Ghostfire Shen Yuan loyally following the lonely, undying, forgotten Luo Binghe from the original outline.
They never even met.
Shen Yuan had died long before Luo Binghe’s story was set to start. Abandoned by his System, he was left wandering the realms, searching for anything to latch onto, anything to stave off the darkness encroaching on his consciousness whenever he stopped. He keeps himself entertained with little jokes and references that will never reach anyone. At least back home, there were other people on the opposite side of his screen reacting, seeing. Paying attention.
He never would have thought he’d miss the times he was perceived by others. He’d give anything, though. Anything.
He stumbles upon the protagonist as he’s ascending the stairs of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect for the first time. Dressed in rags and heaving with the effort, Luo Binghe is exactly as Shen Yuan had pictured: a little bun, soft and kind and so very brave.
The excitement wears off soon enough. When the tea ceremony is held, Shen Yuan watches, hopelessly trying to stop the cup from hitting Binghe’s head. He lunges at Shen Jiu; let him be identified and exorcised, at least he would have done something with himself, however useless. It doesn’t work. Of course not—nothing can come between Luo Binghe and his fate.
Shen Yuan thinks about leaving. Many times. But every time he considers the possibility of going back to wandering the world, or just passing on… Well. There’s still a lot to see, isn’t there? It will get better. It will.
Only, it doesn’t. Not really.
There’s no harem; there’s no warm comfort offered to Luo Binghe by a sympathetic beauty, no wedding celebrations, no moments of gentle companionship, however brief, however superficial. There’s no camaraderie with his demon underlings, his generals, his allies; it’s all casual cruelty and dismissals, before it’s violence and subjugation.
There’s no joy. There’s no hope. There’s no ‘better’.
Something is wrong, that’s clear. Something is wrong, and Shen Yuan has no one to blame.
This is not the Proud Immortal Demon Way he knows.
Centuries later, when Luo Binghe begs for the heavens to allow him to die, Shen Yuan hears. When Luo Binghe rages against the passage of time, alone in the wreckage of his palace, left behind by everyone he’d ever known, Shen Yuan accompanies him. When Luo Binghe lies down in the Holy Mausoleum and refuses to get up, Shen Yuan waits, as he had for centuries, until Luo Binghe opens his eyes again and takes to the road.
They end up in a hidden realm so filled with Yin energy that Shen Yuan can channel it to manipulate his form into that of his former body. It’s not detectable by the living, but it’s there. He feels stronger, too. He can walk, float, fly, interact with what few other ghosts they encounter.
Still, Luo Binghe cannot see him.
Luo Binghe doesn’t talk much. Well, that makes sense, he was never in the habit of talking to himself, but still. It’s lonely.
They end up in a town where a diviner takes one look at Luo Binghe and offers him a free reading. Shen Yuan can’t enter her tent, well-warded against foreign entities as it is, so he waits outside.
She tells Luo Binghe of the little hanger-on he’s got. A powerful one, too, though he’s still getting used to his powers. He’s been here for a long time, she says. Since he was a child. He comes from far away—farther than even the most distant star.
Luo Binghe begins talking to him. Shen Yuan isn’t sure why, but he’s not complaining!
Luo Binghe also begins meditating again, trying to soothe the damage done by Xin Mo over the centuries. For every meal, he places a few fruits or snacks across from him on a plate he’d made himself, which he eats only after finishing his own dish. He makes space by his side whenever he walks on a narrow road. He stops at every landmark and tells stories about them, always starting the same way.
“Do you remember when…” becomes Shen Yuan’s favourite phrase.
One night, Luo Binghe sighs and looks across the table. Shen Yuan places himself so that he’s in Luo Binghe’s focus.
“What is it, Binghe?”
Luo Binghe doesn’t answer him, of course. Still, it feels like a conversation, when he says:
“I wish I knew your name.”
Shen Yuan frets. He’s been trying to manipulate the physical world, but he never got the hang of it. He’d tried drawing in sand, with water, just pushing things off shelves. And yet, nothing.
“I’m sorry, I wish—” he tries, but Luo Binghe is already talking again.
“I wonder if we ever crossed paths when you were alive.” He’s expressed this thought more than once. Shen Yuan never likes to think about how they’ve missed each other, how they’d been set up for failure from the start. “I wonder if we would have been friends.”
Shen Yuan scoffs. Of course not. Him and the protagonist? No way.
But—those cold star eyes, blindly searching for him, trying to land on him… They make him want to say, I would have liked that.
He reaches a hand out to touch Luo Binghe’s forehead. He’s taken to doing it whenever Luo Binghe broods, or makes a silly joke Shen Yuan wishes he didn’t find funny. It’s soothing.
He wishes Binghe could feel it.
When his finger touches the demon mark, it blazes. Luo Binghe gasps, that heavy gaze settling on Shen Yuan’s face.
Shen Yuan startles, and jumps away.
“No! Wait!”
Shen Yuan hesitates. Luo Binghe is looking around himself, eyes begging for even a wisp of Shen Yuan’s shadow.
He can’t deny Luo Binghe this.
He can’t deny himself this.
He reaches out again. This time, he cups Luo Binghe’s cheeks. When those eyes clear of panic and widen in awe, he whispers, softly, “Shen Yuan. My name is Shen Yuan.”
Luo Binghe looks like he’s been handed a treasure so precious he’s afraid to touch it. He hesitates, raising his hands in careful starts and stops, before taking Shen Yuan’s face in them, gently caressing the soft, cold skin of his face. His eyes dance with the haste he takes in memorising Shen Yuan’s features.
Then, he smiles. Helpless and weak and so, so precious. Shen Yuan has not seen hope so bright in Luo Binghe’s face since that fateful day on Cang Qiong Mountain.
do you think airplane might have intended to draw a parallel between shen qingqiu and the old palace master in the original outline?
present shen qingqiu as a monster, a lecher, a horrible, evil man, and slowly unspool the threads of his history. the readers learn of what, exactly, made him the way he is, and what his crimes are. which are true, which are not. his intentions, his failures, his hopes, how they got crushed, how he’d been misunderstood. from an incomprehensible vile man to a pitiful, cruel one.
after being thrown into hell and clawing his way back out, luo binghe is taken in by a proper, protective shizun, who treats him with the respect he deserves. who wants him under his wing, who is proud to be his shizun, who wants to become his family, via marriage with his daughter. then, he is discovered to be exactly what luo binghe thought his former shizun to have been, perhaps worse, and to have been the very reason luo binghe never had his biological parents in his life and all that resulted from that.
when exactly does luo binghe see the palace master’s true colours? after shen qingqiu dies at his hands? before? does it make him see shen qingqiu as he is, if he’s yet to get his revenge, and does it make it worthless, to kill him? does it drive him further towards insanity? does it leave him hopeless, jaded, despondent? with no one to trust, with nothing to hang his hopes on, no one to comfort him, what, exactly, does he do?
original outline luo binghe. speak to me my boy. tell me your secrets
you are luo binghe you are ten years old your mother is sickly and getting worse every day but you’ll make it better. you are luo binghe you are walking towards your future with a stale bun you fought the dogs for and your mother’s memory held tight in your fist, enclosed in the fake jade of your pendant. you are luo binghe and you are digging a hole, digging like a beast digging its way out of its own grave, digging until there’s only darkness around you like a hungry maw deciding whether it’s worth it to bite down, digging until you can’t breathe with the scent of overturned soil and dying grass and when you come to you have barely dug a cun into the ground and your name has already been called. you are luo binghe you look up at the immortal master that has chosen you and you are so anxious to be standing before him but you’ve sworn to yourself that you are brave and strong and becoming a good man who would have never treated you the way the world treated your little family. you are luo binghe and you serve your shizun tea, and he asks about your mother, and you say she was the kindest in the world to you, and your voice is strong and you’ve matured, you won’t cry anymore, and he looks at you, and he looks at you, and he looks at you, all the while scraping the leaves of his tea and you’re not sure why you’re holding your breath but this feels like a momentuous experience, a graze of the universe against your dirt-stained hands. you are luo binghe and shizun smiles, and there’s no explanation for the feeling of ease that overtakes you but you don’t need an explanation, because shizun pats your head and welcomes you to your new home, and introduces you to your new sect siblings all the while never taking his eyes off of you and you’re going to make your mother proud.
you are luo binghe and you wake up in your palace and you are scraped raw by a memory that never belonged to you. you get up, shake it off, and begin your day
tentative (and entirely improvised) list of what i have divined of original outline binghe (bing-xiong) thus far by way of being the Bing-Xiong Whisperer:
bitter bastard that refuses any and all chance at redemption because it’s been proven to him time and again that his efforts of doing anything right backfire incredibly. better be hated than waste effort trying to change anyone’s mind
hates explaining himself -> comes off as abrasive and arrogant -> others’ honest reactions to him make him feel rejected -> self-fulfilling prophecy taken half-demon form
depression spiral reaches depths you cannot even imagine
genuinely wise and well-learned but hates putting on the airs of a proper scholar and prefers a more efficient approach to dealing with issues. this works well with demons, less so with humans
wants to reach an equal distance between his human and demon side. as opposed to bing-mei who wants to be seen as mostly human and leans into that side more, or bing-ge who relishes in the powers of his demonic heritage, bing-xiong would rather just get one day where he doesn’t have to be or do shit
the eldirch-iest of the three variants. he will float ominously and spill like shadows over your dream realm to extract all of your secrets by playing with your soul like it’s a slime toy. he lets his demonic aura spill out of him and slowly induce terror into anyone who makes the mistake of approaching him when he’s “letting his hair down”
moves very little. unnaturally still. very difficult to bore him, too; he looks like the type of person who could just zone out for a few hours. if you don’t focus very very hard you can’t even see him breathing. infinitely patient because, like. he’s got forever. unless he wants to nope out of this realm, he can just wait you out and give you enough rope to hang yourself with it while he plans his next meal
zero wives. zero trusted advisors, subordinates, or associates. hates being personable even if it would help him achieve whatever whim has descended upon him that week. you always get the sense that he’d be literally anywhere else regardless of what predicament he finds himself in. “hit da bricks” meme but if it was “hit da annoying thing very hard and hope it stops struggling”
surprisingly down to earth! or maybe depressed. depends on your perspective
he tries to be nice once. the kid starts crying. sha hualing has to explain to him, very nicely, that when a demon emperor smiles at a demon child, it usually means the child’s about to be eaten
a perennial quality to his presence. like if you looked away at an inopportune moment he might just disappear. he looks plenty solid and terrifying and strong when he’s commanding armies and barking orders but there’s this intangibility to him that you can’t put your finger on
sense of humour decayed and rusted and buried under decades’ worth of being revered and feared and respected. funniest person in the multiverse could say the perfect joke that would bring anyone to their knees laughing and bing-xiong just goes: 😶
i shall update any other findings once i make contact with his prissy excellence again. thank you for your time. here’s my bing-xiong fic as a reward.
“[…] in fact, in his original outline, Bing-gē hadn’t even had a romance plotline; he had been doomed to fade away, alone and unaging forever.”
— The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, Vol. 4 (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu)
The drafts version of Binghe! Not Bing-gē, nor Bing-mei, but a secret, third thing! (I’m partial to Bing-xióng (兄) myself, just for thematic cohesion. Bing-mei remains as he is: Shizun’s special glass-heart maiden.)
So! Who is this elusive, mythical Binghe we never got the chance to meet? What is he? How do I get to pick this one’s brains?
Why is he haunting me! What does he want! So much to think about.
Listen: I love my trash sons, both the racoon and wet dog variations, but I am curious about this handsome demon lord who did not bed thousands, and did not steal his shizun to lovingly coax him into a loving and respectful marriage. Alas, Airplane-bro, as is custom, has left me hanging.
The solitary quote above has been floating around my brainspace for months. Intermittently, I would look up at the sky and sigh a big sad dog sigh, and think of this lonely demon-man emperor who seems to be both perfectly representative of No-Shizunitis Suffering Binghe, and on the exact opposite end of the line. I have spent many a night trying to rearrange the blocks of both SVSSS and PIDW like a sad toddler with no plan but plenty of amorphous longing.
Thus, Bing-xiong. My beloved new toy.
We know he is left alone and unaging. This means that:
He does not marry even once. (Sorry, Other Bing Variants. This one came broken.)
He is not defeated, killed, or left to suffer his not-father’s fate of sulking under a mountain.
From 1) we can assume two more things! Xin Mo either gets fixed/doesn’t influence this Binghe the same way, or: Xin Mo is completely written off à la Airplane Retconning, making Binghe potentially even more individually powerful than his younger counterparts.
(Or he just. Takes people’s cultivation ad-infinitum. Interesting thought, but too straight-forward for my tastes. Airplane’s thoughts? Unknowable.)
From 2) we can also assume Binghe cannot die, is under the influence of the Protagonist Halo unto infinity, and will only be put out of his misery once the heat death of the universe deems it a worthwhile endeavour. Either that or the story ends, but. It tickles a miserable part of my brain pink to think Binghe will not be let off even then.
Anyway. Bing-xiong, of course, has the same source material to work off of. Up until the Abyss, and including it, the plotline should be if not the same, adjacent enough to be indistinguishable.
However. This means:
Bing-xiong never got coerced into sex by Qin Wanyue, thus not starting him on the path of sex-dependency/addiction, avoiding Bing-gē’s fate by virtue of the Butterfly Effect. (Read this post because it explains Bing-ge's whole thing better than a lot of things I've seen.)
Again, Xin Mo implications.
Alternate Universe Shenanigans make an appearance. (Shen Jiu’s fever and death was actually meant to happen, Bing-ge just got very, very unlucky and his Universe’s Yue Qingyuan very, very lucky. For a few years. Either that or there is a Shen Yuan for every Binghe! Again: sorry, Bing-ge. You need to find your own. Middle child issues…)
Once the drafts/original outline got lost, all bets are off and now the characters become real people, without narrative influence. This also has the very fucked up implication that Bing-ge is actually a result of exclusively external forces and would have never gone down that path if not forced onto it by Airplane’s unwitting hands. I do and do not love this version. Very Mo Ran-esque, if looked at from afar and squinting.
Other options I’m either too not-high to think, or too high to put together. (Cold medicine is insane?)
I am fascinated by this… Schrödinger’s Binghe. A jaded, lonely emperor left in the ashes of his world, gazing upon his own history and finding fucking nothing and no one. Metaphorically and, like, practically, if I’m understanding Airplane’s musings correctly. Isolated, cursed by his own blood in a completely new and fucked up way!
I need Airplane to speak with me for like, half an hour. This is paramount to my mental health, I’m losing my braincells by the hour.
What happened to this impervious, cocky, badass demon bastard lord to become so alone? How did it happen? Why did it not happen to the other two, or at least Bing-ge, who has had every horrible and shitty thing possible and impossible piled onto his head? What the fuck is up with Xin Mo? Why isn’t it eating away at Big Bro Luo? Or, worse: why is it eating away at him in such a way that instead of turning into a violent yet charismatic, horror-creature of a man, it turns him into the existential terror-fate I’ve contemplated and abhorred since I was seven?
Tianlang-jun as the final boss. Discovering Huan Hua Palace Master’s crimes, deceit and… stuff. Perhaps even uncovering Shen Jiu’s backstory.
Ooh! Worse! Or better? What if he finds out everything, after having followed Bing-gē’s path, and simply… gives up? A grown up Bing-ge, minus the marriage and surrogate-lover part(s).
(More unlikely than other options, but still there, I guess.)
Fucking insane of MXTX to do this to me, personally and specifically.
I can only speculate forever, I guess! Left… alone and pondering forever.
So. Not a Bing-ge, and not a Bing-mei. A Bing-xiong, if you will.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 人渣反派自救系统 - 墨香铜臭 | The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Original Outline Luo Binghe
Additional Tags: Suicide, Everybody Dies, Original Outline PIDW, Xin Mo - Freeform, (which is itself a warning i think), mentions of cannibalism, Emetophobia, (mild), Blood and Gore
Summary:
The end of a maybe-victory, a long list of transgressions, and the non-definitive end of one Luo Binghe.
