SV scenario where Luo Binghe is the same age as the peak lords, and it was in fact the last gen of peak lords who beefed (unfairly) with Tianlang Jun, well before their successors were on the scene.
So Luo Binghe gets accepted into Cang Qiong contemporaneously to Shen Jiu, Yue Qingyuan, Liu Qingge, Shang Qinghua (Airplane flavor), etc. Shen Yuan is also there, not related to Shen Jiu, just making his way through the Beast Peak ranks and praying that the plot doesn't find him (it does).
Luo Binghe is still also accepted as a disciple to Qing Jing. He and Shen Jiu are rivals. Mostly because Shen Jiu quadruple hates him for having a similar background but being the "ideal age" for beginning his cultivation, and being competition for the head disciple position. How is he supposed to take over the peak and be second only to Yue Qingyuan and have power & money & social security forever if the world's luckiest fucker is right next to him, doing everything better with just as few advantages and managing to be slightly more personable on top of it?
Shen Jiu wants to bury Luo Binghe a million feet under, meanwhile Luo Binghe just wants to become a cultivator and doesn't even have designs on the head disciple position. He'd let Shen Jiu have it, except that SJ's made it clear that if he becomes peak lord he's going to do everything in his power to run Luo Binghe out of the sect entirely, and possibly also kill him and make it look like an accident.
Enter Shen Yuan, whose shizun has recently discovered his Liu Qingge wrangling talents and ability to understand more than half the shit that comes out of that Shang kid's mouth, attributes this to his equally phenomenal success in getting otherwise horrifying demonic beasts to treat him like a Disney princess, and loans him out to the current Qing Jing peak lord as a sort of Jackass Whisperer who might figure out how to resolve the drama between disciples long enough for the peak lord to actually assess their potential. Without someone get poisoned, or missing a test because they were locked in a shed, or getting the time of the test wrong and having to be awkwardly escorted out of a brothel by one of their shidi.
Shen Jiu and Luo Binghe manage to misunderstand this situation as like, whoever wins over Shen Yuan the best will be declared the superior strategist and get confirmed to the head disciple position.
They are both absolutely terrible at figuring out how to get people to like them, though. Shen Jiu just keeps attempting to find blackmail material and Luo Binghe is like, well I guess I could seduce him. That's practical. Plus I want to seduce him, so win-win. But then he's running aground against the rocky shores of Shen Yuan's internalized homophobia. Which only gets worse when Shen Jiu figures out that either Shen Yuan has no skeletons in his closet, or else what skeletons are there are so bizarre that he can't really utilize them, so Plan B: Steal that Beast's Idea and Also Seduce Him gets implemented.
Shen Jiu starts being "friendly" in the exact same weird way that Luo Binghe has been attempting, and Shen Yuan read the book, he knows these two are usually only nice to other men when they're plotting their demise, so he's just like why me??? Why do they both want to kill me??? WHAT DID I DO???
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