![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Quiet Night Thought: Chapter 2 [SVSSS]
Title: Quiet Night Thought
Fandom: Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
Pairing/Characters: Shen Jiu & Shen Yuan, Shen Jiu & everyone, Shen Yuan & Shang Qinghua, Shen Jiu & Yue Qingyuan
Rating: NR (probably T?)
Warnings:
Word Count: 2,376, Ch. 2 / 5; See All Chapters
Summary: Shen Yuan unwittingly gives character-growth advice to the Qing Jing head disciple Shen Jiu in a weak plot device of a shared dream. Of course, advice that's good from a plot perspective isn't always advice that's good for the individual, especially when that individual is a real person with real emotions and real trauma.
Things had been challenging since Shen Qingqiu had tried the Dream Seeking Wisdom flower and spoken to the strange spirit, but that was no matter. Things were always challenging. And while his relationship with his peers seemed stalled at suspicion and distrust, the seniors—and especially the Peak Lords—seemed very pleased with Shen Qingqiu’s improved behaviour, which arguably made it worth it. Even with the way the subservient and mild countenance he was forcing himself into brought back visceral memories of terror that made it impossible to sleep for more than an hour a night or keep down a solid meal.
A junior disciple, one considerably older than Shen Qingqiu, looked up as Shen Qingqiu entered the music hall and smiled. It was not a kind smile. This particular disciple’s delusions of grandeur had been firmly smothered at nearly the same time that Shen Qingqiu had arrived and been swiftly made succeeding disciple, and he projected his own failure onto Shen Qingqiu, despite the fact that his fall would have happened whether Shen Qingqiu had joined the sect or not. “Ah, Little Shen is here,” he said. “Remember how he used to pluck at the strings when he first came? He could have been a servant picking weeds!”
The disregard toward his position combined with the reminder, knowingly or not, of his own meagre beginnings, were enough to fill Shen Qingqiu with a freezing rage. He forced his attention inward, to the rhythm of his breaths, his pulse, his gait, and only when he was completely sure he had himself under control did he respond with, “Thanking shidi for his guidance, without which this shixiong would surely have never advanced.”
He meant this to be truly complimentary, though the lack of actual guidance made the statement rather untrue, but his previous responses to verbal warfare like this were enough to colour his words with layers of sarcasm, going by the expressions of the faces of the other junior disciples nearby. However, the hall master was also within earshot, and he gave Shen Qingqiu an approving nod.
That was enough. It would have to be enough.
After music practice, he searched for a secluded area to work on his current series of landscapes. One would think that finding an empty area in a sparsely populated mountain range would be a simple task, and yet lately, Shen Qingqiu could barely step outside of his rooms without his steps being dogged by someone or other. Liu Qingge’s distinctive fiery qi flared just out of sight to his left, and if Shen Qingqiu stretched his senses, he could feel the ocean of Yue Qingyuan’s qi settled hopefully near Shen Qingqiu’s rooms.
Shen Qingqiu had been certain that with his acrimony apparently vanished, Yue Qingyuan would find other things to spend his time—and stipend—on than a reminder of his shameful past, but instead, Yue Qingyuan seemed buoyed by Shen Qingqiu’s new careful politeness. His steps were lighter, his smiles came more easily, and rather than seeking out Shen Qingqiu’s presence only when a sufficient excuse seemed to justify it, he could now be expected to appear by Shen Qingqiu’s residence on a daily basis. Shen Qingqiu couldn’t understand it, and the combined effort of maintaining his composure, hiding his feelings, and trying to parse Yue Qingyuan’s intentions was exhausting. And Shen Qingqiu really couldn’t handle even more exhaustion right now.
He did not return to his rooms, and though he avoided the copse of trees where he knew Liu Qingge was lurking, he felt the odious little Bai Zhan disciple follow him at an entirely indiscreet distance.
But if he suppressed his qi signature and lost his tail, Liu Qingge’s suspicion of him would only increase.
He sighed. He hoped Liu Qingge would lose interest in him eventually, but the evidence of their shared history suggested that Liu Qingge was about as likely to let anything go as Shen Qingqiu himself was. So… not a chance.
Shen Qingqiu headed toward a pavilion with a pleasant view of Ku Xing Peak, and let Liu Qingge follow behind.
One nice thing about his tail being Liu Qingge was that there was no attempt at contact. Liu Qingge simply followed him and watched him like the little creep he was, and no words were exchanged. Shen Qingqiu didn’t have to come up with pleasantries or work to keep his expression neutral in the face of someone he despised—he could simply look out into the distance at the mountains rising from the clouds and do his best to copy that majestic scene using paints and paper.
Of course, it wasn’t only Yue Qingyuan and Liu Qingge who were being irritatingly sticky lately.
“S-Shen-s-shixiong!”
Shen Qingqiu closed his eyes to try to centre himself. Of all the succeeding disciples to appear and attempt to speak to him, did it really have to be the loudest of them all?
“Shang-shidi,” he acknowledged as neutrally as he was able.
Shang Qinghua laughed nervously. “Shi-shixiong, I brought a special tea I thought you might like! Very rare!”
Another ‘cure,’ then. Shang Qinghua had been appearing with more and more obscure plants and ingredients as time passed, seemingly trying to disperse whatever curse or mind-controlling power was forcing Shen Qingqiu to basic politeness. It was incredibly irritating.
But on the other hand…
It was also somewhat nice that Shang Qinghua evidently didn’t see his personality as something that needed to be fixed. Instead, Shang Qinghua was going through considerable effort to try to help his Shen Qingqiu, even though there were certainly no positive feelings between them, and up until now, Shang Qinghua had always seemed terrified of him, which Shen Qingqiu found both amusing and flattering.
Shen Qingqiu called upon his inner strength and said, “Thank you, shidi. Would you care to have it with me? I’m almost done with this layer of paint.”
“Aha, actually—”
“Sit down, shidi,” Shen Qingqiu snapped, losing patience. He grimaced. “Pardon this shixiong for his rudeness. I hope you will consider sharing this tea with me.”
Shang Qinghua sat.
There was blessed silence for a moment, before Shang Qinghua began muttering to himself. “Isn’t this kind of anachronistic?” he asked nonsensically. As was so often the case with him, he didn’t seem to be aware that his words were perfectly intelligible, even if their meaning wasn’t. “I swear this style wasn’t invented until… I don’t know, like, the 1700s or something? It’s not like I ever spent more time studying art than it took to scroll down a wikipedia page, I mean did Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky ever claim to be an art expert? No, thank you. But I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a painting like this on deviantART before, like… what the fuck even?”
Shen Qingqiu spent some time wondering if he should be offended that his painting was apparently either old-fashioned, a renewal of style, or a copy of someone else’s work, but with effort, he reminded himself that Shang Qinghua’s opinion of art, like his opinion of most things, was uninformed and unimportant.
“Finished,” he said at last, and attempted a smile. Shang Qinghua flinched back dramatically, and Shen Qingqiu sighed and dropped the weak smile. “Let’s have that tea, shidi.”
It took weeks of covert surveillance before Liu Qingge was willing to grudgingly accept the evidence of his own eyes.
Shen Qingqiu wasn’t being possessed by a demon. He wasn’t under a compulsion. He was probably, maybe not even in the process of executing a cowardly and traitorous plan involving pretending to be a kindly shixiong before selling all of their sect secrets to their worst enemies, like—like—
Liu Qingge should perhaps pay more attention to his lessons concerning intersect politics.
But anyway, none of those theories seemed consistent with what Liu Qingge was actually observing, which is that Shen Qingqiu was growing more and more brittle and wan as his weeks of kindness continued. He had always reacted like a feral cat when someone approached him suddenly or from behind, but now he went still. And if someone reached out to touch him, he flinched.
No one seemed to notice. To be fair, it wasn’t easy to see, but Liu Qingge was used to watching Shen Qingqiu’s every minute movement, just as he watched his opponents during battle. And Shen Qingqiu’s movements had changed in ways that were… objectively worrying.
Was Shen Qingqiu being threatened? It seemed impossible, but Liu Qingge couldn’t think of anything else that could explain the way he was acting. The idea that a Cang Qiong disciple could feel threatened even when safe within its powerful wards was concerning. Who could produce a threat that powerful?
Who—or what? Liu Qingge remembered that this behavioural change had occurred right after Shen Qingqiu was rumoured to have tried the Dream Seeking Wisdom flower. Everyone else who had tried it had reported it to be a dud, but… what if Shen Qingqiu did get into contact with something? Something that didn’t like what it saw when it looked at him, and something that wasn’t willing to lift its claws from his mind?
Liu Qingge didn’t like Shen Qingqiu. Okay, that was putting it mildly. Liu Qingge hated Shen Qingqiu. But like hell would he allow some damn flower to threaten a martial sibling. Even if that martial sibling was Shen Qingqiu.
Shen Yuan was dreaming of mist again, but when the mist began to clear, he realised that he was in his own apartment, reclining on his couch with his laptop balanced on his stomach. Kind of anticlimactic, really.
He was in his own apartment, alone, and then he was in his own apartment, and he wasn’t alone. The disciple from his other misty dream was peering around his completely normal flat with wide eyes, taking in the posters, the shelves stacked with meticulously organised books and games and DVDs behind rows of figurines and models.
Shen Yuan squinted at him. It was definitely the same disciple, but in the unforgiving glare of the sun lamp (the actual sun being impeded by his black-out curtains), the disciple seemed worse for wear—pasty rather than pale, gaunt rather than slender, enervated rather than tired.
“You been sleeping okay?” he asked, not bothering to sit up to look mystically wise. LARPing his way through one dream was fun, but he didn’t intend to make it a regular activity.
The disciple flinched, but just like last time, his internal struggle passed, and he looked at Shen Yuan with his intense eyes. This close, Shen Yuan realised they were a bright green. “No,” he admitted. “Sleeping is difficult when I feel so… anxious.” Those green eyes slanted to the side as he spoke, which was just an embarrassingly obvious tell.
Shen Yuan sighed. “Are you really going to waste my time by lying to me?”
The disciple scowled at him, but then he visibly gathered himself and said through his teeth, “I am afraid. I have been taking your advice, but constantly bowing before others’ aggression brings back bad memories.”
Shen Yuan studied the disciple for a moment. He wanted to roll his eyes over the disciple’s drama, but the truth was that some of those tragic backstories in his webnovels made his skin crawl to think of. It wasn’t a reach to think that this character might have one of those awful backstories driving his revenge plot, or whatever. He hadn’t really thought about the physical effects of trauma, though; his novels tended to skip over that part.
“...Huh,” he said ponderously. What do you even do with trauma in the real world, anyway? “Exposure therapy?” he tried.
The disciple frowned at him, trying to understand.
Shen Yuan shrugged and sat up to grab his tablet, which had travelled with him and the rest of his flat into this dream. “Sit down,” he told the disciple, jerking his head toward the cozy armchair his sister had given him—or herself, really, as she’d only purchased it so that she’d have somewhere to sit when he was sprawled out over the entire couch. He pulled up a few pages on exposure therapy and passed it over to the disciple, showing him how to scroll through the pages and click on new tabs.
He had already returned to his own reading when it occurred to him that the disciple might not be able to read the text. However, when he glanced over to check, the disciple’s eyes were moving along the text fluidly with all appearance of comprehension. Of course, it’s not like they’d had any trouble understanding one another’s speech, though Shen Yuan was definitely speaking in modern Mandarin. His xianxia setting must be from one of those webnovels or dramas that didn’t even pretend to be vaguely inspired by period-typical language, then, and Shen Yuan’s memory of the architecture he’d observed in the last dream suggested that it was a widespread issue in his canon. Shen Yuan felt a twinge of disappointment—this would have been the perfect opportunity to practise his ancient Chinese!
“Hey,” he said, turning back to his laptop. “What’s your name, anyway?”
The disciple didn’t pull his eerie green eyes away from the tablet screen. “This one is called Jiu, surnamed Shen.”
“Cool,” said Shen Yuan without much interest. “I’m Shen Yuan. Crazy coincidence that we have the same surname, right?” Us and 6 million other people, he thought drily.
But Shen Jiu looked up at him in surprise, and fair, webnovels tended to give everyone unique surnames, even as the names grew less believable than the literal magic. Shen Jiu probably hadn’t shared his surname with at least two other classmates every single year of his life.
At Shen Yuan’s ambivalence, Shen Jiu eventually returned to the tablet, only bothering Shen Yuan when he ran out of open tabs, so that Shen Yuan had to show him how to open more, and how to follow hyperlinks. The two continued reading quietly for what felt like hours, until the mists wafted into the room and thickened around them, and Shen Yuan woke up alone.
All in all, it had been a kind of nice dream.
Next Chapter
Fandom: Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
Pairing/Characters: Shen Jiu & Shen Yuan, Shen Jiu & everyone, Shen Yuan & Shang Qinghua, Shen Jiu & Yue Qingyuan
Rating: NR (probably T?)
Warnings:
Word Count: 2,376, Ch. 2 / 5; See All Chapters
Summary: Shen Yuan unwittingly gives character-growth advice to the Qing Jing head disciple Shen Jiu in a weak plot device of a shared dream. Of course, advice that's good from a plot perspective isn't always advice that's good for the individual, especially when that individual is a real person with real emotions and real trauma.
Things had been challenging since Shen Qingqiu had tried the Dream Seeking Wisdom flower and spoken to the strange spirit, but that was no matter. Things were always challenging. And while his relationship with his peers seemed stalled at suspicion and distrust, the seniors—and especially the Peak Lords—seemed very pleased with Shen Qingqiu’s improved behaviour, which arguably made it worth it. Even with the way the subservient and mild countenance he was forcing himself into brought back visceral memories of terror that made it impossible to sleep for more than an hour a night or keep down a solid meal.
A junior disciple, one considerably older than Shen Qingqiu, looked up as Shen Qingqiu entered the music hall and smiled. It was not a kind smile. This particular disciple’s delusions of grandeur had been firmly smothered at nearly the same time that Shen Qingqiu had arrived and been swiftly made succeeding disciple, and he projected his own failure onto Shen Qingqiu, despite the fact that his fall would have happened whether Shen Qingqiu had joined the sect or not. “Ah, Little Shen is here,” he said. “Remember how he used to pluck at the strings when he first came? He could have been a servant picking weeds!”
The disregard toward his position combined with the reminder, knowingly or not, of his own meagre beginnings, were enough to fill Shen Qingqiu with a freezing rage. He forced his attention inward, to the rhythm of his breaths, his pulse, his gait, and only when he was completely sure he had himself under control did he respond with, “Thanking shidi for his guidance, without which this shixiong would surely have never advanced.”
He meant this to be truly complimentary, though the lack of actual guidance made the statement rather untrue, but his previous responses to verbal warfare like this were enough to colour his words with layers of sarcasm, going by the expressions of the faces of the other junior disciples nearby. However, the hall master was also within earshot, and he gave Shen Qingqiu an approving nod.
That was enough. It would have to be enough.
After music practice, he searched for a secluded area to work on his current series of landscapes. One would think that finding an empty area in a sparsely populated mountain range would be a simple task, and yet lately, Shen Qingqiu could barely step outside of his rooms without his steps being dogged by someone or other. Liu Qingge’s distinctive fiery qi flared just out of sight to his left, and if Shen Qingqiu stretched his senses, he could feel the ocean of Yue Qingyuan’s qi settled hopefully near Shen Qingqiu’s rooms.
Shen Qingqiu had been certain that with his acrimony apparently vanished, Yue Qingyuan would find other things to spend his time—and stipend—on than a reminder of his shameful past, but instead, Yue Qingyuan seemed buoyed by Shen Qingqiu’s new careful politeness. His steps were lighter, his smiles came more easily, and rather than seeking out Shen Qingqiu’s presence only when a sufficient excuse seemed to justify it, he could now be expected to appear by Shen Qingqiu’s residence on a daily basis. Shen Qingqiu couldn’t understand it, and the combined effort of maintaining his composure, hiding his feelings, and trying to parse Yue Qingyuan’s intentions was exhausting. And Shen Qingqiu really couldn’t handle even more exhaustion right now.
He did not return to his rooms, and though he avoided the copse of trees where he knew Liu Qingge was lurking, he felt the odious little Bai Zhan disciple follow him at an entirely indiscreet distance.
But if he suppressed his qi signature and lost his tail, Liu Qingge’s suspicion of him would only increase.
He sighed. He hoped Liu Qingge would lose interest in him eventually, but the evidence of their shared history suggested that Liu Qingge was about as likely to let anything go as Shen Qingqiu himself was. So… not a chance.
Shen Qingqiu headed toward a pavilion with a pleasant view of Ku Xing Peak, and let Liu Qingge follow behind.
One nice thing about his tail being Liu Qingge was that there was no attempt at contact. Liu Qingge simply followed him and watched him like the little creep he was, and no words were exchanged. Shen Qingqiu didn’t have to come up with pleasantries or work to keep his expression neutral in the face of someone he despised—he could simply look out into the distance at the mountains rising from the clouds and do his best to copy that majestic scene using paints and paper.
Of course, it wasn’t only Yue Qingyuan and Liu Qingge who were being irritatingly sticky lately.
“S-Shen-s-shixiong!”
Shen Qingqiu closed his eyes to try to centre himself. Of all the succeeding disciples to appear and attempt to speak to him, did it really have to be the loudest of them all?
“Shang-shidi,” he acknowledged as neutrally as he was able.
Shang Qinghua laughed nervously. “Shi-shixiong, I brought a special tea I thought you might like! Very rare!”
Another ‘cure,’ then. Shang Qinghua had been appearing with more and more obscure plants and ingredients as time passed, seemingly trying to disperse whatever curse or mind-controlling power was forcing Shen Qingqiu to basic politeness. It was incredibly irritating.
But on the other hand…
It was also somewhat nice that Shang Qinghua evidently didn’t see his personality as something that needed to be fixed. Instead, Shang Qinghua was going through considerable effort to try to help his Shen Qingqiu, even though there were certainly no positive feelings between them, and up until now, Shang Qinghua had always seemed terrified of him, which Shen Qingqiu found both amusing and flattering.
Shen Qingqiu called upon his inner strength and said, “Thank you, shidi. Would you care to have it with me? I’m almost done with this layer of paint.”
“Aha, actually—”
“Sit down, shidi,” Shen Qingqiu snapped, losing patience. He grimaced. “Pardon this shixiong for his rudeness. I hope you will consider sharing this tea with me.”
Shang Qinghua sat.
There was blessed silence for a moment, before Shang Qinghua began muttering to himself. “Isn’t this kind of anachronistic?” he asked nonsensically. As was so often the case with him, he didn’t seem to be aware that his words were perfectly intelligible, even if their meaning wasn’t. “I swear this style wasn’t invented until… I don’t know, like, the 1700s or something? It’s not like I ever spent more time studying art than it took to scroll down a wikipedia page, I mean did Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky ever claim to be an art expert? No, thank you. But I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a painting like this on deviantART before, like… what the fuck even?”
Shen Qingqiu spent some time wondering if he should be offended that his painting was apparently either old-fashioned, a renewal of style, or a copy of someone else’s work, but with effort, he reminded himself that Shang Qinghua’s opinion of art, like his opinion of most things, was uninformed and unimportant.
“Finished,” he said at last, and attempted a smile. Shang Qinghua flinched back dramatically, and Shen Qingqiu sighed and dropped the weak smile. “Let’s have that tea, shidi.”
It took weeks of covert surveillance before Liu Qingge was willing to grudgingly accept the evidence of his own eyes.
Shen Qingqiu wasn’t being possessed by a demon. He wasn’t under a compulsion. He was probably, maybe not even in the process of executing a cowardly and traitorous plan involving pretending to be a kindly shixiong before selling all of their sect secrets to their worst enemies, like—like—
Liu Qingge should perhaps pay more attention to his lessons concerning intersect politics.
But anyway, none of those theories seemed consistent with what Liu Qingge was actually observing, which is that Shen Qingqiu was growing more and more brittle and wan as his weeks of kindness continued. He had always reacted like a feral cat when someone approached him suddenly or from behind, but now he went still. And if someone reached out to touch him, he flinched.
No one seemed to notice. To be fair, it wasn’t easy to see, but Liu Qingge was used to watching Shen Qingqiu’s every minute movement, just as he watched his opponents during battle. And Shen Qingqiu’s movements had changed in ways that were… objectively worrying.
Was Shen Qingqiu being threatened? It seemed impossible, but Liu Qingge couldn’t think of anything else that could explain the way he was acting. The idea that a Cang Qiong disciple could feel threatened even when safe within its powerful wards was concerning. Who could produce a threat that powerful?
Who—or what? Liu Qingge remembered that this behavioural change had occurred right after Shen Qingqiu was rumoured to have tried the Dream Seeking Wisdom flower. Everyone else who had tried it had reported it to be a dud, but… what if Shen Qingqiu did get into contact with something? Something that didn’t like what it saw when it looked at him, and something that wasn’t willing to lift its claws from his mind?
Liu Qingge didn’t like Shen Qingqiu. Okay, that was putting it mildly. Liu Qingge hated Shen Qingqiu. But like hell would he allow some damn flower to threaten a martial sibling. Even if that martial sibling was Shen Qingqiu.
Shen Yuan was dreaming of mist again, but when the mist began to clear, he realised that he was in his own apartment, reclining on his couch with his laptop balanced on his stomach. Kind of anticlimactic, really.
He was in his own apartment, alone, and then he was in his own apartment, and he wasn’t alone. The disciple from his other misty dream was peering around his completely normal flat with wide eyes, taking in the posters, the shelves stacked with meticulously organised books and games and DVDs behind rows of figurines and models.
Shen Yuan squinted at him. It was definitely the same disciple, but in the unforgiving glare of the sun lamp (the actual sun being impeded by his black-out curtains), the disciple seemed worse for wear—pasty rather than pale, gaunt rather than slender, enervated rather than tired.
“You been sleeping okay?” he asked, not bothering to sit up to look mystically wise. LARPing his way through one dream was fun, but he didn’t intend to make it a regular activity.
The disciple flinched, but just like last time, his internal struggle passed, and he looked at Shen Yuan with his intense eyes. This close, Shen Yuan realised they were a bright green. “No,” he admitted. “Sleeping is difficult when I feel so… anxious.” Those green eyes slanted to the side as he spoke, which was just an embarrassingly obvious tell.
Shen Yuan sighed. “Are you really going to waste my time by lying to me?”
The disciple scowled at him, but then he visibly gathered himself and said through his teeth, “I am afraid. I have been taking your advice, but constantly bowing before others’ aggression brings back bad memories.”
Shen Yuan studied the disciple for a moment. He wanted to roll his eyes over the disciple’s drama, but the truth was that some of those tragic backstories in his webnovels made his skin crawl to think of. It wasn’t a reach to think that this character might have one of those awful backstories driving his revenge plot, or whatever. He hadn’t really thought about the physical effects of trauma, though; his novels tended to skip over that part.
“...Huh,” he said ponderously. What do you even do with trauma in the real world, anyway? “Exposure therapy?” he tried.
The disciple frowned at him, trying to understand.
Shen Yuan shrugged and sat up to grab his tablet, which had travelled with him and the rest of his flat into this dream. “Sit down,” he told the disciple, jerking his head toward the cozy armchair his sister had given him—or herself, really, as she’d only purchased it so that she’d have somewhere to sit when he was sprawled out over the entire couch. He pulled up a few pages on exposure therapy and passed it over to the disciple, showing him how to scroll through the pages and click on new tabs.
He had already returned to his own reading when it occurred to him that the disciple might not be able to read the text. However, when he glanced over to check, the disciple’s eyes were moving along the text fluidly with all appearance of comprehension. Of course, it’s not like they’d had any trouble understanding one another’s speech, though Shen Yuan was definitely speaking in modern Mandarin. His xianxia setting must be from one of those webnovels or dramas that didn’t even pretend to be vaguely inspired by period-typical language, then, and Shen Yuan’s memory of the architecture he’d observed in the last dream suggested that it was a widespread issue in his canon. Shen Yuan felt a twinge of disappointment—this would have been the perfect opportunity to practise his ancient Chinese!
“Hey,” he said, turning back to his laptop. “What’s your name, anyway?”
The disciple didn’t pull his eerie green eyes away from the tablet screen. “This one is called Jiu, surnamed Shen.”
“Cool,” said Shen Yuan without much interest. “I’m Shen Yuan. Crazy coincidence that we have the same surname, right?” Us and 6 million other people, he thought drily.
But Shen Jiu looked up at him in surprise, and fair, webnovels tended to give everyone unique surnames, even as the names grew less believable than the literal magic. Shen Jiu probably hadn’t shared his surname with at least two other classmates every single year of his life.
At Shen Yuan’s ambivalence, Shen Jiu eventually returned to the tablet, only bothering Shen Yuan when he ran out of open tabs, so that Shen Yuan had to show him how to open more, and how to follow hyperlinks. The two continued reading quietly for what felt like hours, until the mists wafted into the room and thickened around them, and Shen Yuan woke up alone.
All in all, it had been a kind of nice dream.
Next Chapter