No Thoughts

Shen Jiu finds out he's mostly plant. There's an extremely rare plant that will regrow a body from just whatever bits you have. So he tracks some down - maybe YQY had a stash in case this body didn't work- and goes to find YQY's remains.

There's not much left after so long. But eventually he finds the still visible remnants of a large pool of blood- he dumps some of the plant seeds on it to see if that'll work. He keeps looking though in case it doesn't and finds a shallow grave nearby with the rest of YQY in it. The rest of the plant seeds go on that.

The plant really is meant to go on fresh remains, but it tries it's best. But with the lack of material it's only partially successful.

Shen Jiu winds up with a 18 year old Yue Qingyuan who only vaguely remembers being older. (He remembers enough though, and he remembers more as he ages). And also a baby who's only a few months old but already has YQY's square jaw. The babies cries unless Shen Jiu is holding him.

I think any audience post-2020 would have good reason to be skeptical of any work that involved the whole world recognizing the seriousness of an existential threat and being able and willing to work together to resolve it. However, I also don't think that's what's actually going on in Project Hail Mary?

The whole point of the Project Hail Mary initiative is that they don't need the buy-in and cooperation of every government and company and institution in the world. They only need enough powerful sponsors, ones who are effectively willing to write them a blank check, that they can get access to the resources they need and bypass the obstacles that might stop them.*

Much of the flashback part of the book deals with Eva Stratt researching, contacting, and negotiating with disparate interests to make this happen. Taking one of the most drastic elements of the operation, the whole 'paving of the Sahara,' for example. Stratt didn't need the local governments to be willing to abscond their positions and offer up their treasuries to make that happen. The project negotiated it, through Redell, with the understanding that this initiative would end with many local African warlords in command of the world's biggest energy generators and would be vastly enriched thereby. They don't need to broker world peace or even necessarily local peace for that to happen.

And they don't need every government in the world to grant them an exemption from their respective laws, either; they only need the determination to take the necessary steps now and the willingness to take the consequences later. After all, even if an international court later rules against them, they can't exactly un-nuke Antarctica.

*The only major miss Weir made -- since this book was written in the early 2020s and predates some amount of the current fuckery -- was assuming that the US government would be one of those powerful sponsors. Which was a reasonable, if optimistic, extrapolation of how the US gov't has behaved with regards to past concerns, say the handling of Y2K or the ozone layer. The current one very well might not be so cooperative, but even then, the US government isn't the only power in the world with money and a military. Their participation would be helpful, but not required.

That's wrong. He shouldn't.

It's dark wherever he is and as he moves his hands slide across smooth cold stone.

That's wrong too. He doesn't have arms anymore.

Shen Jiu flexes his very real fingers and then moves a hand up to touch his face. They're blind in the dark, but he seems to have two eyes as well.

Shen Jiu sat up, his legs curling underneath him.

His movements echo off distant walls...

This is all wrong. He was in the Water Prison... Ripped to pieces by that beast.

Swallowing the shards of Xuan Su- finally a way to end himself within his grasp...

He gropes blindly for answers around him, and his fingers find a night pearl. It lit up with only the slightest trickle of qi, illuminating the space around him.

This is the Lingxi Caves.

"No." he says out loud, his voice hoarse and strange sounding in his ears.

He's naked, sitting in the middle of an insanely intricate array, in the last place in the world he should be.

There's a qiankun pouch nearby and... A letter.

He snatches it up and opens it to find Yue Qingyuan's familiar handwriting.

Xiao Jiu -

If you're reading this I am dead and I have failed you yet again.

I don't even know if these arrays will work. I may be writing this for no one but myself. I will never know, I'll be dead long before you finish regrowing. Even if it works I don't know what world you'll emerge into.

I'm so sorry. I'm always too late to save you, and yet I can't make myself stop trying.

I know you'll hate me for this too, but I have to try one final time.

I love you.

Qi-ge

"You bastard." Shen Jiu chokes out before dissolving into sobs.

He isn't sure how long he cries. At some point he throws the crumpled letter across the cave and has to go retrieve it later. He shoves it in the qiankun pouch before he can think better of it.

Somewhere in his crying jag the glow from the night pearl illuminates a faint jagged line running all the way around both of his thighs.

The beast had sent the sect leader his legs.

He dry heaves. There's nothing in his stomach to throw up. He dims the night pearl so he can't see the marks.

He shouldn't be here. He doesn't want to be here. He should be dead. Why can't he just die??

He lays there in the dark and thinks about never moving again. He's weak as a kitten currently. Surely it can't take that long for him to starve if he just doesn't move.

my brain worms have not left me alone on this so heres me projecting them out

Heres a lil extra for the road lmao

i’d really love for it to happen during a night hunt. they’re pursuing some particularly nasty monster and at some point it turns ugly. and dangerous. so much that xxc can’t keep up anymore. he’s quickly finding himself in serious trouble, desperately swinging his sword at the beast, he even falls down to the ground. and xy sees it. only he can’t really help him with whatever small knife he’s got for a weapon, so without thinking he does the only logical thing.

he pulls out jiangzai in all her two-bladed beauty and fights the monster himself. and it feels so good to not hold himself back anymore and be himself in a fight. he’s missed this even more than he thought. (bonus points if he used demonic cultivation on top of everything.)

of course he absolutely obliterates that poor evil creature. he doesn’t even quite notice what he’s doing until it’s over, only realizes how great he feels and how alive. maybe he’s a little out of breath when he comes to a halt in front of xxc who’s still sitting on the ground and hasn’t moved one inch since xy started his spectacle.

he and shuanghua recognized him, of course. immediately. and while xy laughs “all clear, daozhang” (he hasn’t quite grasped the situation yet) xxc is just sitting there like.

doppelganger

close ups under the cut!!!!!

Hideous things should be kept hidden away.

Something something while lbh was away in the abyss, sqq without noticing offended a misterious (demonic-succubi-esque???) cultivator with a weird thing for making dolls. She had dolls all over her secret workshop that she very kindly let him into when she heard about the famous Xiu Ya sword being in the city.

What she wanted of him? Who knows, sqq couldn't bring himself to care. She probably wanted his money or try to steal his hair, the hair of those dolls seemed very much like real hair, although he had to admit the level of details on these dolls were amazing.

(she wanted to trick him into buying one of her cursed dolls and steal his life energy little by little, but got wifebeamed by widow sqq during their conversation about how talented she was to be able to make so many dolls, and without really understanding he rejected her with little to no emotion on his face)

So she cursed him, and since sqq didn't feel anything bad at the moment he thought it just didn't work and left, not sparing the curse a single thought after their encounter.

The rest of the story goes as usual, excep that after he self detonates his soul doesn't go into the mushroom body, instead it got directly into the shape of a doll in the workshop of this woman.

NMJ thinks the way to make things work is to essentially guide JGY to a heroic path at all costs. JGY thinks he's being threatened. (He's not wrong.)

JGY thinks the way to make things work is to keep NMJ happy at all costs. NMJ thinks he's being manipulated. (He's not wrong.)

LXC thinks the way to make things work is to mediate between NMJ and JGY and not to take sides. NMJ and JGY think they're not receiving the support they deserve. (They're not wrong.)

It's happened like three times on the same character, and I just realized that, in universe, I have essentially trapped my poor character in a time loop where she keeps trying and failing to save her friends.

Sadly for my character, I am quite bad at video games, so this is probably gonna keep happening.

In my defense, I *am* trying to help her end the time loop. I'm just *Really* fucking bad at it. (........ And now I kind of want a story where someone is like in the middle of a standard timeloop plot, only to then meet the higher power that "decided to torment them", only find out that "no, actually. They are very much trying to help, not torment. They are just really bad at the stuff you have to do and also *spectacularly* unlucky."

Just— "I met a God I thought was cruely torturing me. Turns out they are actually trying to help me, they just have even less of an idea for what they're doing than I do. They apologized for all of it. A lot.")

If I say that this could be the funniest Bingzu reveal of all time would you forgive me