#because it fucks the whole thing for the person who start it and also the donators because the cash doesn't always go back

[codnasties]

bull rider!ghost 👻

having an uni bestie that's from a small rural town as someone who was born and raised in a city has it's perks, like getting to experience things you had never experienced before. and i'm talking about going to a rodeo.

crowd roaring as a new rider sat on an angry bull and got tossed into the air as the animal bucked fiercely. the first few wild dudes that you had seen were interesting. you know, the attraction of something new that you had never really seen before. but after a handful of them it started getting a bit boring, but your friend was cheering on so loudly and seemingly enjoying that so much it would probably be rude to tell them that you weren't having so much fun.

trying to find some kind of entertainment, you told your friend you were going to go and get a drink, because at this moment a beer looked like it would bring you some semblance of entertainment.

but you were wrong, because as you make your way back to the rodeo grounds, your eye caught a rider that was different. he had a commanding and charming aura to him, something that impelled you to look at him. well, maybe it was more that just the way he carried himself.

it was the way those jeans seemed to hug those thick thighs of his, how, with the help of the chaps he was wearing, they left little to imagination, giving you a perfect view of his ass. and oh what an ass! and his shirt... the way his strong and built muscle seemed to flex and ripple with each movement that he made.

when you finally made it back to where your friend was sitting - which took you longer than the way to the bar because of adoring such a man -, this mysterious dude was now on the chute, lowering himself onto one hell of an angry bull.

while the rest of the riders had caught your eye, there was nothing but anticipation inside of you to see him try to tame that ton and a half bull. and he did not disappoint, the beast beneath him bucking trying to get him of.

it wasn't just the way he has holding on or how long those eight seconds seemed to last when it was him on the arena. it was the way his hips swayed trying to follow the bulls movements, the way the bicep of the arm he was using to hold on became impossibly bigger with the tension, the veins that were proptinding on the hand he had up in the air, the glimpse of tattoos on his forearm as the sleeve of his shirt got pulled by his muscles.

before you ever realised, the buzzer had sounded, indicating that the time necessary was over and that he could now get off the bull. and when he did, you became even more intrigued by him and how fucking tall he looked and how he, amazingly, had managed to keep the hat he was wearing on his head the whole time.

seeing how entranced you were by this one specific rider, your friend immediately gave you that information that you were unknowingly desperate to know. "his name is simon riley, but they call him ghost"

"ghost?", you asked them back.

"yup, because of the way he rides, breaks records and then fucking vanishes. the public doesn't really know much about him or his personal life. and it's also a know fact that is hard to even get to meet him and talk to him" they explained. "oh, an also he ghost every single person that he fucks'

"hmm interesting", you hummed, starting to get into your head that as much as this 'ghost' seemed attractive and got you horny just from looking at him, he was quite unreachable and maybe a bit of an asshole.

"yeah, the man's a beast at what he does", they exclaimed, cutting your thought process.

"i can see, you don't need me to tell me twice", you uttered back.

"and he's actually a cousin of mine! let me introduce you to him'" they gave you further explanation.

you couldn't help the immediate 'oh' that left you. because you actually had a chance to talk to this man an maybe, maybe try to cham your way into those tight jeans of his. because an asshole has his charm, you know?

₊˚ ✧ ‿︵‿୨୧‿︵‿ ✧ ₊˚

hope y'all enjoyed that, i just pulled this out of my pussy.

no smut just pure hornyness. anyways, save a horse ride a cowboy or sum

[thankskenpenders]

Today we got some news regarding a big change for the Ian Flynn's Q&A podcast, the BumbleKast. As outlined in a blog post by Ian, starting in 2025, all Sonic-related questions submitted to the show will first need to be screened by Sega. (I have to assume this is also why Ian announced they'll no longer be doing live Q&As starting next year.)

Frankly, I can't say this is particularly surprising.

While the BumbleKast is ostensibly a podcast about Ian's work as a freelance writer for all sorts of things, and also just a place for him to shoot the shit about stuff he likes, he's still predominantly seen as The Sonic Guy. Sure, he also does a bunch of other freelance work for other series, and original comics like Drogune, and he's also the narrative mastermind for the whole Rivals of Aether franchise these days, but it's his insights into what goes on behind the scenes with Sonic that people really care about. Your average Sonic fan can't just go up to Iizuka or whoever and ask him a question about the current state of the lore, but Ian's inbox is always open.

Because of this, I've thought a lot about the BumbleKast's place in the fandom and The Discourse in recent years. Ian wants to be as open and honest as he can about his work, and I think that's admirable. To me, hearing about creators' struggles and the shit they go through just to get a story out the door tends to make me sympathize with them more. Sometimes a story just doesn't turn out as well as you'd hoped, but you're on a tight deadline and all you can do is move on to the next project. I've even softened a bit on Penders over the years as he's shared more about the absurd situations and odd creative demands made behind the scenes at Archie. Unfortunately, not everyone has that mindset.

Ian's basically always had obsessive haters who were eager to take everything he says out of context to try and stir up shit, but that used to be contained by the niche nature of the Archie comics. Most of the fandom didn't give a shit about what Ian was doing with Sonic and Sally's love life or whatever. Most of the fandom wasn't even reading those comics. But Ian's gone from being a writer for a non-canon spinoff comic, to being the initial lead writer for the first ever canon Sonic comic series, to being the new main writer for the games themselves as part of the official Sonic Lore Team. Way more Sonic fans care about his work now, and when he's so open about his work that makes him an easy scapegoat.

It feels like damn near every week on Twitter Ian's personal trolls have posted yet another BumbleKast clip out of context to rile up the fandom and make it look like he has no idea what he's talking about or like he has some kind of agenda. And, unfortunately, people often fall for this. Of course, it also goes the other way, with people more sympathetic towards Ian taking things he says about Sega and framing them as proof that Sega has no idea what they're doing with the brand. Which, well, let's be real, isn't always the most unreasonable thing to think, given Sonic's rocky history. But I'm surprised it took this long for Sega to start paying more attention to what gets said on the BumbleKast when fans use it so regularly as a source of drama.

I've also often felt that they just need to be WAY more selective about what messages they respond to on the show. Questions Ian can't actually answer due to NDAs, questions that are borderline incomprehensible, "questions" that are really just fan ideas. And the haters, oh, the haters. Ian does not need to put up with angry rants about how he should make SonAmy canon or what the fuck ever. Even if Ian's willing to put up with it, as a listener it can make the show just super unpleasant at times when someone aggressive pops up with an inflammatory question. There have been entire BumbleKast Mini episodes I had to skip because they were just obsessive critics of Ian's paying to grill him on a dozen different things and treat him like an idiot.

But at the same time, I get why the show got to be this way. It's become a part-time job for Ian with multiple new episode a week. Given how piss poor the pay tends to be for freelance writers, I can't really blame him for wanting to keep this secondary stream of income open, and to not have to refund people left and right for rejecting their questions. The man's got bills to pay. (And so does Kyle, for whom managing the BumbleKast seems to have become a full-time job.)

I dunno. The man's got the patience of a fucking saint. I would've quit the franchise if I was in his shoes, with people wishing he would die for shit like minor disagreements over Sonic's characterization or him misremembering an obscure old lore thing. While I do hope that Sega doesn't keep too tight of a leash on him moving forward, and I hope that he's still able to speak his mind about his work, part of me also hopes that having to be much more selective about Sonic questions results in less bullshit like this.

[star2fishmeg]

ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ, ᴘᴇʀғᴇᴄᴛʟʏ | sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅs

Pairing | Quinn Hughes x afab!reader Summary | six years later Quinn and y/n find themselves back in the place it started and old memories truly are precious...but so are new ones Authors Note | enjoy the (long) blurb @thehugheslover, sorry it took so long! This is only going to make sense if you read Feel This Way!!

The familiar clink of pool balls hitting each other, music at a moderate volume but mainly muffled by laughter and chatting and the back doors wide, opening the basement onto the patio where meat roasted on the barbeque under the balmy sun. Everything had stayed. The world was almost the same as they were back as teenagers but this time, they weren’t as naive, and everyone had grown up. Really grown up, into adults with jobs and lives, new ambitions and what happened six years ago were nothing but fond memories protected by the walls of the lake house. 

Y/n and Quinn sat on the sofa, turned slightly to face each other so they could look out into the rest of the room, her finger gently brushing over the stain between them. The second her skin touched the fabric, it all came flooding back like film tapes, the night Brady stayed over in particular. 

“We were so stupid, but it was a lot of fun,” she began with a chuckle, Quinn turning his head in interest, watching her trace around the splotch, “The Vodka Incident, when Brady brought that vodka, and we all thought it was fucking amazing.”

Cole’s voice groaned out from the distance, followed by Trevor and Jack’s obnoxious laughing, clearly relishing in Cole losing their game of pool. The couple giggled, glancing over at the group, their memories fading in and suddenly they were bought back to that night, and they were sixteen with three fifteen-year-olds and little Luke sat in a circle. The way Cole’s face had screwed up hideously, Jack and Trevor’s attempts to be ‘cool’ but landed them both in the bathroom and gagging and Luke tucked into her side most the night. 

“Yeah, Luke used to cling to you all the time, he was literally your shadow,” he said, watching Luke take a cocky bow after a successful turn, “and Brady, oh my God, you two used to torture me, like, come on, ‘who do you currently have a crush on?’ while you were sitting on my lap? You two killed me.”

Y/n laughed fondly, watching Brady enter the basement waving tongs like a magic wand, passionately interrupting the guys by fact checking them about something too muffled to make out from where she was sat. She then remembered the argument she and Brady fell into that everyone retold as if they’d thrown fists at each other, “Honestly, I thought you’d be jealous that I’m close with Brady too, but I was so wrong.”

“How about we not bring up my teenage insecurity, I felt so lame,” he smiled, hand taking hers and interlacing their fingers. He remembered that part too well, Jack and Luke loved to bring it up with him because for them, it was peak comedy and a learning curve on what not to do. Watching it happen was not as funny, but Quinn was their older brother, so how could it not be funny? “You don’t even understand, y/n, I got a scolding, from Jack.”

“Well, I was also lame so we’re even. Luke told my brother about the whole thing and that fucker did not let me live it down.” She grinned and placed a kiss on his nose, “You know what he said? ‘Yeah, everyone knew Quinnifer was, like, in love with you’ the little loser.” 

He groaned playfully at the nickname, even after all the years her brother still called him that. He really couldn’t escape that one, he’d somehow obtained it during college, y/n’s brother just started calling him Quinnifer out of the blue and his only explanation being that the women love it and it’s catchy, but it was better than other thing’s he’d been called.

Looking back over at the group, their friends that’d grown up with them, but whose personalities hadn’t changed, they wondered what it’d be like if they were sixteen again, and what they’d do differently. But they weren’t sixteen anymore and all the angst had been and gone, that chapter closed. Quinn was captain of the Vancouver Canucks and y/n was flying in her own career, and while they’d achieved so much by twenty-five, Quinn still had a list he wanted before he could feel satisfied.

Moonlight shimmering over the ripples of the lake, warm lanterns illuminating along the dock just like it always had. Y/n and Quinn’s bare feet padded along the wood leisurely, hands encased in each other’s and not a word spoken between them, they just needed a bit of peace away from everyone, even just for a moment. Passing the boats harboured up, Mila came to mind. Not in any other way than what happened that day and how he felt y/n’s desperate, burning glares from the other side of the boat, how he wished it was y/n breasts pressed against his shoulders and not some random girl’s. 

“I should’ve just told you how I felt from the start,” Quinn mumbled, but his voice clear from the serenity of the dock, nothing but crickets singing and distant chatter, “Like, we wouldn’t have had to go through that confusing, are-we-are-we-not phase. I can’t believe I was such a pussy.” 

Y/n giggled, swinging their arms, “Don’t blame yourself, I was also responsible. I told most the story to some friends in college, and even they thought it was obvious we liked each other. I sort of wish we hadn’t had that situationship, like, we were just hurting ourselves.”

“Yeah, no, I agree. Had me crying myself to sleep, it was fucking stupid.” 

“I know, Jack told me the night of the Vodka Incident, he saw you crying when we were going to sleep.” She didn’t need Jack to tell her Quinn cried that night, she felt his tears on her skin and the way he’d squeezed her like she would evaporate, his favourite teddy bear. She just never said anything, no need to bring up the painful past when they were living in their own paradise in the future. 

The more time she spent in the lake house, the more the memories swirled in her mind, not dwelling just remembering the times she couldn’t during the hockey season. The lake was a sanctuary, a museum of youth that held so many minor details you’d never see unless you were searching for them, like the names etched into the decking, aged but still prominent.

Quinn glanced down, barely reading the names scratched into the wood until he walked over something he distinctively remembered scratching with Brady, right before they were off to college; Q + y/n in a heart. He stopped right above it, tugging y/n back to face him, sweat forming on the back of his neck with butterflies in his stomach. Y/n blinked twice at him before raising a brow. He pulled his hand away, wiping both on his shorts before taking a deep breath.

“Uh, hey, listen…” his eyes shifted to her ‘Q’ necklace, to her eyes and then back to the etching on the floorboards before her necklace again.

“Q?” she asked, head flooding with multiple scenarios, piecing together location and their ages, his sweating, the fizzling in her chest and down to her stomach, “Oh God, you’re not getting traded, are you?”

His eyes widened, “Huh? No, no, Jesus no. It’s uh…well…um, just wanted to tell you how much I love you and appreciate you. You’ve, um, been by my side forever and I’ve been, uh, thinking about the future…”

He dropped to one knee, sliding a little, velvet box from his pocket and held it out in front of her, eyes sparkling under all the little lamps but more importantly because when he looked at her, he saw the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. The most caring, supportive, girlfriend. His best friend who, no matter what, never gave up on him. He gazed at her with dilated pupils that may have well been hearts. Y/n’s eyes widened, her lips parting slightly as she gasped gently, hands covering her mouth, and she struggled to hold back the tears welling in her eyes.

“Y/n L/n, I have loved you since we were fifteen and only you can make me feel this way. There isn’t anyone else I’d rather spend the rest of my life with, in sickness and in health. Will you make me the happiest man alive and marry me?” Quinn’s voice shook, not a filler word tumbling out for once. All those days rehearsing his speech in the mirror paid off, all that stress lifting off his shoulders and she watched his hands tremble.

Y/n nodded desperately, tears spilling down her cheeks, “Yes, of course!” 

He grinned from ear to ear, corners of his eyes creasing as his eyes watered, wiggling the ring - polished with her birthstone - from the cushioning and sliding it onto her finger, his arms wrapping around her waist firmly. He held her close into his chest, spinning her around with his face buried in her shoulder, his heart swelling. When they rounded back to their original spot, they melted into each other’s bodies as they always had, t-shirts soaking up the salty tears of joy, the realisation of how far they’d come hitting them like bricks. Y/n and Quinn Hughes, forever and always. Their new chapter, with new adventures and the start of their own little family one day.

small worlds | @bunbunbl0gs

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[Masterlist]

[Requests CLOSED]

2024 © STAR2FISHMEG All rights reserved - do not plagiarise/copy, translate, or repost any of my works. Please let me know if you notice that any of these have been done to my work.

Banners & dividers belong to @/cafekitsune

[welcometohell09]

That thing that Gets me about Timebomb, both platonically and romantically, is that Ekko doesn't need to love or care about Jinx, but he does so anyway. Jinx is emotionally fucked to the point of barely being able to sustain any form of relationship, she destroys the things she cares about when she doesn't mean to, she pushes everyone away and she self-destructs. Ekko has absolutely no reason to care beyond maybe a memory of them being friends as kids, but he chooses—actively—to look for her when she disappears from her cell.

He also doesn't obsess over the arbitrary distinction between Powder and Jinx in the same way other characters, including Jinx, do; Jinx becomes Jinx to protect herself from being Powder and Silco encourages it, Vi (in S1) separates Jinx from her little sister so she can 'save' Powder, but Ekko watched as she chose to become who she did—he probably saw her grenades start to work, her fighting abilities improve, her hair grow out and her reputation take root, if only from a distance—and accepts it as a part of a whole person. He doesn't care whether she is the kind, arguably less traumatised Powder—like in the alternate dimension—or Jinx, because to him it's just her. She's brilliant. She's awesome. In Ekko's eyes, she's not just worthy of being loved, but she's worthy of being chosen to be loved and held on to when she hasn't done anything 'for' him.

[shapelytimber]

Wanted to paint some of my favorite characters, nothing more nothing less

[COMMISSIONS]

Way too much yapping like an embarrassing amount, the individual portraits and the template I used below vvv

I shouldn't be allowed to talk about my favorite characters- especially to people who (presumably) don't know them xjfkdk apart from the very popular ones ofc

ILLYA KURYAKIN (The man from U.N.C.L.E)

gay ass little Russian spy I love him he is so *dramatic* and a huge nerd and a Beatles fan and into fashion design- perfect pocket size blorbo ;w; also seeing a Russian character being given a positive leading role in an American tvshow from the 60s ?? Yes he lives in New York and works for UNCLE America.... But he is still a communist ?? Incredible ! Also I really like the fact he isn't given the cliché personality traits often given to Russian characters i e anger issues drinks a lot violent ect (looking at you shitty(imo) modern remake... What did you do to my little guy ;;). In a close contest with Spock for the "gayest man from tvshow" of the 60s..... And in my heart he is winning djdkd for me the gay subtext of muncle hits so much more because it's not a scifi show- it's closer to home, Napoleon and Illya were *like that* in the present day of the 60s, they were both human, and no alien fuckery made them go to the village more than once or play house in the suburbs or get attached ass up to get pegged on a regular basis... Truly a show that feels written by an old queen and a guy with the biggest fem dom fetish jkvjjkb (don't get me wrong tho I adore star trek tos and spirk too <3)

KUROO HAZAMA and PINOKO (Black Jack)

sometimes I rewatch some of the oavs from the 90s when I'm sad :) I had a huge phase a couple years back when I read nearly all the manga (should really finish it... Or reread the whole thing frankly), watched *all* the shows (bar young black jack, hated that shit) and idk I just love this venal bitch so much- him and his daughter and his conflicted feelings for his tboy ex that he still loves kfkfkf btw I'm dying for a modern take on this like please please please I'd love to see Kei Kisaragi's story rewritten a bit (trans character in the 70s sure was progressive but oh boy-), because him and black jack's relationship makes me so *weak*.... And maybe see him a bit more than in one story- anyway ! When it comes to his daughter Pinoko, it's very hit or miss- when the writers lean on the cute father adoptive daughter relationship it's great, when they lean more on the whole "she has a crush on him" (very much like a child in most case, and he *never* reciprocate thank god) and bring up the fact she is technically 18 a lot (she was an evil tumor trapped in her sister before he created a body for her- black jack shit dw), and she gets jealous of other women.... Well it's terrible and I'm uncomfy :(

EVA KANT (Diabolik)

Look.... You just can't show me danger diabolik 1968 and not expect me to become insane djdkdkdk she is so cool ;; !!! Her and her devious eel of a man (here as a panther, because even tho I haven't read the comic yet, I'm taking an educated guess that all the panther imagery is here to represent him, the lethal twunk always in the all black gimp suit... And if it's not then fuck my entire life ig fjfkkd), the cuntiest het couple you've ever seen, such freaks I love them ! Partners in crime that will blow up the tax offices of the whole country if you try to put a bounty on them <3 they are in the guilty faves category only because I'm this invested in these characters after 1 (one) movie fkfkf watched the first two remakes and was hmmm let's say underwhelmed, could have been worse but going after the 60s one ie peak cinema was hard... I went in fully invested in these heterosexuals and they still fucked up their romance and relationship ;; (don't spoil me the third one btw haven't seen it yet ! I know it's the yaoi one- which doesn't give me much hope for Eva tbh...) I'll soon start reading the comics tho ! Managed to find all twelve volumes of "Il grande Diabolik" in french for pretty cheap so I'm excited for that :D (might scan them and upload them online because omg I tried finding scans in *any* language and only found a dubious website that sold digital copies for 7€ a volume ??? What is this)

UTA (The Void / Тургор / Turgor / Tension)

Apathy girlyyyyy she just like me for real for real nfkfk what absolutely charmed me about her is yes her design, but more importantly her chamber's design (if you've never played the void, a sister's chamber is a space that represent her. You get a sense of who she is by exploring her chamber before finding her and talking to her soul it's great). The lonely island out at sea, her laying down on a suspended steel boat in a grotto, looking passively at the moon by a crack on the ceiling.... And the moon is looking back. Incredible ! I love this game so much

KIM KITSURAGI (Disco Elysium)

Do I really have to explain this one ? When I played the game with quiji I remember I kept saying "when Kim talks, we *listen*" djkdk we did get a good grade in Kim Kitsuragi and got him to dance in the church <3 this fucking centrist cop wormed it's way into my heart and many others because of course he did. The only Kim K in my eyes. Also funny anecdote : before I played Disco Elysium, I had one concept art masterclass where a kinda famous concept artist came to give advice, make us really stressed then give us a shitty grade.... And when I tell you this man looked so much like Kim ??? Same haircut, glasses, face with a scar *exactly* where Kim's portrait has a stark shadow on his cheek and he was dressed in an orange top- truly uncanny. Anyway, Kim is so fucking cool how does he do it

DARK VADOR (La guerre des étoiles)

*sight* not surprising if you know me... and to be clear when I say Vader I don't mean Anakin Skywalker, post barbecue only zouz here. I refuse to yap about this man djdkdk I already do that way to much in ao3 comment sections

And here is the template I used ! Don't know who made it tho sorry...

PS : all these where made in 2-3 hours each :D wanted to challenge myself by painting quickly, and I mostly (looking at the Eva Kant one that gave me trouble) succeeded !

[arrowfleur]

✩‧₊˚ Redacted HC’s ✩‧

I’ve been pretty shit at writing and posting this past year, which is crappy because I enjoy it so I wanted to do something that was less pressure than writing fics but could still make people happy. I’ve put every main redacted couple - plus a few extras - on a spin wheel and will be writing a long list of HC’s each day depending on who I get :)

Anyways, Part 1: Lasko and Dear

Dear loves thrifting but they didn’t want to take Lasko with them at first in case he found something they wanted, before they did. Now they borrow each others clothes so it wouldn’t matter anyway.

When they eventually took him he spent the entire time trying to find things they liked.

Dear has two toned hair

Lasko has never stopped thinking that dear is the coolest person to ever walk the earth, ever.

Sometimes dear wears colour contacts for fun

Both of them have a pocket watch on a chain

For their first anniversary Dear bought Lasko a locket, with a picture of the entire Damn Squad in it.

He added a photo of them to the other side

Dear has pet rats, they take such good care of them and their cage is huge

Lasko was slightly weary at first but he warmed up to them pretty well

Dear is very good at fixing things.

One of the first times they went to his apartment, his Ac broke. Dear just calmly listened to his apologetic rant about it before asking where the toolbox was.

Dear has tattoos behind their ears

Lasko is very good at saving but he’s not tight and always tries to pay for the whole table.

Very rarely has he succeeded

Dear has a collection of paper boy hats.

Lasko wears earmuffs when it’s cold because he always gets earaches

Dear has curled their hair with coke cans before

They love old black and white movies

Lasko likes really crappy b-movies

Can’t be let down if you know it’s going to be bad before it starts

Dear can keep up very well with Damien’s academic discussions and sometimes debates him just for the sake of it. Damien enjoys the challenge.

Dear is not the biggest Christmas enjoyer but this year they’re looking forward to it.

Lasko has booked a couple of Christmas markets for them

Dear HATES the idea of a cruise. Not because of the ocean but because they can’t get off the boat once it sets off.

Lasko always takes those little pots of jam and the little shampoo/conditioner bottles whenever he goes to a hotel

Neither of them can ice skate well whatsoever

Lasko has and will continue to use those little penguins meant for children. Dear finds it fucking hilarious all while they’re clinging to the side of the rink themselves

They share grandpa jumpers

When they first started dating, dear would pretend to forget their lanyard so that lasko would have to go down and let them in.

They both wear lots of rings and love playing with each others hands

Lasko used to wear those fake glasses from Claire’s

Dear is so casually flirty with Lasko that he thought it was just their personality at first

That’s why they eventually just had to go into his office and straight up ask him out

Dear kisses Lasko’s nose often, especially when they’re saying goodbye to each other or he’s severely overthinking

Dear really enjoys those mugs that change colour when you put hot water in them

Lasko has an entire cupboard dedicated to board games

Dear was delighted

Dear reads random niche comics and webtoons

And they have a lot of figurines

Lasko is an unsweetened oat milk enjoyer!!

Dear inhales food like it’s nobody’s business

It doesn’t last five minutes on their plate

They also never get indigestion

Their go-to cocktail is an old fashioned

Lasko hates it

Dear will simply repeat what Lasko says in a teasing tone to fluster him

Or they’ll just randomly start acting like the weirdest story is sexy.

‘And then he, he told me they’d have to charge me more for these stupid tires that I didn’t even ask for!’

‘ and what did you say? 😏

‘Well I- I told him,

‘ did you stick up for yourself? 😏😏

‘ well I told him I wasn’t going to pay for it’

*dear looking him up and down’

‘Good job, I don’t like it when other play dirty with you’

And they’re making out, Lasko doesn’t know how they do it they just have a way. It literally doesn’t even make sense.

Lasko’s hair grows incredibly quick. He shaves ALOT.

His skins is also so beautiful, it’s so soft and clear and glowy.

Dear has acne scars and they do little skincare nights together but Lasko thinks they’re HOT AS FUCK

Okay that’s all, also my proof that I got these guys first

[hexite-nightmares]

My very unorganized thoughts on S2 of Arcane but only about Viktor

Alright I finally had time to think and write everything down so here we go. I want to preface that I have been weary about this season ever since I watched the act 1 leaks. Mainly because it was very clear he was never going to be a machine, and they didn't give him enough screen time to develop his motivations into ACT 3 Viktor being convincing enough

LET'S START WITH THE FALSE PROPHET VIKTOR

Alright so he has about 11 minutes ish of screentime. Aside from the glaring issue of Jayce reviving him and not destroying the hexcore, taking away agency from a disabled character. It was clearly a false prophet situation, but it was so fucking confusing on whether he could feel like a regular human, if he was under the Hexcore's control which makes the agency issue worse or just jaded. He all of a sudden starts speaking like he's reading Deuteronomy passages ?? We don't know for sure if he's aware that he's basically creating a hive mind now, did he start his plans of making everyone into one right here? Sky seems to encourage him to do this, what does she know about it since shes been in the hexcore ALONE for a little longer? (writers didnt confirm whether it was the real her or not) . Act 1 Viktor's issues are mostly about agency, and a seeming full abandonment of his identity as a scientist, his personality does a full 180. He doesn’t seem to question that the object that revived him and killed Sky is giving him healing powers, but he’s angry at Jayce so we have no clue if he’s being controlled or not.

The show doesn't seem to care to spend time with him bc Isha and Ambessa I guess.

Anyways lets move on to not even act 2, but ep 6, his only episode in this act.

I had huge gripes with this episode, mainly because whatever the fuck was going on with Viktor trying to "keep" Vander's humanity, when he clearly was taking it away from everyone he touched, does he actually believe what he's saying or is he under the Hexcore's control still?. Obviously the glaring issues of Sky being there without any actual input, they're cosmic friends I guess but with very generic lines, and the fandom has to fill in the blanks with whatever Amanda Overton feels like saying about Sky in the moment(if we don't see it in the show I don't take it as her development, sorry). So Viktor builds Colloidal silver drinking Joshua tree and ppl think it's fucking Eden, Jinx calls him a Machine Herald when there's NO SIGN OF MACHINERY JUST PURPLE MAGICAL METAL LOOKING FLESH. We get a whole ass different realm with no explanation other than, oh yeah Viktor is inside there. Jayce comes in and almost kills him. The only option there is at this point is for Singed to start his MH era. The choice of becoming MH is nonexistent now, other people have to jumpstart things for him. I know some people interprete this commune as Viktor achieving his dreams, thinking he was being himself, that he was in paradise with Sky and.. that wasn’t the case for me.. it was extremely sinister. Worst part of this Act, is that MH was seemingly a damn trial experiment for Orianna.

BONUS:

So it seems that Christian Linke has confirmed Sky was the hexcore using its influence to manipulate viktor into the glorious evolution. He said it was meant to be as a misdirect. So to everyone who got dunked on here for “wanting to be spoonfed” or “not reading into it deep enough” for thinking he was being mind controlled, you were right about it being the hexcore. Viktor has been confirmed to have no agency until episode 9 I guess. He also mentioned Viktor’s goal was getting the most power/influence… we never saw a fucking glimpse of this in season one I’m sorry.

ACT 3

First awful problem here is obviously Singed having to jumpstart things. Viktor is aware for his choice of whatever is happening with the egg thing. Yet....there's still no sign of machinery. We get a scene where Sky fucking dies again, he refers to her as Ms Young, which im guessing is a parallel to the other time he dismissed her in S1. But of course we get the double fridging in the show, cuz making female characters just for the sake of advancing her crush's plot line is sooo amazing. Here lies sky, the character who is barely a character. Well after that we get the sequence of his transformation and we get that butt ugly mask. His personality does another huge change again. So we know the hexcore is not influencing him anymore as the hexcore completed its goal of the glorious evolution.. so I guess viktor really does think this is the right way?

A huge issue I have again, is the lack of agency. In this particular scene Jayce goes "My partner died in this room" yeah..Viktor didn't fully choose to become this right? it all started with Jayce using the hexcore on him, it’s been manipulating him the whole ass season…Kinda wish there was some sort of acknowledgement from Jayce that he’s basically the catalyst of this.

He gets his laser because...fanservice. There's no way he went all the way to the lab and magically attached it to himself just to cut off a wall. He keeps going on that choice is false, but a few minutes before he said he’d evolve all of those willing?

In the cosmos, beautiful sequence. I don’t love Jayce’s dialogue choices(about his disease) here and then it all being about viktor hating himself.. since the hexcore was leading to all of this, his motivation for it all being self hatred feels a bit eh. The sequence is beautiful and Jayce and Viktor destroying the anomaly with the rune shard is nice, that part was cute. But then they kinda disappear and we only know that viktor is alive so far, no clue about Jayce. The sequence is touching towards the end and I’m a sucker for characters finding each other in every timeline/universe but it can’t make up for all the other things that are bothering me. This seems to be the one time Viktor has some sort of agency I guess.

Then obviously the worst part that will bother me forever. The thing that made me almost slam my laptop shut

This retcon is just awful I shouldn’t even have to say why, it makes things fucking weird and it’s frankly stupid. Also viktor can’t rock a beard like that.

Anyways this is very disorganized, fuck you riot I felt like an insane former this whole time but I was right.

[queenvhagar]

It’s hilarious when TBs cry “Rhaenyra TRAINED to be heir” because that honestly makes her look worse. Wdym she spent 20 years training and managed to fuck things up more than Aegon, who got pulled out of the trash 2 days ago?

Legitimately and it's why nerfing the Greens was such a dumb choice 😭

Like what do you mean you apparently trained your whole life (which btw spending years away from court hiding from bastard rumors "managing" Dragonstone is not really training for ruling an entire kingdom, especially when it comes to navigating political realities when in power) (but then again that's something she no doubt figured she could ignore in favor of ruling with hardcore fire and blood and fear of dragons and Daemon)

Like apparently you "trained your whole life" for this and you're somehow the only one divinely ordained and suited and qualified enough to rule...

AND YET SOMEHOW up against these apparently incompetent, short-sighted, impulsive Greens, who are made up of:

- a drunk dude who's apparently never been trained to rule despite him ruling being the plan since he was a baby, who appoints his unqualified and unnamed frat boys to Kingsguard, bullies his brother in public, drunk flies his dragon to battle, and executes a dozen dudes for "no reason" causing a "PR disaster"

- a kinslayer attempted kingslayer who took out one of his side's only dragons and rider because he got bullied :( and now he hates his brother and wants power and also he's gonna nuke a village for no reason except to feel powerful and manly I guess... also he unfairly does nothing about Rhaenyra's blockade and it's HIS fault people are starving from the blockade apparently and that's why the common people LOVE Rhaenyra SO much

- the dowager queen who converted to Team Black out of sapphic longing for a woman she was friends with decades ago for a couple of years, who willingly sells out her entire family to the enemy, including the son she crowned, two other sons fighting for the war she started, her father who was her only ally at court, her brother who was the only one to sympathize with her position, her sworn shield who lives to serve her and protect her family, her uncle and his men leading the Hightower host out of Oldtown, most of her family's dragons who will die defending their riders... all for the chance to win the favor of a woman who never showed any ounce of care for how her life turned out and the sacrifice she made (in fact the woman who was remorseless about her son's eye getting cut out, who blatantly pushed lies that endangered her whole family, who married a man who hates her whole family and wants them dead) (she fails in winning her favor) but girls stick together - girl power! And she's finally free from the confines of medieval feudalist patriarchy :) (except there's nowhere for her to go and no way to live her life as a free woman in any capacity as the wife of the former king and a highborn lady, unless she wants to try to be a survivalist in the wild or go to Essos and join a pleasure house, which, again, not really "free" and sustainable long term options for her)

- a poor helpless infantalized neurodivergent woman who can't even ride her dragon because she doesn't like it for some reason and she's incapable of acting outside of autistic stereotypes, also she's totally fine about her 6 year old getting murdered in front of her very eyes now, and actually she's gonna use her visions to condemn the brother who's always had her family's back up until this point and instead help the man responsible for her child's death, because she's seen the Grand Design and wants to help Team Black now :)

- "misogynist incel" but somehow also at the same time "Alicent worshipping and unreasonably Rhaenyra hating sex toy" (don't think about why he might have valid reasons to hate this particular woman) who doesn't think ahead and is apparently the most violent terrible hypocritical person in this show (don't think too hard about the show making him Dornish and casting a brown actor and the implications it has for this character on and off screen because the show and mainstream fandom won't!)

- offscreen brother nobody barely remembers who only just started riding his dragon apparently

- former Hand of the King immediately fired and sent away and captured off screen after doing nothing to help the war effort apparently

- Lannister twin off to Essos to fuck several wives and mud wrestle LOL!!

- foot fetishist shadowy creep (don't think about how they made a disabled character have a fetish involving their disability for no reason)

AND YET SOMEHOW against THESE villains... she can't even beat them 😭 she can't beat THESE guys who at this point are actively helping her out... she can't take and hold the throne against THESE Greens...

Like way to just completely make her and her team look equally incompetent by failing to take on THESE foes and instead elect to... mope... complain... do nothing except what others tell you to do... basically make no real decisions of your own except... dress as a nun and sneak into enemy territory with no real plan, leaving nobody in charge while you're gone despite a war looming... and burn a group of people alive for no reason to get dragons that you immediately refuse to use... ride dragon... speak a foreign language... cry... kiss your advisor immediately after she opens up about being violently assaulted and mutilated and never bring it up again... girlboss 💪💅

Truly astounding how badly they managed to fumble the bag with the show. Like. My god 😭 THIS was your vision for the historic Dance of Dragons aka the worst civil war in Westerosi history where both sides were Targaryens with dragons who destroyed each other and the Realm in their quest for power? Like THIS is what the singers in mainline ASOIAF books were singing about? 😭😭😭 bruh 😭😭😭

[littlemanthings]

Dear Fandom,

To say I am deeply disappointed in what this fandom has become is an understatement, but because I really don't want to start aggression by using vulgar language or to stress the VAs out anymore than they probably are; I'm going to try keep it at a certain level. But man, there are better ways to ask for a whole army to come after you with pitchforks like this was the fucking middle ages and without having all this damage being done.

And now we're losing a big part of this show because some people just had to cross the line over a hundred fucking times now. I'm so ever proud and impressed with Kat for dealing with this and for so long— and with three other jobs as well? All I can do is hope that she knows how important she and all the others who work with the shows is to us all.

I don't like getting personal, but if there is that small chance that any of them read this I just wanted to share this with you; about like two-three years ago I was very lonely, and my head space was not in the right place, but in that same year I also found the SAMS channel, and my heart kinda just made a nest there. Then Lunar and Earth started their own thing and things just felt better. For a while I really thought one of these years was going to be mark the end for me, but these characters, the writing, everything about it made me want to stay a little longer— just until I got to see how it ended, I would tell myself. And now I'm pretty sure I do want to be here long after the curtains fall.

So thank you, if I could say it a million times I would. Thank you for making Earth who she is. Thank you for representing the rest of us girls out there. Thank you for reigniting my love for writing. Thank you for unknowingly raising a young teenager who wants to live thanks to you and a lot of other people (you too Davis and Reed).

To clarify a few things; I am not in any way trying to convince Kat to not quit writing for the shows, I understand her decision and fully support it. I hope to god I didn't make things weird or project myself onto this situation, I really just wanted Kat to know she means a whole lot to us.

[hauntingofhouses]

arcane rant. spoilers for all of season 2 #caitlyn-critical

yeah okay i was scared to say this which is SILLY but ALAS. anyway yeah seeing that im not the only one i feel like i have to get this off my chest as well.

i wanted to give caitlyn a chance in season 2, especially in the beginning of this season during her """corruption""" arc wherein she was turning into a tyrant and a bad guy. because see, to me that was caitlyn at her best. not as a person but as a character. before this she was just so uninteresting and downright annoying to me, but starting with s2e1 i started really enjoying where the writers were taking her journey. i would've loved to see her continue down that path and caitvi evolving from reluctant allies to lovers and then perhaps to enemies-WHILE-lovers. i wouldve loved seeing caitvi hatefucking, and i thought that was where this arc was taking her. but no, instead she's still the good one, while maddie turned out to be the bad guy all along. plot twist! but it made me feel nothing but more annoyance not only at caitlyn but also at the way the narrative seems to baby caitlyn and excuse her for everything despite the supposed anti-cop messaging intrinsic to the way vi was written throughout season 1.

i understand that caitlyn's whole thing in season 1 is that she's a naive rich girl just trying her best in the ways she knows how, and that's by being a cop. like yes i get that, which is why i didnt mind her very much and gave her a chance to grow, and even though i didn't care for her as a character at all because she's boring AND a cop, i did like that she was in the story as vi's love interest, and primarily served the story in that role.

but when season 2 decides to give her a bigger role and allow her to shine on her own, they do a good job! until... they don't. because caitlyn still has to be a good guy, because she's SO loyal to vi. and why? the two barely know each other, they're attracted to each other but I don't understand why and how caitlyn could so easily put aside all her rage and grief and desire for vengeance and retribution, to be loyal to vi. to betray ambessa and work with jinx?

like i think my biggest problem is how little conflict there is for vi and cait to end up fucking in that prison cell. like if it was angry hate fucking, that would be perfect and honestly a natural followup if you really do wanna implement a sex scene right there and then. but it wasn't. instead it felt more like "okay my suicidal sister gave me her blessing to fuck you so i can finally do it now yippeee" meanwhile jinx literally went to kill herself over and over again while ekko had to keep trying to talk her down.

like the thing is i'm here for the drama and im here for a rollercoaster ride of emotions and i'm here for character development. but more than anything else i'm here for the drama where vi and jinx's story as sisters, as family, is ultimately the driving force of the story. so for them to just push that aside SO quickly, felt JARRING. like "okay sister MOVE i wanna fuck this cute cop who was acting like a tyrant in the city for the past few months (?), and btw the cute cop works for an institution that killed my parents and destroyed our whole lives ❤️ #lovewins"

like okay. i dont mind if the final ending finds both jinx and vi distanced and estranged because they both need to heal and move on from the past (and each other) in order to grow and invest love in their own new found families. but for it to have been done just like that, for caitvi to get together in the same prison cell where vi's suicidal sister had just been suffering in mental agony and grief... I don't know. i don't like it.

[almayver]

GMM2025 Lineup Game / Tier List

Rules: write your thoughts on all the GMMTV series pilots released (or just the ones you plan to watch) and tag people whose thoughts you wanna know about!

@jojotichakorn @wangxianinventedromance and @valentinaonthemoon tagged me in basically different variations of this, so I'm gonna smush them all together. Thanks for tagging me 😊 I love to be given the chance to ramble.

Prefacing this with a reminder that I am the personification of CinemaWins so I find things to like in everything, and that I was born to yap, so this will be long :)

I'm going to do it in the order of the trailers and put the tier list at the bottom. I'm adding a twist to mine and tracking the most important thing to me, Will I cry? (mostly just so I can look back and see if my guess was correct)

Dare you to death: I LOVE a good murder mystery. Yes. Give it to me. Snarky partners solving a crime was THE dynamic i was raised on and I still love it. It's going to be so entertaining trying to pick up clues and stuff while seeing these two bicker and fall in love. Don't think ill cry on this one, but serial killers, brothers, possibility of whump? There's a chance.

Head 2 Head: FUCK YES. Starting with the fact that I adore SeaKeen with all my heart, this one has me so invested!! Their bickering-flirting? ON POINT. When Sea says the line of “I've been saving my lips for you for ages” while flipping him off?? Yeah, that's my shit. But add to that the whole magic plot of seeing that they are in love and together years in the future, but then he dies!!! In his arms!!!! Yes. Yes. Just yes. “I will do anything to prevent that from happening…except not loving you”?? Yep. They made this show for me specifically, the rest of you can stay only if you are nice. The side couple also has me 👀. Basically, I loved every single second of it, and I'm ready for it. Oh, I will absolutely cry. No doubts about this one. These boys had me weeping with their soft rom-com, adding looming visions of death to it? yes, I'm ready to cry.

Burnout Syndrome: I'm intrigued by this one! Looks very messy and full of complex feelings all around, with some very very interesting characters. I don't actually have more to say about it except !!!, and it's on the watch list for sure! Hmm from what I get, I'm thinking is going to be more in the stressful, thoughtful side than in the emotional one for me, so maybe teary eyes but not full-blown crying.

I Love “A Lot Of” You: I've only seen one thing in which this topic didn't feel wildly offensive, so. Hmm. Even without that whole can of worms, I'm not fully interested in it? It seems cute and fun I guess, and the title is very sweet but eeeh. Not in the watch list for now, unless it gets some strong endorsements once it starts airing.

Whale Store xoxo: Oh this looks lovely! So so so warm and sweet. Having a character in just full-blown crisis and feeling lost, is always the best way to get into my heart. Add to that a sweet girl, full of joy, trying to help?! And the You've got mail vibes with the whole small business being threatened by the family of the love interest, plus feeling a duty to the store because of a parent without knowing if its what you truly want? Say less babe, I'm there, I'm seated. The side couple story also has me really intrigued. Oh yeah, tears will be very much present. Not full on wailing, but rom coms do make me cry, I see some tears due to both the angst and the character finding herself.

Only Friends-Dream On: Making the entire first half of the trailer one shot that manages to explain all the dynamics is enough for me to put it in the watch list no questions asked. I haven't watched Only Friends and from the bits I know and have seen I know I wouldn't enjoy it purely for weird personal reasons. This however? Oh yeah bestie sign me up, ill have popcorn ready, let the messiness begin. Also, the cast is insane and as someone who was absolutely taken by Ohm and Leng week after week, I'm so excited. Hmm, I'm going for yes. At least one of these assholes is going to be broken in a way that speaks to me and I will cry about it, I see it in my future. (Side note, please tell me I'm not the only one that laughed at the characters being called Jack and Dean)

That Summer: I CHEERED. Troublemaker sent to the beach to find some discipline finds a kind, amnesiac prince is something that i didn't know I needed so hard but fuck i do. It's going to be so fucking charming, and it has this very quiet emotional vibe to it that I'm going to eat up weekly, yes sir. I have no thoughts except loud cheering, I'm just excited for it. I was going to say I hope it comes in summer like that means anything to me. pft. Umm, yeah probs some tears, nothing too big, but I can see some emotional moments hitting hard specially considering the two people acting here. *side eyes that We Are scene that I still can't fucking rewatch because it did enough damage once*

My Romance Scammer: Marriage scam!!!!! I could cry of joy. This is the kind of shit I love sorry. It's so messy and at its core very silly, and I'm just going to have such a good time watching. It's going to be fun! I also feel like some of the backstories of these characters are going to be interesting and emotional, I'm excited for that. I was going to say I won't cry, but I always cry with fictional weddings and I'm guessing some sort of “real” wedding is going to happen at the end that will break me, so maybe.

Melody of Secrets: I'm fucking thrilled. As a horror fan, I don't know what I did to get this gift but ill fucking take it, thank you. This was SO WEIRD!!! Isn't that great!! What the fuck was happening? Is it ghosts, is it magic, is it a curse, is it trauma? I don't know, and the character doesn't know either, and ooof the journey we will go in while trying to figure it out! My only request for this show is that I want to say “What the fuck??” every episode. That's all. Whether I cry or not depends on where they are going with it so, no clue. Possibly.

Love you teacher: I had such a strong negative reaction to this, that it kind of went back around, and now it's in my watch list? It was a journey. So, fun fact about me, one of the fanfiction tropes that I adore the most and I will eat up every single time it pops up even though it's not that common is amnesia in an established couple (I'm sure no one was kind of scared I was going to say something else). I just love the idea of a couple having to kind of fall in love again, with the angst of one of them not knowing anything while the other has all the memories and feelings. It's specially interesting if the person with amnesia has a very different life in the present to what they expected/think they should have, or in a enemies to lovers dynamic? it fucks. So I was really really excited. And then he was 7 years old, and I got so shocked I stopped processing the trailer. But now I'm intrigued. I want to see if this show is going to surprise me, I'm going to be there seated for the first couple of episodes at least because there is something there that just, its intriguing. I think there is a chance this one will be special. I mean if I hate it I can just stop watching right? No big deal. The other thing is that Dome gave me a show so fucking special to me that I have to give the dude a chance. He already surprised me. I trust him enough to know that this will be fun at the very least. And also, if I do stick with it, tears 1000% guaranteed. The emotional beats of this will hit, absolutely, and motherfucker over there knows how to hit you with emotions with the simplest stuff.

MU-TE-LUV: Yeah so I'm probs only watching the SeaKeen and OhmLeng parts. Those are actually so compelling to me and I love watching them act, so I will be having fun with those stories. The rest fully depends on my mood and what other people are saying when it airs. Also, the Dew one that is just Amarres: la serie, kind of seems interesting. I kind of doubt this one will pull my heartstrings much but hey I'm willing to be surprised!

Cat for Cash: I have my blanket and my warm drink ready, I will be seating there just cooing at everything and feeling all the emotions. This is going to be a chill watch, it's going to be fun, and I love it for it. The familial shit is going to break me and sell me for parts, so that's going to be fun. And yes, absolutely going to cry, no-brainer.

Girl Rules: We all cheered. So what is going to happen is that I'm going to liveblog this, absolutely, and all the liveblogs are just going to be me being in love with Namtan, and I need everyone to be cool with that. In all seriousness, leaving behind my gigantic crush on her, this is going to be so gooood. Messy!!!! Hot!! FUN!!!!! The dynamics between all the characters are already delicious, and i can't wait for this one, it's going to be great. Grabbing pop corn and something to fan myself with. The NamtanFilm relationship has some real potential to pull some tears from me.

Boys in love: I love fluffy shit, sue me. We are going to sit here, and giggle and kick our feet and have a good ass time while doing it. The Chokun and Aston relationship drew me in so hard, I'm going to live there, but everything was just so sweet and delightful!! Its a fun time. Honestly, yeah, I can see a couple of tears. Not sad tears but more like, overwhelmed with softness kind of tears.

My Magic Prophecy: Once again, angsty visions of the future are always compelling to me, so I'm here for this. It's kind of in the same level as Burnout where I'm not shaking chihuahua levels of excitement but I'm interested! The relationship seems fun and touching, the science vs. magic thing could be interesting. If I get invested enough, yeah crying for sure.

A Dog and A Plane: I'm sure no one who has spent more than a minute in my blog knows this, but i fucking love these two so much. Shocker, I know. But seriously, they have something that makes me 20000% invested whenever they are together on screen and i didnt want to hope for a new show but i was secretly wishing for it and the universe decided to throw me a bone the size of Jupiter. And to add to it, they are bickering, they are horny, New is a fancy flight attendant and Tay Tawan is a paramedic with tattoos that wears a lot of tank tops. They both think the other one is better than them in some way. The plot is just the kind of rom com i eat up. And I know, I KNOW, I'm going to cry. I cry every time these two are involved. They will have one vulnerable moment and i will be in the corner cheeering with tears in my eyes. They will have the conflcit and the same thing will happen. They will have the happy ending and i will be weeping. I'm so fucking happy. Just one thing. I need them to fuck in that plane. I dont care where, I dont care how, but it has to happen. I have that small wish. Oh and MarcPoon!!!! Their bits seem so so good too.

Me and Thee: I made the joke that I read this Phumpeem au before, because actually yeah kind of, but also because these are the exact same vibes that drew me to Phum. The characters are super different and so cool, but oh lonely rich boy!!!!!!! I'm gonna have a new one for my list. And this one is so weird! and a dork! and loves soap operas so he is speaking my language. I love him already. The plot is also just for me. Teach me how to hit on someone?? And he uses it all on him!! yes yesssss. I cant wait to see more of them. I cant wait to see them each fall in love in such different ways and the conflict has the opportunity to be so so so my thing. In terms of crying, he is a sad lonely boy, i dont have to say more. I'm ready to imprint on him and feel very emotional.

WU: This was less of a plot and more of a "here, we heard you, they'll keep working together, dont kill us". I haven watched their show yet because of a silly reson, but i had been planning on binging it before the last episode next week, so im excited!! The brief glimpse we got compels me, i love me some red string of fate.

Memoir of Rati: I said I could watch them read the dictionary (and i fucking meant it) and instead they give me an intense period show??? I could cry. Look, one could say Great Sapol single handedly got me back into live bloging, i have a debt with the guy, add to that the fact that him and Inn became two of my favorite actors ever in just a couple of episodes? Yeah I'm here for this. They have an insane chemistry that is such a joy to watch, and i dont mind period shows, they arent my favorite but I find them charming if done right and they often teach me new things. These two are about to eat the shit out of these roles and i will be clapping while suffering. Also the AouBoom story is so interesting too!!! No notes. I'm going to cry like a baby multiple times. I still cry with their fake break up. This is going to kill me. Can't wait.

Ticket To Heaven: First let me list some fun facts about me. I was raised catholic in a very catholic family in one of the most catholic countries in the world. I still live in a house where my room is the only one that doesnt have some form of religious imagery. Bare a pop opera and Jesus christ superstar are two of my favorite musicals of all time. I ran away from religion before my confirmation but after my first communion, and every time i think about it i discover some new complicated feeling about it and a fun trauma it left behind. I am right now wearing a Look Khunnoo shirt.

They made this show for me and its going to break me. I'm already making playlists for it. I keep listening to Heaven while staring at the wall. This is just, gods, this is everything to me. The vibes of it are just so so so delicious. The aesthetic? The quotes? I am so going to relate more with Gemini's character, and thats going to be a fun painful little trip. And of course. These boys. I adore them. I'm ready to be killed by them acting the shit out of every single frame. I am going to cry in ways that will be dangerous to my health. I can't wait. There is no way that the ending isn't going to fuck me up, whether is super tragic, a time skip, a hopeful ending. Its going to be a Thing. Fucking Rosa de Guadalupe got me with its gay episode. and its. La rosa de guadalupe. This? Will murder me. I will listen to the ost and cry instantly like i do with Bare.

Basically im excited :)

And the tier list!!

I kind of did it in the scale of how much is it going to make me feel like a dog waiting for its owner, sadly pawing at the door, wanting to be let in.

I think everyone I would tag on this has already done it or has already been tagged so if you see this and you have thoughts that you want to share, you are tagged. This is legally binding. I want to hear your thoughts

If you read all that you can reclaim a cookie before leaving

[perpetualcontrolleddrowning]

Zui Xian Peak Fic

alright, that's enough, let's get you home

JRaylin441

Summary: Liao Qinglan spends her days making wine, drinking with Shang Qinghua, and having a good time. Surely, this will never be disrupted.

Written for the Gotcha for Gaza prompt "would love a fic about Zui Xian, the Cang Qiong Mountain devoted to...alcohol. What are they doing over there?"

Content Warnings: there isn't much here beyond a LOT of drinking and getting drunk. It's not presented as an unhealthy coping mechanism but please just take care of yourself. Also Liao Qinglan has some bias against demons that she works through. It's not a whole deep thing and I keep the tone light, but be aware of that too.

Read it on ao3 here (x)

Cang Qiong Mountain Sect has twelve peaks. That's something they don't talk about a whole lot. Well, okay, so they talk about the fact that there are twelve of them, all the damn time. Twelve peaks. A nice, round number.

But who can actually remember all the peaks? Who could actually name them? Sometimes it feels like the literal members of the sect can't do it, let alone any of the common folk or the people from other cultivation sects around them.

Sometimes, Liao Qinglan lets this get to her. Sometimes, it really bothers her, that no one seems to give enough of a shit about her peak to even remember that it exists, let alone the names of its peak lord and disciples.

Usually, though, it kind of kicks ass. Like, all of the benefits that come with affiliation with the most prominent and highly-revered cultivation sect in the jianghu but none of the actual obligation, expectation, or responsibility. Not too bad a deal, when you think about it.

"I'd take that any day. Please, someone come and give me a single day when some peak lord or another isn't pounding on my door, begging me to come fix another thing, give them more money to replace the wall again, and they pinky-promise that this time, this time they definitely aren't going to break it. I mean, fuck, you know? What am I beyond a money purse, if you think about it?" Shang-shixiong flops his head down into his arms, resting against the fine oak table in Liao Qinglan's home and groping across it to take another sad sip of his wine. It drips down the side of his mouth and onto the wood, since it's almost impossible to drink when you're laying down like that. Liao Qinglan can do it, but she's kind of an expert, when it comes to things like this.

"I mean, what was I thinking? Why does a money purse need to have feelings and the ability to be tired? Could have just made it a magical, floating cave full of riches. Psychically read the mind of everyone who comes and gives them the money they need if they deserve it. Fuck. But no, had to go and make an overworked lackey of it all. Should have known, with my luck."

"Truly, your suffering is never ending," Liao Qinglan drawls, reaching out to refill Shang-shishu's cup, because she's nice like that. He's not making any sense right now, and he'll start making even less sense if he drinks the new cup, but that's fine too. What kind of peak lord could she call herself, if she wasn't prepared for such things?

Liao Qinglan, peak lord of Zui Xian Peak. Specializing in alcohol.

You might be wondering how it is that a person can ascend to peak lord status on alcohol alone, but anyone who had ever partied with Liao Qinglan back in the day wouldn't dare. She knows how to hold her liquor. Can really put it away. Will trounce your ass at literally any drinking game, just come and try it.

And then, of course, they all ascended, and suddenly the other peak lords were so busy being all prim and proper that they forget about the person who literally ascended with them from the force of their partying together. They're pretty much all on her shit list, if she's being honest.

Well. Not everyone. Shang Qinghua is fine. He comes by every couple of months to get rip roaring drunk and then cry on Liao Qinglan's table, and that's not too bad. Certainly isn't a change from how he always used to behave. Pretty much the only change she's seen in him since they first met is the increase in workload and, subsequently, the volume of tears he can produce when three sheets to the wind.

Shen Qingqiu was as stuck-up and reserved as ever, but he never really talked to her in the first place, certainly never went out drinking with them. So, you know, he was fine. Didn't drop her when he achieved notoriety because he never really picked her up in the first place. Can't be too pissed off about something like that. Then, in the last decade or so, after the huge change in personality (Liao Qinglan is still betting on possession, fuck what the relics and artifacts all said), he mostly just smiles vaguely when he notices she's there. Harmless and inoffensive and unremarkable. She's pretty sure he doesn't know her name.

And, you know, Huang Qinghao. Fuckhead of all fuckheads. The stuck-up asshole who has never had a drink in his fucking life, certainly never went out partying with them. Where Shen Qingqiu has always been a distant and vaguely superior presence, Huang Qinghao has always been the vocally judgemental and holier-than-thou dick who Liao Qinglan kind of wants to push off the mountain. Over on his all-male, ascetic peak. Sure, fine, to each their own, fucking enjoy it. But don't come over to Liao Qinglan's peak to give her another fucking lecture on why everything that she has built her peak on is stupid. Just because he's sworn to be a lonely and boring stick in the mud for the rest of his life doesn't mean everyone has to.

She's complaining. Again. It's fine. Shang-shishu is drunk as a skunk and definitely not processing anything she's saying. There's no one else around to overhear, because she always clears them out before he gets drunk like this. Says a whole lot of shit that might freak out the other peak members. Better to keep this kind of thing just between them.

Liao Qinglan has a few working theories. She isn't dedicating any particular effort to investigating or anything, but she toys with them now and then, notices when something happens that adds more evidence to one column than the other.

Theory One is that Shang Qinghua has fully and completely lost his mind. He's living in a daze or lost in some memory of a past life or something else equally disorienting, and it's making him think he designed this world. Sure. He seems to be managing the finances fine and hasn't died yet. If this is what that does to a man, then she's just glad An Ding was never for her.

Theory Two is that Shang Qinghua is actually a fucking god. Like, fell from the heavens, currently walking among them, had a hand in the creation of the world kind of god. Which, obviously, is completely stupid and impossible. He's literally laying on her table right now and drooling while he tries to work out the very complicated technique behind taking a drink while keeping your head flat on a horizontal surface. That's barely even advanced disciple shit.

So, of course, it's impossible and ridiculous. Still, though, she's been around him drunk more than probably anyone else in his entire life. People say things, when they're drunk. And, you know, while those things are almost always ridiculous and dramatic and overblown, they're also often true. Rarely the whole truth. It's all base emotion and instinct. The things you don't say on a day-to-day basis because some other part of you is blocking it. Whether that's common sense, shame, manners, morals, or some horrifying combination thereof. That's a part of people too. It's not like the things people say when they're drunk are the whole truth. There are other parts of them that matter as well and are also true and are the reason they haven't said this before.

But it's really, really rare. Rare, like, the peak leader of Zui Xian Peak has never seen it happen, for someone to get drunk and then start just spouting off reckless lies without any kind of truth behind them.

If Shang Qinghua is here, drunk at her table every few months, murmuring about the fact that he should have designed the world in a different way, well. That's something that someone as smart as Liao Qinglan has learned to pay attention to. Besides, she didn't get to the point of Theory Two just because he likes to talk like he's a god. If that were true, she would probably think he just has some kind of heart demon that's twisting his perception of reality. But, beyond mumbling about design choices for the world, Shang Qinghua has an uncanny ability to mention future events, that he couldn't possibly know about, that come true. He has a tendency to casually throw out very secret and personal details about people that they never would have told him but that also turn out to be true.

Like she said, Liao Qinglan isn't the type of person to go digging into mysteries like this. She's found that things in this world mostly unfold in the most dramatic way they possibly can but have the good-nature to ignore her peak and her disciples. Zui Xian Peak tends to mostly sit back, watch it happen, and make drinking games out of the events. Nothing she does either way has much of an impact, so it's more about just keeping her head down and keeping her peak safe.

Some people might think it's shameful. Huang Qinghao certainly makes it clear that he thinks so. But he's been slamming his tightass head against the solid wall of the higher peaks' indifference for literal years and has made exactly no progress. It's kind of pathetic to watch. He can feel as superior as he wants, over there on his all-male peak where Liao Qinglan assumes they sit around telling each other what a good job they're doing and punishing anything that even looks a little bit like pleasure, every hour of the day.

Liao Qinglan provides a service, here. Sure, night hunts and Qian Cao Peak's Dragon-Bone Cantaloupe seeds help bring in a lot of the income that the sect relies on. But that's all external stuff.

Liao Qinglan has been in charge of the alcohol peak for long enough that she knows the truth of things. Cang Qiong Mountain Sect is enormous, practically a small town unto itself, between all the peaks. There are a lot of people who need to live in the same space, endure incredibly physical training, experience upsetting things.

They may not be the source of income for the peak, but Zui Xian Peak is the thing that keeps all the members of the sect able to talk to each other. They keep conversations calm and civil, provide a break from all the work, set a framework for socializing.

What Liao Qinglan knows, and Shang Qinghua knows, and no one else on this entire mountain range seems to know, is that this whole place would collapse without the work that they do. So, you know, every now and then, when it all gets to be a little too much, she and Shang Qinghua meet up and get absolutely wasted and complain about what it's like to be the two most underappreciated and easily-forgotten of all the peak lords.

Which, of course, brings her right back to this little tableau.

"Shang-shixiong," she calls, laying her head on her arms, so that they're both looking at each other, sideways on the table. "I have a question for you. How do you think this is going for you?" Even as she asks the question, Shang Qinghua tries to tip his cup into his mouth and ends up dribbling onto the table and his chin in a way that is definitely going to drip down onto his robes. Liao Qinglan isn't even sure that he managed to get any of it in his mouth.

Because she's always been competitive and a little bit petty, and because this is her best buddy Shang Qinghua, which means he's her most frequent victim, she reaches for her own cup and tips it gracefully into her sideways mouth. Advanced techniques. Like she was saying.

"Your elder sect brother thinks that you haven't been doing your part to drink this wine." He pushes the jar in her direction, and Liao Qinglan is more than happy to refill her cup. He's not wrong. They've been drinking the same amount, but her tolerance is much higher than her dear Shang-shixiong. It's going to take some work to meet him where he's at.

"As my Shang-shixiong says," she demurs, then reaches out to take a hold of the jar, raises it in his direction, and knocks it back.

There's another jar beside the table.

They're just getting started tonight.

*~*~*

After that lovely night, it's an unusually long time before they have the chance to visit again. Shen Qingqiu, who was always kind of distant and tragic after the loss of his most treasured disciple, just recently died in some dramatic self-destruction. Right in front of the disciple that was, supposedly, dead all this time. Which sounds like a whole lot of drama that Liao Qinglan knows literally nothing about and will probably never get answers to. The way that they do things in this sect, though, with not appointing another peak lord until everyone is ready, means that Shang Qinghua probably just had to take on a bunch more work to adjust. She's waiting to offer a warm smile and listening ear, when he finally finishes figuring out just who will be in charge of what, but that's going to take a long time and they both know it.

Until then, she supposes she should focus on her own disciples.

Yan Yazhu is her head disciple, and she knows better than to think for even a second that the place would survive without her. Sure, Liao Qinglan's got the whole charismatic-leader and maintaining-relationships-with-other-peak-lords thing down. And she generally has some pretty spectacular ideas about how to make everything run even better than it was already, but that's, sadly, not all that it takes to run a place like this.

Sure, you can have all these fabulous ideas, and even start them up, but a lot of time they require ongoing and consistent daily check-ins, after that, and the minutiae of things like that is not at all where she tends to shine. So, when she picked her head disciple, she picked her carefully.

"It's been a while since our friend Shang-shishu came around for a visit. Who else is supposed to be sympathizing with me about all of this work we have to do?" Yan Yazhu sits upright at the same desk that her peak lord is currently slumped across, because she's also one of the most proper and polite people on the entire peak. Sure, Yan Yazhu can cut loose with the best of them when it's time, but she tends to enjoy things like gently plucking out the notes of flavoring in an expensive liquor, and sipping slowly, rather than getting involved in some of the proper games that younger disciples on the peak like to make.

"You could always come and complain to the cruel peak lord who assigned you so much work," Liao Qinglan drawls, because this is how this conversation always goes.

"Ah, but how could this lowly one dare to do such a thing, when surely her peak lord has assigned so much work in order to better manage her own, much larger workload?"

"Yes, yes, the head disciple of Zui Xian Peak is humble and devoted." Liao Qinglan nods sarcastically in Yan Yazhu's direction and she grins the same smile that she does every single time they have this conversation. Liao Qinglan has tried to delegate the head disciple's workload before. Yan Yazhu ends up claiming that no one else is handling it correctly and taking it all back anyway. Liao Qinglan has also tried to do more of her own tasks. Yan Yazhu doesn't tell her that she's doing them wrong, but she does follow along behind her and redo all of it anyway. So, for now, she lets it be. "This Peak Lord will have to drag Shang Qinghua back to this peak by his ear if he does not come back to visit soon."

Yan Yazhu grins and waves her out of the room before she can distract her further.

Liao Qinglan takes a leisurely stroll across her peak. It was so thoughtful of the sect to claim these twelve lovely mountains for themselves. Sure, the scenery and environment are perfect for meditation and cultivation and all that. More importantly, though, the view kicks ass, and it makes for a lovely backdrop to all sorts of activities, no matter the time of day.

There are disciples training in one of the fields, since it is late in the afternoon. She watches as some of the older disciples guide the younger in slow drills. Some focus on combat, but most of the efforts are focused toward learning how to properly circulate qi through the body. A good way to burn off alcohol as you drink it. A good way to stave off a hangover. A very good way to recover from a hangover, should you forget to do any of this in the middle of all the fun.

There are disciples napping in the sun, just beyond the training fields, draped in the dappled shade from some of the trees. Some of them might be sleeping off a long night. Others may simply be joining their friends in a lazy way to pass the time. Liao Qinglan lets them be, either way.

Deeper into the peak, and there are a few of the elders sitting in a hot spring. A cup floats between them. When it drifts within reach of someone, from the natural current, they raise it to their lips, drink, and then utter a line of poetry. The cup goes back to floating toward the next person, who will have to drink and then add a line to the verse. Liao Qinglan knows that, when the other players judge a line to be insufficient, someone will have to drink the entirety of the cup and go to refill it. She also knows that, after playing games like this for as many years as they have, that will rarely happen. They can keep this kind of lazy game up for shichen without tiring.

Other members of the peak, crouching together before barrels of liquor as they debate over tastes and notes and distilling techniques. A visit to the class where some of her most precise and attentive students are teaching others the art of drinking and appreciating a fine rice wine. Checking in for just a moment on the juniors who are only just about to reach full adulthood, pretending not to notice as they hide the disastrous and far-reaching impacts of the newest drinking game they have tried to invent.

It's a mess, and it's silly, and it's her favorite place in the whole fucking world. Liao Qinglan still wonders, sometimes, what possessed Cang Qiong Mountain Sect to have a peak like this. She suspects it was simply a group of twelve friends, there at the beginning, and they let everyone do what they wanted and went back and made it sound mysterious and important later. That's her favorite theory, and so it's the one she chooses to believe.

No other sects have anything close to this. They take themselves so seriously, focus on meditation and fighting and ridding the world of evil. That's good and all, but is that really all that they want to focus on, throughout their whole life?

Liao Qinglan's cultivation is legendary in its fine technique. She can take effortless control over her own body. There's always been a bit more trouble, though, when it comes to pushing it outside of herself, in a fight or with some kind of seal or talisman.

So, maybe she's not out ridding the world of evil. But she likes to think, sometimes, that she's putting a little bit more peace and comfort into it. And that's always been enough for her. The world is chaotic, and the struggle for power is endless. She isn't strong enough to go out and make anyone stop what they're doing, but she guards a peak in the shadow of the strongest cultivation sect. They are secure, protected, and forgettable. The trials and tribulations of the world may lap against the edges of the sect, but they rarely ever touch Zui Xian Peak. There's something good there, for the disciples that live here.

Maybe she keeps an eye out, when the kids are out there in the dirt, digging their little holes. Everyone else watches eagerly for the ones that are particularly strong, particularly determined, particularly strategic. Liao Qinglan tends to focus on finding the ones that seem frantic, desperate. The ones with arms a little too thin, or marked up with more than just dirt.

It's not everything. She can't offer them strength or notoriety or the ability to fight back. She can build the kind of peak where people like that can come and rest in the sunlight all day, learn to take care of their own bodies, and pass the time away with games.

It's nice, to see them working to perfect the taste of alcohol. To watch them teach each other the ways and methods they have for preparing such things. It's even nicer to see them lazing together in the sun.

So. It's nice. It's a good time. She likes it. Fuck off, why is anyone interrogating her about this shit anyway? Liao Qinglan can be whatever kind of peak lord she wants to be and she doesn't have to explain herself to anyone. That's one of the many great things about being a peak lord in the first place.

Shut up.

*~*~*

"You know, I really should turn you in. You're not supposed to be here." She's teasing, a little, with her tone, but only because she doesn't know how else to talk about something like this, with her oldest friend. With someone she could genuinely get in trouble for seeing. With Shang-shixiong.

"You wouldn't do that to poor, little old me, would you?" Shang Qinghua slumps across her table again, a perfect mirror of his previous positions from every other time they've done this, even though he's defected from the sect and run away to join up with the demons and shouldn't have been able to get through the wards in the first place.

"You shouldn't be able to even get onto the mountain." She wants to send him away again. She wants to be the kind of person who holds the line and cuts him off, after it was revealed that he had betrayed the sect to the demon realm. She wishes that was all that it took for her stupid, soft little heart to leave behind all the years of shared friendship.

"No one else knows how to go through the process of banishing someone from the mountain except for An Ding Peak, and they still keep reaching out to me to help make sense of my notes and shit." Shang Qinghua throws back the wine in his cup. Liao Qinglan doesn't refill it. When it becomes clear that she's not going to do that, Shang Qinghua sits up and focuses a little bit more. Maybe the break in their routine is making it clear enough that she's certainly not happy with him. Maybe they won't have to talk about feelings at all, and he can just leave, and then she doesn't have to learn that she's not the kind of person capable of sending him away.

"You know, my Yan Yazhu is ending up with more work, now that you're not here to take it on. She already works hard enough." Liao Qinglan is holding onto the parts of this that are easy to be angry about. That make more sense. She doesn't know how to make the version of Shang Qinghua that has fallen into drunken sleep on the floor of her home make sense alongside the version that apparently colluded with demons to plan the massacre at the Immortal Alliance Conference.

She doesn't know how to make those two things make sense. She is maybe hoping that this evening will help with that. It's almost definitely a wasted effort.

Still. She reaches out, grabs the jar of wine, refills his cup. Hers is still full. She hasn't even touched it.

"It's not my fault I was banished! Besides, if the sect wanted to be able to carry on without me, then they shouldn't have made me the one in charge of literally every single thing." He drinks from the cup. Shang Qinghua has been sloppy in his movements and whiny for the past hour, but she is suddenly aware of the focus of his gaze. He is not nearly as drunk as he has been behaving. It's a trick she's pulled on people before. She doesn't particularly care to have it reversed on her now.

"I would argue that there is no one else we could blame for your defection. If you didn't want to be pressured into leaving the sect, perhaps you should have pondered that prior to causing the death of hundreds of children."

Shang Qinghua flinches at the unsheathed steel in her voice. If he hasn't been able to talk to anyone in the Human Realm, other than his own disciples begging for his help, then she might be the only person who has taken the time to address this with him. Or, maybe no one else has tried to do this because they know better than to think it will make any difference. Maybe she should listen to their wisdom.

"Ah, well, I could see how you would say that, yes. I definitely could see why it would look like all of this was my fault. And why you would blame me for, you know, all the things that...happened."

"The child murders." She refuses to let him run away from this. If she is going to let him sit at her table, if she is going to be the kind of person who cannot send him away, then he is going to explain himself. She needs an explanation for the fact that she still sees him as a friend.

"Yes, ah, the child, ha, the child murders." She lets the laugh slide, because Shang Qinghua has always been the sort of man to laugh when he is feeling uncomfortable. It still pisses her off, though.

"So. You're seated at my table. You're drinking my wine. Are you going to offer any kind of defense or explanation for yourself?"

He looks a little cornered, a little frantic. She watches his eyes dart around the corners of the room, stare off into the distance for a bit. Maybe he's swept up in the memories of it all, feeling guilty. Maybe that's her soft heart again, and he's just putting on a show to manipulate her. Before she can get an answer, he starts to shift like he's getting up.

"Ah, I can see that Liao-shimei is upset. Rightfully so, rightfully so. Maybe it wasn't the best idea, for us to try and meet up for drinks like this. I'll see myself out. Don't worry, don't worry. I won't be seen by anyone else on the peak."

He's got a jade token in his hand, carved with a sigil she is unfamiliar with. It strikes her, suddenly, that this is likely an artifact of the Demon Realm. It strikes her, suddenly, that he is so casual with such a thing because it is familiar and rote to him. It strikes her, suddenly, that she does not know much about her friend at all.

Still. This is her friend. She wants to cast him away, but she cannot just yet. When he moves toward the door, she rises to her feet and steps in his path. They pause there, staring at each other, neither of them as drunk as they have been pretending to be. Neither of them drunk at all, really.

"Sit back down, Shang-shixiong." He sits, unable to avoid following the command in her voice, even though he outranks her. Outranked her. It doesn't matter. He sits. "You are seated at my table. You are drinking my wine. For many years, I have considered you a friend." She meets his eyes, raises her cup, takes a long drink for the first time since he walked through her door. "Show that friendship the respect that it deserves. Explain this to me."

She is not pleading. She is ordering him. It's the sort of thing he usually folds beneath like a golden foil palace. This time, he acquiesces, but his eyes are still and clear while he takes a drink himself.

"Our friendship is important to me. I will not be able to explain the Immortal Alliance Conference in enough detail to set your mind at ease."

"Shang-shixiong has yet to explain the Immortal Alliance Conference at all. Perhaps he should try before he determines what would be enough for this peak lord." She can't believe this happened. Her friend betrayed their sect and then succeeded in hiding that for years, while she was still meeting with him for drinks and gossiping with him late into the night. It's been years that they've been doing this. At least seven, since everything happened at the IAC. How is she meant to reconcile that?

There is something strained and tense held in the air between them. This is not what their friendship looks like. Liao Qinglan will cry about this, later, if it remains like this all through their evening. This will be enough to make her stay up the rest of the night, weeping alone in her room, as she almost never does. But it is not her job to fix it. She is not the one who broke it.

"Ah, yes." He takes another drink of his wine and she stares at him unceasingly, feeling rather like a snake watching a mouse, quivering in the grass before her. She does not like feeling like this. She reminds herself that it is necessary. "Well, there is very little that this humble one can say." She bares her teeth at that, tired of him pretending to be helpless, tired of the equivocation, and he flinches at the face she is making. "This humble one knows that his actions are unforgivable. He cannot explain why it was necessary for the Demon Realm to attack at the Immortal Alliance Conference. Would Liao Qinglan accept the explanation that this was what fate decreed was necessary?"

He is cringing underneath the insufficiency of his words, and Liao Qinglan is sick to see it. The decree of fate, as if that would be enough to explain the death of so many Cang Qiong Mountain Sect disciples. So many Huan Hua disciples. Zhao Hua Monastery and Tian Yi Overlook.

And yet, despite it all, she cannot help but look closer at her dear friend. He looks shifty and suspicious, knowing that his words are not enough to explain his actions, just as he said they would not be. Beneath that, though, he looks sad. He looks resigned. As if he has already accepted that there is nothing he can say to convince her.

She cannot help but think again about Theory One and Theory Two. Fully lost his mind or a fucking god. It was funny, to think about, for all those years while they were building a friendship and nothing was serious and no one's life was at stake. Back when it didn't really matter one way or another, because he was doing his job just fine and it was more of a fun thought experiment than something that she actually wanted or needed to solve.

And then, the Immortal Alliance Conference.

And then, the death of hundreds of children and young disciples.

And then, defecting from the sect.

Now, her friend is sitting before her. He didn't even have to sneak back onto the mountain, because no one knows how to stop him from coming and going. He is telling her that this was fated, and already looks like he is preparing to lose her over that explanation.

Maybe he should lose her over that explanation. It's not enough. Of course it's not enough. There would never be something that could justify actions leading to this kind of atrocity.

Fully lost his mind or a fucking god. Sitting before her and saying that it was necessary. If this is all part of some great delusion, pushing him to do this because he thought it was right, then he has the potential to be someone very dangerous. If he is a god, and he knows this was right, then he absolutely is someone very dangerous. In either situation, he should not be sitting at her table.

So, what, is she meant to kick him out? Send him back to the Demon Realm, so that he can live among demons and never interact with another human again, except when his own disciples reach out to him for help? In what way will that help to prevent him from hurting anyone else again? In what way could any of her actions prevent him from doing something like this again?

Perhaps she should not allow him back on her peak. It is a space that she has built to be calm and safe and unremarkable. A place to protect the members of her peak. If there is someone dangerous and unpredictable, perhaps she should prevent him from ever setting foot here, for all the danger he brings with him.

But to what end? So that he could wander alone, only talking to those who might agree with his actions? And, if she starts removing anyone who could potentially be a threat to her peak, where does that stop? Does she throw off her own disciples, when they are teenagers and angry at the world and lashing out at everyone?

"I want more of an explanation than that. I want to know why you think fate required you to do such a thing. I want to know if you will ever do something like that again."

He is shrinking down smaller and smaller with each word, cringing in on himself. He glances again at the corners of the room, the door out of her home, vaguely into the middle distance. When he looks back at her, finally, Shang Qinghua's eyes are cold and distant. His voice is a dead thing.

"I cannot answer why I did what I did. I cannot tell you how I knew what fate required. I can tell you that I have no intention of doing such a thing again."

"And, if Fate were to suddenly make such a demand again? Would you take such an action then?"

It's his turn to grimace and hang his head, an answer unto itself.

"Would you be able to tell me, warn me, if Fate were to make such a demand of you again?" At least this, maybe this much, and then she would be able to set her mind at ease. Feel like she isn't betraying the whole of her sect due to her soft heart.

He hunches in even further, so small now that she can barely see him over the low rise of the table. That is an answer. That is a perfectly clear answer, and she should throw him off the peak right now, before her heart has any more of an opportunity to argue with her.

"Do you regret it?" She cannot help it. The words are stone cold, but they come from a desperate place and they both know it.

"How could this one even deserve to regret something like that, when it changes nothing of the actions he took?" He still won't look at her, but he's speaking now, and the words are drenched in distance and emptiness. Cold. His words are a windswept tundra. This is not how her friend speaks.

"That is not an answer. Do you regret it?" Her voice is hardening, the fury boiling up within her, that he will not give her anything at all to hold onto and justify the fondness that still lives within her.

"It is the only answer that I can give."

And that is not enough. She slams her palm against the table, frantic, breath heaving through her like the flame of a dragon. Her sword is in her hand and she is across the room, holding its point to his throat. She is not an incredibly strong cultivator, but she is stronger than him, and they both know it. They have dueled a few times, when they were both still disciples, and then as a game when they were older. Shang Qinghua has reached again for that token around his waist, but he has not done anything with it. He is watching her, calm and steady, waiting to see what she will do next.

"Shang Qinghua, banished peak lord of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, do you regret the actions you took, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of disciples across the jianghu?"

She wants to see him break. She wants him to cry and fall into a kowtow, apologizing and begging her to forgive him. His eyes, when he finally responds, are flat, dead things.

"Of course this one regrets. What would that matter to the disciples lost? What would that matter to their families, their friends, their sect? It is the action this one took, and there is nothing this one can do to bring them back, and so what would anyone care about whether or not this one regrets?"

Is that enough? It shouldn't be. It really, really shouldn't be enough to justify his return into her regard. It certainly has not erased all that he has done. But, in all of this, what would be gained by casting him out now? What could she do to punish him that has not already been done by his sect? That he has not already done to himself? To leave him alone now, how would that accomplish anything other than to put more pain into the world?

Many would say that she is wrong to do this. Many would disagree with her actions, and perhaps they would be right to do so. But she has spent so many nights with this man, and they are friends, and he has done something horrible. She wishes that would wipe away all the good that exists between them, but it doesn't and it won't. Not when a friend of hers looks like that. Not when he is sitting calmly and dully at the end of her blade, waiting for her to decide his fate.

"Leave my home," she bites out, because she cannot look at either of them, knowing the choice that she is about to make. She needs some time alone, some space from him, to make sure that this really is the decision that she's going to make. (She knows herself, though. She knows what she is thinking and feeling. She will take him back as a friend, and she needs some time to come to terms with this fact. Come to terms with the fact that she has just learned what kind of person she is, and she's not proud of it.)

He stands without argument, drawing back from her naked blade and moving toward the door again. He makes it only a step before she reaches out to take his arm.

"I will expect you back in a month. Just because you are living in the Demon Realm now does not mean you can neglect your friendships here in the Human Realm. If it's so simple for you to enter this sect, then there is nothing preventing you from continuing our meetings."

She watches the words hit him, a physical force in his eyes. Shock, then confusion, then a creeping hope and wonder. What does it mean, what does it mean about her, that she is happy to see something like that? Is she willing to accept this about herself? What else is there to do, now that she knows it?

"This one will return." The words are faltering. They both pretend not to notice.

"See that you do. And next time, maybe you could bring some wine with you. I have heard about the spirits of the Demon Realm, but no one has ever been willing to retrieve such a thing for me."

He stares at her for a moment longer, nods once.

He steps through the door. By the time she moves to the window to watch him walk away, he is gone.

*~*~*

"You shouldn't have him around. It's not safe," Yan Yazhu scolds when she comes in the next morning, tiding up the room even though that very much is not her job.

"I don't know who you're talking about," Liao Qinglan replies, because she's the peak lord and also because she doesn't want to talk about any of this until she has had at least another week to ruminate on it. Late at night. Without anyone else's input, thank you very much.

"I know what it looks like when Shang-shishu has been to visit." The tone is chiding and frustrated, because this is the dynamic they have made for themselves after decades of shared leadership. Yan Yazhu is trying to lean on their trust in each other to get more of the answers that she wants. Too bad. She is underestimating Liao Qinglan's ability to avoid thinking about things.

"This peak lord does not know why her head disciple would be so daring as to imply that this peak lord is violating the banishment of that traitor Shang Qinghua."

Yan Yazhu, who had been stooped to pick up another empty jar of wine off the ground (something Liao Qinglan may have drunk all by herself after Shang Qinghua left), straightens up. She stares, dead-eyed, at her peak lord for a long moment. Liao Qinglan tilts her head innocently back. Yan Yazhu quirks an eyebrow. Liao Qinglan smiles winningly.

"Okay," Yan Yazhu says. The doubt on her face smooths into the perfect expression of a filial disciple. She smiles the same sort of smile Liao Qinglan has seen her give to members of other peaks when they suddenly remember that Zui Xian Peak exists, just in time to come and acquire the alcohol they'll be needing for this or that ceremony.

"Great."

"Then, Peak Lord Liao, this humble disciple would like to discuss the plans for the upcoming ascension celebration."

What a good head disciple. That's more like it. The ascension celebration. The annual commemoration of when this generation of peak lords stepped into their positions.

"Sect Leader will be wanting his mulberry wine," Liao Qinglan ponders. Yan Yazhu wrinkles her nose and she cannot help but sympathize. "How are we stocked in that?"

"The batch from several years ago should still be available and prepared. It is not as though anyone else in the sect will be drinking it."

Their poor sect leader and his poor, terrible taste in alcohol. What a shame, what a shame. Yan Yazhu and Liao Qinglan spend the rest of the day talking through the annual plan to pretend as though everyone is drinking the same wine while working to provide a much more palatable option to everyone else at the banquet.

Here. She's competent at this. It's all fine.

It's going to be fine.

*~*~*

The next time she sees Shang Qinghua, it's been exactly one month. She is fairly sure that he counted down the days. She is only able to make that kind of guess because she definitely counted down the days, and so she can't bring it up at all, because then that would show what she had done.

Okay. Maybe the point of this is that she's trying to repair the relationship and everything. Maybe it would be helpful for him to know that she was eager to see him again, worried that he wouldn't come back. Too fucking bad, though. If he wanted her that open and vulnerable, then he shouldn't have betrayed the peak in the first place.

It takes a while. A long while. That first visit, they end up sitting mostly in silence. They keep trying to start the conversation up again, complaining about their days and the kind of people they have to put up with, but the rhythm's all off, and they keep getting distracted by thoughts in their own heads, so that they're missing the natural flow of when it would be their turn to talk again. Liao Qinglan is a sharp, vicious thing at times, and she wishes that weren't the case but she doesn't know how to make herself stop. Shang Qinghua is cringing and anxious, sweating and laughing too loudly at jokes that aren't funny. It's terrible. She wishes it weren't like this at all.

He brought some of the most expensive wine available in the Demon Realm. It's delicious, made from wolfberries grown in the Human Realm but fermented with methods that are legendarily secret to the one particular family that makes it. It's light and delicate on the tongue and burns like a song down the throat. She would normally spend hours talking about the finer details of it with Shang Qinghua. He might not have been brought up on Zui Xian Peak, but after all their evenings together, he is more than able to keep up in a conversation about wine.

It's even worse, then, that they're just sitting here, drinking the best wine she's ever tasted, and they're not even talking about it. They're not talking about anything. Nothing that matters, anyway. Or, maybe, too much that matters and not enough that feels like the way that they have always talked in the past. Whatever it is, it's awful, and it's turning this beautiful wine into tar in her mouth, and she wants nothing more than to crawl out of his skin and fly away from all the vulnerability and discomfort of this.

They sit and drink until morning, then both go their separate ways to sleep it off.

She wakes up without any of the effects of a hangover, and by then she's furious.

*~*~*

"We haven't even thought about other kinds of fruit wine that we could have at the Ascension Celebration."

"Right," Yan Yazhu drawls in a way that she clearly stole from Liao Qinglan. They are walking through the peak together, today, even though there are never really any emergencies on Zui Xian Peak that would require the presence of both the peak lord and the head disciple. There's never really any emergencies at all. That's kind of the whole point. "Because we both agree that the peak lords are much more willing to accept a rice wine and that fruit wine is rarely worth the effort it takes to prepare."

"Of course," Liao Qinglan replies absently, still thinking about the delicious way that the demonic wolfberry wine had sat on her tongue and left no after-effects. "Unless, of course, we've been neglecting fruit wine because of that and haven't actually figured out the way to prepare it correctly."

Thinking about it, this is a glaring oversight on Liao Qinglan's part. Who knew that it was possible for any fruit wine to be so delicious? Especially for it to leave no hangover or negative effects the next day? But, then, who else on this earth should have known, if not the peak lord of Zui Xian Peak herself?

Yan Yazhu is staring at her questioningly, as though she has just opened her mouth and let out a donkey's bray instead of words, but Liao Qinglan barely notices it. She's distracted, too busy running over the exact taste and notes that she detected in that demonic wine. It's hard to remember, because everything was tainted by how stiff and awkward the conversation was. She was too busy tasting the stilted air to notice what she could detect of the specific flavor profile and techniques used.

They continue their walk through the peak, resting for a while in the sun with those who are circulating their qi and napping. They check in on the little junior disciples, which is one of Liao Qinglan's favorite parts of her job. They aren't allowed to be drinking much yet, but that doesn't mean that it's too early to begin developing a discerning palate. The juniors spend much of their morning cultivating and learning various techniques for the circulation of qi, and then much of the afternoon cooking and tasting and working on developing the ability to channel their qi to their mouth. Tasting at a level most people could never dream of.

It's important, when you're working on creating new drinks. Just because a normal person, or even another cultivator, might not be aware of the nuance, it doesn't mean that it won't influence their experience of the drink. Even if they can't put their finger on what it is that they like, the Zui Xian Peak disciples should be able to take account for every note of flavor in something they produced.

It's fun, to sit with the juniors and talk through every detail of what they are tasting in the food and drink that they're eating. It's fun, to watch them start to find the perfect words to describe things, even if it means making up new words or metaphors. It's fun, to show off a little when she takes a turn at their little tasting game.

Best of all, it's easier to focus on something like this than all that nonsense going on with some big-shot traitor out doing who-knows-what.

*~*~*

The month after that, Shang Qinghua comes to visit again. It's still stilted, and it's still awkward, but it's a little bit easier, because at least this time they both knew what to mentally prepare for. Also, he brings more of the wine, and Liao Qinglan sets one of the jars aside without providing anything close to an explanation for her actions. Shang Qinghua, wisely, stays silent and allows her to do as she will.

*~*~*

"Yan Yazhu, did you know that we have an entire section of the peak that is set aside for making fruit wine that we've been neglecting?" She is slumped across the cluttered desk of her head disciple, because this is the proper pose for bothering one's head disciple.

"I believe that we have a section dedicated to fruit wine that you have been neglecting. If I'm not mistaken, some of the older peak members have been teaching a few of the previous class of juniors about how to use it. They gather there every few nights for a club that they think is secret." Yan Yazhu sits at her desk and casually ticks off another number on her incredibly comprehensive rota. She's a little bit terrifying, the kind of head disciple who can keep track of the schedule of every other member of the peak while also keeping up to date on secret goings-on. Every few weeks or so Liao Qinglan lets herself get smug all over again at how clever it was to pick this one for this position.

"Right, well, that's only because fruit wine is a waste of time compared to the other kinds of alcohol we could be making." The words jump to her tongue with the practice of the thousands of times she's said it before.

"As you have said before. Repeatedly," Yan Yazhu says dryly. "Which, again, might make someone wonder why it is you are suddenly speaking of it so much."

"Just because something doesn't taste good doesn't mean that it's a reasonable excuse to ignore it! How can we call ourselves Zui Xian Peak if we are neglecting such an enormous sector of alcohol production?"

"An inspired question, Peak Lord Liao." Yan Yazhu isn't even looking at her anymore. Might not even be listening. "Truly, your wisdom is endless."

"When did you say that secret club was meeting, again?"

"Every three days, with their next meeting tomorrow evening, shizun."

"Ah, good, good. I knew there was a reason I keep you around, Yan Yazhu."

Without looking up from her rota, Yan Yazhu throws an ink stone in her direction. It misses, because she wasn't looking. Liao Qinglan yelps like it hit her anyway, and she bustles herself out of that room to go find a place where she is more appreciated and respected.

*~*~*

Don't get it confused. Liao Qinglan's whole life does not consist of staying up late in the night and engaging in drunken gossip with an old friend! Just because she's been spending most of her time thinking about Shang Qinghua, recently, doesn't mean that she doesn't have a whole lot going on. She's a very important peak lord for the most prestigious cultivation sect in the jianghu!

No, she also stays up late in the night to engage in secret preparation of fruit wines! See? There are layers here. She's a complicated person.

She does eventually make it over to the part of the mountain that was set aside for fruit wine. She's known it was there since she was a very young disciple, and she did her lessons on fruit wine when they were required of her. She's been here before. It's just been a while.

Pretty much as soon as she had enough power to make such decisions, Liao Qinglan left the fruit wine life behind. She hasn't missed it for even a moment. The rest of the peak, following the example of their dazzling and charismatic peak lord, also left the practice alone. Maybe she should feel bad about all the ancient techniques that would potentially be forgotten by an entire generation of Zui Xian Peak ignoring research on fruit wines. But, well, there are certainly more than enough records, for anyone who might choose to take it back up someday! That's a central part of Zui Xian Peak! Even if every disciple tends to guard their personal recipes with the kind of possessiveness and ferocity of a dragon before its young, there are still a great many peak-wide records and references for the recipes everyone follows.

There are records of the teachings, and there are elders who have been here since long before Liao Qinglan took control and that will remain here long after the next generation steps up. The practice of fruit wine preparation won't die. Besides, she never forbade anyone from coming here. It was merely that, again, she knew what the correct opinion was and was not afraid to share it. Once everyone else was shown the error of their ways, what could they do but sing her praises and fall in line?

Well, she supposes, the thing they could do was form a secret club and continue to do it anyway. There is evidence of their efforts all over this room. (Though, the workspace in the building remains spotless. Good. Her disciples know better than to allow any kind of rot or decay or disarray to develop in their preparation spaces.) It's all so dramatic. She wouldn't have actually stopped anyone from doing what they wanted. The elders didn't need to go this far. That said, it's a little bit cute. She kind of wants to keep letting them have their fun. Besides, it's fun to feel like you're sneaking around and conspiring. Really, she was helping her peak by giving them the opportunity to have a secret club.

This is why she's here on a night when no one else is supposed to be. She's here at this time because she wants them to keep their cute little secret. It has nothing to do with the fact that she has been ranting against fruit wine for literal years and can't stand the blow her face would take if she were suddenly spotted here in the building they have fully devoted to the preparation and fermentation of fruit wine.

Liao Qinglan, peak lord of Zui Xian Peak, would never go back on her word. She still hasn't. If it wasn't for that fucking demonic fruit wine, she wouldn't have to be here at all. It's really all Shang Qinghua's fault.

She knows what she tasted in that wine, and she's made more than enough wolfberry wine herself, over the years she's been in this sect.  Liao Qinglan knows how to work with wolfberries. She doesn't know how to make them taste like that, though. She's done everything that's done with wolfberries, even preparing the pulp and residue to be used as feed or fertilizer across the peaks. It's all part of the approach to cultivation on the peak. She's experimented. She's labored. She's done this shit before. It's unfair, that someone else figured out how to make them taste like that before she did.

Wolfberry wine usually just tastes like almost nothing at all, slides down your throat, and leaves you without a hangover. Fine, sure, but what's the point? This demonic wine, though, still had all the positive effects of a wine made with wolfberries, but had somehow turned into something that she actually wanted to drink! She needs to break down the barrier between the human and demon realms so that she can pressure the demons into telling her everything she could ever want to know about their techniques.

There was other stuff in there, of course. She could taste it. She's trained her whole life to be able to taste it. The demonic wine was, at its core, a simple wolfberry wine fermented with a base of rice and qu. There were notes of du zhong, gancao, camomile, and lilyturf. She's fairly sure she identified them all, sitting alone in her office and taking slow, meditative sips of her pilfered jug of wine while circulating her qi through her mouth.

It should be simple, to make such a fruit wine. She has all the ingredients on hand. Even the wolfberries, since they often will use them to flavor some liquors or to brew medicinal tonics for Qian Cao peak. No one in the sect will notice that she took a few baskets of the dried fruit for herself tonight.

All the minor, long-term steps of the process have already been done. That's what a lot of the juniors do, to practice their cultivation. The peak makes meditation out of all the preparatory steps: sorting through fruits and grain to pick out any detritus, bugs, leaves; grinding steamed rice down into the finest powder and mixing it with water to pack into qu; preparing the base rice wine that is used as a foundation for so many other steps in more complex processes.

It means that, tonight, it might be possible for Liao Qinglan to move through the process and start something fermenting before anyone on the peak even wakes up to see her.

She prepares the flavorings first, just as she detected the notes of them earlier. It is an automatic process to begin adding the dried ingredients to a large pot. She throws in some dried leaves and roots from the wolfberry plant as well, to allow more of the flavor to come through. It is a long, slow boil to draw out the flavors. She knows that she's not going to get the proportions quite right, not without a few more attempts and failures, but she'll never know what she needs to change until she's already fucked it up once! So, she measures with her heart and writes down what she did, boiling the ingredients until the water is a rich, dark color like over-steeped tea.

While that is boiling, she also starts the dried wolfberries to boil in another pot, so that the bright red color pops out again and the water starts to take on some of the flavor as well.

There's time to pause after that, because she needs to allow the berries, the water they're in, and the steeped flavorings to all cool. It's easy to stay calm and meditate through the long cooling process. She's actually really good at stuff like this. It's how she ended up as the peak lord here

Simple, simple. She's done this thousands of times.

It's dark in this building. She has brought a lantern with her to light the way, but it is dim so that the light does not move beyond the circle of her work space. It would ruin everything, for someone to see her light from somewhere else on the peak, come to investigate, and find their peak lord in the one place that she had sworn never to go again!

In that circle of dim light, she waits for her first few steps to cool. Liao Qinglan pours the water with the flavorings through a cloth as it cools to filter out any of the bits left over from the dried roots and flowers and leaves. Finally, when there is no difference between the temperature of the berries, the brewed ingredients, and the air around her, she mixes the two together and begins making a large, fresh batch of rice.

Calm and patient. There is so much waiting in this process, so many starts and stops. That's a large part of the beauty of it. She has something she is focusing on. It will take as long as it takes and she will patiently wait throughout that time. Liao Qinglan breathes deeply as she feels her mind empty out of any thought but this one. It has been so long since she took the time to prepare something herself. She can't remember why, but that doesn't matter at the moment. All that matters is the project before her.

The rice is done. While it is still steaming and warm, she spreads a cloth across the floor of the building, in the space cleared and cleaned for this exact purpose. The rice spills warm and steaming and cloud-like across the wide swathe of cloth.

She breaks apart the cake of qu that she has brought with her. The dried, malted rice crumbles apart under the firm pressure of her fingers and she sprinkles the resulting crumbles out over the expanse of fresh rice. Mixing the two together was always one of her favorite parts of this process. The rice is warm and giving under her hands. It is a slow, repetitive motion to knead at the ingredients until the two separate parts become one, uniform mass. The qu was mixed in at just the right temperature. She knows it was, because she has done this before.

After that, it is nothing to pull over one of the enormous, smooth wooden bowls that the junior disciples have carefully and diligently carved. Their elder sect siblings have checked over every bowl for cracks or flaws anywhere in the process, before they are distributed throughout the peak.

Into the bowl goes the base rice wine, the fresh mixture she has just created, the combination of wolfberries and brewed water. This is a different motion, a different technique, but she combines all of these in the bowl with a rhythmic kneading as well. Then, all of it into a large clay pot, enough water to rinse out any residue in the bowl and fill the pot to just the right level.

She can easily lift and carry the pot out to the place where they set such things to wait and ferment, out in a large field and marked with the name of the disciple working on whatever is inside, as well as the date it was placed there. She is a cultivator, after all. It is no effort to pick up her large pot, carry it into the woods, and creep around the outside edge of the peak so that she can come up near where they brew their baijiu. From there, she finally starts making her way toward the fermenting field. Just in case anyone sees her and tries to guess what she's been working on. They'll never be the wiser.

No one does see her. They all seem to be settled in with their friends and their games or well asleep by now. Good for them, good for them. Liao Qinglan sets down the pot, labels it under today's date and Yan Yazhu's name, and then heads back to the the woods. She slinks back around to the building set aside for the fruit wines and cleans up thoroughly after herself.

As the sun is starting to just peek over the edge of the horizon, she knows that not a soul on her peak will be awake. The building is clean and the only things left behind are the fruits stolen by the secret fruit wine club and the pots they have secretly fermenting out at the back of the building.

Now that she has gone back through the whole process all over again, Liao Qinglan can admit that there are maybe a few parts of fruit wine making that are pleasant and enjoyable. She still stands by her belief that they are more effort than the product could justify, when there are so many other fantastic alcohols that could be created in the same amount of time.

Her final project, that wolfberry wine she just dedicated her whole night to, should be ready to be tasted in just 20 days. Of course, she could leave it to clarify for six months past that, but just those 20 days should show whether the taste will be worth justifying all that extra time spent to refine it to perfection. Given the fact that nothing she did tonight was any different than things she has done in the past, she probably won't go through the effort.

She doesn't have high hopes for any of this. She has made wolfberry wine more times than she can count. Of course, some of the flavors are different this time, and the proportions have been shifted. Maybe that will miraculously be enough to change the taste into something sweet and mellow and refreshing instead of watered-down juice with a little bit of medicine hidden in it. It shouldn't be, though. It wouldn't make any sense.

There is no way to make wolfberry wine taste like that. It is impossible. The very peak lord of Zui Xian Peak cannot make it, so it cannot be done!

She will wait the 20 days. And then she will try the wine.

Hopes are not high.

*~*~*

It's a simple thing, to sneak back into the fenced-in fermentation field where they leave their clay pots to sit. The peak has never been particularly active during the night. Or, that is to say, they are much more likely to be settled in by the night and are rarely out running across the outdoor work areas of the peak. That's left for the daytime hours, while the evening is for fun, resting, spending time with friends.

Liao Qinglan is quite proud of the culture she has created for her peak. She was proud of it even before she realized that it makes it very easy for her to sneak around on secret, fruit-wine-related missions.

It's been 20 days since she left the pot to ferment and the qu to work its magic on the liquid within. When she pulls off the lid, it's to see the thick, pale gruel of the rice and wolfberries that has gathered at the top. She stirs it up a little and then wedges a close-woven reed basket into the center. The thin spaces between reeds filter out any of the larger particles in the wine and allow only the foggy wine to gather in the center.

It could still be clarified, and it will take longer than just a few minutes for the wine to separate out from all the detritus. Still, she knows what wine tastes like at this point in the process. She knows how to taste for the flavor it will develop into.

She uses a small hand bowl to scoop out some of that clouded liquid in the center of the basket. It is dark. There is no one around to see that she is doing this.

A small sip, swirled in the bowl before it is raised to her lips. The wine sits light on her tongue. There are hints of wolfberry, the rice wine base. She can tell that there is camomile, du zhong, gancao, and lilyturf. Just like she could taste in the demonic wine that Shang Qinghua brought.

The notes and flavors are all there. It should be the same as the wine that her friend brought. If anyone in the world should be capable of recreating a wine, after having tasted it multiple times, it should be the peak lord of Zui Xian. In fact, the wine that she prepared should be even better that whatever dreck the demon realm is making.

So why, then, does it still taste mostly of diluted, slightly medicinal rice wine?

It's exactly the same thing that she is always complaining about, when it comes to any kind of fruit wine. Sure, it tastes fine. But why bother with something like this, when there are much more flavorful versions of liquor available? Why bother with something like this, when it is so much more satisfying to pull out the subtle notes of flavor in a well-prepared batch of simple rice wine?

Fruit wine, as far as Liao Qinglan is concerned, is rather like striking yourself over the head with a bludgeoning club of flavor. There is so little subtlety or nuance, when compared to the rich and various ways that one can bring out notes of flavor in rice alone. And then, even worse, once the fruit has drowned out all the nuance, it doesn't even have the decency to stick around. It hits you in the face and then leaves you with no aftertaste at all.

This batch is boring, even for fruit wine. She has never particularly enjoyed the taste of wolfberries. It isn't a surprise that she doesn't enjoy this. As far as the actual technique behind fruit wine goes, the flavors are delicately balanced. She has never tasted something prepared better than this. She should be able to walk away from all of this with her dignity intact, having proven that she can make a perfect wolfberry wine that she doesn't have a taste for.

But, if it were so simple as that, then she wouldn't have even been in the fruit wine building in the dead of night in the first place. No, the point of this all is not that she is doubting her ability to follow the steps and her own artistic ability to create a delicate and perfectly balanced wolfberry fruit wine. Her resulting product is as high quality a wine as any that might be purchased in the human realm.

The problem, is that, somehow, that anxious disaster of her best friend has brought her a version of wolfberry wine that sits mellow and sweet on her tongue and sparks along her senses as she swallows it down. He brought her wine that tastes rich and verdant, with a scent stronger and more alluring than any fruit wine she has ever encountered before.

She is the peak lord of Zui Xian Peak, dammit, and if there is a technique to making wine that can be learned, then how could she ever let herself rest without learning of it?

She does not pour the wine out of the pot and directly onto the ground, even though she really wants to. This is the field where so many other alcohols are fermenting in their pots in the sun. It would be careless to invite pests to the sweet residue the wine would leave behind, or to risk any kind of cross-contamination to some other wine that a disciple has been perfecting for years on end.

Instead, Liao Qinglan channels all of her anger at this situation into her arms, in order to hoist the pot of fruit wine over her head and haul it back out into the woods, where she can pour it out upon the ground without feeling any kind of guilt about it.

Well, okay, maybe there is the smallest amount of guilt. Someone might have benefited from this wine. It was perfectly fine the way it was prepared, by anyone else's standard. Perhaps it would have been more logical and reasonable to keep the wine and clarify it until it could be distributed out like many of the other products on this mountain.

But, unfortunately, every export of Zui Xian Peak goes before the careful eyes and thoughtful brush of Yan Yazhu herself. As the only fruit wine currently leaving the peak is the result of the secret club and the mulberry wine they prepare specially and specifically for the sect leader every few years, there is no way she would not notice the sudden export of several small jars of wolfberry wine.

There would be questions. And Yan Yazhu has an uncanny ability to sniff out any lie or deception on the part of her peak lord. It makes things terribly inconvenient for her, if Liao Qinglan is being honest, but that's the price one must pay in order to have a competent and self-sufficient subordinate. Think of all the work she would have to be doing herself, if Yan Yazhu weren't there to do it for her.

So, the wine, mixed all together with the pulp and residue, spills out onto the forest floor, far away from where any casual wanderer might come across it. Liao Qinglan lugs the pot to a stream nearby to rinse it out until it no longer smells distinctively of wolfberries, at which point she can place it with all the other pots that need washing by the younger disciples. They like to make a game of singing and cleaning them up, and she allows them this one chance to have fun with the tasks rather than turning it into meditation. Cleaning should be fun, anyway.

She's going to think about her cute little juniors and forget all about the infuriating demonic wine that she cannot reproduce even with centuries of research and experience and wisdom on this exact topic behind her.

It's fine.

She doesn't even care.

It's literally fine.

*~*~*

Months pass. Recently, it had turned out that Shen Qingqiu wasn't actually dead and was instead running around the jianghu causing problems. This had very little to do with Liao Qinglan's life, and seems to have recently settled down a bit, but she heard the rumors.

The fifteenth month after their falling out, Shang Qinghua doesn't visit at all, even thought they've been sticking to an unspoken, very strict schedule. Liao Qinglan does not worry, because she is a peak lord with a thousand very important duties to hold her attention. If that means that she spends the entire evening sitting in her home and completing any paperwork she can find, just so that she can be present and available should anyone else arrive, that's her own business.

Well, her business and Yan Yazhu's business, since she's the one who comes through the house the next day, gathers up everything that Liao Qinglan did, shoots her a very passive-aggressive glare, and redoes all of it to her own specifications. But, well, that's what she gets for being the kind of over-controlling head disciple who won't allow anyone to help.

Maybe Liao Qinglan's in a bad mood. Maybe she didn't sleep well the night before. Who can say for sure.

When Shang Qinghua finally arrives, three nights after the time when he was scheduled (not actually scheduled, but they both fucking know that he was) to arrive, he looks harried and panicked. There are no bruises or cuts visible on his body, because such things never trouble immortal cultivators for more than a few minutes, but there is blood on his robes, bright and still fresh and blooming out from a point on his shoulder. Not the way that blood tends to look when it's coming from someone else.

Liao Qinglan hasn't been worried about his absence for days, and she certainly isn't worried about him now, so she walks at a very normal pace to greet him and ask how his day has been. She can hear the ice in her voice. She still does not know how to go about melting it, even for a friend.

Shang Qinghua accepts her worried hand-patting like he knows what it means, anyway (which, rude, how dare he), and they stand in front of each other awkwardly for just a moment before moving this whole embarrassing display of emotions indoors and over to the table. Where there are cups that can be filled with wine. If this happens to be a convenient excuse to avoid eye contact and conversation for another second, no it isn't.

"Ah, it's been a few days longer than we scheduled. This one apologizes for upsetting Liao-shimei."

"Why would I be upset?" She snaps. "We didn't have anything officially scheduled. I didn't even notice if you missed the night, like you're saying."

"Of course, of course. This one apologizes for the presumption."

They sit in silence for a little bit longer, because Shang Qinghua is the talker between the two of them, and she is not going to ask about any of his injuries when he's been so secretive about his life over in the demon realm. She doesn't actually know where the lines are anymore. It fucking sucks.

After twitching and growing more and more visibly uncomfortable, Shang Qinghua finally speaks.

"This one genuinely didn't mean to be late. There was an uprising in the North, and we've been so busy on the front lines that I lost track of days."

"You've been fighting?" She can't help the skepticism in her voice. It's not fair, maybe, but it is also valid. She and Shang Qinghua always pair up for the showy spars between peak lords, because both of them are absolutely terrible at cultivation with the sword. She knows the kind of prowess he would be bringing to the table. They both know that neither of them are built for the 'front lines.'

"Ah, no, not me, not me. I have been attending to and advising My King, as he leads the charge."

"There's blood on your robe." Her voice is as flat and hard as the oak table between them. She doesn't know how to make it softer than that. She's furious. She's so worried. She had no idea any of this was going on.

"Ah, well, yes. Not from the front lines. There was an..." he trails off, gauges her reaction to all this talk of his new life, continues, "an assassination attempt on My King. Just before this, after the fighting had mostly wound down. There were some minor members of a noble family that we deposed and they were...less than satisfied with the results of the battle." He pauses again, still so hesitant to speak in anything more than vague generalities. One of his hands has come up to rub absently against the blood stain at his shoulder.

"I fail to see how an assassination attempt against a demon king would result in your injury." Unless the king had thrown his servant in front of the blow, in which case Liao Qinglan is worried that there will be no force in the human or demon realms capable of stopping her from going on a furious rampage. Even if she would likely be killed quickly, due to the aforementioned lack of martial prowess.

"That would be because I may or may not have gotten in the way of it. My King was asleep, you see, and he hadn't rested in days. I thought it best for him if I just...took care of it." There is a flicker of darkness in his eye as he says that last bit, and maybe this is the part of him that is able to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of children and keep on living?

None of this is painting the kind of picture that Liao Qinglan was expecting, whenever she thought about her friend's life in the Demon Realm. Which she doesn't do. None of this is full of the kind of abuse, violence, horror that she has always heard, when listening to stories about the Demon Realm before now.

Shang Qinghua, in the months that they have been repairing their friendship, has not talked about the Demon Realm. Not really at all. It's been an explosive array that they have both danced around on the floor without ever allowing themselves to touch it. They could, presumably, do that forever. It's also, probably, fairly impracticable, considering everything about her friend's current living situation.

It doesn't make any sense. Nothing is matching up with her expectations. It doesn't make sense, until she starts listening back to everything he has said so far. Particularly, the emphasis that he has been putting on the words My King.

Liao Qinglan has shared a sect with Shang Qinghua for years. She knows what it sounds like when he says their sect leader's name.

This is, Most Definitely, not the way that he says their sect leader's name.

This is something very different. Something reverent. Something soft. Something overwhelming.

And she wasn't paying close attention before, because she was too busy making sure that her friend wasn't fucking dying. But, now that that's all resolved and put away for now, she can really dive into the fact that that's not how anyone says the name of their boss.

That is, rather, the way that someone talks about someone they are desperately in love with. Someone they idolize and worship.

She is starting to get a picture of what may or may not be going on here, and it is absolutely ridiculous, and it is far beyond anything she could have ever known to prepare herself for.

"Oh," she drawls. "So it's like that, then."

Shang Qinghua's head whips up, and the cup of wine in front of him teeters on its side, almost tipping over and spilling everywhere before it spins its way back to center. Guilty, guilty, guilty. He's already completely given himself away.

"What do you mean?"

And it's against everything she expected, when her friend was heartily encouraged to leave the sect. When he ran away to live in the Demon Realm. She's always heard that demons are cold and cruel and violent. But, then again, demons are also always coming in, spouting all sorts of nonsense about cultivators. It seems that the hatred and misinformation might be going both ways. Either that, or her dear friend Shang Qinghua is more unwell than she ever considered before.

She never expected anyone might feel this kind of fondness for a demon, especially not a demon king. That said, Liao Qinglan likes to think that she is the kind of person who stands by her friends. Some might even argue that she stands by them long past the time when she should have left them behind. Those people may even be correct in that statement, but it's never stopped her before and it certainly won't stop her now.

"Tell me more about this king of yours, Shang-shixiong." He flushes underneath her knowing look, looking around all panicked again. At least, this time, it's not the kind of cornered panic of someone worried his life is in danger, or that his friend is about to throw him off the mountain or report him for crossing back over a rainbow bridge following his banishment from the head cultivation sect. She knows what that kind of panic looks like on her friend's face.

This is the much more familiar, much more damning, look of a person who has been caught out on a secret they very much hoped that no one would notice they were keeping.

Too damn bad. This is what he gets, for maintaining a friendship with the peak lord of the drinking peak, even after cutting almost all ties with the Human Realm.

Liao Qinglan reaches out and refills his cup, even though he hasn't taken a drink from it yet. A little of it spilled when it twirled earlier, and she's not really doing it for the practicality of the thing. Rather for the drama of it all. The unspoken implication.

They are going to get drunk tonight. They are going to get absolutely shit-faced and she is going to hear all about this king of Shang Qinghua's. It is her god-given right as one of the only humans that he still talks to and one of the few friends who has stuck around. This is the reward for all the effort they have put forward these past few months, rebuilding the relationships and finding all the new boundaries and limits within it.

And, miraculously, it all sort of goes to plan. Shang Qinghua talks to her about the king of the Northern Desert, his king, his Mobei-Jun. He doesn't provide details about tactical information, or the exact specifics of how they came to know each other. She can tell that he is still wary of giving her any kind of information that may be used against his precious king, but that's not what she's interested in anyway.

She wants to know what they talk about. How he makes Shang Qinghua feel. If they are together yet.

And she gets to learn all of it. One blustering, stuttering, blushing sentence at a time, she gets to hear about the story of a young disciple of the An Ding clan and the relationship that he built with the young, not-then-king of the Northern Desert in the Demon Realm.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as all that. She is a master of obtaining information from other people, and not all of that information is from what people will tell her directly. Shang Qinghua, as much as he likes to talk and ramble, isn't actually the sort to provide endless information about his life. The drink certainly helps with all that, as it always has with him, but there is also much to be inferred from the places he pauses, the information he omits, the look on his face while he's talking.

It's actually, strangely, kind of sweet. In a confusing, paradigm-shifting kind of way. Liao Qinglan would never have thought, for even a moment, that this would be something that her friend would want, but the more he talks, the more it makes sense. He's always been the type to need someone to ground him, stay calm while he sprints from one panicked task to another. She had thought, if he chose to have anyone, it would be a human, but there's really no reason it needed to be.

If this Mobei-Jun is capable of caring for Shang Qinghua in the same way that Shang Qinghua so obviously cares for him, well, then she supposes that she wishes them all the best. She just needs to take the time to make sure this demon king is treating her friend kindly.

"Are you actually his advisor, then?" She asks, because it's starting to sound like much more of a soulmates, best friends, lovers sort of situation.

"Oh, no, not officially or anything. I'm just a servant for him. A spy, for a long time," he cringes at that but they both continue on as if he hadn't said anything. "I guess, now, I'm not even that. Mostly I follow him around and do all the busywork that comes with running a kingdom that no one else wants to bother with."

And, well, that doesn't sound accurate at all. Not with the way that Shang Qinghua has been going on about his king. That can't be right.

"It doesn't seem like he's the sort of man to put up with someone if he doesn't enjoy being around them."

"Oh, god, no, not at all. You have no idea the number of times I've had to follow behind him and clean up all the messes he makes while speaking to the other members of demon royalty. My King will just say whatever he's thinking or feeling at the time and doesn't care at all about how that might impact the very delicate balance in the Demon Realm. Sometimes, if he's in a very bad mood, he'll just kill someone who frustrates him, and then I have even more work to do." He's wringing his hands, clearly still very caught up in his worry about all of this, now that he's been reminded that it exists. "Honestly, I almost never leave him alone. Can't be trusted not to go off and do something ridiculous. The nights when you and I hang out are probably the most amount of time I spend away from the court."

"Right," Liao Qinglan drawls, because she's starting to put a few clues together and it's not looking too good for poor Shang-shixiong. "So why would he spend time with you unless he was enjoying it? It sounds like you spend nearly every moment together."

The shock of the words slaps him right across the face and leaves Shang Qinghua's cheeks burning.

"What are you talking about? No, that's not. No, it's not like that. He tolerates me because I take care of all the things that he doesn't want to have to deal with."

"Sounds like a lot of trust to be putting into a random subordinate."

"No, it's not. It's really not like that."

"And he listens to you, when you tell him not to do something?"

"I mean, sometimes." Shang Qinghua is viciously uncomfortable, clearly. Too fucking bad. He made her reevaluate her entire opinion on what it means to be friends with someone. He can take some teasing.

"He doesn't sound like the sort of man to listen to someone's input if they don't matter to him."

"I mean, no, of course not, but that's not-" His voice is shooting up an octave, hands in his hair and tugging at the loose strands. It's all falling out of his bun at this point, and he looks scattered and frayed. Honestly, as far as Liao Qinglan is concerned, it's about damn time he be the one to feel that way.

She takes another long sip of the delicious demon wine, paying close attention to savoring the notes and flavoring and technique of it all. If that has the added bonus of making Shang Qinghua stew in the ideas she's been putting before him, then good. That was the fucking point in the first place.

"He wants to be with you. And you want to be with him. You should probably do something about that." She gestures toward him with the cup of her wine, but quickly tilts it back to make sure that not a single drop of it spills on the table from such a careless motion. Damn her tendency toward dramatic body language. Sure, it gets her point across, but the number of drinks that have been lost to it are far too high. If only she didn't look so cool doing it, she would think about stopping. Instead, this is where a significant portion of her effort as a cultivator goes: in maintaining perfect balance of her drinks until she is too drunk to keep it up.

"I can't talk about this." Shang Qinghua stumbles to his feet. "I have to go. This isn't-. I can't talk about this anymore."

He doesn't look like he wants to stop talking about it. He's wringing his hands and glancing at her in between every word, and there's something in his eyes that is desperate to talk about this further. This is similar to the look he usually gives her when there's some fabulous gossip about another peak lord and he wants her to drag it out of him. What kind of friend would she be if she didn't comply?

"Are you going to go back to the palace, then? Perhaps your king is wounded as well and needs someone to tenderly nurse him back to health?" He makes some kind of horrified, shrieking squeak but, importantly, doesn't argue. "If you leave now, I'm afraid that's the only explanation I'll have."

"I can't talk about this. I really can't. You don't understand, it's not like that." He's shaking and mumbling a little bit, which is cute, if he thinks that's going to be enough to deter her. He still doesn't actually look upset. More like a man who is being forced to talk about a thing he hasn't allowed himself to think about for years on end. What is Zui Xian Peak for, if not something like this?

Liao Qinglan leans over the table and refills Shang Qinghua's cup. It actually was getting a little bit empty this time but, more than that, this is a well-established message between them. It is not time to leave yet. Shang Qinghua watches the wine pour from the jar into his cup with wide, round eyes. When she sets the jar back down, he lowers himself to his seat along with it.

They sit there until late in the night. The wine flows freely. Shang Qinghua's words are blocked for a while, but everyone's tongue loosens under the pressure of enough liquor, and Shang Qinghua is a beautiful accomplice in accomplishing that goal. By the time the rest of the world has been asleep for a shichen, they're both drunken messes and Shang Qinghua is finally willing to go into depth on just how desperately he yearns for his king. By a shichen after that, they have compiled a list of evidence that this king might see him the same way back. Perhaps some of it will even continue to make sense in the morning light.

It's strange, whenever she takes a step back to realize that she is helping her friend in his efforts to seduce a demon. That they are evaluating the behavior of another person as a potential romantic option, and it's a demon, and that's really not making all that much of a difference, beyond the fact that they're having to do all kinds of hasty research on demonic courting rituals and culture.

A year ago, she never would have even considered something like this. It was not simply taboo, or repulsive, or any other negative word. More truthfully, the thought would have never even entered her head for her to have a reaction to it. This reality is so incredibly unthinkable that there hadn't even been the precedent to establish a taboo.

Or, well, that can't be quite true, can it? Because the most recent story that's been flying through the jianghu is that the little disciple over on Qing Jing Peak actually turned out to be some kind of big-shot half-demon. So, presumably, at least one other person has violated the not-yet-a-taboo before. Strange, that no one ever really talked about that. It would have been super convenient for her to get the chance to start changing her opinion on demons years ago.

And then, now, that disciple is supposed to be in a relationship with his shizun. A little scandalous, perhaps. Liao Qinglan tends to live and let live when it comes to love and politics. As long as no one seems to be hurt, and just looking at them shows how pleased they both are with the arrangement.

Why has she been okay with hearing about that side of things? If that Luo Binghe is half-demon, why did she not have a problem with Shen Qingqiu's relationship as well? Would she have considered that relationship taboo, if she'd thought about it further?

This is stupid. And it's not the point. And she's drunk. It doesn't matter whether or not it's a taboo, because the point is that it's not taboo, or at least it doesn't feel like it. It feels like talking to any of her other friends about someone they are interested in. Not that it happens all that often, considering she has something of a reputation on her peak for being unsympathetic. As if that could ever be the case. She simply knows exactly what everyone should be doing and finds it ridiculous when they decide to do something other than what she said to do. Is that so wrong?

The point is that her friend, one of her closest friends, went off and fell in love with a demon king. Something that was completely unheard of and now it seems to be happening to two different peak lords of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect. And it doesn't actually seem to be that bad of a thing at all, when she gets to hear some of the details about it.

She's drunk. This is ridiculous and she is so drunk and so is Shang Qinghua and they shouldn't be having any kind of revelations like this when it's this early in the morning and they still haven't even gone to sleep.

With that thought, and with their written-out evidence spread on the table between them, Liao Qinglan tips over and falls asleep. Presumably, Shang Qinghua follows suit, since he is still there when she wakes up hours later to a throbbing headache and scribbled sheets of paper she can barely read.

*~*~*

The next batch of wolfberry wine is remarkably similar to the first one. Because she knows how to make wine and she knows how to do it well, so why would she have created anything other than the most perfect result possible on her very first attempt?

She had changed some of the proportions of ingredients around, switching out some of the camomile for the lilyturf and adding in more of the wolfberry leaves and roots to deepen the flavor a little. She knows what she's doing. She knows how to create a delicious fruit wine, even if it's objectively inferior to all other kinds of wine. She knows what she's doing.

This time, she doesn't even taste it when it's first done fermenting out in the field. She filters it, just as it is meant to be, and leaves it to clarify for another month before she even touches it. Maybe that's what it will take for the flavor to develop. Maybe that's what's necessary for the taste to develop the same way that it does over in the Demon Realm.

When it is finally ready, she sneaks out at night to find where she has hidden her pot, separate from all the others and out in a clearing in the forest, because she cannot find a way to keep hiding this under Yan Yazhu's name without her finding out and getting suspicious.

Instead, she's become some kind of common, sneaking criminal. Apparently. There's a secret pathway out from her house and a secret setup and everything. It's ridiculous. She can't believe she's going this far for something as simple as wolfberry wine.

She sneaks out at night and brings a little snack along, because wolfberry wine pairs well with salty, light, fried things. She knows her shit. She knows how to make these things taste as good as it's possible for them to taste.

The drink pours clear and settled into the little porcelain cup that she brings with her. Liao Qinglan sits peacefully on a small cushion that she has brought with her and sets the cup and the food out on a folding lap table. If she is going to enjoy this drink, then she is going to set herself up to properly enjoy it. Perhaps that is the problem at the root of all of this. Perhaps it is not that the wine is better-tasting, just that she was drinking it while comfortable in her home and happily talking to a good friend. That's got to be why it tasted so much better than any other wine before.

When she sips the wine, the balance of flavors are delicate and much closer to those that she tasted in the original wine. She knows how to balance flavors.

It also has about one tenth the potency and richness of the fucking demonic wine.

It's not even worth it. She pours the rest of her cup out onto the ground and throws the pot with every bit of cultivator strength in her body. It flies through the air and smashes to pieces against a tree at the edge of the meadow. The wolfberry wine runs down the bark of the tree.

It's perfectly prepared. It's perfectly paired. It's perfectly balanced.

It's bullshit.

She goes back inside.

*~*~*

"And how has my friend been faring this month? Have you successfully seduced your demon king yet?"

"Ah, ha ha. Not yet. But, um, no, what have you been spending your time on this month? Anything interesting here?"

"Oh, no no no. Nothing interesting going on here. Besides, I asked you first, and I'll be needing more detail than that."

*~*~*

"I cannot help but notice that my shizun has been spending more time than usual outside of the house, particularly in the late hours of the night."

"Is there something you're implying, Yan Yazhu?"

"This lowly one would never dare to do such a thing. This one merely wondered what the peak lord could possibly be doing, to return home last night so covered in stains."

She returned home last night so covered in stains because this whole fucking fruit wine experiment is fucking bullshit and no one should ever try making something like this ever again. What's even the point, when the Demon Realm can come along and so effortlessly and indisputably crush any one of your efforts right into the ground?

She returned home last night so covered in stains because another one of her attempts to recreate the wine had matured enough for tasting and had turned out to be the same faint, inscrutable mess as the batch before it and the one before that.

She returned home last night so covered in stains because, after tasting the results of her weeks of effort, she had punched straight through the heavy clay of the pot so that the wine had spilled all over her. She was covered in the light pink-orange wine that smelled undeniably of wolfberries. And maybe she ran into Yan Yazhu as she was trying to sneak back into her home after that event. Maybe she could smell the guilt and secret missions all over her. Who can say? Liao Qinglan certainly won't. And, if she doesn't confess to anything, then no one can prove that any part of this is happening.

"This peak lord wonders what her head disciple's work load must be like, to have so much time leftover to wonder about her peak lord's personal business."

"Ah, of course, shizun."

*~*~*

"Did you hear? Shizun has been working with fruit wine again!"

"Do you think that means she'll start teaching us how to make it ourselves? I've always wanted to make loquat wine for my mother. She says it's one of her favorite things in the whole world, and I wanted to join this peak to make some for her."

"I heard that she's been working on a special project and that she's going to show it off and share it with the whole peak when she finishes! Maybe we'll have to wait until then before she's willing to share any of her techniques with any of us?"

*~*~*

"Liao Qinglan, I would like to officially introduce you to my friend, Red Tree." Shang Qinghua gestures between her and the enormous demon that towers behind him. He is quite a bit different, like this. Liao Qinglan had, of course, noticed the changes in his outfits as he became more willing to talk to her about his life in the Demon Realm. He has slowly and gradually taken to wearing more furs, more deep blues and soft silvers and greys. The cut of the clothing itself is a little different, even if he never tends toward some of the more revealing styles that can be popular among some of the demons Liao Qinglan has encountered.

Apparently, even the changes she saw were significantly toned down in an effort to make Liao Qinglan comfortable during visits, because that is not at all how her friend is dressed today. Sure, there is some of the same essence, but Shang Qinghua is carrying himself so differently. The overall picture is so different.

His simple cultivators robes have been set aside. Instead, he is draped in layers of thin blue fabric. They are all see-through on their own and, when layered together like this, make a beautiful scale of deepening blue as it moves away from his throat. As the color deepens, so does one's ability to see through the fabric itself. All this to say, she can definitely see much more of Shang Qinghua's chest than she has ever wanted to before this moment.

Over top of the thin blue fabric, he is wearing a luxurious cape with a thick ruff made from some kind of monster pelt that shines the brightest white and is flecked with little spots of black. It looks like it cost about the same amount as the entire budget for her peak in a year. As if that isn't enough, Shang Qinghua's wrists and neck and ankles all tinkle with the weight of dangling silver bangles and charms. Even his guan is elegant and detailed silver, dripping with diamonds and sapphires.

This is still her friend. He doesn't carry himself like this is the natural way that things should be, or with the elegant lines of old royalty. Instead, and even more unnervingly, he wears them with a kind of patient exasperation. She watches as her dear friend talks, occasionally huffing in frustration when one of his hand movements jostles his bangles in the wrong way. His irritated adjustment to the way they lay is practiced and automatic.

Shang Qinghua may not have been raised in this kind of luxury, but this is not a new way of presenting himself. Truly, there is much she has not known about her friend's life.

Liao Qinglan takes the time to look away from her friend. There's no more time to analyze all the ways that he is different when there's something much more important to focus on.

Her frustration had boiled over the last time he came to visit, several weeks ago and several hours into their drinking of the delicious wolfberry wine. She never would have allowed any of her shame to show itself without at least a jar or two of wine in her. But, when it had, and she took another sip of that damned wine, she couldn't help but explode her frustration all over Shang Qinghua, about how ridiculous is was that someone in the Demon Realm could come up with a recipe for wine like this when she, the peak lord of Zui Xian Peak, wasn't able to even replicate it. It was keeping her up at night and bringing shame to her entire peak and he had better take responsibility for the crisis he had caused by bringing it into her life.

She hadn't thought it would actually go anywhere. That's pretty much how their drinking nights have always gone. The two of them get drunk and shoot the shit and complain at length about anything that is pissing them off in the world. Then they yell at each other a bit and pass out on the table. It's great.

When Shang Qinghua had shown up at her home in the middle of an afternoon, long before he was due for another monthly visit and dressed like he was born and raised in the Demon Realm, she had been suspicious as hell. She is also very much not the kind of person who can leave a mystery alone when it arrives at her doorstep. Or, well, she's actually usually very good at ignoring mysteries, but not when they involve her friend.

Now, less than a shichen later (after a short flight through a hidden gap in the border between the realms), here she is: standing in the middle of a small plateau in the center of a desert in the Demon Realm. There is a pagoda nearby, a demon standing behind her friend, and very little else to be seen.

"A pleasure to meet you," Red Tree (the demon in question) says, through lips that are really more like a beak than any other kind of mouth Liao Qinglan has ever seen. The hands that are raised in a mocking salute are lightly feathered along the knuckles and fingerbones, with longer, showier feathers sprouting from the wrist like wristguards. Red Tree is huge, several heads taller than Liao Qinglan could ever hope to be. The feathers crest like hair atop their head and flow down their back. The feathers themselves are bright red and glaring in the afternoon sun. With so many feathers about them, there is very little need for clothing. They are wearing a few wrapped layers of thin red fabric in a shade that matches the feathers. Rather than the bangles that Liao Qinglan has seen so many demons wear, Red Tree seems to prefer golden jewelry that wraps closely against their skin. Likely in a way that keeps anything from interfering with their work. They would maybe be fascinating to look at, if they weren't so clearly uninterested in anything Liao Qinglan has to offer.

"And you, Red Tree," Liao Qinglan replies, dipping into a proper and sincere salute, because fuck you, that's why.

"Consort Shang has shared that a cultivator has developed quite a taste for our wolfberry wine." Liao Qinglan wants to roast the hell out of Shang Qinghua for the fact that people are running around calling him "consort" and he still doesn't know if his king is interested in him.  Instead, she shoots him a betrayed look, deciding to focus on the fact that he is going around telling everyone about the things that they discuss in confidence. "This recipe has been in my family for many generations. To think that such a great cultivator might take interest in our humble wine."

The words themselves are humble, but the tone is scathing and sarcastic. Red Tree watches Liao Qinglan with a fire in their eyes. The eyes are small and black, like a songbird's. Liao Qinglan can't believe Shang Qinghua brought her here for something like this.

"It would be this lowly demon's honor to share such a treasured and secret family recipe with Liao Qinglan, great cultivator of the Human Realm, at the behest of someone so renowned as Consort Shang himself." The smile that stretches across Red Tree's beak reveals that there are razor sharp teeth behind it.

"This is ridiculous," Liao Qinglan snaps, because it is clear that this demon does not want to do this and that Shang Qinghua is out here making some kind of political move that he doesn't even know he made. Liao Qinglan doesn't even want to be here in the first place. Also she is not the kind of person to go around taking someone's secret recipe when they clearly don't want to share. She has more honor than that. "Why are any of us here? Take me back home, Shang Qinghua."

She turns to leave but, before she can take another step toward her traitorous friend, the towering figure of Red Tree moves between them. They have returned to their mocking salute and the sharp smile on their face is so ingratiating that it loops back around to being threatening. Shang Qinghua cowers behind the figure of Red Tree, as if this entire situation is not of his construction in the first place. Liao Qinglan is going to kill him.

"Surely, Liao Qinglan would not depart so soon after Consort Shang went through all the difficulty of arranging such a meeting." Those sharp teeth are incredibly close to Liao Qinglan's hands. She grips tighter at the sword that she brought with her. Only she and Shang Qinghua know that it's a bluff. She is not competent with the sword. Red Tree doesn't know that. "This lowly one has prepared such a thorough tour of the process we use."

There is something going on here that Liao Qinglan does not understand and that no one seems willing to explain to her. Which, whatever, fine. It's a tour of a wine-making process. She knows how to do this sort of thing. And, besides, she has been trying to recreate this flavor for months on end. If the demons want to give away their secrets, if they're insisting on it even after she gives them an out, then that's not Liao Qinglan's problem.

And so, she smiles back, just as gratingly and insincerely. Red Tree gestures her over to where the materials for wine-making seem to be gathered, and Liao Qinglan goes without comment. Fine. If this is what her day is going to turn into, then she might as well get something out of it.

Red Tree, when they aren't threatening humans, does actually know quite a lot about the wine making process. It seems that they were right to say that their family had perfected this recipe over many generations. Liao Qinglan's knowledge of alcohol is broad and sizable, spanning all the various forms that it can possibly take. Red Tree's knowledge isn't wide, but it is deep. Clearly, their family has dedicated much of their time to the study of this sort of thing.

"I didn't know that demons spent much time on the preparation of food and drink," Liao Qinglan remarks, as Red Tree shows off their stores of preserved, dried wolfberries, shipped from the Human Realm. Red Tree doesn't have skin around their nose to wrinkle, but their brow furrows in a way that suggests a similar bad smell.

"Humans are unable to consume raw meat and remain safe. Of course you would develop ways to prepare food in a way that is pleasurable and safe to you. Don't look down on demonic cuisine simply because we are able to enjoy our meals with less effort required."

Liao Qinglan snaps her mouth shut, feeling chastised, even though that didn't actually answer the question she had been asking. Well, maybe she hadn't phrased the question as a question at all. Still, Red Tree doesn't seem like they would be much in the mood to answer no matter what she says, so Liao Qinglan decides to simply listen now and interrogate Shang Qinghua later.

Red Tree seems to have batches of the wolfberry wine sitting at all stages of preparation, as most families do, when they are responsible for meeting a demand. Red Tree shows how they prepare the malted rice and form it into qu. They show the store rooms where the qu sits until dried and ready. They show the rehydration of berries and brewing of additional flavors. The preparation of fresh rice as well as the base rice wine. They mix it carefully and store the entire thing in a pot, explaining that it will sit for 20 days before it will be filtered and left to clarify.

And.

It's.

The.

Exact.

Fucking.

Same.

It's the same. It's the exact same process that Liao Qinglan has been completing over and over and over again. She watches every single step. She takes visual measure of every proportion. She compares every timeline Red Tree mentions with the ones used by her own disciples. It's all the exact same damn thing that she has been trying for months with no result to fucking show for it.

"Is this some sort of trick?" She demands, when it is impossible to stay quiet for a moment longer. Red Tree, who is actually fairly pleasant in demeanor when they are so focused on their craft, straightens to their full height and turns their fathomless black eyes back on Liao Qinglan.

"Surely Liao Qinglan misspoke." It's a warning, and Liao Qinglan isn't going to listen to it. If this is the whole process that they're going to go through and she isn't even going to get the secret to the recipe out of it, then what the fuck are they doing here?

"Liao Qinglan did not misspeak." She gets up in Red Tree's space, even though they could easily crush her and they both probably know it. "The honorable Red Tree is speaking of the basic steps of the wine making process, as if this peak lord would not already have extensive knowledge of such things." Liao Qinglan is hissing with the fury of a thousand nights of secret wine preparation. "This lord has followed the exact process laid out today and the results taste nothing like the wine that I have tasted from this very winery."

A sneer starts to spread across Red Tree's face. "Has the great peak lord Liao Qinglan considered, perhaps, that it is not the process that is flawed, but rather the craftsman?"

Liao Qinglan is not the type of person to become upset easily. She could never survive as the peal lord of Zui Xian Peak if she were the kind of person who needed everyone to remember her and think she was great. But, she is good at one specific thing, has built her life around one specific thing, and it is unacceptable to her that Red Tree might challenge her here. Without another thought, Liao Qinglan draws her sword.

The razor sharp sneer grows even sharper, and then Red Tree is flying toward her and Liao Qinglan is discovering that, beneath those feathers, there are talons. She is discovering this as she feels them dig into the flesh of her bicep and press her flat on the dirt ground. There are razor sharp teeth pressed right up alongside her neck, a promise of retaliation for any further efforts. The fight is over before it even starts, with Red Tree so soundly defeating her that it would be heinously shameful were anyone else around to see it. Speaking of-

"Where is that coward Shang Qinghua," she huffs.

"I do believe he left us to ourselves ages ago, oh mighty cultivator. And," the teeth draw even closer. Liao Qinglan can feel the heat of breath against the join of her neck and shoulders. "I do believe you have more pressing concerns."

They're right. Liao Qinglan definitely should be more afraid right now than she is. Why is that? She supposes it just seems difficult to be scared of someone after you have just watch them talk for several shichen about a craft that they are passionate about. Red Tree has their teeth pressed right to Liao Qinglan's jugular, and it would be very difficult to kill her like this, but not impossible. Liao Qinglan is good at circulating her qi and healing herself quickly. Is she good enough to heal a torn-out neck before it kills her? She should definitely be more scared than she is.

"If you were going to kill me, you would have already done so." She's pretty sure. At least 60% sure. Red Tree certainly has every opportunity and hasn't taken it.

"You seem sure of that."

"I'm still alive, aren't I?"

Red Tree huffs a scathing laugh before pulling their teeth back. Just far enough that their unnerving bird's eyes can meet Liao Qinglan's own. They stay there for a moment. The talons dig deeper into Liao Qinglan's shoulder, drawing up blood onto her robes. When nothing changes, when Liao Qinglan doesn't make another move, Red Tree finally pulls away, flopping to sit in the dirt next to her. Liao Qinglan hauls herself up so that she's mirroring the position, circulating her qi so that the punctures in her shoulder are already almost healed.

"That's a handy trick," Red Tree murmurs, gesturing toward the place where the skin is already showing fresh and new through the blood.

"There is actually a reason I have managed to survive this long. A very good reason I don't have to be afraid of you."

"You are alive only by the influence of your friends, you know. Horrifying as it is that the king of the Northern Desert has taken a human as his consort."

Liao Qinglan can't argue much with that. She had felt much the same about Shang Qinghua's choice of romantic interest.

"Where did that little rat go, anyway?" She glances around before following the line of Red Tree's finger where they point at a small figure, dressed in blue, laying down on a flat rock and tossing and catching a pebble above his head. While they watch, Shang Qinghua fumbles the catch and it slaps down onto his face. He rubs at his nose, glances around to see if anyone noticed, misses them watching him, and returns to his little game.

"He stepped away just a few minutes into the explanation of the process. It seems not everyone is as interested in the noble process of wine making as you and I."

"You are hiding something," Liao Qinglan persists, unable to leave the point alone, even if much of the anger has left. "I've been trying to replicate your recipe for months now and I've done the exact same things. It does not carry one third the flavor of the wine you produce here."

"And it could never be true that the Demon Realm is simply better at wine production than the Human Realm?" It's the same conversation again, but some of the poison has been drawn out of it.

"It's not a matter of demon versus human. I am not upset because I think a demon has done something better than me," Liao Qinglan explains, realizing as she says it that it's the truth. "I am the peak lord of Zui Xian Peak. It is a peak dedicated to the production and consumption of alcohol, and I have labored my entire life to master the craft. There are generations of research and similar experts behind me. How can it be that I cannot even detect where your recipe might differ from my own?"

"Your crisis of identity isn't my responsibility to solve." Red Tree huffs again, and it rustles some of the feathers on their face and neck. "Doubt me or no, I would not dare to lie or conceal information when it is at the request of the King of the Northern Deserts."

Liao Qinglan flops back into the dirt and stares up at the way the bright sun of this realm turns the skies red.

"What did Shang Qinghua threaten you with, to make you so willing to share a secret family recipe?"

"Your little rat did not do anything," Red Tree says drily. "It was his king that came to visit, threatening to wipe out the entirety of my family home if I did not follow his consort's every request to the letter."

"So you're doing this out of fear for your life?" Liao Qinglan cannot believe that she is feeling protective over this demon she tried to attack only a few minutes ago, but this is not something she would have thought Shang Qinghua capable of. Red Tree waves a dismissive hand through the air between them.

"It is not an unusual thing. With demon kings, that's just how life is. They're powerful. Demons feel their emotions so strongly, when they fall in love, they might be willing to do anything at all to keep the one they love happy. It's best to just follow along, when there is someone stronger than you, asking for something on behalf of someone they love. I should be thankful he asked at all."

"Still, I didn't know that your family home was in danger." Liao Qinglan is waiting for some kind of further response, but Red Tree just kind of grunts a little and goes back to looking around them. There are more questions bubbling up inside Liao Qinglan, and this might be the only chance she'll have to ask any of them. "Where is your family home?"

Red Tree laughs again, clicks their beak mockingly, and gestures grandly to the dirt ground they are sitting on.

"Oh," Liao Qinglan murmurs, wrong-footed. "Right. It's beautiful."

"You're stupid," Red Tree snipes, spitting onto the ground. "Demons don't build above ground. The grand mansion of my ancestral home extends for stories into the ground beneath our feet."

"Right." Liao Qinglan shuts up again. She keeps fucking this up, so she's just going to shut up for the day.

"I'm not hiding any part of the recipe," Red Tree finally says, after they've sat in silence for what feels like half a shichen. "I don't know why the wine tastes different here. It simply does."

Liao Qinglan sits with that for a moment.

"I don't think I can accept that."

"Accept it or not, it is the truth." Red Tree stands up, brushes the dirt off their clothes and shakes it off their feathers. "And the time we are scheduled to speak is up."

Sure enough, Shang Qinghua is walking back from his perch on the rock. He's gaping and gesturing frantically about the dirt on both of their clothes, as if that was something they did on purpose.

Liao Qinglan shares one final commiserating look with Red Tree, and then they leave, mystery unsolved.

*~*~*

"So, oh honored peak lord, is there going to come a day where you start to explain to me where all of our spare budget is going, or am I going to have to go talk to Shang-shishu myself?"

Yan Yazhu comes striding into the room as if they are continuing a conversation, even though Liao Qinglan has been happily enjoying her time alone in her room, reviewing the notes she took so many months ago. When she returned from the Demon Realm, Liao Qinglan had copied down every single step of the wolfberry wine making process that she could remember, before it left her head. Every single thing that Red Tree did and said and showed, to see any moment when there may have been an opportunity to do something secretively.

It's possible, of course, that they had merely intentionally done a step incorrectly while Liao Qinglan was there, willing to throw out the results of that particular demonstration, so that there would be one ruined batch and no way to worry about the secret of the recipe escaping into the Human Realm. Which means, of course, that Liao Qinglan needed to write down not only everything that they did, but also everything that she saw while walking around the preparation area.

She had done all this right from the beginning, but there really wasn't anything that caught her attention. Now, two failed batches later, she figures it can't hurt to look through all of it again. The notes are...significantly lacking. In her defense, Liao Qinglan isn't accustomed to running spy missions like this, or actually putting effort into solving all the mysteries and theories she quietly forms in the back of her mind.

Also, and this is something she just realized the other day and has been incredibly frustrated about ever since, Red Tree had pointed out that all of their family's infrastructure was underground. Meaning that there was actually very little for Liao Qinglan to notice, visually, beyond the flat dirt plane and the roof under which the wine was prepared. There was an entire mansion's worth of places to hide the things actually used in the recipe.

"Right, so, is this how we're going to be playing this? You're just going to ignore me until I go away?"

"Huh?" Liao Qinglan realizes quite suddenly that her head disciple had definitely asked her a question earlier, and she hadn't done anything even close to acknowledging it, let alone answering.

"I asked if you were going to provide an account for where all of our peak's money has been going, recently." Yan Yazhu's voice is as flat and dry as the dirt in the Demon Realm where Red Tree makes their home. Maybe that has something to do with why the wine tastes different...

"Ah, no." No, Liao Qinglan is not eager to share things like the answer to that question with everyone. Shameful enough that it's officially become impossible to hide that she has been working with fruit wine. This can't get out too.

"Okay, so I'll just go ask Shang-shishu, then." This is possible because, infuriatingly, Shang Qinghua has recently been reinstated as the peak lord of An Ding Peak. After all that work that Liao Qinglan had personally done to decide what she thought of him, her friend was welcomed back to the sect as if nothing had happened in the first place, all because no one could figure out how to do the things that he does.

Yan Yazhu strides from the room before Liao Qinglan can stop her.

*~*~*

The money, of course, is going toward the very expensive process of sending letters back and forth between the Demon and Human Realms. With the improvement in relationship between the realms (mostly due to several specific members of demonic royalty), recently, it seems that a few enterprising demons have seen the opportunity for moneymaking and have started a business conveying letters through the few borders where the boundary between realms is weak.

It's not cheap, though. It's a very specialized service.

It takes Yan Yazhu a few more weeks before she comes back with the answer to her question. There is no reason that Shang Qinghua should have known the answer, but Liao Qinglan accepted, when processing through all the shit that came out, that her best friend is a sneaky, conniving snake who always knows more than he should about everything. So, when Yan Yazhu starts looking at her significantly and sighing loudly every time she sees her peak lord sitting at the desk in her room, scribbling away at another sheet of paper, well. It's pretty obvious that she's figured out what's going on.

The first time that Liao Qinglan sent a letter to Red Tree, it was mostly full of pleasantries and thank yous and politeness, because that was the only excuse she could think of for writing a letter in the first place. And because that was how a peak lord probably should write a letter to someone from a realm they were recently in a sort of angry stalemate with. And it also seemed like Red Tree had agreed to the tour in the first place because of the influence of someone from royalty, so why not remind them that Liao Qinglan also has a title and some level of clout?

She wrote the letter in her best calligraphy, with the finest ink, on her heaviest paper. She signed it with her full title.

When that hadn't worked, Liao Qinglan had sent another letter every day for a week straight, so that they all arrived one after the other. She had to pay extra to make sure the post didn't pile up and arrive in one big lump. She wanted there to be a letter arriving every day. She wanted Red Tree to feel pressured.

When the first return letter finally arrived, with simply a bold fuck off written across the thick paper, Liao Qinglan knew that she was starting to have an impact. It was a reaction. A response.

The next letter she had sent merely said no.

The one after that involved a breakdown of every part of the process that she had noticed Red Tree following during the tour, along with a request for them to edit any part of it that was incorrect.

It took a few more tries for Liao Qinglan to realize that Red Tree tends to ignore any letter that comes right out the gate asking about wine. But, if she just rambles on about this or that from her day to day, she can sometimes get a brief response. If she asks a question or two about Red Tree's day, she will sometimes even get a few word long response directly answering those questions. It helps when she includes enough of a payment for a return letter as well, because it is (again) not a cheap process and Red Tree could easily use that as an excuse.

It had taken months. It really had. But! As of yesterday, Liao Qinglan can finally say that it is starting to pay off! Entirely separate from the potential friendship that she may or may not claim to have with a demon, she also officially received a package of the specific dried wolfberries that Red Tree uses in their wine.

They may be from the Human Realm initially, but Liao Qinglan has tentatively given up on the idea of there being a secret ingredient that Red Tree is refusing to tell her. They are close enough now that Liao Qinglan can say that they are probably not the sort of person to maintain a lie for such a long time.

If there isn't some secret ingredient or technique, that means that there is a larger secret, unknown to both of them. There is definitely something different between the two recipes. If it's something that Red Tree genuinely doesn't know, then it's something hidden either within the ingredients or the process. Which means that Liao Qinglan has chosen to start by focusing on isolating which of the specific ingredients is causing the change in the flavor, since the process is (as far as she can tell) the same. No ingredient can be above suspicion.

So, Liao Qinglan finally managed to convince Red Tree to send her their wolfberries. She'll make a batch of the wine with this and see if it changes the flavor at all. It shouldn't, because, again, these berries are from the Human Realm and Zui Xian Peak already receives the best fruits available, but there's no way to know until she's experimented, and Liao Qinglan is not willing to leave any stone unturned.

Maybe Yan Yazhu figures out just what is going on, and maybe she sends a few dark glances over Liao Qinglan's way every now and then. She can't blame her. It would be confusing to her as well, to see the peak lord suddenly reverse her opinion on fruit wine in general, dedicate herself to the production of a very specific kind of fruit wine, and spend all the extra budget on communication with the demon realm, when that has never been an interest before now.

Maybe Yan Yazhu would understand better if she would just get a taste of Red Tree's wine. But that's not going to happen, because Liao Qinglan is not willing to share even a drop. The wine is too delicious, too rare, too precious for her to go sharing it around with anyone who's interested.

The important thing is that she's finally managed to convince Red Tree to share some of their materials, even if it's just one thing at a time, with the requirement that Liao Qinglan share any findings she makes as soon as she makes them. That's the part that matters.

She keeps sending the letters, though, even while the wine is fermenting.

*~*~*

This is an absolutely terrible idea, and Liao Qinglan is pretty sure that everyone here knows it. If they are all smart enough to know it, then it really shouldn't have happened in the first place, but they can't seem to actually live out any of that wisdom everyone says that these immortals are bestowed with.

All this to say: Liao Qinglan is sitting at a table in her house. Not the one that she usually sits at for the monthly bitch-sessions she has with Shang Qinghua, because that one would be too small. Instead, Yan Yazhu helped her cart in a huge table earlier in the day. Seated at the table are Shang Qinghua, his emotionless ice demon king, Red Tree, Yan Yazhu, and Liao Qinglan.

They've been here for almost half a shichen at this point, and you would think that would mean that some of the tension would have died down into a calm pattern of conversation. Not so. Not at all. Liao Qinglan is the most charismatic of them all by far, and they all know it, which leaves her to chatter away while almost everyone else sits in silence. Shang Qinghua is talking too, because he's literally never not talking, but he's so anxious and uncomfortable that his voice is two octaves above where it usually is, and it's just drawing everyone's attention to how weird this is.

Red Tree is sitting calmly on their cushion, sipping leisurely at the cup of wine before them. Liao Qinglan was maybe, potentially, showing off a little bit when she was planning this, so she set out rice wine and fruit wine and liquor and baiju and this delicious mixed drink that one of the older juniors has been trying to get everyone in the sect to drink. There are options and cups within reach of every single person at the table, and Liao Qinglan has been graciously pouring for anyone who indicates a preference.

Red Tree had brought a jar of their own wine and is drinking that. Yan Yazhu took the opportunity to finally try this drink that her peak lord has been trying to recreate and has been expressing her appreciation with little happy noises and praise. Mobei-Jun asked for tea and indicated that he did not intend to drink while he was here. Shang Qinghua has been trying the mixed drink and keeps talking about how delicious it is, even though he grimaces every time he takes a sip, and he's not drinking nearly as frequently as he usually does when he comes to visit.

Liao Qinglan has been sullenly drinking one of the rice wines that she takes the most pride in creating and that she believes is the finest drink produced by her peak. She is also moments away from slamming her head against the surface of the table until she passes out and wakes up once everyone has left.

"So glad that we all got together like this." Red Tree's voice is as dry as the desert they live in and Liao Qinglan considers wrestling them to the ground right there, even though they've already shown exactly how a fight like that would go.

"Yes, well, this lowly one thought it might be time for all these friends to have the chance to get to know each other." She can play this overly polite, shit-eating game as well. Take that, Red Tree. As if anyone wants to be here.

"Ah ha ha," Shang Qinghua, the motherfucker who actually planned this whole disastrous event, pipes in. "Yeah, there have been so many times where one or two of us has been talking to another and talked about someone else here. I though it might be good to all get to know each other, that way everyone has a little more context for the people everyone else is always talking about. In a good way! Like you do when there's a bunch of people who you think would all get along!" Liao Qinglan smiles at him and inclines her head in a graceful acknowledgement. It is a threat and they both know it. Shang Qinghua laughs again, even more uncomfortable.

"I had no idea that a peak lord of a righteous cultivation sect was spending so much time talking about the Demon King of the Northern Desert," Red Tree snarks.

"And I had no idea you spent so much time talking to Shang Qinghua about me." Liao Qinglan may not be able to win in a physical fight, but damn if she is going to let Red Tree get away with that when they're on her peak. "Had I known you thought of me so often, I would have been sure to write more. Although, I cannot blame you for being fascinated by someone who is an expert in your field." She smiles at Red Tree this time, a knife's blade in her mouth.

"Pretty sure Red Tree isn't the one spending all of our peak's budget on sending letters back and forth between realms." Yan Yazhu adds, the traitor.

"Can confirm." Shang Qinghua raises his cup in Yan Yazhu's direction and they both take a long drink in solidarity with each other. Shang Qinghua's nose wrinkles up when he remembers that he's only pretending to be enjoying his drink. Good. Suffer. Mobei-Jun doesn't say anything, but reaches over to refill Shang Qinghua's cup from the teapot sitting before him. Shang Qinghua glances up at him in worshipful gratefulness.

"Well, it would be quite rude to expect someone else to pay for such an expensive service. Of course this immortal master is more than willing to assist Red Tree in this method of communication."

"Of course, as someone capable of creating a wine that is so thoroughly enjoyed and treasured by so many," Red Tree gestures around at everyone except Mobei-Jun, "this one has never been lacking in funds. Perhaps, if someone finds that they are the only one putting forward all the effort to engage in communication, that may be a reason for that other than money."

"If the honorable Red Tree has something to say, then perhaps they should be so principled as to state it clearly."

"Oh, I'll speak clearly when I-"

"SO!" Shang Qinghua jumps to his feet to interrupt, speaking loudly and quickly while clearly unaware of what the next word to leave his mouth at any moment will be. "I'm just so happy that we all get to spend a time in community like this! How lovely, to be able to unite the Human and Demon Realms over something so simple and universal as a good drink."

"A very good drink," Red Tree mutters under their breath, at the same time that Liao Qinglan hisses out "as if anyone has even tried the drinks." They scowl furiously at each other before Shang Qinghua sidles over to stand directly between their line of sight.

"And how lucky we are, that the night has only just begun, and we will have the chance to try so many new things. There may be a few bumps in the road, but community can only grow stronger over time. Perhaps, next time, we could even invite Liu Mingyan and Sha Hualing, or Shen Qingqiu and Junshang!"

And that, the idea of the absolute catastrophe that would result from something like that, is overwhelming. The thought of that terribly shameless couple, one an immortal and untouchable peak lord, the other his adoring younger disciple who also would outrank everyone in the room in terms or status and power, sitting at this table and in this terribly uncomfortable moment with everyone else, it's so funny that it pierces right through all the tension and frustration that Liao Qinglan has been feeling all night. She finds herself suddenly slumped with her cheek against the smooth, cool surface of the table and giggling uncontrollably. Across the table and out of her line of sight, Red Tree lets out a single, derisive snort.

"That would be such a terrible, awful idea. I really can't think of a single idea worse than that," she stutters out between helpless giggles.

Shang Qinghua blusters a bit, but Red Tree backs up Liao Qinglan with "If you invite them to something like this, I am afraid I will fall suddenly and terribly ill and be unable to attend." Mobei-Jun doesn't say anything, but calmly pulls Shang Qinghua back down to his seat beside him. The message is clear enough.

Shang Qinghua slumps in defeat for a bit, but something about that really cleared the air anyway. And, suddenly, it isn't quite so awful to sit with all these people that she doesn't know very well. The night goes on, and Red Tree actually tries some of the wine that Liao Qinglan made, after all the wine that they brought runs out. Yan Yazhu seems to strike up an easy and cutting rapport with Red Tree, which is a horrifying thing that Liao Qinglan needs to keep a very close eye on. Shang Qinghua seems to actually calm down a little bit, once everyone else starts to, and Liao Qinglan gets to see the quiet and unspoken way that he and Mobei-Jun look after each other. The way that Shang Qinghua effortlessly directs attention and conversation away from him, and the way that Mobei-Jun pours him a cup of tea between every few drinks and makes sure that his cantaloupe seeds are always within reach.

And maybe Red Tree, at the end of it all, makes a quiet comment about how the rice wine wasn't all that awful. And maybe Liao Qinglan treats herself to one cup of the wolfberry wine before it all goes away. And maybe the night isn't actually that awful after all.

*~*~*

It has been months. Months and months and months of meeting up for drinks in any combination of the original five at that first night. Of making all kinds of wine. Or, more accurately, of making the same exact wine from the same exact recipe over and over and over again. There shouldn't be any difference in taste. There hasn't been any difference in taste, even as she substitutes in every ingredient from the Demonic Realm, one after the other. At some point, she started to come to terms with the fact that she is going to have to figure out what to try next. Nothing is changing and there is very little else that could be a secret factor. She is starting to prepare to travel to the Demon Realm herself for every step of the process, to see what individual stage contributes to the unique flavor.

She's tasting this most recent batch because it's the last one and she needs to check every option off the list before she starts trying something else. The only thing they changed this time is the qu, and that's barely anything at all, so she's not expecting any impact on the taste. It's not involved in the actual ingredients or flavorings, really.

That's why it's the last thing she tried. That's also why it's such a surprise when she draws a bowlful of wine from the woven reed basket straining out the pulp and rice from the actual wine.

The taste hits her at the tip of her tongue and floods along her taste buds. It's light and mellow and sweet, but the flavor is richer and more complex and layered than anything she has ever managed to draw out of a fruit wine in the decades of her residence on Zui Xian Peak. It's ridiculous. It slides down her throat like a song, leaving a warm tingle behind, followed by the sharp cold of alcohol.

She has, at this point, drunk enough of the wine produced by Red Tree to know that she has perfectly recreated it. She's the peak lord of Zui Xian Peak. More than that, she has trained for almost her entire life to taste every note in a beverage, beyond what any other human, demon, or cultivator could. If she can't taste a difference, then there isn't a difference.

This is a perfect recreation of the wine produced by Red Tree.

It's perfect. It's exactly the same. She takes another careful sip, cycling her qi through her mouth as she does so, just to make sure. Then she takes a deep gulp, because she really has to make sure.

And it is. It's the same.

She lets out a loud whoop.

Her project stopped being a secret ages ago. She has thoroughly trampled her pride and eaten her previous words about fruit wine, and all the peak already knows about it. Embarrassing, sure, but it means that she can shout one more time and then leap to her feet.

She's in the fermentation field, surrounded by so many other deep brown pots full of various fermenting things. It makes for a lovely little obstacle course. Liao Qinglan leaps on top of the jar that her wine is in, jumps from the lid of one to another, landing light as a fluttering bird's wing. She keeps throwing her hands in the air, shouting and howling, stomping the ground.

It's been over two years, at this point, that she has been so focused and fixated on this one thing, and it's finally done. She finally did it. Fuck yeah, she's literally amazing. She did the thing that no one thought she could do.

The qu. It was the qu all along. Fascinating, because she has managed to get Red Tree to write out the whole process at this point, if only to make her shut up about it in all her letters. Liao Qinglan knows that Red Tree makes theirs the same way that the disciples of Zui Xian do. Or, well, because they make so many different types of alcohol here, they have multiple techniques for creating various types of qu. The one that Red Tree uses, though, the one from malted rice, is prepared exactly the same way that their malted rice one is. It's the one that both of them use in their preparation of wolfberry wine. There shouldn't be a difference. There really shouldn't be a difference here.

However, the qu is the part of the recipe that takes the longest to prepare. That's an important part of the process, allowing the malted rice cakes to sit in the dark until they color and dry out. It can take months before it is ready to be used. Out of any ingredient, the qu is the one that has the most time to take in the qualities of the environment its in, if you think about it that way.

Red Tree had said something about that, right at the beginning. That merely being in the Demon Realm made them better at this than Liao Qinglan. Actually, Shang Qinghua might have said something too, back when she was hearing about this amazing wine for the first time. Something about the location of the winery being the reason that it was so famously perfect.

Yan Yazhu comes running before Liao Qinglan can think any further on this, presumably because some disciple or another went to her and told her that the peak lord looked like she was having a qi deviation in the middle of the fermentation field. Tattle-tales.

Still, this is a good day, and she's happy to share. She doesn't need to solve every problem right now.

"Yan Yazhu! Come try! I figured it out!"

She can finally stop worrying about it.

*~*~*

She can't stop worrying about it.

If it's the qu that's causing the wine to taste as good as it does, then that's complicated. If it's the fact that the qu came from the Demon Realm that makes it taste so good, rather than some technology in the preparation or some secret ingredient, then what does that mean about the wine that Liao Qinglan finally managed to make?

If the thing that finally makes her wine good is the qu from the Demon Realm, then does that mean that she's going to be taking credit for a taste that she is actually incapable of creating?

Or, is it just like ordering a very special and rare ingredient from somewhere else? Maybe the act of incorporating it into her recipe means that she is making it her own, and can still take credit for it.

But, then again, the actual process of making the wine is no different between them. Red Tree does it the same way. There's no difference at all between the art the two of them are making, except that Red Tree's is better. Because it was made in the Demon Realm.

*~*~*

Red Tree,

If I pay you for some of the qu that you make and then start properly making my own wolfberry wine (instead of just as an experiment), what are the odds that I end up being attacked in the night by a very offended demon? Just trying to get an idea of how much of this would be considered stealing your recipes.

Liao Qinglan

Qinglan,

I get wolfberries from the Human Realm. This is stupid. Stop worrying.

Red Tree

Red Tree,

Got your letter. Can't believe you're being so quick to dismiss this. If I start making the same exact wine that you do then you'll lose a lot of your income. This is serious. I don't want to take a step and then realize later that it was a mistake.

Liao Qinglan

Qinglan,

I'm telling you it's fine. Everyone who makes wine has a similar recipe. If you're paying me for the qu, then I don't know why this is such a concern.

Red Tree

Red Tree,

Is there something I could provide in exchange? Feels like this is going to make a strange imbalance between us. We have a supplier for our wolfberries that provides high-quality fruit as long it is in season. I am willing to send you the name, as well as potential access to our base rice wines. Additionally, we could compare closer notes on the exact proportions of flavorings you're adding? See if we can perfect the combination together?

What are your thoughts on this?

Liao Qinglan

Qinglan,

Holy shit. I'll just talk to you about this in person tomorrow.

Red Tree

*~*~*

Shang Qinghua still isn't quite sure how he got to a place in his life where he is cleaning up after a wedding ceremony between himself and the Demon King of the Northern Deserts. It all feels like something of a whirlwind, even though they have spent the last few decades knowing each other better. Even though there is not a single part of their relationship that moved quickly.

Still, he feels somewhat in shock, as he starts to sort through all of the gifts and tributes that arrived to the palace. They were piled onto several large tables in the receiving room of the royal suites. The wedding was several days ago, but this is the first chance that Shang Qinghua has had to actually start going through everything. There will need to be thank you notes sent out and appropriate appreciation shown to the clans that actually impact their political standing.

Mobei-Jun is lounging on the bed in the other room, with the door wide open, so that he can watch and throw judgemental looks in Shang Qinghua's direction. He is not thrilled about the decision to begin doing important work again, rather than spending another day in bed.

It's several shichen into the work before Shang Qinghua stumbles across it. He's been picking through each table methodically, writing down detailed notes on each item as he encounters it, as well as who it is from, what he thinks should be done with it, and potential implications of this particular choice of wedding present.

The jar of wine, when he comes across it, is elegant but, overall, quite unassuming when compared to all the other presents. It isn't eye-catching all on its own. Simple and light brown, with a detailed impression of a wolfberry vine on the outside. It looks, at first glance, exactly like the jars of wine that Shang Qinghua procured so many times to bring to the monthly hangs with Liao Qinglan. Expensive, but worth it in the effort to rebuild one of the only friendships he was actually able to make. (He'd put so little effort into writing Liao Qinglan, when he first made the world, that meeting her in person was actually like getting to know a real person, for once.)

He only notices, after setting the bottle to the side and catching an inconsistency from the corner of his eye, that a new seal has been added to the rim of the bottle. Rather than the simple red wax seal with a tree pressed into it, it now features a high mountain peak, with a tree growing from the top.

When he checks the letter that came with the bottle, he sees that it is from both Liao Qinglan and Red Tree.

[keferon]

Did you think I was done? Ahahahaha no, I have more.

Because chapter 70 of MOMU gave me the very dynamic between them that I missed so much, I just blacked out and started drawing uncontrollably lmao

Also. ALSO. I noticed a while ago that Prowl has the habit of..like…constantly frowning. So. I did a bit of research and made this graph.

In 70 chapters, Prowl frowns rougly 104 times. And the intensity of this gesture is very clearly correlated with the development of his relationship with Jazz, as you can see ahahahahah It might be wrong tho don’t take me seriously I’m not good with graphs

[lucabyte]

i feel like people are sleeping on the occam's razor situation of how buckwild it is to outright accuse a guy of being a clone of your friend even if you DO have a lot of circumstantial evidence. there's other options is what im saying. they could just be like. a guy. that's a sensible deduction. you should explore that deduction. ignore my shirt that reads I <3 RED HERRINGS.

i still think odile has the correct theory on lock but she's smart enough to know it needs like... a real smoking gun to be able to bring it up without sounding insane.

anyway. (mirabelle voice) i know its rude to speculate but has anyone else noticed the grieving? they seem to be grieving. does anyone have any thoughts on the grieving? i have some thoughts on the grieving.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Sword of Kaigen

standalone fantasy set in a rural mountain village at the edge of an empire that still holds traditional values, with families of powerful water/ice magic warriors

follows a powerful young heir who begins to question his beliefs about the empire when a new boy comes to his village from the city

and his mother, a housewife who has tried to forget her youth as a warrior and vigilante in the city since she moved back home to a loveless marriage

when there’s a violent attack on their village that they’re unprepared for, everything changes, and she has to embrace her old skills to protect her family and people

[ratatatastic]

local man haunts (me) open practise yet again more news at 11