#feropariente

tada!!!

You would think being promoted to the head disciple position would change things in Shang Qinghua’s life – and it did! It sure did! He had to worry way less about sabotaging people and more about people sabotaging him!

But being an An Ding disciple still meant, like… work. He had the power of delegation now, even if a lot of people stink-eyed him for it, but he was still doing a lot of work. And, well, the only person he could blame for that was the An Ding Peak Lord.

MAN it's been a while since I've done Undertale stuff. Feels like going back to my roots a little, haha.

I'm going to assume this is a prompt and write a scene as my response. Admittedly, Lani's story is the least developed of the three so this is very messy and as always what I write here might be changed or deleted later.

"Aren't you tired, Miss?" says the woman in white, golden eyes flecked with infuriating sorrow. "I'm tired."

Lani barks out a harsh laugh. "Oh, you're tired? I didn't think you had enough humanity for that."

"I am more human than god."

"Are you now?" How funny. How very fucking funny. Lani sneers. White hair, white skin, white gown, white dream—as if any human could tolerate so much white. "If I say I'm tired, would it mean anything? Would you fucking let me go home?"

"I want to go home too, you know?"

"Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?"

The other woman shakes her head. "I wouldn't ask that of you. I simply ask—"

"You," Lani says venomously, "are in no place to ask anything of me."

She knows what all this is. She'd be a fucking idiot if she hadn't been able to figure it out by now: all the other dreams, the memories of blood and war, a little boy pleading to uncaring gods, a girl holding her scepter over her head to chase away a burning sky—all for the purpose of evoking empathy. Place her among the bodies and oh but of course she'll want to save them all.

Ha.

Lani's life may not have been perfect but it was hers. How long had it taken? How many clothes, how many hairstyles, how many personalities before she looked in the mirror and failed to find herself? The life that was painstakingly hers, stolen away, and now she's told to be someone else again. Your home is gone, your world is past, so won't you move toward your future, Miss Heroine?

Those weren't her memories, this isn't her world, and that's not her fucking name.

How like both gods and royalty, to make demands and expect to be followed to the letter.

"Tell me, your majesty," Lani wonders, "will you bleed red, or gold?"

hi there have a random assortment of words

“Do not call me that.”

“...”

“Xiao Jiu,” Yu Ziyuan said, deadly soft, “is the name of a misbegotten urchin brat. Must you persist in using it? Is it amusing, defining me by the name of dead child?”

There was a long silence. Jiang Fengmian held still, watching the lightning wrapped around his wife’s fingers.

Quietly, Yu Ziyuan began to laugh.

“At one point, that was your name,” Jiang Fengmian said steadily.

“And what of it?” Yu Ziyuan said. “Shen Jiu was a dirty, stunted creature with dirty, stunted cultivation, better off dead --”

“Don’t call yourself--”

If the Thousand-Petalled Ginseng Fritilliary did happen to exist, then now was a good time to go looking for it.  It was said to be ripe for the picking every one hundred years, and as far as he could calculate, the harvest window should be around now.  Accordingly, Mu Qingfang had submitted a request for his leave to his master and a general application form for an escort.  Both had been approved.  

summoned! a continuation of this, sort of.

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"I don't actually like you," Liu Qingge said, as blunt as Shang Qinghua expected him to be.

Fucking ouch! Sure, Shang Qinghua wasn't the greatest catch, but he was still a head disciple of Cang Qiong! What disrespect!

"Thanks, shidi, I really appreciate hearing that," Shang Qinghua said. "I'm glad you're comfortable sharing your feelings with me."

"But," Liu Qingge said. "You were supposed to be mine. So."

And then Liu Qingge stopped talking. He let the sentence lie there unfinished, presenting it to Shang Qinghua like a dead rat. It, like all freakishly large animals dropped at An Ding's doorstep, was Shang Qinghua's job to figure out what to do with it.

"Yeahhh, huh," Shang Qinghua said, eloquent as he always was. But hey, what was he supposed to say to that? It was true! Everybody thought it was going to happen! Shizun had flat-out admitted that yeah, he meant to set Shang Qinghua's fancy Peak Lord ascension engagement to whoever Bai Zhan's head disciple ended up being!

hello! okay!!! for wip wednesday, november 12:

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In some ways, Qian Cao could be considered a peak of intellectuals.  Certainly Qing Jing held court in this field, but their scholarly pursuits tended to lie in the four gentlemanly arts, not in research and development.  There were interesting journals that came from Qing Jing, but those were few and far in between compared to poetry, paintings, and essays on the art of war.

On Qian Cao, research and development was a requirement. Cang Qiong was well-known for its medical prowess, but there was only so long that could remain true without innovation. Therefore, to advance on Qian Cao, disciples had to participate in scholarly study.