#ends up being an outside contact on various shady things for sxy on nighthunts

[vermillioncrown]

Do you have any thoughts about ZYX!Qiu Haitang? Probably with PIDW knowledge only because I feel like knowing what a piece of shit her brother is would just have her handing SQQ some gasoline

it’s like the danger of being oc!huan hua disciple friend of su xiyan, but x1000

the cruelty at the qiu household and the nasty groomer older brother qiu jianluo thrived on the ignorance of og!qiu haitang. if z!qht was unfortunately aware enough that something was wrong but not clever enough to hide that she knew, uh. things would not bode well

new family! they seem nice. and it’s so relaxing to not have to be responsible for once in her life--good karma and all. the key here is that she’s essentially a doted-on princess and this life is so different that it softens her brain a bit. bc lbh had a bajillion wives and she didn’t obsessively hate-read to the extent that sy did, it’d take a while to realize why her new name sounded so familiar.

(oh no.

... well, obviously, she’s ... uh she’s not going to become the scum villain’s origin story and shit. if she - if she kills sqq first, before he kills her family -)

z!qht would probably discover the cracks in her older brother’s persona around late childhood--she’s not as pliable and sweet-natured as og!qht and qjl would have shown some excessive over-protectiveness that would set z!qht’s creeper detector off

(not letting her play outside, not letting her play as she wants to, not letting her get dirty, suggesting how she should dress and act)

bc z!qht does know how to occasionally ‘act cute’ to get what she wants (zaa de 詐嗲 is a canto phrase meaning to play coy and she’s done it enough as a real child), qjl goes to the extremes to tempt her into being cute/listening to him. z!qht doesn’t understand the extent of qjl’s fixations, but knows it’s a thing that she can leverage sparingly.

“haitang,” qjl tries to cajole. “da ge will get you a playmate, okay? so don’t fuss”

cue him dragging a boy into her courtyard a week after--his body bone-thin and skin scrubbed red raw, looking too small for the new clothes he’s wearing.

the boy’s name is shen jiu. and he was to stay with their family from now on.

z!qht first encounter with the grim reality of this new world is through puzzling out this ‘shen jiu’s background. it’s not like her first thought is ‘slavery exists, my brother just participated in human trafficking, and now i technically own another human being yikes’, since that’s not a standard of life she’s been close to before and she didn’t expect it from her family

‘shen jiu... shen... shen qingqiu?’ right, he didn’t always have ‘shen qingqiu’ as a name. how the fuck was a slave boy going to be her fiancé? let alone get close enough to slaughter the whole family?!?!

z!qht keeps sj under close observation. easy enough due to extra transmigrator braincells to see that sj’s situation is not all it seems. they talk honestly. it takes a while for sj to warm up to z!qht bc she’s not naïve and he fears possible machinations. eventually, sj does see her as a friend and not just as refuge.

qjl finally pulls that shit with ‘marrying’ sj to z!qht. that’s the last straw. was this the truth behind PIDW? or did she distort everything with her existence?

it’s gonna end up with z!qht: let’s run away together. we can put out a declaration that we ‘eloped’, once the wedding announcement is put out so it doesn’t seem like you kidnapped me or whatever. just a silly rich girl who made a disgraceful choice and dishonored her family.

sj: they’ll hunt us to the ends of the earth to get you back. there’s only one way.

z!qht, being raised lovingly (for the most part) by this new family, has to deal with this conundrum. for the sake of one person and possibly her future, she’ll have to kill them. instead of sj’s arson, she tells him to leave it to her.

she poisons her family at dinner, with some desserts that she ‘brought back from town from that well-known restaurant’. whatever else abuse the other servants may have laid on sj, it wasn’t worth the notoriety of completely salting the earth of the qiu household. she takes money, jewelry to be pawned off, and other supplies or things for survival before running off. her brother and father’s corpses will be discovered in the morning.

upon freeing sj from his quarters, he insists that they go into town and meet up with someone. while z!qht and sj are friends, z!qht doesn’t completely trust sj (based on pidw bias). the fact that he meets with an older, unknown boy also skeeves her out. z!qht is very aware that she’s now a rich orphan girl with no way to defend herself and no one to advocate for her. she can’t afford to gamble her life. maybe she’s done enough to help sj and help herself, but this is where they must diverge.

sj was genuinely excited that yes, he’s out and reunited with his qi-ge, he managed to convince his only friend to leave with him and save her from her family (alongside himself)... only to find that she has disappeared. a part of him wants to look for her, but the survival instinct tells him to continue onto safety. he listens to his instinct.

sj and yq are able to go to cang qiong earlier, avoiding the wu yanzi mess and all that. very little bottleneck, a smoother path to cultivation.

but sj will always wonder what happened to her. will take whatever time he has, once cultivated, to travel and look for her, if she survived, if she was able to make a good life for herself. regret only comes when one has the luxury to care not just for themselves.

(z!qht most likely ends up a rogue/demonic cultivator, learning from fringe and unsavory individuals, disguising her gender. gains a reputation. once sj becomes sqq, there is definitely a dramatic reunion.)

(meanwhile, airplane as a disciple is just ‘?!?!?!?! what happened to my scum villain???? [Plot deviation]?!?! [Mission: hunt for the rogue] wtf is this?!’)