#plus they turned the fun and chill lantern festival into a competition too

[budd-ie]

I like to imagine Xie Lian checking in on heaven every once in a while for business or something and now that heaven barely has a central government and people are more relaxed without any one scary force up their asses all the time he sometimes comes back to some pretty weird stuff. After all, every god is a nosy drama queen and everything has the potential for a competition. Imagine if one day some smaller martial gods got bored and started an arm wrestling contest and whoever won started bragging about it which caused some other martial gods to want a piece of the action. Because every martial god is overly competitive by nature, this eventually gets weirdly out of hand and now the top martial gods are having the most legendary arm wrestling tournament in history. Xie Lian walks in in the middle of it, bewildered; “Oh, no thank you, I couldn’t possibly, I should be quick, San lang is waiting for me—“ he answers but a simple “come on, your highness!” and a recap of the latest events is all it takes to convince a top martial god to give it a shot.

Across the room, Feng Xin just obliterated another round and is on a crazy hot streak. His spirits are high and he’s ready for his next victim as he looks across the table, and the opponent in his view is none other than Xie Lian.

A cold sweat runs down his back.

Of course it ends with Xie Lian vs Pei Ming, the grandest showdown they’ve seen in a great while, and Xie Lian going home that night to that San Lang of his with another weird heavenly trophy to put in the display case they had to make for all these weird prizes he keeps bringing home from work. Who knew gods really are more idle than ghost kings!