#it can't be that much worse than whatever clown show moshang put on when unsupervised...

[tcfactory]

Okay, random 1 am idea:

In the earliest of Airplane-bro's drafts, Luo Binghe's sidekick was a sneaky spy ice demon with teleportation powers. A real overworked backstabbing ladder-climber type. He was supposed to bide his time and then try to double-cross Binghe when the protagonist got his eyes on the ancestral power of the north, because Luo Binghe was a shitty boss to him and trying to take what should have been his birthright was the last straw. (Overworked, underappreciated backstabbing sidekicks may or may not have been a common trope at the time he started writing, but also incredibly relatable, even if his betrayal was doomed to failure by the narrative.)

But then the direction of the story started getting out of Airplane's hands (gotta please the readers after all) and he really wanted to have something for himself, so the original Ice Demon Sidekick TM got split into the current Author's Favorite Mobei-jun and sneaky spy waving deathflags OG!Shang Qinghua. Then, because by then OG!Shang Qinghua was long dead in the story, Airplane ended up simply reusing the original concept/personality for Linguang-jun (after some nerfs of course) and the ancestral power storyline got revamped for Mobei-jun's personal story.

As a direct side effect of this, Linguang-jun and OG!Shang Qinghua are extremely similar in personality and, because overworked author put more of himself into the overworked spy's character than he realized, he's also quite similar to Airplane-as-Shang-Qinghua.

From there it takes one accidental meeting for him to gain some insight into Linguang-jun's motivations (quite logical, if you ask Airplane, but that might just be the authorial bias speaking) and then a spur of the moment decision to go: you know what? None of this has any effect on Binghe and his general... everything, so why shouldn't he be allowed to fix the Mobei family drama before it can escalate to murder attempts? Having two crafty schemers instead of just one would only benefit his king, after all. (This has nothing to do with him having weekly meetings / venting sessions with Linguang-jun, nothing at all I say.)

But then it does end up mattering. Maybe Sha Hualing's demon invasion doesn't happen. Maybe the attack on the Immortal Alliance Conference is so well-organized that the Old Palace Master dies. Maybe Linguang-jun recognizes Binghe as Tianlang-jun's kid and the whole thing turns into a kidnapping instead. There are plenty of options, but in short: the story goes way off the rails, all because Shang Qinghua managed to make Mobei-jun and Linguang-jun set their conflict aside and work together as a team.

He doesn't exactly mind it, as such. He's much less overworked and his king is happy and it's all probably going to be fine. That's all he needs, really. The details can work themselves out over time.