clown (affectionate)

He would never admit it, but he hated it, too. Like he's a trans egg for at least his secondary gender but he had no wherewithal to process that, plus his health issues meant he was totally failing to meet a lot of the standard expectations for Alphas to be strong and hale and fit and so on, which is part of what drew him into reading masculine power fantasy novels where the protagonists are always peak Alpha males.

Except that he's not really into that, too, because (insert complicated feelings about genderx2 here), so part of the reason why Luo Binghe lit his brain up so much on his first read was that narrative element of perpetual dissatisfaction and existential futility. That he insists is a major flaw because it's too unjust for Luo Binghe to never be happy in all his conquering Alpha male emperor glory.

Airplane reading his comments like, wow we don't have time to unpack all that...

Anyway, when Shen Yuan transmigrates into Shen Jiu he finds that despite his Alpha presentation and his description in the book as an Alpha, Shen Qingqiu is apparently an Omega. Who had been disguising his secondary gender for some baffling reason (dysphoria) that probably had to do with social disadvantages or pride or something (dysphoria 100%) but he's not exactly around for Shen Yuan to ask.

At first the OOC locks mean that Shen Yuan has to keep pretending to be an Alpha (not hard, he's been doing that his whole life so far -- by which he means actually being an Alpha in his first life, of course) but then he finishes the Skinner Demon mission and in the midst of that, Luo Binghe and Ning Yingying get a good whiff of his actual pheromones, after which Shen Yuan figures it's no use trying to keep up the OG's charade.

But this is also strategically sound! Luo Binghe in PIDW did not kill Omegas. In fact several of his future wives arguably did him dirtier than Shen Qingqiu, albeit at a less formative age.

Shen Yuan decides the only path forward is to Omega it up as hard as he can. He's going to have to compensate extra not only for the OG's past abuses and misconduct as a mentor, but also for his years spent "pretending" to be an Alpha, and for Shen Yuan's own completely understandable certainly real difficulties in "pretending" to be an Omega now. It will be really hard for him, all things considered, so he is going to have to be as maternal, gentle, brave, compassionate, and prone to somehow landing in mortal peril with his clothing artfully torn and tears glistening his eyes as the most cliche Omegas straight out of fiction. He is going to mother the protagonist so hard that Luo Binghe won't be able to make an exception for killing him, because everything that saved those other Omegas, Shen Qingqiu is now going to dial up to eleven.

You have been transmigrated into Scum Villain as a No Name NPC from a relatively important and wealthy family. Well, you aren’t a family anymore. You are tragically the only surviving member of your family, the bodies still warm on the ground with no identifiable cause of death. Your system, that asshole, has tasked you with your first mission. You must falsely accuse a named character of your family’s murder (if they are currently dead, assume you are at a point in the timeline when they were alive) and bring legal action against them. The system will send you back to your deceased original body if you do not bring that person to court. It doesn’t care what the results of the trial are, but you will have to cope with the aftermath. Fortunately, the system has given you a gift in exchange for killing your new family! A second named character will side with you— either to defend you in court, threaten/harm your opponent, and/or shield you from the aftermath.

Spin the wheel twice. The first character you get is who you must accuse. The second is who will help you. If you get the same person twice, they will turn themselves in for the crime. Considering your role as an upper class, non-cultivator human, whatever dirt you have on the accused, what you know about your ally, and what the consequences of such a trial may be….

me: trees are full of ligma

my brain, bass boosted and with airhorns in the background:

'MICROAGGRESSIONS'

me:

me:

me: trees are full of ligma

my brain, bass boosted and with airhorns in the background:

'MICROAGGRESSIONS'

me: trees are full of ligma

Back when I did the Airplane Extras analysis I commented on how Shang Qinghua was away from CQMS for months when the Shens switched because he was on a business trip.

I talked about how An Ding must - despite us all saying it would collapse in minutes without him - be such a well oiled machine that Shang Qinghua can just leave it to go on a sales trip for months at a time, and do that regularly.

I also talked about how fucking weird it is that the PEAK LORD is the one going on these trips and posited that it must be visiting the emperor himself because who the heck else is important enough for the peak lord to go in person?

And then it hit me: what if these sales trips are Airplane taking advantage of his modern and creator knowledge to absolutely curb stomp the silk road?

Of course he would have to go in person! He's the one who knows where Rome should be! He's the only one who knows how the world is actually shaped! He has to go on the first contact missions! Ancient maps of the world had some pretty silly ideas about how the world was shaped!

He's also the one who has some general grasp of what other ancient cultures were like! He's used to short hair from the modern world and wouldn't think Rome was full of disgraced villains! Etc.

Obviously, Airplane meets and trades with the local human emperor first. It would be rude not to.

Next are the already extant trading partners and known places - although they have historically accurate names - Japan, Mongolia, Malaysia, India (wait, did India's name change go through? Are they called something else now?). These places have traded with China before but having one of the immortals come down off their mountain to visit in person? Especially when places like Huan Hua think themselves too good to trade directly with foreigners? What a delightful deligation! Give them a royal welcome and a sweet deal!

The Iranian Achaemenid Empire is a bit trickier, because while Airplane knew enough history to get some things right, that included the fact that one of the ancient Iranian empires really, really did not want Rome and China trading directly. Still, he leaves there with a trade route secured and a reasonable - albeit shifty - reputation for An Ding and CQMS. Which may have come off as its own independent country, but translation is hard, okay?

At this point Shang Qinghua starts returning from these sales trips with new disciples, because he wants translators who understand his culture and are loyal to An Ding, and hey, turns out being able to use qi isn't cuturally or ethnically locked in this world he made. Cool!

At this point the early by several centuries creation of the Maritime and Land Silk Roads has to pause because Shang Qinghua has to spend some very frustrating meetings explaining that yes, he does need the swordsmith and artificer peaks to work with him on building faster boats, and yes despite being a mountain sect removed from the mundane base things in life like money they do, in fact, have a fleet of merchant vessels. Which need to go faster. And maybe be able to fly. It would be so much cheaper to dock them on An Ding than to have to rent space on a wharf and then sail smaller ships with the cargo up river and then haul it up the mountain on carts. He pinkie promises he'll expand everyone's budget if he gets this!

He gets it eventually, but only after holding back the goods from the alcohol peak when their lord complains about An Ding's uselessness. Trying to make spiced wine with Arabic spices bought on the common market turns out to cost 300x as much as An Ding gets it for.

(This is also the point where Airplane starts working on a fleet for the northern desert and starts sneaking out of trade missions to make trade connections with other demon and non-demon-but-also-non-human nations on behalf of his king.)

Then it's back on the road: hitting up the horn of Africa (No, sect leader, we are not sending the Queen of Kush a panda as a gift, they only eat bamboo and there is no bamboo on that continent. No pandas!) and trading directly in Arabia (ignoring the memory of Peerless Cucumber ranting in the comments about how it shouldn't be called that yet and how terrible at history he is).

And then there's Egypt. Egypt is where Airplane realises that the Suez Canal does not exist yet and he never wrote it into this world by accident because Binghe never got this far. And sure Ramses ii (oh how Cucumber would rage if he transmigrated and saw this!) has been trying to build some canals, but they're kind of dinky. Good thing the pound lock for canals was really invented in China!

And sure, it adds a few months to the trip, but "we'll build you a better canal using our magic and technology in exchange for ships bearing our sigil never having to pay import, export or travelling through fees" is a pretty sweet deal.

Shang Qinghua and An Ding's reputation is more confused the farther he goes.

This is partially because stories about him have come from places he's visited briefly and ooh boy does the game of telephone get wild when it's thousands of kilometers and multiple linguistic groups apart from the source.

In Greece they're pretty sure the Lord of Silk is actually Hermes in disguise. He's a flying immortal merchant trickster who has something to do with gods who lives on top of a mountain with eleven others - including a drunk and a smith - and the two highest ranking of them squabble like a married couple all the time (Airplane chokes on his drink when he realises Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qingqiu are being conflated withe Zeus and Hera).

In Rome they get confused by his gender before his potential for divinity, since the -a suffix is usually feminine in their grammar. He's told of in rumours as Shanga Singhua, Queen of Anding - which is "clearly" a foreign word for silk.

When Airplane finally makes it there in person he becomes known as Quartus Shange Tantionus*, because the concept of martial siblings didn't translate that well. According to the histories some of the senators he dines with will write, his elder siblings are Primus Yue Tantionus, Secundus Shennus Tantionus, and Tertius Veius Tantionus, from the republic of the Andingia.

*Airplane's not sure how they got that out of Cang Qiong but at this point he's too afraid to ask.