what matters is you and not the state of you

He’s looking for the kind soul that made him eat so he wouldn’t die. He’s looking for the older soldier he protected during a hard fight, who told him he wanted this kid to train under him. He’s looking for the man who got drunk and spilt his sorrows to a ghost fire and talked to him like he was a person. He’s looking for his fellow war orphan, who was self-destructive and suicidal when he last saw him. He’s looking for his general, whom he followed into a ghost rage. Xie Lian is all of these things to Hua Cheng, and more importantly, Hua Cheng is all these things to Xie Lian.

He never forgot that kid he wanted to protect, that young soldier he wanted to train. He remembers the devoted ghost fire fondly, and Wu Ming is the wound on Xie Lian’s soul that never healed. They were always thinking about each other. They always cared for each other to some capacity. They like each other. They are friends. Like, yes, greatest love story ever told, he looked for him forever, but Xie Lian had no idea!! Like, if Xie Lian had known Wu Ming lived, he would have looked for him, too.

1# i define all PROBLEMATIC SHIPS as vessels with a hull width exceeding 10 chi, and a draft exceeding 4 chi, as they would OBSTRUCT PASSAGEWAY in my GLORIOUS LINGQU CANAL, the longest man-made waterway in the world at the time, which i built to transport troops and supplies to the south, aiding in my glorious unification.

2# clearly i have not been persecuting the scholars enough. between this, and having my soul trapped inside a ps5 headset while forced to babysit a coughing baby, i’d pick the ps5. the brat would at least provide some intellectually stimulating conversation.

3# ok, that’s enough monologuing “bruh”. you can help me exercise my horsies “bruh”

Prompts are open from now through March 10! You can find the prompt intake form here.

S/FW prompts are $5USD each, and N/SFW prompts are $8USD. If your donation covers your prompts with extra to spare, you may request that the extra be used for creator's choice prompts or giveaway prompts.

As a reminder, we are only supporting the following charities:

The Sameer Project (supplying essentials such as food, water and baby supplies as well as medical aid and tents for families)

Dahnoun Mutual Aid (sponsorship for families in Gaza)

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, Gaza Relief and Recovery (providing food and emergency care as well as general medical aid)

Any verified fundraiser on gazafunds.com

Available fanwork types:

Fanfiction (Minimum: 1000-word oneshot)

Fanart (Minimum: cleaned-up sketch)

Moodboard/collage (Minimum: arrangement with six themed images: no N/SFW tier available)

Gifset (Minimum: Arrangement with four GIFs: no N/SFW tier available)

Podfic/novel narration (Up to 2.5k words of narration per $5/$8 donation; donation amount can be scaled up for longer fics as needed)

Video edit (Minimum: 1 minute of video: no N/SFW tier available)

Fan playlist (Minimum: 2.5 hours of music for $5 USD; 4 hours for $8 USD: no N/SFW tier available)

They are in Traditional Chinese though, since that's what I'm most familiar with, and because it actually doesn't exist anywhere as a digital version, licensed or not. Plus, I wanted to have my phone's dictionary easily reachable whenever I had to look up words. I also like to highlight sentences so I can live tweet (scream and yell) to myself!

Converting Simplified to Traditional Chinese is actually very time-consuming, because so many words in Traditional overlap with the way Simplified writes it (e.g. 发 means 'hair' or the word for 'to happen; become; launch; produce, etc,' while in Traditional it's 髮 and 發 respectively). So I had to catch a lot of bugs 錯別字... For all nine volumes... 🫠 I have tried my best to correct all of them, though! 🙏🏼

This was how I read TGCF Serial ver :) Here's a brief look at them ↓

The Collection: (Apple Books app)

Revised Version:

Serial Version:

Google Drive link

Attention! Contributor sign-ups for the Wangxian Gotcha for Gaza are now open here; the sign-up form will remain open until January 31, 2026.

Note that contributors can create all types of fanwork and are not limited to fanart and fanfiction; transformative works like podfic, video edits, gifsets, and moodboards are also welcome! If you would like to participate in this event by donating/leaving prompts, our prompt intake form will open on Fabruary 10, 2026.

Minimum fanwork requirements are as follows.

Fic: A completed oneshot no less than 1k words long

Art: Cleaned-up sketch

Moodboard/collage (S/FW only): Arrangement with 6-9 images

Podfic/novel narration: Clean voice recording. The required word count will depend on the prompter's donation amount ($5 for every 2.5k words of S/FW text, $8 for N/SFW).

Other fanwork types such as videos (FMVs, AMVs, slideshows, etc.) are up to the discretion of prompters/contributors.

The Gotcha will be supporting these fundraisers:

The Sameer Project (supplying essentials such as food, water and baby supplies as well as medical aid and tents for families)

Dahnoun Mutual Aid (sponsorship for families in Gaza)

Palestine Children's Relief Fund, Gaza Relief and Recovery (providing food and emergency care as well as general medical aid)

♡

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

Like, these two are both Supremes, they're on a similar power level, that's clearly not the issue here. He Xuan is constantly ravenous and eats other ghosts for fun. Man can clear out a full kitchen in seconds.

The two officials inside fell over themselves and groaned nonstop. Hua Cheng leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. Xie Lian looked at him, then at the Wind Master and Earth Master, who were curled up into balls on the ground and clutching their heads.

"Is it maybe because I didn't add enough water after all...?" he murmured. "Why are their reactions stronger than Qi Rong's?"

Hua Cheng arched his eyebrows. "I think it's fine. It's probably a problem with their taste buds. It happens."

Xie Lian had never thought much about the difference between Qi Rong's usual diet and that of heavenly officials, but comparing the two now made clear an obvious disparity in taste. It was only logical that a heavenly official's shock in this case would be greater, which meant their reactions were naturally far stronger.

Of course, it never crossed Xie Lian's mind that anything could have been added to the pot after it passed through Hua Cheng's hands...

[Vol 3, pages 388-389, Seven Seas edition]

Hua Cheng's anger when "Ming Yi" shows up isn't just for show and to keep He Xuan's cover, it's also because he appears to have been genuinely angry that He Xuan is letting Shi Qingxuan drag Xie Lian once again into the whole sordid affair with Shi Wudu. Hua Cheng isn't going to stop Xie Lian from involving himself if he chooses to, but he's repeatedly expressed the wish that Xie Lian stay out of it. Because as Xie Lian and Shi Qingxuan have unexpectedly become friends, Hua Cheng correctly deduced that witnessing what's going to happen will affect Xie Lian a lot.

Jonathan Stalling’s Yingelishi is a book of poetry that is read in two ways: in Chinese and in English. He offers a line of English poetry, then rewrites it phonetically in the Chinese language, so that the new line in Chinese has its own unique and coherent meaning, which is then translated back into English. The end result is a poem existing in multiple languages and in no languages at all, with multiple meanings that can be read many ways.