#jiuliu

okay so. Shen Jiu is, officially, a normal teacher at a random college with two adoptive kids (Ming Fan and Ning Yingying) and one younger brother he’s extremely overprotective over.

Turns out he used to be an exorcist. Turns out he used to be a *vicious* one. Turns out some demon would like to get revenge. Turns out some demon is a prince.

Anyway, Luo Binghe waltzes up to that college like he owns the place, fully prepared to turn it into a battlefield and… what? His teacher’s nice? His teacher gave him a handshake? He calls him A-He now? “Please call me Yuan”? Apparently, the exorcist has a brother. A pretty one. And of course Lbh straightup jumps to seducing the pretty one. What better revenge on the guy you hate than to marry his brother?

Thing is, Ming Fan is immediately suspicious. Shen Jiu partially adopted him because he showed some talent in becoming an exorcist, even if he decided to retire and not tell his kids about his former job so his family could lead normal lives. And Both Ming Fan and Ning Yingying copied their A-die’s way of dealing with Uncle Yuan: extreme overprotectiveness and suspicion towards anything romance-shaped. Especially men. Especially men radiating evil red energy.

Shen Jiu’s currently on a trip or smth, maybe on honeymoon with Liu Qingge, anyway he’s not available and the kids think it’s their job to protect their uncle.

Ning Yingying is a lot more easy-going and a lot less suspicious of everyone and everything that moves, so it doesn’t take long for Lbh to convince her that he may be weirdly pretty and his existence gives people goosebumps but that’s normal! He’s just a chill guy! Ming Fan is harder to convince, but lbh is getting there. He remembers mf as the kid always trailing behind sj when sj was off-duty, but he doesn’t really care about him. So Mf is about to be convinced when he sees lbh kill someone without even moving his hands. Like, with a floating sword/shadow spear or something.

so of course he decides to pretend he’s not suspicious about the obviously suspicious and dangerous murder flirting with his uncle (who is by the way his age, so, he’s gross, and jail, jail for a thousand years, how dare he) and also investigate every single millimetre of his past. And thus begins a cat-and-mouse game where the cat is not aware that it is being chased by a mouse.

ming Fan, despite not knowing about the exorcist business, manages to uncover larger and larger parts of it and get closer to his answer. He also gets more and more convinced that lbh belongs in jail, not just for flirting with a man old enough to be his father, but also for, well, being a murderer.

he thinks lbh is part of some gangster family or mafia.

Meanwhile, lbh is too busy being a stupid teen in love (he’s 20+) to notice someone’s sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. But his cousin/father does notice and starts trying to protect his cousin/son.

So ming fan and tlj meet. And it’s. Terrible. Terrifying. Ming Fan thinks tlj is a mind reader. Tlj thinks mf is just funny enough to not get murdered today. (It could be zzl but he wouldn’t spare mf so it’d turn into a whodunnit with nyy and sj as the leads)

so instead of killing the possible threat, he starts watching it. Everytime ming fan gets a new lead, that stupid old man’s there, sitting in front of him, smugly, being all “well? Found anything, detective?”

at the same time, ming fan IS finding something. He just doesn’t like what he’s finding. What started as a simple background check on a possible psychopath trying to seduce his uncle turned into a wild goose chase and he’s starting to realise that he’s in over his head. He needs an adult. An adulter adult that him. Except that the only currently available adults are a) being actively seduced by the problem or b) the problem’s insufferable father.

And he still doesn’t give up.

Ming Fan goes through all his memories involving Sj (which he found out has something to do with all this) and remembers that he used to always be complaining about this group named Huan Hua. Something about greedy old wretches and their grubby little hands. He’s desperate for any lead since his have been running into dead ends. So he starts digging. Apparently, it’s an exorcist union. Again, Ming Fan does not like the picture his investigation’s painting.

So he does the only sensible thing. He hacks into Huan Hua’s archives. which is something tlj has been trying for ages because of his traitor ex wife. At least he thinks she’s a traitor.

And then begins the craziest, most traumatic “what do you know that I don’t” Ming Fan has ever went through. They blackmail each other. Ming Fan finally knows the whole picture but he’s also sure Huan Hua erased parts of the history so he doesn’t actually have the whole picture. Tianlang-jun wants to know about Sxy. Ming Fan just wants to protect his family.