Okay, no problem. We’ll just—let’s get you back in the water. Right now. The pool fixes everything, right? Curse side effects included. Let’s dunk you again, it’ll probably sort itself out in ten seconds flat.”

Mobei-jun did not move.

Shang Qinghua pulled harder. It was like trying to drag a mountain. His boots skidded uselessly on wet stone.

“My king, with all due respect, please get in the magic pond.”

Mobei-jun’s patience, already stretched thin, finally snapped.

A low, guttural snarl rolled out of his throat, sharp and unmistakably demonic. Before Shang Qinghua could register the warning, Mobei-jun moved.

One large hand closed around Shang Qinghua’s upper arm. In a single fluid motion he spun Shang Qinghua around, pressing him back against the smooth, frigid cave wall. The impact drove a startled gasp from Shang Qinghua’s lungs; cold stone bit through wet robes into his spine even as Mobei-jun’s body heat crowded in front, pinning him in place.

His mouth crashed down hard, claiming, all teeth and hunger and weeks of pent-up silence finally breaking open. Shang Qinghua’s head knocked lightly against stone; he made a small, muffled sound of shock that melted instantly into something needier. One hand slid up to fist in Shang Qinghua’s wet hair, tilting his head exactly where he wanted it; the other braced beside Shang Qinghua’s hip, caging him without escape.

Shang Qinghua’s hands flew up instinctively, clutching at Mobei-jun’s sodden collar, fingers twisting into fur-trimmed silk as though it were the only thing keeping him upright. His knees buckled; Mobei-jun followed the motion without breaking contact, thigh sliding between Shang Qinghua’s legs to brace him, pressing just enough pressure to make Shang Qinghua’s breath hitch hard against his mouth.

When they finally broke apart it was only because air had become a necessity. Shang Qinghua’s lips were swollen, tingling; his chest heaved against Mobei-jun’s.

Mobei-jun’s breath was harsh and warm across Shang Qinghua’s mouth.

“Does Qinghua believe this king now?”

Shang Qinghua blinked slowly, dazed. His tongue darted out to wet his lower lip; the motion made Mobei-jun’s pupils dilate visibly.

“…Not quite,” Shang Qinghua whispered. “I think—we should try again. Just… to be thorough.”

Mobei-jun made a low, rumbling sound that might have been agreement. Then he kissed him again.

Mobei-jun’s tongue slid against Shang Qinghua’s in a slow, thorough sweep that drew a helpless whimper from the back of Shang Qinghua’s throat. Hands wandered: Mobei-jun’s slid down Shang Qinghua’s side, fingers digging into wet fabric over his hip, pulling their bodies flush. Shang Qinghua arched into the contact without thinking, hands sliding up broad shoulders, nails scraping lightly through silk as he tried to get closer, closer, closer.

Heat built fast. Shang Qinghua’s head tipped back against stone; Mobei-jun followed, mouth trailing fire along his jaw, down the column of his throat, teeth grazing just hard enough to make Shang Qinghua gasp and clutch tighter. Mobei-jun’s thigh pressed higher, deliberate friction that sent sparks racing up Shang Qinghua’s spine; a broken sound escaped him.

They might have kept going—might have forgotten the cave, the cold, the entire frozen North—except Mobei-jun suddenly went still. He pulled back just enough to speak, voice rough, almost gravel.

“We must return. Quickly.”

Shang Qinghua blinked up at him, pupils blown wide, chest still heaving.

“…Huh?”

Mobei-jun’s hand cupped Shang Qinghua’s jaw, thumb tracing the swollen curve of his lower lip with something close to reverence.

“We must marry.”

The words landed like a boulder dropped into still water.

“What?!” 

Mobei-jun’s expression remained completely serious.

“Now.”

“Now? Like—right now? Today?!”

“Yes.”

Shang Qinghua ran both hands through his wet hair, looking wildly around the cave.

“My king,” he said carefully, “this has been a very emotional ten minutes. Maybe we could process one life-altering revelation at a time before escalating directly to marriage?”

Mobei-jun regarded him calmly.

“No.”

Shang Qinghua didn’t even have time to think of a rebuke. 

“Also,” Mobei-jun added with the same grave composure, “I must kill those guards.”

Shang Qinghua blinked owlishly, lips still tingling from the last kiss.

Mobei-jun gave a single, solemn nod, as though this were the most straightforward conclusion in the world. Then, without further discussion, he turned and began walking toward the mouth of the cave.

Shang Qinghua stared after him for one stunned heartbeat. Then reality caught up.

“Wait—my king!”

He scrambled forward, boots slipping slightly on the damp rock before finding purchase. His brain was still frantically replaying what had just happened. Somewhere in the near future, he suspected there were going to be several very long conversations about misunderstandings, mixed signals, and why Mobei-jun had apparently decided to skip every intermediate step between “servant” and “spouse.” 

Also—why hadn’t he tried harder to make it obvious?! Shang Qinghua understood that being a stoat came with certain communication limitations, but surely there had been some way to indicate that the animal sleeping on his pillow was actually the missing king of the North. A dramatic gesture. A meaningful arrangement of scratches in the dirt. Something a little clearer than sitting there in dignified silence while Shang Qinghua happily confessed every humiliating thought he had ever had about him.

By the time he caught up, Mobei-jun had already reached the narrower stretch of the cavern where pale daylight spilled in through the entrance. The wind outside had picked up again, rushing across the basin with a thin, icy howl.

Mobei-jun stepped out into it without hesitation.

Shang Qinghua hurried after him, arms instinctively wrapping around himself as the cold air hit his soaked clothes all at once. He had barely taken two steps into the wind when Mobei-jun stopped.

Shang Qinghua nearly walked straight into his back.

Mobei-jun’s gaze swept over Shang Qinghua’s damp hair, the thin tremor running through his shoulders despite his attempts to hide it. Without a word, he reached up and unclasped the heavy fur mantle still clinging to his shoulders. Water streamed from the dark pelt as he drew it free.

He stepped forward and draped it around Shang Qinghua in one smooth motion, settling the sodden weight across trembling shoulders. The fur was cold, heavy with water, and did nothing to block the wind—in fact it made the chill sink deeper—but Shang Qinghua felt the gesture settle into his bones like warmth anyway.

He looked up, lips parting on a small, helpless exhale. Mobei-jun’s hands lingered a second longer than necessary, smoothing the edges of the mantle against Shang Qinghua’s collarbones.

Shang Qinghua’s mouth curved, soft and unsteady.

“Thank you, my king,” he said. “But, shouldn’t we at least dry off first before we start planning murder?”

Mobei-jun regarded him for a moment, then turned and resumed walking toward the open expanse of snow. 

“We will dry on the way.”

Shang Qinghua smiled into the fur at his collar and followed without another word. 

The North swallowed them gently.