Chapter Text
Xiang Fei had not missed an update of Proud Immortal Demon Way in almost three years. He had it down to a science: every day he woke up sometime between noon and three, sat down at his crappy desk with an energy drink, and banged out ten thousand words of mediocre garbage by six in the morning (pausing intermittently for such mortal needs as using the bathroom and shoveling cup noodles into his mouth). Then he posted it no matter how bad it sucked and passed the fuck out, and then he did it all again the next day. This was why Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky was the undisputed king of the Zhongdian boards: you could say what you liked about his prose, but the guy delivered.
He'd even gotten sick before and written through it—if he recycled old papapa scenes, hardly anybody complained as long as he was really careful about swapping out the names and switching some sentences around. The important thing was getting the novel back to the top of the boards! Visibility was vital! Consistency was key!
By the second week of this flu, though, Airplane was running out of fuel. His head throbbed, feeling somehow simultaneously swollen like a balloon and stuffed with heavy cotton. He could barely keep down even the non-spicy cup noodles from the back of his pantry. Just sitting upright at his desk for more than a few minutes was enough to make black spots waver in his vision. He squinted at the screen, the black characters in front of him seeming to jitter and crawl across the white screen like ants. Every time he started a sentence, he forgot how it was supposed to end halfway through.
Maybe he could use a little more sleep, Xiang Fei decided hazily. He could finish up later when he was better rested, and he could fish up one of those old wife orgy scenes to make up the word count. He hadn't done one of those in a couple months, he was due for one anyway. Thus reassured, he stumbled back to bed and passed into a sweaty, uneasy sleep. His dreams were weird as hell, slippery and shapeless, and he kept having to run away from a huge hairy guy chasing him and trying to beat him with a cucumber.
Xiang Fei wasn't sure how long he slept. He woke abruptly with a dry mouth, his sheets soaked in sweat and twisted up like he'd been fighting ghosts in his sleep. There was a terrible noise bouncing around his skull, which eventually resolved into a relentless pounding at his door.
What the fuck. Xiang Fei fought his way free of the sheets, nearly tripping and eating shit. He just barely remembered to grab a pair of pants at random from the floor and haul them onto his sorry carcass, wincing at the taste of his own breath. God, he smelled like a sewer, he hoped it wasn't too obvious.
As he shuffled to the door, Xiang Fei waded through drifts of used tissues and empty ramen cups. Gross! Blearily, he unlocked the door and opened it, squinting out into the painfully bright hallway. The fluorescent lights felt like they were stabbing directly into his eyeballs. "Whrggh?" he asked muzzily.
"Good, you're not dead," said someone crisply, elbowing the door open and pushing past Xiang Fei into his apartment. Hello? What the fuck? It dawned on Xiang Fei that he should have left the chain on the door. Whoops.
The complete fucking stranger advanced into Xiang Fei's apartment and stood there with his hands on his hips, narrowing his eyes in disgust. "God, of course it's completely fucking foul in here. I should have expected you'd live in squalor."
"Whuh?" Xiang Fei asked, still stuck on "who is this guy" and "why is he in my apartment" and also coping with the realization that he needed to piss like a racehorse.
The guy rounded on him. "Okay," he said, in the tones of a man who expected to be obeyed, which was kind of funny because he was, like, half Xiang Fei's size. Not all that short, like, definitely taller than Xiang Fei! But, well. Scrawny.
He was wearing a face mask (probably sensible) and—Xiang Fei's stomach sank—a PIDW t-shirt. It was finally happening, he was going to get Stephen King's Misery'd. It took him a minute to zone back in. "Are you even listening to me? You," the guy was saying, "are going to go take a shower. SIT DOWN in the bath or you'll slip and die and I'll have wasted the trip. I am going to call a cleaner and a nurse. And for food."
"Uh," said Xiang Fei, whose brain was not at the top of its game just now. "Who… are you?" Then he sat down hard on the nearest of his shitty chairs, because black spots were starting to creep into the sides of his vision again. He bent over and tried to breathe, putting his head in his hands. Ugh, his head was pounding.
"Oh," said the guy, pausing in his incredulous self-guided tour of Xiang Fei's apartment. "Uh, sorry, I'm Shen Yuan." Was he turning a little pink under the mask?
"Okay," Xiang Fei said. "And you're a fan?" He tried sitting upright again: mistake. Back down he went. Man, he wouldn't even have thought about sitting down in the shower but honestly that sounded pretty good right now.
"Sure," Shen Yuan said finally.
"Okay," Xiang Fei repeated. There was a short silence while Shen Yuan just watched him sit there and try not to pass out.
"Where's your bathroom?" Shen Yuan asked.
Xiang Fei gestured, then said "Hrrkk" as Shen Yuan hoisted him upright and started shoving him towards the bathroom. He was clearly trying to support Xiang Fei's weight but wasn't actually strong enough to be very helpful, so they were kind of both stumbling. Shen Yuan braced Xiang Fei against the wall while he opened the bathroom door, and then predictably exclaimed in disgust. Which, fair, but also, it wasn't like Xiang Fei had been expecting company.
Shen Yuan prodded Xiang Fei inside and sat him down on the closed toilet, where he swayed a little but didn't go so far as to fall over. "I'll start the shower," Shen Yuan declared, fiddling with the knobs, "and you just—go at your own pace. Don't slip and die, okay, I don't know how I'd explain that to the police."
Yeah, thought Xiang Fei, who simply didn't have enough energy right now to worry about this random home invader murdering him, that would be difficult for you. Laboriously, he started heaving his horrible sweaty t-shirt over his head and got stuck halfway, breathing heavily.
Shen Yuan got the shower started and then emitted a high-pitched screech. Inside his stinky cocoon, Xiang Fei winced. "Dude!!" squawked Shen Yuan. "Don't just—ugh!! I'm going outside!!"
"Okay," said Xiang Fei, muffled, to the slamming bathroom door. He rallied and managed to finish taking off his shirt, and then had to breathe with his head between his knees for a minute before easing down to the cold tile and shuffling his pants off like a worm. Then he kind of just scooted his ass into the shower and sat, shivering, under the lukewarm spray. After a moment, he mournfully relaxed his bladder and pissed for about a full minute. Not his finest hour!
The shower itself was deeply undignified even after he, uh, finished that little piece of business. He did have to sit down the whole time and even then he still got dizzy and needed to just rest his head on the wall for a little while, and the soap was on a little shelf in the shower that he couldn't quite reach without standing, so that was out of the question; he just kind of had to scrub himself half-heartedly with his hands. Also, he kept fumbling the detachable shower head and water went all over the bathroom. When he was done, Xiang Fei belatedly realized that 1. he hadn't brought any clothes in here except the ones he was wearing, which were 2. not only disgusting but 3. now also kind of wet. 4. As were his towels. He did his best to half-scrub himself with a towel anyway; it only sort of dried him off but probably cleaned him up way more than his hands had.
There was a lot of mysterious clattering coming from outside the bathroom. Great. Hopefully he wasn't being robbed blind. "Uh, Shen Yuan?" he called hoarsely.
"What?" snapped Shen Yuan from outside the door.
This really was one of the weirder mornings Xiang Fei had had in his life. "I don't have any clothes in here except the ones I was wearing?" he said weakly.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," said Shen Yuan, as if this was really inconveniencing him. "Fine, just—I'll bring something."
Xiang Fei slumped on the toilet again, bare-assed this time, until the door opened a crack and Shen Yuan tossed a bundle of clothes inside before slamming it shut again. Xiang Fei blearily rescued the clothes from the floor, where they, too, were getting damp, and managed to wriggle himself into them. Shen Yuan had selected a t-shirt from ten years ago that was now a little small and a pair of sweatpants. He had not seen fit to include any underwear, or maybe he just hadn't felt like digging around in Xiang Fei's underwear drawer (fair). Xiang Fei resigned himself to freeballing it.
Emerging into the living room, Xiang Fei beheld Shen Yuan wearing gloves and scooping the drifts of garbage into a trash bag. "Oh good, you're done," Shen Yuan said briskly. "I called a cleaner to come by this afternoon and a nursing service for two hours after that. Obviously I wasn't going to subject the nurse, or, frankly, the cleaner, to this pigsty. You genuinely disgust me, how long have you just been throwing trash on the floor? I'm going to finish picking all this shit up and then get takeout. Give me your house keys."
"Huh?" said Xiang Fei.
Shen Yuan actually had the gall to snap his fingers impatiently. "House keys, where are they? Wait, can you promise not to die if I leave the apartment for half an hour to pick up food? Also, where's the trash room in this place?"
"Dude," Xiang Fei said. "I don't even know you. What if you were like, a total psycho."
"Okay, well, I'm not. Keys."
"They're on the… stupid little table by the door. Probably under the mail," mumbled Xiang Fei, giving up, and staggered over to the couch to lie down heavily. That shower had kind of knocked him flat!
"Wait, seriously, where do I take this trash," Shen Yuan asked, but Xiang Fei was already blissfully passing out.
He woke up again with a start a few hours later, which he could tell because the light was coming through his narrow window at a different angle than it had been earlier. Someone had tucked him under a big quilt which he vaguely recognized as one that he'd had folded up in his linen closet for, like, years, and which smelled kind of musty. That was nice, maybe, but now he was all sweaty again. There was a gently steaming container of pork liver congee on the table, which appeared to be from the place a couple blocks from his apartment that normally had a crazy line and didn't do delivery. There was a fresh box of tissues next to it, and a little trash can on the floor near the couch.
What the fuck. He wasn't this pampered when he was sick even as a little kid.
Shen Yuan appeared like some sort of freaky ghost in a horror movie. Xiang Fei tried not to yelp. "You're up," he said, approvingly. "Eat your food. I'll make tea after. There's also some Gatorade in the fridge. Where the fuck is your trash room? I'm running out of space for the bags."
"Uh, it's kind of confusing, you have to go down to the second floor and down a weird little hallway. There's a sign," said Xiang Fei blankly.
"Thank god you're capable of complete sentences again," Shen Yuan said.
"I was saying complete sentences before!" Xiang Fei protested.
"Stupid ones," Shen Yuan said. "Eat your food before it gets cold."
Xiang Fei obeyed while Shen Yuan took like five trips to the trash room, muttering pissily to himself the whole time. When he was done with that he disappeared into the kitchen and Xiang Fei heard his kettle boiling before Shen Yuan emerged with a steaming cup of tea and plonked it down in front of Xiang Fei. "Drink," he commanded.
Xiang Fei obeyed this too, reflecting that if someone had told him the day before that by this time today a leggy infant would be ordering him around in his own apartment, he would have been—well, he'd been pretty incoherent at the time, so, whatever.
The tea was really good, which was weird, because no way did Xiang Fei have tea this nice. He bought whatever was on sale and then let it go stale in his cupboard because he mostly drank the kind of energy drink that was banned in other countries. "Where did you get the tea?"
With a totally unwarranted level of vitriol, Shen Yuan spat out, "I brought it with me! Because I have manners!"
"Uh, okay? Thank you? For being polite about breaking into my house." Xiang Fei took another, more appreciative sip.
"I did not break into your house, you're being so dramatic. You literally let me in."
"I mean, only because I forgot to put the chain on the door. Which also doesn't explain where you came from or how you got this address."
"Your address has been online for years," Shen Yuan said. "Since that time you made Sha Hualing first wife for three chapters and that Yingying fan doxxed you? I was mostly surprised you haven't moved somewhere nicer."
"Okay," Xiang Fei said, putting his teacup down. "First of all, this place is fine. Second of all, I definitely did have that scrubbed." Shen Yuan looked offended. "You have to know this is creepy! That comment only got, like, four page views before I deleted it."
"I was online," Shen Yuan said. "I had class when the chapters go up that semester and always had to catch up at weird times. And I thought it might be useful someday. And I was right, so."
Xiang Fei said, resigned, "You're not a normal fan, are you? I mean, that's some black powder—you make it sound like you were going to send me a bomb or something!!"
Stiffly, Shen Yuan said, "I thought it would be funny to send flowers if you ever posted a good update."
After a beat: "You will notice I have not done so. Yet."
"You are genuinely crazy, kid," Xiang Fei said.
Shen Yuan bristled. "I'm not a kid!!"
Not the part of the sentence Xiang Fei had expected him to object to, but whatever. "Okay, bro. Are you sure? You look about fourteen. Aren't you missing school right now?"
This was an exaggeration, which paid off in Shen Yuan's look of pop-eyed outrage. Man, messing with his home invader was such a bad idea, but fuck it. This guy was hilarious.
"I am TWENTY TWO," Shen Yuan said icily. "I finished university last year. For your information."
"Woah," said Xiang Fei, warming to his subject. "That's crazy. Damn, a university graduate? Wow. Sure you don't have anything better to do at," he checked the clock on the wall which was always kind of slow, "three PM on a… Tuesday? than break into some guy's house?"
"It's Friday," Shen Yuan said.
"Shit," Xiang Fei said, and then, increasingly alarmed, "shit! How many updates have I missed?"
"I bought tickets after three missed updates. So it's been four."
Xiang Fei clutched his head, roasts forgotten. "Fuck! I'm ruined!!"
"People are worried, mostly," Shen Yuan said, awkwardly, and like someone who had probably thrown an enormous tantrum about missed updates, Xiang Fei thought, hysterically. FOUR DAYS!!!! Fuck! "Also," Shen Yuan added, thoughtful, "a lot of people are kind of impressed that it's really a one-man operation. You know, those idiots who thought you were content farming..."
"Aw, bro," Xiang Fei said, because he'd left his mouth set to roast before his brain wandered off to panic about the fucking wife orgy of all time he was going to have to cobble together. His fucking schedule! He was so behind! "You believed in me?"
"A team product would have a style guide. Or editing. Or internal consistency."
"Haha," Xiang Fei said, "it's kind of cute that you believe that. I have to start writing."
"You have to lie down until the nurse shows up. The cleaner should be here soon."
"No, dude," Xiang Fei said. "I need to get another update out."
"Everyone knows it's going to be copy-pasted papapa," Shen Yuan said. "Stop acting like you're actually going to have to use your brain for whatever update goes up next. You're sick. Not that your creative production is ever peak, but."
Hey, ouch. That was true, but Shen Yuan didn't need to say it. Had he actually been trying to be nice earlier? Xiang Fei squinted at him. "Did you just say papapa out loud?"
He definitely went pink under the mask this time. Cute! "Just finish your tea and go back to sleep, asshole."
Xiang Fei obediently took another slurp of tea. A thought that had been gently percolating for several minutes solidified. "Hey, wait. I assumed you were local—you bought tickets and then it took you a day to get here? Where the hell do you live?"
"Uh," Shen Yuan said, staring hard at his phone. "Shenzhen. I got a train."
"Haha," said Xiang Fei, wondering if this was what a break from reality felt like. Beijing was like… 10? or 15? hours from Shenzhen by train? Xiang Fei didn't know, he barely left his apartment, but it was far. He'd missed three updates and this guy picked up and traveled halfway across the country? On an overnight train? What the fuck. "Wow, you're… dedicated!"
"Would you look at that, the cleaner is here!!" said Shen Yuan, leaping up to go open the door. Xiang Fei watched him go, his mouth hanging open slightly, and slurped his tea again. What the fuck was actually wrong with this guy.
And then he just. Didn't leave. He took Airplane's laptop hostage before the cleaner started up (insane. The kid was crazy!!!) to make him lie on the couch, fidgety and bored, while a very nice auntie scrubbed his apartment clean around him. Then he made Airplane go to bed early after the nurse left (yes, it had been the flu, nothing left to do but sleep it off), but hadn't thought to confiscate Airplane's phone, too.
He stayed up all night scrolling miserably through his comments section (which really were mostly worried about him by now, after all the blow-up angry tantrums posted after his first missed update) and then trying to outline his next update in the notes app. By which he meant: using the extremely detailed and organized fan wiki as crib notes for the porn collage he would assemble whenever he got access to his laptop back.
Shen Yuan did give the laptop back the next morning (well, afternoon), and Airplane did manage to post some mediocre pornography with a flaccid author's note (thx for all the concern everyone, nearly died of the flu, you guys better burn so much paper money for me if i actually die writing this), and got back to his 10k daily schedule. But Shen Yuan just… kept living in his apartment.
He had brought a suitcase with him, so he had clothes and his own laptop and stuff, and he had put some of Xiang Fei's sheets on the couch. He went out every day to get them food. Honestly, the way Xiang Fei lived, it actually took him almost a week to realize the kid should have left by now instead of establishing a, a, domestic routine. But Shen Yuan went grocery shopping—or, somehow, the cupboards in Xiang Fei's kitchen filled up. There were always snacks. His favorite energy drinks were in the fridge. Shen Yuan usually left the house when Xiang Fei was sleeping during the day, he assumed, because he'd always been a pretty light sleeper and nothing ever woke him up, but maybe he was just sitting in Xiang Fei's living room on his phone all day. That was weird to imagine. Xiang Fei stopped thinking about that.
But there was always dinner waiting for him when he woke up in the afternoon ready to start writing. Shen Yuan slept on the couch, at night; his alarm always went off right before Airplane's publish deadline, which was kind of helpful. It was actually a pretty nice lifestyle, which was maybe why it took him so long to notice how fucking weird it was.
"Shen Yuan," Xiang Fei said on the eighth consecutive day of this, peering at the heaping bowl of hand-pulled noodles on his table, which had been there already when he hauled himself out of bed. "Not that I don't appreciate… all this? But don't you have other shit to be doing?"
Shen Yuan looked up from playing some gacha game on his phone to bestow on him a withering stare.
"Who the fuck do you think reads your writing? No," he said.
Airplane really had to respect Shen Yuan for his willingness to drop this kind of devastating conversational drone strike on his own location, ruthlessly destroying everyone in the vicinity. Shen Yuan reminded him fondly of his very best online haters.
"Yeah, okay, fair enough," agreed Xiang Fei peaceably, digging into his noodles. They were excellent. "How do you always get such good food, man? I've lived here, haha, half my life, and I still only end up with food that's good like half the time."
"Like you've even bothered to look at what's highly rated around here. Also, stop talking with your mouth full, you animal, you make me genuinely sick," said Shen Yuan, but he was turning pink. Hmm. Interesting.
"I mean, I don't really have a lot of energy left over. 75 or 80,000 characters a week really takes it out of you! I'm either writing or I feel like my brain's been scooped out of my head," Xiang Fei said, making a scooping gesture with one hand for emphasis. It was really, really funny how much it pissed off Shen Yuan when Airplane stayed calm through one of his hissy fits. "But I can usually still follow instructions, if I remember before I start writing for the day. Do you have some sort of system for finding good restaurants you could show me?"
Shen Yuan shifted. They were eating at the absolutely minuscule table Xiang Fei had shoved against the half-wall dividing his kitchen from the living area, because Shen Yuan slept on the couch now and it felt weird to sit on someone's bed to eat. He kept meaning to replace these chairs and then forgetting—he never thought about them because he never sat on them because he didn't like sitting on them. They were kind of rickety; he was always a little worried one would break. This would only be annoying if it were just him in his house, but absolutely mortifying if it happened front of Shen Yuan.
Xiang Fei jiggled his leg and waited patiently, though. This was going to be really good. Shen Yuan was fucking unhinged: the shit he openly admitted to boggled the mind. Airplane wanted to know what actually embarrassed him. He applied himself to his noodles in silence.
"I've been going through all the dishes in PIDW where the description was longer than 150 characters," Shen Yuan said, finally. "In descending order. By word count."
Airplane finished chewing and swallowed, out of consideration for Shen Yuan's delicate sensibilities. Then he said, "Damn, dude, you are definitely the craziest stalker I've ever had. I'm actually a little touched? You know you could've just asked me what I like to eat, right? Or, since you're paying, you could have gotten stuff that you like?"
"Can you fucking relax, this isn't stalking—that was literary analysis, okay. It wasn't for you, I had it already! Wh—you've had other stalkers? I mean, um."
Xiang Fei took pity. "Oh, are you one of the wiki freaks then? That's cool, that's cool… What's your username, anyway? I mostly don't remember them unless it's someone who buys a lot of extras but, I dunno, you seem pretty intense…"
Shen Yuan was looking at his gacha game very intently. "Um, I'd… rather not say."
"Have I banned you or something?"
"No," Shen Yuan said, annoyed. "I never do anything ban-worthy!"
"Now, that I don't believe. C'mon, tell me, maybe I'll un-ban you."
Shen Yuan huffed and crossed his arms over his chest instead of answering. Adorable. He didn't actually look like a teenager, just young enough to make Xiang Fei feel really old, and kind of fond and indulgent? Maybe this was what being an uncle was supposed to feel like. But okay: message received, he'd drop it for now. Change of subject. Xiang Fei had more of his noodles.
"You know you can take the mask off, right?" Xiang Fei finally said, because Shen Yuan was just sitting there all sulky, which was admittedly cute but otherwise not very entertaining. "I'm not contagious anymore. It's weird for you to just sit there and watch me eat. And, like, I'm obviously not going to report you or press charges or anything, it's not like hiding your face is going to protect your identity." A thought occurred to him. "Is Shen Yuan your actual name?" Another thought. Oh, he should totally do a plot like this: a veiled beauty infiltrating the harem under false pretenses…!
Shen Yuan was talking (outraged! Airplane didn't even have to listen to know!) and Airplane waved his chopsticks in his face.
"No, no, shut up, I have an idea, I have to go write. Thanks for the food, man, hope you like the update!" and retreated to his room.
It was a fucking beauty of a chapter. Airplane was so relieved that the flu hadn't completely killed off his brain that he really dug in, had some fun with it. He spent almost ten whole minutes slacking off, just picking out the character for her name! He had been planning to toss the chapter in as a one-off, but the more he wrote the more plot appeared: this wife could be a whole mini-arc, with political intrigue and some actual character work!
He had a real sense for her personality, too: an ice-queen tsundere bitch, personality so spiky she was constantly shooting herself in the foot. Absolutely no one was going to want to help her with her quest—never mind Binghe, who'd been particularly proud and imperious lately. But she was stubborn, and way too fucking competent to write off.
Maybe she could help Binghe first, to get him on-side! It was hard to come up with ways to get Binghe vulnerable, he was too OP, but in honor of Shen Yuan's wiki-freak ways, he did check the fan wiki. He conscientiously selected an appropriate mechanism by which to leave Binghe just incapacitated enough that even a palace infiltrator might take pity on the Demon Emperor—and to reveal that no matter what her (still-secret!) purposes were, she at least wasn't there to try to kill Binghe. Assassins-turned-wives were really popular, but kind of boring to write. He wasn't sure why she didn't want to kill Binghe—she had to have a reason to want to kill him, too, obviously, or the reveal that she wasn't going to wouldn't hit, but he was sure he'd think of something…
He couldn't believe how easily the words came. Secretly he loved writing the girls who pushed Binghe; obviously, they couldn't ever push him into any real character development, but watching Binghe's mask catch strays and maybe even chip a little was always way more interesting to write than letting him pretend it was the truth.
Ugh, this was probably stupid—he knew what his fan-base liked, and this wasn't going to be it. But it felt like writing had right at the start, and also, he had had a hard couple of weeks. He had earned this! He could always go back to cookie cutter wives after this; producing original(ish) and complicated(ish) plots pleased his (more) literate fans and usually let later cliches slide for a little while.
Not that this plotline was actually going to end in any way other than this poor mysterious Yuan-mei getting pushed down hard and loving it, but Airplane could at least enjoy the journey, couldn't he?
The fan wiki really was useful. He apparently already had a tribe of mostly-human-shaped demons Binghe had slaughtered in a Xin Mo deviation, so he didn't have to invent a new one. Their only demonic feature was a facial marking, so the veil would hide it! The page had a fan-drawn map of the demonic realms with their territory marked, which sparked another thought. Didn't he have an artifact in that region that might be more important than revenge? Basically sure this would be a dead end, he tried searching for it. It was something he had made up to sound cool in a list, he only remembered it because of how cool it had sounded… and THAT had a page, too. For one mention! He was impressed. These fans really were dedicated; he didn't usually feel guilty about the slop he was feeding them, but he kind of wished these fans, at least, had picked something better to fixate on.
Okay, the artifact was rumored to have been located in the mountains neighboring that tribe's territory, which meant…
Airplane totally lost himself. He only returned to his body when Shen Yuan's alarm went off in the next room at 15 minutes to post time, at which point Airplane swore, and cut the scene he'd just started, along with his outline for the rest of the arc, to dump into his notes (which backed up to the cloud every hour, he wasn't making THAT mistake again). He spent the remaining time with an eye on the clock, and ended up cutting the previous two complete scenes out and into his notes, too, because there was a better chapter ending a bit further back, something he could punch up into a light cliffhanger. The cut stuff was some buffer for tomorrow, then… It left today a little under his target, at 8.7k, but he didn't even care! It wasn't high literature, sure, but he had just written something he was confident was actually good.
He hit post on schedule and relaxed, feeling like he'd run a marathon. Well, he always posted feeling the way he would feel if he, Xiang Fei, had run a marathon (almost dead); today he felt the way someone who was physically capable of running a marathon would feel after running one! He felt proud of his writing. It was crazy. He hadn't felt like this in years.
Peerless Cucumber (whose comments had been so neutral lately that it kind of depressed Airplane; even his biggest hater thought he'd lost his sauce!) had better give him an actual compliment for this one. Oh, fuck, if his readers didn't like this chapter he might cry, and then Shen Yuan would make fun of him. Xiang Fei was jittery, high on adrenaline. Fuck! He jerked off right at his desk and then went to bed.