There’s a wifeplot Shen Yuan genuinely enjoyed towards the beginning of Bingge’s wife collecting journey. A tribe of deeply isolationist and territorial demons have metal working techniques capable of producing blades similar in strength to Xin Mo as the legend goes. Apparently an aggrieved offshoot of this clan created Xin Mo out of malice millennia ago, but the swords the clan elders usually produce do not cause qi deviation in the wielder. Bingge is trying to track them in the middle of nowhere, planning to infiltrate and slaughter the clan, so their knowledge and resources can be brought to the palace.
And he does eventually find the entrance to their hidden city, wrought in the side of a mountain. He’s able to pass through the broken down gates, traveling the maze like passageways of the mountain to… a ghost city. Old enough that any wood structures have already crumpled to rot. At a central spot in the city, there’s what appears to be a cross between a smithy and a temple. When Luo Binghe enters, he’s immediately drawn to a sword sunken in a central display, radiating power. The aura is at least as strong as Xin Mo, but it’s calming. It calls to him the same way Zheng Yang once did, many years ago; safe and reassuring.
As he goes to draw it from its pedestal, the lines of an ancient array go taught, trapping him in a powerful web of qi. It wrenches his body, breaking his bones and melting his skin, his mind frozen in torment as he is shrunken down into a Nine Torments Hound— a type of yaogui dog that appears to be almost made of mildew and drowned. They’re not violent, only able to cause harm accidentally from the spores they shed, which can cause sickness in mortals and weak demons. They are universally shunned creatures.
At this point the narration shifts, implying that Luo Binghe’s mind was taken in the transformation. He leaves the abandoned city in search of food, and is immediately wounded terribly by a stronger demonic beast. Days later on the brink of death, a wild woman finds him, and actually takes doghe back to her home to nurse him back to health, despite the risk to her own wellbeing. She’s almost unrealistically kind, and doghe is completely devoted.
One day the same beast that attacked doghe comes back to ravage the woman’s homestead. Doghe tries to defend her, but the wild woman can’t stand to see her companion injured. She kills the beast at great personal expense, mortal wounds incidentally revealing her to be some kind of mushroom spirit. Someone that doghe wouldn’t have been able to harm. With her last bit of strength, she drags herself up to kiss doghe’s little forehead and call him a good boy, before dying. It turned out this was a princess and the frog type plot, and doghe turns back into human Binghe, watching the wild woman decompose in front of him, her mushroom biology rejecting his blood.
The arc ends on a quiet, somber note: Binghe buries the wild woman, retrieves Xin Mo from the ghost city, and returns to the palace empty handed. Shen Yuan marks this as one of the last instances of Airplane writing a genuinely compelling plot, and there is long standing debate within the fandom over wether the wild woman would have been THE wife to make Bingge truly happy. In a Q&A a few years later, Airplane reveals that the character of the mushroom wife was based on one of his ex-wife’s nephews who was always bringing back injured stray animals, who airplane described as “too young for me, but total wife material”
