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Shen Yuan wasn't certain there was ever going to be any comfortable way to wake up from being dead. In a hospital it was safest, but definitely not comfortable. Anything else had even higher levels of alarm going for it, even if he had woken up in a nice plush comfortable bed. Unless it was his own bed and somehow literally nobody had known he had sort of died and he just got to go back to being angry at webnovels and doing absolutely nothing with his life.
He did not wake up from being dead to that.
He woke up on the floor, outside, straight in the dirt. With some very alarmed looking guy that he had never seen before grabbing at him.
Shen Yuan had always sworn that if he transmigrated he wouldn't be one of those people who thought the locals were reenactors or that he was on a movie set or something, and to his credit he didn't do that.
What he did do was attempt to scramble away, fall down, notice the dead man laying not two meters away with a fucking sword sticking out of his back, fail to make the connection that if the alive guy still had his own sword then he probably wasn't the one who did the stabbing, and freaked out.
Somewhere between him freaking out and him trying to get the hell away into the woods, fancy robes dude had knocked him out.
Shen Yuan knew that because what seemed like seconds later he was waking up in a nice bed. Not his bed, this place was super rustic, but it was a bed in a really plain but nice room. Nice sheets. Weird pillow.
Right about the time that a boy in incredibly fancy clothes came in--not the one who had been stabbing adjacent, a new one--he was piecing things together.
He couldn't figure out where he was yet (he would later argue to himself in his own defense that Airplane had changed the Cang Qiong peak insignia so many times that even the most devoted hate reader couldn't be expected to actually have them memorized) but it clearly wasn't modern China. And also this wasn't his body, he didn't think. He was taller, his hair was a hell of a lot longer, and his hands looked different.
"How are you feeling," the new guy said, pulling a stool over and sitting on it.
"Fine," Shen Yuan said honestly, shrugging. He felt okay? Kind of strung out, but also like he could go run a marathon and stand half a chance at beating it.
"My shifu--" fuck, more evidence that he had transmigrated, "wants me to ask some orienting questions, to make sure you're okay. Are you okay with that?"
"That's fine," Shen Yuan said, feeling uneasy. Part of him wanted to say how bad could it be, but the more rational part really didn't want to play twenty questions of 'does this fuck even know what setting he's in' with someone who may or may not be really important. There was no way to know! Could he say the wrong thing and get killed? Was he another disciple of this sect, assuming this was a cultivator thing? Was he some rando? Was he about to get got for murdering whoever the dead dude had been--or worse, framed for it if it turned out he hadn't done it?
"Do you know where you are?" The disciple asked.
Shen Yuan hesitated, took stock of things--the bare room, the complete lack of insignia or fancy robes for himself--and went for it. "Not a clue."
Amnesia was the absolute lamest play, but with luck he really was some rando and he could get away with ignorance without directly admitting lack of memory.
"You're on Cang Qiong," the disciple said, calmly moving past it in a way that would have been reassuring if he had said literally any other words.
Seriously, he could have told Shen Yuan that he was in the deepest pits of hell and it would have been better news! Shen Yuan pressed his lips together, trying to keep his panic entirely internal.
"Do you--are you okay?"
Shen Yuan attempted to say that he was fine, but when he tried he really couldn't manage to actually get any words out.
Two panic attacks and several panicked declaration that he was perfectly fine later, there was a distinguished old dude with a nice beard in the room. Shen Yuan had found out that Mu Qingfang was Mu Qingfang and promptly had another panic attack because Fuck that set where he was in the timeline terribly, and at some point someone had force fed him tea until he stopped panicing enough that he could just drink the tea like a normal person.
He didn't feel like it was helping but at least he was able to do basic things like breathe and confront his current reality.
"You're in a safe place," the old peak lord told him, in a voice that was probably very reassuring to most people. "You had a qi deviation and we think it affected your memory, so we'd like to try to figure out how much. It's possible you'll have emotional reactions to things and not be certain why, but that's normal with this sort of situation."
It absolutely was not normal with Shen Yuan--or he guessed Shen Jiu, the old man had called him that at one point while trying to calm him down so that was probably his name and he should get used to it as quickly as possible--considering the situation.
He couldn't tell the old dude that though.
He also couldn't tell anyone here that Cang Qiong absolutely was not a safe place. It was, in fact, the absolute opposite of a safe place! Especially as a transmigrator who transmigrated into some dude with a Shen surname! The only things that would make him feel safer were confirmation that some other asshole was off on Qing Jing being Shen Qingqiu already and to be very off of this mountain as soon as possible!
He couldn't just rush out of the door though, not without them thinking he was panicking again (he was not) and dragging him back in, so he tried to play it cool and drank his tea and answered the really careful questions as vaguely as possible. Amnesia wasn't his favorite excuse so he was trying to avoid that, too many pitfalls with it, but it looked pretty inescapable.
He was fine until the guy who had been there when he first woke up walked in--he was fine past that, even, because it wasn't that big of a deal, right? It was just some rando, surely.
And then Mu Qingfang called the guy Yue-shixiong.
Shen Yuan--Shen Jiu couldn't really remember exactly what it was he said while trying to get the heck out of that room, but it wasn't very convincing or effective at anything but getting Yue Qingyuan out of the room.
Fuck.
He spent the next hour not listening to a single thing anyone said in favor of fending off another panic attack and trying to convince him that he was definitely not that Shen no matter how unlikely it was that Yue Qingyuan would be overly invested in multiple rando Shen people. Apparently he'd stabbed some dude and saved Yue Qingyuan's life? Had he somehow transmigrated right into the center of the original villain's backstory and entry onto Cang Qiong?
Whatever, he needed to get out of here. Either he had transmigrated into the scum villain and needed to not become part of Cang Qiong at all costs, or there was some actual Shen Qingqiu somewhere around here who he really never wanted to meet.
It took about two days of carefully keeping calm and very vehemently insisting that he did not want to talk to Yue Qingyuan for Mu Qingfang to stop hovering somewhat.
It was two days of planning.
Shen Jiu knew that he couldn't stay here. At all. The longer he stayed here the more likely it was that he would get tied up in the plot and the more that happened the more likely it was that he'd die a horrible limbless death.
He really really did not want to die that way.
Leaving without telling anyone wasn't exactly a great prospect--he had a couple changes of clothing in this room but no shoes (had he been wearing shoes when he transmigrated in? He didn't think so), no supplies, and definitely no weapons--but even if he got eaten by something it was probably better than staying. Realistically he'd make it out of here, figure out some way to use this body's cultivation to earn money while not setting off another qi deviation, and muddle his way along fine.
He didn't seem to have a system, and nothing was forcing him to make choices like the original (assuming he was even the original villain and this wasn't all a major case of mistaken identity on his part) so in theory he could just disappear. It wasn't like Yue Qingyuan could be that attached and Shen Jiu had no intention of guilt tripping him about the rescue or whatever it was the original may or may not have done.
In the end he waited for a night when things were busy and decided to go for it. He very reluctantly didn't bring anything from the room--if he got caught he needed plausible deniability in order to try again.
Liu Qingge had vaguely heard about some drama happening with Yue Qingyuan--something about encountering a childhood friend with amnesia--but he honestly had been more preoccupied with an upcoming hunt and not really focusing on it all. If Yue-shixiong himself had told him then of course he would have paid full attention! But rumors were just rumors and not really worth time that could be spent doing more important things like fighting and sparring and studying and planning routes and fighting.
So it really wasn't all that surprising when he noticed someone sneaking into a valley and didn't make the connection immediately.
"What are you doing?" He demanded, after swooping down on his sword towards the person. He might have grabbed him or something, but, honestly the guy looked about two seconds from being blown over by the wind.
They were closest, by a good bit, to Qian Cao. They weren't that far from one of the main paths up that peak.
The guy was wearing a single layer of thin clothing, no shoes, and had his hair in a simple braid.
It didn't take a genius to recognize that this was probably a patient.
"I'm taking a walk." The guy crossed his arms, looking affronted despite the fact that he was standing in the middle of the underbrush dressed for bed. "I just got lost, is all, the paths are windy"
Liu Qingge frowned at him, trying to figure out what he was dealing with here.
"Did you come down from Qian Cao?"
"How about you just point me back to a path and I'll find my own way out?" the guy said.
"Are you trying to run off from Qian Cao?" Liu Qingge said, somewhat incredulously. It wasn't like the healers peak ever took prisoners. Or outside patients who looked pretty much perfectly fine.
He would have guessed this was a disciple from another peak who had gotten tired of being fussed at and was trying to go home…but there was way too much odd going on for that to make sense to him. He didn't remember ever seeing this guy, and he felt for some reason like he would have remembered if he had.
"Of course not." The guy crossed his arms, frowning up at Liu Qingge. "I was just going."
"Where?"
"On a walk, I already said."
Liu Qingge sighed. "Do you need help getting back to Qian Cao?"
"No."
"You said you were lost."
"Not that lost."
….
Mu Qingfang was going to be really annoyed at him if some patient slipped off in the middle of the night and it turned out Liu Qingge had seen him and hadn't stopped him from going.
The guy complained the whole way back up the peak. Apparently it was rude to just grab people and haul them onto your sword even when they were sneaking around. And it was cold, which was somehow now Liu Qingge's problem. And it was windy. And also rando guy didn't need help. And what if he cut his feet standing on a sword. And then more accusations of rudeness.
All the complaining dropped off into sulking as they got back to Qian Cao's main building, confirming Liu Qingge's instincts had been right even before Mu Qingfang ran out to confirm them much more directly.
The other head disciple didn't seem all that upset though, weirdly. Liu Qingge hung around while the healers herded the strange near-escapee guy back to his room, mostly out of curiosity.
"He didn't seem panicked." Mu Qingfang said, happily.
"He wasn't panicked, just a brat." Liu Qingge said, irritably. He really wasn't sure what to make of this whole thing.
"Not at all?" Mu Qingfang asked, perking up. "Did his qi feel like it was spiking?"
"No?"
Mu shixiong pressed his lips together, thinking. "Do you have any major plans for the next few weeks?"
Liu Qingge shot him a wary look.
"It's just--Shen Jiu is almost constantly veering towards another qi deviation. We've had to pull him away from several, and it's not easy because they tend to show as panic at first and that makes him uncooperative. It's not even always triggered by normal conversation--sometimes I'll be doing something completely different or things will be entirely silent and suddenly he's deviating."
"It may have been the walk was good for him. Or a fluke."
"Maybe!" Mu Qingfang said, smiling slyly, "But, I would appreciate it if you would step in and help out a little bit, just in case it was a combination of things."
Liu Qingge didn't exactly have anything to cancel, but he didn't start planning another hunt either. Even though there were a few things he most certainly could start planning--or even leave to go do.
It was depressingly easy to set everything aside. All he had to do was tell his Shifu the basics and he was being encouraged to work with the other head disciples.
"How are you this much trouble?" Liu Qingge asked, irritably, before even saying hello. He was standing outside, waiting while Shen Jiu tried to get away from the healers that were fussing at him because apparently they didn't have faith in his ability to go for a walk without three tonics and a babysitter.
"How are you this rude, aren't you supposed to be fancy?" Shen Jiu demanded.
He was admittedly sort of annoyed at everything right now after two days of being hovered over. The 'went for a walk and got lost' explanation had turned out even less convincing than his worst case scenario. Worse, it had resulted in a visit from Yue Qingyuan which had resulted in a panic attack which meant that Shen Jiu's head was still feeling terrible. Mu Qingfang kept fussing about qi and qi deviations and at this point Shen Jiu was convinced that having usable qi was less of a useful thing than it was a trap.
He didn't say that, though, he was smart enough to know that a bunch of cultivators wouldn't understand that sentiment at all.
Even though they damn well should have, seeing as he had to have someone come mind him just for a walk.
…Was this how the original had ended up so bad off with Liu Qingge? Had Yue Qingyuan put him up to this?
After three minutes of awkward silent walking down the path away from the Qian Cao buildings, Shen Jiu had to ask. "Did Yue Qingyuan make you come to fuss at me? I can go for a walk without being minded the whole time."
"Mu Qingfang asked me to, and no you can't, you got lost last time while barefoot and undressed."
"I was dressed," he insisted. "Barefoot yes but very covered in fabric."
"You know what I mean."
"Just because it wasn't fancy doesn't mean I wasn't perfectly dressed."
"You want to leave, and you can't even remember which clothes are meant for bed and which clothes are meant for walking around."
That was…technically true, but also escapees couldn't really afford to be picky about what they were wearing. And transmigration didn't come with a manual! Sure, he'd literally written the wiki on this setting, but the narration didn't really include interesting things like clothing types that normal people wore and any historical research had been proven incorrect by the narrative so quickly that he was certain Airplane was only mentioning clothing details when it would annoy Peerless Cucumber in specific.
"It's not like I'm just completely empty headed!" Shen Jiu protested. "I'm keeping up with you fine right now, aren't I? And no that isn't an invitation to go running off to prove something, you're a fancy cultivator and I've got a busted foundation. But I can go out and do things perfectly fine and know what's out there, if not the exact people and places."
"People and places tend to be important things to know."
"I can relearn them."
"Not if you rush out and get yourself dead by eating something that looks edible but turns out to be a qi poison."
Shen Jiu took a breath, told himself that pulling out his inner wiki editor wasn't going to help anything.
"I wouldn't do that, I know my plants."
Liu Qingge gave him a skeptical look, and apparently that was all the challenge that Shen Jiu needed to take off into spiteful information dumps.
Liu Qingge hadn't meant to issue a challenge. If anything, it would be incredibly rude of him to do so given that he knew Shen Jiu had pretty severe amnesia. Clearly the guy wasn't completely wiped, he remembered how to do things and had reactions to things, but it would still be a really mean spirited thing to do. Even he he didn't begrudingly almost like the guy, he wouldn't have done that.
So Liu Qingge hadn't expected him to actually remember plant facts.
Who remembered plant facts, but not basic things about themself?
Shen Jiu did, apparently, and within ten minutes Liu Qingge was convinced that he had been on his way to be some sort of plant focused scholar because otherwise there was no explanation for all of this.
Granted, most scholars weren't really the type to identify a plant by going "That's either a Creeping Wisteria that someone clearly forced to grow in the wrong fucking light based off the piss poor state of its flowers or a Willow Willow, but I'm going to give you lot the benefit of the doubt to assume you were just stupid about plant sunlight needs rather than the sort of stupid that would plant a sex pollen along a normal path so we're going to assume it's a Creeping Wisteria.", but that just made it far more entertaining than Liu Qingge wanted to really admit it was.
"Well," he said mildly, when there was a break in the stream of plant knowledge. "I'm pretty sure it's the one that isn't sex pollen."
"I would fucking hope so. Or--not fucking--you know what I mean."
Liu Qingge decided to keep his mouth shut and just not say anything. Cute guy he just met talking about sex pollen was just, not going to be somewhere he let his mind go. Especially a guy he was supposed to be taking out for a walk to keep him calm.
"There's a bunch of weird plants in the valleys around An Ding," he said instead. "I think they throw seeds they can't use down there and odd things happen. Adaptations and strains that nobody really has time to sort out. Nobody really goes there so it sort of grows wild."
He glanced over and--yeah, bait taken.
"Well we can't walk there, then."
"I have a sword for flying." He much preferred that than walking anyways.
Shen Jiu almost forgot that he was supposed to be looking for a way to escape, he was that distracted by the weird ass plants on the south slope of An Ding.
(Liu Qingge's company didn't hurt either, but he wasn't letting himself think about that. It was awkward enough to spend so much time standing on the very small area of a sword with someone who his mind kept getting stuck on the prettiness of!)
None of them were particularly spectacular, and he was certain that this area wouldn't survive being razed when Cang Qiong inevitably fell in the future, but the plants were weird. Why was there a Brilliant Orange and Dome Leafed Fig hybrid? Could that even happen naturally? Was some An Ding disciple doing unholy experiments or had the plants here hit a plant singularity and started just combining in their inanity?
The fruit was tasty though. He'd shoved a whole fig into his mouth before Liu Qingge could stop him and been too pleased with himself to even mind that he was acting like a five year old.
"We need to come back here," he said happily as they left, munching on another fig.
"Not if you keep eating random things that even you admit you don't recognize!" Liu Qingge protested, grabbing the fig out of his hands.
Mu Qingfang made Liu Qingge give him back the fig later, and Shen Jiu didn't even try to not act immature about it.
Liu Qingge knew that he probably should be focusing on taking Shen Jiu to places that were safe and restful…but everyone agreed that taking him to weird plant places and getting into dumb arguments seemed to be doing him a lot of good.
Weirdly, Liu Qingge's arguments that maybe the treatments they'd been doing to settle Shen Jiu's qi were what was actually helping fell on deaf ears. It wasn't until a few weeks and several odd trips to the strangest places that Liu Qingge could think to go on the peaks later that he got a concrete look at why they kept ignoring that.
Normally Liu Qingge wouldn't have just dropped his practice session for anything, but when a Qian Cao disciple came to find him right before and said that Mu Qingfang needed him to distract Shen Jiu…well he didn't have to think about it too hard.
Shen Jiu looked miles worse than Liu Qingge had ever seen him. His face was white and he was clutching his tea like a lifeline.
"What happened?" Liu Qingge asked, alarmed.
"Nothing, I'm fine, I don't know why they're getting all fussed." Shen Jiu said, looking like death warmed over. "Don't you have things to do? Why aren't you doing those?"
"I was just going to practice."
"You're a sword person, you need your practice."
"Why don't you go with Liu Qingge to watch, then?" Mu Qingfang suggested, firmly.
Shen Jiu hesitated, set the tea down, then said, "Might as well."
Mu Qingfang pulled Liu Qingge out of the room, looking apologetic. "He was fine until he wasn't," the healer said. "It happens sometimes, he'll get in his own head--thinking too much--and suddenly his qi is going all over the place."
"So the solution is to send him off with me?"
"You seem to stabilize him." Mu Qingfang gave him a pleading look. "Do you mind taking him with you?"
Of course he didn't.
By the time Liu Qingge had gotten Shen Jiu onto his sword to fly back to Bai Zhan, he was already more stable.
…Maybe there was something to what Mu Qingfang was saying.
"It's going to be boring." He warned. "You might want to bring something to read."
"I'm sure it'll be fine. Yay pointy things. Much stabbity. Riveting."
"We can't all be scholars."
"You sure can't."
Liu Qingge huffed out a disgruntled sound, choosing not to point out that they were on Liu Qingge's sword in the sky only because Shen Jiu had looked about five seconds from a qi deviation just a few minutes ago.
It was still very tempting though.
"I'm a better scholar than you are swordsman."
"I don't even own a sword, that's not a fair comparison!" Shen Jiu protested. "I bet I've never--" He stopped, suddenly, and it only took Liu Qingge a moment to remember that he'd apparently killed someone who had attacked Yue Qingyuan right before his memory loss. He hadn't asked where the sword had gone, but he assumed it wasn't important if nobody was talking about it.
"Easy way to tell." He said, recklessly, because he didn't know what to expect. "We can spar a bit and if you hold the sword like a tiny baby we'll know you're hopeless at it."
That was maybe a bad idea, it was maybe something that would bring up bad not quite memories and a panic attack and prove Mu Qingfang's whole theory completely wrong, but it was all that Liu Qingge could think to say at the moment so it was worth a try.
The worry lasted throughout him flying back to Bai Zhan and right up until they went to find a practice sword for Shen Jiu to use.
Shen Jiu carelessly looked them over, then grabbed one seemingly at random, testing the weight. "How about this one?"
Liu Qingge's eyes narrowed. "That one'll work fine." It was a quick grab, for a sword that was weighted well for someone of Shen Jiu's stature, and the grip was right. Not perfect, not the grip of someone who had been taught well, but definitely not one that would make Liu Qingge completely disregard someone in a fight.
There was a lot to say for instinct.
He felt a little bit bad for knocking Shen Jiu on his ass the first time, quickly reminding himself that he was supposed to be distracting the other cultivator, not pushing him further into a qi deviation…but Shen Jiu bounced right back up onto his feet, looking furiously delighted and not at all like he'd been close to a qi deviation barely an hour ago.
Liu Qingge was still careful, and still held his blows, but Shen Jiu definitely had at least the foundation of a swordsman. Rough, probably self taught, but very good with good instincts.
It was ridiculously attractive, Liu Qingge couldn't even get himself to lie about it. He was going to actually have to focus on the more boring sorts of studying more because even while Liu Qingge was definitely the better fighter, the gap was going to close rapidly when Shen Jiu got actual training. 'Better fighter' wasn't going to cut it unless Shen Jiu was also just merely a better scholar.
The sparring kept them both in a good mood until he forced them to stop, not wanting to push Shen Jiu too hard. The other man flipped the sword in his hand, looking pleased with himself, and said mostly to himself, "I guess I'm going to need to get myself a sword once I'm out of here."
Liu Qingge's good mood crashed. "Are you still planning on trying to sneak away?"
Shen Jiu regretted the words immediately. He needed to stop tipping his hand on things like that! Yeah, being surprisingly quick with a sword whenever he stopped thinking about it too much was both very cool and very useful, but Liu Qingge didn't need to know how that factored in!
"I can't stay permanently," he said, mostly gambling on this being true at all but pretty sure that he was onto something. "How many people are there who are here, permanently here, who aren't part of the sect? As far as I can tell there's none."
"So you just become part of the sect," Liu Qingge said, as though that wasn't a massive issue.
"I can't. It doesn't work that way." Shen Jiu shifted his stance, trying to look reasonable and open…which was a very difficult thing to do considering that his instinct was to go because I said so and flee. "I'd wager almost everyone here joined as a small child. There might be exceptions, but those exceptions are going to be people who were really skilled and valuable and brought more to the sect than they were taking."
He took a deep breath. "I'm none of those things. I appreciate you guys helping me out, I really do, but at this point my foundation isn't getting better anytime soon and my memory isn't coming back. A too old disciple who may or may not have had any training but definitely can't remember it certainly isn't on the list of people who get accepted late. And that's without even getting to my foundation being fucked. I wouldn't be anything but a drain. Eventually I need to go out and start figuring out where my life is going."
Preferably by leaving before anyone either found out he was a transmigrator or decided that he was a mooch who had worn out his welcome. This was a pretty dangerous world even now, before shit had hit the fan, he needed to avoid burning bridges by mooching too much from those bridges!
Liu Qingge didn't look too thrilled with that explanation, but he didn't argue either, so that probably meant that Shen Jiu was right.
Shen Jiu didn't think anything of it when Liu Qingge pulled Qian Cao's peak lord aside after escorting him back there. If he was lucky, Liu Qingge was telling him that Shen Jiu wasn't a complete clutz with a sword and everyone would either decide it was time for him to leave or start leaning in that direction.
If he wasn't lucky, he wasn't sure exactly where that would go, but probably also in the getting kicked out direction so that was only a good thing, right?
It wasn't until a whole day later, when Qian Cao's peak lord walked in with another fancy looking person in Qing Jing robes, that he realized there was absolutely a worse option that didn't include him fleeing into the wilderness.
"Hello, Shen Jiu," Qing Jing's peak lord said, looking very kindly for someone who was about to absolutely wreck Shen Jiu's day. "I've heard a lot about you."
If this ended with him getting dragged onto Qing Jing, he was going to kill Liu Qingge.
…All he had to do was make absolutely certain to fail this interview, right? He could do that!
"This is your fault!" He said angrily when he saw Liu Qingge not even a full day later. Shen Jiu was wearing green and white and everyone on Qing Jing was acting suspiciously nice, which was very alarming. If anything he would have prefered for there to be at least one asshole, preferably surnamed Shen, so that he could dismiss the creeping certainty that it was the other guy who was fated to become Shen Qingqiu and toss that sadsack fate right on the other Shen person.
There was not another Shen person except for an older woman who even Shen Jiu couldn't convince himself was going to somehow become Shen Qingqiu.
There was a fairly smug looking Liu Qingge though, so he directed his anger at that. "How did you manage that!"
"All I did was tell them exactly what you told me."
"You can't tell peak lords that! They'll try to fix things!" Shen Jiu paced furiously, trying to figure out a way to explain why this had wrecked his plans without spilling the transmigration beans. "Anyways it's just a really bad idea and it'll never work out."
Liu Qingge gave him a long look, something unreadable on his face. And then he kept looking, long enough that Shen Jiu started to feel less angry and more uncomfortable. He flicked his fan up to hide most of his face and glared over the edge.
Liu Qingge reached out to gently grab the hand that was holding the fan, pulling it down so that he could see Shen Jiu's face. This was especially inconvenient because for some reason Shen Jiu's head was getting stuck on the feeling of Liu Qingge's fingers on his own and the look on Liu Qingges face and--well it wasn't Shen Jiu's fault if his face was going red it was just very awkward!
"Let's go spar," Liu Qingge finally said, letting him go with almost a smug look. "You'll probably be getting your own sword soon."
Shen Jiu made several disgruntled sounds, but Liu Qingge didn't look put off at all and was just waiting for Shen Jiu to jump onto his sword with him which--well--it wasn't like he had anything better to do so might as well. He definitely wasn't having emotions about it. And refusing to get on the sword would have been admitting he was having emotions about it.
He got on the sword.