another stupid bing-ge au idea
emperor bing-ge gets a prophecy that he needs an empress to truly gain happiness so he starts testing out the wives for the position, mostly in order--Yingying is a little too cheerful and nothing gets done cos she won't order anything of consequence as she doesn't want to bother anyone, Mingyan flat out refuses cos its too much work (or she makes citizens rpf her danmei book plots)
the less said about the twelve hours Sha Hualing was empress the better, related this is also why he does not try the little palace mistress out (she does not take that well)
qin wanyue seems overwhelmed, qin wanrong is easily distracted, qiu haitang is passable but then stops paying attention to anything remotely relevant and he runs into the issue that all his human wives don't give a fuck about the demons and his demon wives don't care about the humans and his etc wives have their own issues, like his tree spirit wife who can't understand the passage of time and either takes two seconds for a question asked during an audience or six hours
eventually everyone, including the wives is tired of this shit and bing-ge spends a while tracking down the source for the prophet who created this prophecy and it's this weird ass hermit guy who spends most of his day looking at different monsters and traveling through towns handing out herbs and shit for various minor ills and has an eclectic but good reputation among all the villagers
and bing-ge is like WTF is this and the hermit guy (shen yuan obviously) was misquoted by this ancient prophetic being he had NO IDEA was using him for anything (they sensed his otherworldly presence) and thought he was merely discussing fan theories like in the forums--SY gets really annoyed and was like "I DID NOT say that, I said, if Bing-ge wants to be truly happy he needs to find someone who will love and accept him and SHARE his burden, like an empress. I mean if I had to pick one of the wives, I'd go with liu mingyan she's clearly the best."
insert bing-ge following hermit nerd shen yuan around trying to figure out what the fuck is his deal and plotting revenge on how he wasted like an entire year on this shit and it almost fucked up his entire rule and meanwhile shen yuan is doing his usual head pat, ooo tell me about monsters and cool fights appreciation thing and wifebeaming the hell out of him
then bing-ge figures it out and is like hey out of curiosity what are your ideas for the 3 realms that an empress should do and shen yuan has thought extensively about this now that he's seen some of the world building in person and comes up with some TOP NOTCH ideas (including universal childcare) that bing-ge starts slowly testing out and people go bonkers for--and his ideas are for everyone not just humans or demons
bing-ge tries to bait him with terrible things he's done to get him to reject him but shen yuan is like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pobody's nerfect and passing all the tests thinking about how cool it is he gets to explore the world and be friends with bing-ge
meanwhile bing-ge is getting official empress shit together and planning a wedding for him and shen yuan
shen yuan: ah this is so cool bing-ge asked me if i wanted to hang out with him forever! of course I would sheesh
