The Cat House

The sword is a glowing ghostly vision of Yue Qingyuan in the Lingxi Caves- battered and bloody and openly weeping.

As soon as Shen Qingqiu enters the sword turns to him.

"Xiao Jiu." It says in a strange raspy voice and then runs over to hug him.

Shen Qingqiu hugs the ghost of teen Yue Qingyuan on autopilot. Adult Yue Qingyuan looks devastated.

"What is this?" He demands from Yue Qingyuan.

But Yue Qingyuan can't bring himself to explain even now... So Xuan Su reaches up, takes his face in its strangely warm hands and shows Shen Qingqiu itself.

He sees everything, from Xuan Su's perspective. The sword pulling, the caves, Yue Qi clawing at the walls and screaming his name over and over.

He wakes up flat on his back with the smell and taste of ashes on his tongue after watching Yue Qi digging through the ruins of Qiu Manor.

Yue Qingyuan is holding him. Xuan Su is kneeling nearby watching them both.

Shen Jiu punches Qi-ge in the face and then hugs him tightly.

And now Rocky and Adrian equally love Grace. They always argue over who gets to bring him to their work (Adrian likes to have him for feedback for the bio-dome and Rocky likes to have someone to talk to while he tinkers). They both watch over him when he sleeps and Grace wakes up to two Eridians very, very close to his face.

They’re the couple with the third wheeling friend, except they are all equally happy about the arrangement. Rocky and Adrian go on a date, just the two of them, one time and get asked by no less than six people if Grace is okay.

Liu Qingge is a cultivator who travels and fights all sorts of foes. He's also a character in PIDW. Because of this, he has a somewhat skewed view of sex (in relation to the real world), and treats things like heats as just something to get through in order to get back to the fight. Of course, with his tendency to travel so much his body is often under enough stress than his heats are short and infrequent. He does not keep track.

When that demonic disciple kidnaps Shen Qingqiu's body he of course goes to retrieve it, fighting Luo Binghe day after day after day without end. The fights are thrilling. Liu Qingge's omegan instincts *adore* Binghe, much as he tamps them down. The man has clearly shown his loyalty, fierceness and complete battlefield control. An *extremely* suitable mate. LQG does not give a fuck about this man, however. But when his heat sneaks up on him he's hardly going to stop trying to get Shen Qingqiu back because of a few hormones.

As great as these daily spars are for Binghe's excess of demonic energy, he's far from being *well*. Xin Mo still requires sating, ever more so in fact. But he isn't a heathen. Just because Liu-shishu is an omega (who can fight, who *does* fight him, snarling and vicious and bright and bold in a way that makes both his demonic instincts and his inner alpha sing) doesn't mean he wants to fuck him. He's saving himself for Shizun, and if shizun won't have him, no one will.

Unfortunately for both of them, they're in PIDW. And PIDW as a setting cares very, very little for what it's characters actually want. So LQG turns up on the cusp of heat. LBH fails to kill to sate Xin Mo for a little too long. They both recognise that the other risks serious injury/qi deviation if they put off their conditions, and as much as they hate each other for their tussle over SQQ, neither truly wants the other to suffer or die. So they dual cultivate to stymy LQG's heat, LBH manages to sate Xin Mo without triggering his own rut (desperately glad that that, at least, he's managed to save for Shizun), and they go their separate ways with a tacit acknowledgement that absolutely no one can know.

Of course, nothing goes the way we want things to go, and neither of these two people can be this casual about sex, at least not with each other. So it happens again. Regularly enough that even LQG recognises he probably should start actually using birth control. But there's no way he's visiting Mu Qingfang about it (how the hell does he explain he's sleeping with their sect's public enemy number one??) So he just visits a regular apothecary and is done with it.

Alas, the protagonist's spawn is a little too strong for some herbs to fight. LQG figures out he's pregnant a month or two before SQQ wakes up in the mushroom body, and everything is chaos for a while. Everyone is too busy trying to get to SQQ (himself included) to really do anything about this right now so he just doesn't tell anyone. Then BQ save the world (in their awful way), and go off and get married without anyone's approval before fucking off to the demon realm for a bit on their supposed honeymoon.

LQG is used to taking pretty much anything that happens to his body in stride so he pops out the kid (an extremely cute brat who, unfortunately, looks exactly like his father after only a few months) and continues his escapades travelling the world just with a baby in tow.

Sometime two years later Binghe finally mentions that he wasn't a virgin when he and Shen Qingqiu finally got together and SQQ responds "Well of course. You're the pro- I mean, Binghe is very attractive and had to deal with Xin Mo. This Master doesn't blame him. Besides, we weren't mates or even courting at the time." He asks no further questions, ostensibly because he expected it (he's seethingly jealous). Binghe very happily does not deign to mention it again.

They visit Cang Qiong for a few weeks on a whim and Shen Qingqiu takes the opportunity to finally catch up with his shidimei, calling in at Bai Zhan Peak. Only. What. Who. Why is there a small child attached to his leg. Why does that small child have a flame-shaped mark on his forehead and a mane of black curls??? LUO BINGHE WHEN YOU SAID YOU SLEPT WITH SOMEONE ELSE-

Shizun Binghes tea getting spiked with the powder that's supposed to show him his ideal dream and he sees his disciple shen yuan in the bamboo house telling him "Shizun can throw away all those courtship letters sent for me... this disciple only wants to stay with shizun."

Binghe is so happy as he hugs shen yuan and says they'll be together forever and no one will steal shen yuan away. And when they part their faces are so close they just have to move a little closer until they're kissing and then binghe is scooping shen yuan up bridal style and placing him on the peak lords bed...

Obviously because its binghes fantasy shen yuan is blushing as he says it's his first time, shizun, please be gentle

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

I’m in the middle of re-reading “pride is not the word I’m looking for” by @tossawary and MAN. something about this line in chapter 27 just HAUNTED me. Had to draw it to get the demons out lmao

Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe wake up in a field somewhere far, far away with no memory of how they got there or who they are, but they get one look at each other and come to the conclusion they must have been important to each other- husbands maybe?

Insert some time passing where they wander around, realize some things about themselves (like, whoa! They're really strong? They have swords! Binghe can heal really fast! Binghe...can actually do some freaky things with his blood? Shen Yuan is *fascinated*. Also, Shen Yuan doesn't have to eat? Or, well, he does sometimes. He's also sick? Maybe??) And basically fall in love all over again.

And they get domestic *so* fast. It's a record. They build a home in the middle of nowhere, wander their 'territory', fight together in spars and against beasts, and share tender moments of sweet sweet bonding-

And also very clumsy sex.

Look, what do you think these two are gonna do? They're sparkling clean virgins with no idea sex is even a thing. At best they figure out if they do this, stuff feels real nice, and they like doing it together. They probably only found out on *accident* and then Shen Yuan decided to be curious and experiment with it. Binghe, of course, goes along happily.

Luckily he is not a normal horse, no! He is a spiritual stallion, a character that was mainly a joke about the novel's genre in PIDW, originally bred on Cang Qiong's beast tamer peak but not actually encountered until Luo Binghe's "raze cultivation society to the ground" phase. At which point there was a subplot about him finding the stallion and letting it loose to run free, as like, an allegorical reference. Occasionally Binghe would find other horses across the years that were obviously descended from that one, as more jokes, until Airplane forgot about the reference and never brought it up again.

Shen Yuan, of course, was always Big Mad that Binghe never got to actually ride this super magical mystical horse, and never got the horsegirl arc he deserved! Where is the man's companion animal? How can someone with nine billion wives and even more nameless underlings be fated for a life of perpetual loneliness??

Naturally, the first thing Shen Yuan does upon figuring out that he's this magic horse is break out of the beast peak and make for Qing Jing. He's not necessarily planning to go bond with the protagonist or anything, but he's not particularly keen to live out his fate as some feral horse that fucks other horses either, and he's extremely valuable so it's unlikely anyone will kill him even if they catch him again. So, might as well take the opportunity to clap eyes on his favorite character before he's doomed to a life of eating hay and whatever, right?

Horse SY manages to arrive on Qing Jing Peak right before the start of the skinner mission, though, just as Ming Fan is telling Luo Binghe that there aren't enough horses. Ning Yingying points out SY and is all oh look, one of the stable hands must have realized the error and brought another, and everyone else is kind of like "uh that is... not a normal horse...?" but then Shen Qingqiu gets impatient and snaps at them to get a move on, and fear of their mercurial shizun overrides everything else to the point where Binghe just clambers desperately onto this mystical saddle-free horse.

Airplane borrowed kelpies for his demon beasts at some point and they are pretty common, so it occurs to Luo Binghe only after he's climbed onto the strange and definitely not normal Horse SY that he might be on the verge of getting carried off and drowned. But SY just kind of rolls with it, and falls into line with the other horses.

Hey, it's an excuse to leave the sect! And practice doing horse stuff! And also, he's not going to buck Luo Binghe off of his back!

Of course as it happens, the specific kind of magical horse that Shen Yuan is comes with a specially bred-for trait where they only bond to one rider. They're usually bred for like, kings and emperors and other highly important figures as status symbols, like magical companion animals but ones with perfectly mundane utilities. He's also got Shadowfax-like stamina and speed, meaning that Airplane can treat this kind of horse as interchangeable with a motorbike, and of course the capacity to cultivate. Which means that when the party finally arrives at their destination, everyone suddenly realizes that Luo Binghe has unwittingly bonded with a horse that's worth a fortune and won't ever let anyone else ride it now.

Shen Qingqiu flips his shit, Shen Yuan bites Shen Qingqiu, Luo Binghe hyperventilates, Ning Yingying gets kidnapped, and the situation basically resolves with Shen Yuan kicking the shit out of the skinner demon in defense of his new BFF the baby protagonist.

Well if he's going to end up letting anyone ride him for the rest of his life, Luo Binghe would be his first choice.

Anyway they get back and Shen Qingqiu is still spitting mad and offers Luo Binghe's head on a platter to the lord of the beast peak, but Beast Peak's people are actually kind of pleased. Like sure it's a little inconvenient, because Luo Binghe is a Qing Jing disciple and not one of theirs, but they were honestly beginning to worry that this stallion wouldn't bond with anyone! It's really hard to manage them when they don't! And SY in particular comes from a long and illustrious lineage that has nearly died out a few times, so they were never planning to sell him off even for a high price anyway. With a rider chosen, the odds of them getting him to cooperate for breeding purposes are a lot higher, plus it will be much easier to take care of him now! Though they will be taking Shen Qingqiu up on his offer of Luo Binghe's time, since "punishment" for this transgression will involve splitting his time between the peaks in order to help take care of SY (all the beast peak disciples are super relieved, apparently before Shen Yuan transmigrated, the horsey original goods was extremely prone to biting and kicking...)

Shen Qingqiu basically tells Luo Binghe not to bother coming back, which fills Binghe with despair, but he gets over it eventually. The beast peak is nice! They give him a cultivation manual as well, in order to help him understand what they do, and it seems that Binghe can understand it a lot better than his QJP one. The peak lord gives him permission to use the dorms as well, since there will probably be times when he has to stay overnight, and no one says much about it when Binghe basically moves in full time. On the books he's still a Qing Jing disciple, but functionally he's a transfer student now. He even sits in on classes and lectures, and a lot of the peak are just under the impression that he was transferred over to their peak in full.

Shen Yuan considers this a big improvement, and expects Luo Binghe to enjoy running around with all the pretty girls on the peak. But Binghe mostly seems to spend his time with him, in fact, asking questions upon questions not only about Shen Yuan's breed, but about his specific background and lineage. The beast peak is overall pretty nice, although sadly it's not full of cool monsters and companion animals as Shen Yuan would have hoped. Mostly the peak specializes in the cultivation world's equivalent of livestock and work animals, training beasts like spirit eagles and horses like himself, and raising animals prized for their meat, organs, bones, or other parts for medicinal, alchemical, or culinary ingredients, or sometimes components for weapons or other spiritual tools. They work the most closely with Qian Cao, Wan Jian, and An Ding.

Being a horse is honestly kind of boring for Shen Yuan, although running is fun, and he at least gets plenty of time to work on his cultivation.

By the time Sha Hualing's invasion happens, he's gotten pretty comfortable in his new state of affairs. Binghe has even figured out that he likes being read to, and has started reading aloud to him from various texts in the evenings! So far no good novels, or even bad trashy novels, but it's better than nothing!

Binghe also takes him for a lot of rides around the peaks (not Qing Jing) which is how they end up caught on Qiong Ding when the rainbow bridge goes down. When Shen Qingqiu tells Luo Binghe to fight, Binghe doesn't even have a weapon at hand.

Actually, he doesn't have a sword at hand.

Turns out having your magical horse kick a demon to death is still pretty effective!

Shen Yuan even manages to avoid getting poisoned too. Rather, Elder Hammer threatens to poison him and Luo Binghe charges at him shouting "stay away from my horse! I'll kill you!" and etc, and does get nicked by the thorns, but only Binghe and Shen Yuan notice and of course the poison doesn't work on Binghe, congrats for unlocking a new hint as to Luo Binghe's mysterious origins!

Yes, Horse SY shows up to help Binghe in the Dream Demon event. He still looks like a horse for it, but it also marks the first time he's able to speak to Luo Binghe, which successfully distracts Luo Binghe from a lot of the tormenting visions of his past because talking magic horse friend has a way of doing that.

So the Dream Demon is like, that's not a normal horse, and Luo Binghe is all "stay away from my horse! I'll kill you!" and Shen Yuan gets knocked out of the dream as usual. Wakes up to Luo Binghe rushing to his stall to check on him and prepare him some nice warm congee and double-check that he can't talk for reals (only in dreams for now, alas).

Anyway Luo Binghe has no reason to hide his demonic cultivation practice from his horse, so Shen Yuan gets to sit in on it as Binghe tries to put Meng Mo's teachings into practice, which he finds super cool. Binghe's normal cultivation also progresses quite a bit, but he's still very much disadvantaged there because the beat peak is only giving him like, half-assed guest disciple status lessons, no personal one-and-one tutelage, and he's unofficially banned from Qing Jing and wouldn't get any help there anyway (apart from Ning Yingying). The beast peak lord isn't really his shizun and Shen Qingqiu isn't going to take Binghe to do things like claim a sword from Wan Jian, either.

Luckily, Binghe can now confer with his horse in his dreams! Shen Yuan has such helpful ideas as compelling various hall masters and combat teachers to dream about their lessons, so that Binghe can insert himself into the form of their students and supplement his tutelage with nighttime training from all around the sect. And also stealing some blank documents from An Ding and forging paperwork to turn over to Wan Jian to make it look like Binghe has permission to claim a spiritual sword without Shen Qingqiu's approval.

What a way to pass the time before the Immortal Alliance Conference!

Horse Shen Yuan would like very much to just carry Luo Binghe away in the opposite direction, thank you, but he does have a system and it is still holding a metaphorical gun to his head about this. Still, there's no force in the world that could keep Shen Yuan in his stable when shit starts to go down, or that could stop him from kicking the snot out of Shen Qingqiu when he tries to throw Binghe into the Abyss. (Binghe's thoughts on the fight: "stay away from my horse! I'll kill you!")

However, Binghe does still get thrown down, and Horse SY runs off whilst weeping crystalline tears of dismay as his mane whips in the wind, imagining a future where a blackened Luo Binghe returns for his revenge arc and symbolically sends his beloved horsie companion away forever to go frolic or some shit, which Shen Yuan is not interested in!

But what can he do? By the time Binghe gets out of the Abyss, his need for a horse will be decidedly minimal. It already went down a bunch when he finally got Zheng Yang (that Binghe somehow almost never flew anywhere on, surely for reasons unrelated to his bond with SY), and with Xin Mo and all his OP talents, even if he did keep Shen Yuan, wouldn't he become as much of a useless background character as countless auxiliary wives in his harem?

No! He won't stand for it! There has to be a way for him to convince even blackened Binghe that Shen Yuan is still the best ride in town!

Luckily, Shen Yuan knows where there are some power-ups that might be able to help him. While he won't touch anything that would be vital for the protagonist, he's more flexible on screwing over random future harem members or side characters, especially when it wouldn't even really harm them all that much. So while Binghe is going through his gauntlet of horrors in the Abyss, Shen Yuan embarks on his own level-up quest to dramatically increase his cultivation, and become more capable of keeping up with Binghe.

When this leads to Shen Yuan being able to take on a human form, he gets really excited, but that's mostly for personal comfort reasons. He can finally hold books again! And talk to people! Who cares if he looks like someone's ponysona gijinka, he can walk over to a stall and order meat buns!

Unicorn form is next, and it's... meh? Mostly it's a boost in his cultivation. The horn looks fun but doesn't really do much.

When he upgrades to being able to take on a pegasus form, now that's really cool. He can fly now! Not only is it crazy good fun, but it also increases his mobility exponentially. Surely riding a flying horse would be more comfortable than balancing on a sword, too?

But that's not enough for his actual goal, he needs to keep going until he finally finds the right bullshit mythical item that will do what he hopes:

Turn him into a dragon!

Unfortunately said bullshit item is in the demon realms, which are a fairly difficult place to navigate as either a horse or a human. Beefing up for the trip takes Shen Yuan just about two years, and requires all of his other upgrades. But he does it, he gets to the demon realms, eats the creatively named Dragon Fruit Plant, and... gets... stuck???

In his new dragon form???

WTF this didn't happen to the random ox that Luo Binghe fed the fruit to in order to create a suitable beast of burden to impress the husband of Wife No.666! Although, thinking about it, maybe it did because it wasn't like the ox ever turned back into an ox afterwards. But Shen Yuan just figured that was because it was a simple beast of burden and saw becoming a dragon as an overall upgrade, why go back? He honestly hadn't really thought about it!

Shen Yuan still saved Liu Qingge. It was a lot more hilarious this time, too, because it basically involved a horse dragging a bleeding and aggressively displeased war god to Qian Cao with his teeth. Liu Qingge did not try and kill him because, seeing as how SY was horse-sharped rather than Shen Qingqiu-shaped, his addled state could not recognize Shen Yuan as a threat.

Horse Shen Yuan has a reputation for showing up in places where a horse absolutely should not be. Ling Xi Caves was probably the most dramatic example but he will absolutely climb on roofs or squeeze his way into An Ding leisure houses (searching for novels). He is a living example of those "horses in unexpected places" image montages. He would do perfectly fine in a hospital, too, he's been in them before after all.

Horse Shen Yuan is so traumatized by the implications of his horse body's canonical fate in PIDW that he will literally run away from mares or anything he suspects of being a female horse. Luo Binghe finds this hysterical and does nothing to deter the behavior, much to the frustration of his fellow disciples on the beast peak.

People Horse Shen Yuan has bitten since transmigrating:

Shen Qingqiu, Ming Fan, Liu Qingge, Sha Hualing, Shen Qingqiu again, Shang Qinghua, Qin Wanyue, Shen Qingqiu again.

I don't know if Airplane is Shang Qinghua in this AU. Leaning towards the idea that he is some terrifying legendary demonic beast that can also take the form of a donkey, and has spent most of this time just vacationing in Mobei Jun's stables, kind of clueless as to why his king spends so much time hanging out with him and also why his sheer presence seems to have reduced Mobei Jun's political competition down to a trickle (being visibly favored by the legendary king-favoring beast tends to work PR wonders).

Like he goes to sleep and wakes up to a dragon instead of a horse and he's like "who are you invader, and what have you done with my horse!"

And SY is like "It's me. I traveled far and wide to become the most powerful horse ever so that I could protect Binghe."

And Binghe breaks into tears because he's been traveling beside his horse without knowing it and his horse has done all of this work in order to stay by Binghe's side.

I'm not saying Binghe would make out with his horse.

But once SY takes a human form, Binghe has no reason to not make out with his horse.

Shen Yuan’s “default” form when he stops being exclusively a dragon should absolutely be that of a Longma!

I also firmly believe Binghe would go the Loki route decide his horse form should be a mare, just so he can birth Shen Yuan’s offspring. 😂

To pair with Horse-Yuan’s dragon features, Binghe should get to be a horse with the traits of a fenghuang (often called the Chinese phoenix). Dragons and fenghuang are traditionally portrayed together to symbolize blissful relations between husband and wife, so it’s only fitting!

Liu Qingge: It wasn't just an apology, he also has tried to be civil with me. That's why I am trying to be civil with him.

Shen Yuan: You really do just copy how people act towards you, don't you? I thought the phrase was 'Treat people the way you want to be treated' not the other way around.

Liu Qingge: I want to be treated with brute honesty, but turns out people don't like that. But everyone else understands it, so if they treat me the way they want to be treated, I know how to treat them, and I won't mess up as much. People have made talking to others unnecessarily complicated, but I have found a way to win at social interaction.

Shen Yuan: You would have loved an autism diagnosis.