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There is a classic Chinese riddle: If you’re in a burning plain with the wind blowing east, and there is nothing but flammable grass as far as you can see, and the wall of fire is moving towards you, how can you survive?
The answer is to take a stick and set it on fire, then run several hundred yards forward and set the ground in front of you ablaze. The wind will push both walls of fire forward, and the wall of fire behind you will hit a fire break, where it can no longer burn anything.
Shang Qinghua decides that the same concept applies to rumors. So when the rumor comes flying around that Shang Qinghua is in love with his King, Shang Qinghua tells another rumor to the palace staff: that Mobei Jun is looking for a wife.
This is, potentially, the same as setting out one fire by starting another, bigger one, but hey, Shang Qinghua doesn’t care. He can’t keep driving into new hallway urns and avoiding the palace staff! He has work to do!!!
Work that includes running the entire Northern Kingdom for an uninterested, uninvolved, and ungrateful Emperor, because even though the whole world belongs to Luo Binghe, it’s not like he actually deals with any of it.
Pros of this strategy: everyone ducks for cover. Everyone. Shang Qinghua has the brief, power-trippy experience of witnessing demons, both big and small, carrying an expression of absolute terror on their faces. Ha! How the tables have turned! Nobody bothers him for a week straight. Shang Qinghua gets a solid eight hours of sleep. It’s a miracle.
Cons of this strategy: as the word spreads, potential brides and powerful demon families start showing up at the gates of the Northern Palace. They form crowds of dark-faced, glowy-eyed, villainous-looking creatures. After this starts happening, Shang Qinghua’s average hours slept per night plummets to near-zero.
Also, Mobei Jun gets mad.
Mobei Jun is not amused to find himself suddenly on the marriage market. Shang Qinghua can sort of understand this. It’s a big life change. He honestly doesn’t think he is ready for marriage either, not that it would ever be in the cards for him. As a thirty-something reincarnated cultivator, Shang Qinghua has silently accepted that he has no idea how proper romance works.
It doesn’t help that in all 6,666 chapters of PIDW, he has honestly never written about a proper marriage. Marriages of convenience, trap marriages, and ghost marriages, yeah, sure, sure. Luo Binghe had been married countless times. However, Shang Qinghua had been careful to always specify that they were contracts that did not specify any sort of exclusivity. After all, Luo Binghe’s relationship with his harem must always be seen as that of an emperor and his concubines, not as an emperor and his empress. Shang Qinghua had always edged his readers with the possibility of one girl winning, but had never really gone through with it. Readers would have used that sort of marriage as an excuse to declare one girl as best girl, which would ruin the competition, and Shang Qinghua had to maintain a very delicate balance of making sure none of the three thousand beauties actually came out as best girl, otherwise the fans of the other 2,999 might get mad.
As a result, marriage ceremonies and courting rituals in this world are … a little wild.
For example, one potential pride, the daughter of some demon ruling some layer of Hell, tries to baby-trap Mobei Jun in an effort to court him. Apparently, there are some laws that dictate that men can be forced into marriages this way. As a result, dispensing with any introductions or politeness, the demoness simply shows up in Mobei Jun’s rooms, half-naked, snarling in a way that shows off her wicked canine teeth, and attempts to subdue him in the bedroom.
Given that this is Mobei Jun, suffice to say, it doesn’t work.
There are also a few snake-goddesses, spider-monsters or other female spirits of the animal variety that borrow traditions from the animal kingdom, who try to kill him in single combat. The idea is, apparently, that if they defeat him, then they can marry him, and get to rule his kingdom and obtain everything he owns.
Given that Mobei Jun is second in combat prowess only to the Emperor Luo Binghe himself, this also doesn’t work.
A truly astonishing number of evil female characters come out of the woodwork. They had been lurking in the shadows this entire time, and this spark of an idea had always been in the back of their minds. Shang Qinghua’s announcement has essentially dumped a whole load of kerosene onto this flame.
Shang Qinghua wants to sob. He has a sinking suspicion that the IQ of these marriage attempts reflects poorly on his IQ as an author.
Shang Qinghua also wants to throw up his hands at the sky in borrowed indignation. What the fuck! Why are all these women so terrible!!! Why does Mobei Jun only attract venomous seductresses? Did all the pure-hearted good women go to Luo Binghe? (Only to be later rejected in light of his newly-discovered homosexuality?) Why are all of them such a bad match?!?
He says as much to Mobei Jun, who stares at him with a complicated expression for a long, long time.
The silence stretches on, and on, and on, until Shang Qinghua replays back what he had just said in his mind, and blushes.
“This sounds like I’m in love with you,” he says to Mobei Jun. “But please, take no offense. I just want what’s best for you!”
Mobei Jun’s expression darkens.
“You’re the one who got me into this mess in the first place,” he says. The temperature in the room plummets several degrees. Shang Qinghua’s heart plummets with it.
“Forgive me, my king! I only wanted—I wanted you to find someone who could make you happy.”
It’s a lie. Shang Qinghua had wanted to sleep. And also to cover up the rumor that he might be in love with Mobei Jun. Because if Mobei Jun ever got wind of that rumor, then Shang Qinghua’s days would surely be numbered.
Mobei Jun looks taken aback for a moment. Then his brows furrow, and he gestures out in the general direction of this whole situation, which is unlikely to make him happy and far more conducive to starting a war on several fronts. In short, it’s a mess.
“You make me happy,” he says unexpectedly.
The meaning in his expression is clear. Why would you do something like this?
“I don’t know what I was thinking—” Shang Qinghua stammers. He briefly debates the pros and cons of explaining the wall of fire analogy to the king, but then decides that it’s unlikely that Mobei Jun has seen a huge grass plain before anyway. The analogy would probably fall flat. Was there a similar analogy that could work for fields of ice? An ice storm, maybe? One that froze water? Start another ice storm?
He doesn’t realize that he’s babbling all of this aloud and that Mobei Jun is listening, until he recognizes that voice echoing through the halls as his, and not the sound of his thoughts bouncing around in his brain.
Mobei Jun watches him ramble on, the way he sometimes does, his expression inscrutable but not interrupting. Shang Qinghua hurriedly runs back several lines of their conversation, and starts to sweat.
Wait a second. Mobei Jun hadn’t … accidentally confessed somewhere in there, had he?
No way. Ridiculous. Shang Qinghua must be dreaming. He is already more than a little wound up by the lack of sleep and the general stress of helping run a kingdom and drawing up seating charts for fifteen or so potential brides that all want to eat Mobei Jun for breakfast. Surely he’s just hallucinating out of tiredness and a deep-seated, unsuccessfully suppressed desire.
Mobei Jun’s hand comes up to catch him by the chin. His fingers are cold like they always are, but Shang Qinghua feels warm shock go right through him.
A traitorous warmth spreads to his cheeks. He stares up at Mobei Jun helplessly.
“Why would I be in need of a wife if I have someone who loves me right here?”
Shang Qinghua’s jaw drops.
Oh fuck. The rumor had reached him after all.
A small, amused smirk appears on Mobei Jun’s face. With a face like his, and with his designation as a so-called villain, it should look evil. But instead it’s the most breathtaking sight Shang Qinghua has ever seen.
His thumb brushes gently across Shang Qinghua’s cheekbone.
“I think I’ve just found a solution for this mess you got us into,” Mobei Jun says, still smiling. “I’ll just announce that I’ve already taken a wife—you.”
Shang Qinghua feels his soul detach from his body.
“My—my king,” he says faintly. “You can’t possibly—I—I’m not suitable—”
Mobei Jun’s eyes flash dangerously. Oh, so here comes their first couple’s fight, Shang Qinghua guesses.
“Are you planning to take my head off?” Mobei Jun asks dryly.
Shang Qinghua recoils. “No! My king! I would never!”
“Any plans to take over my kingdom? Poison me in my sleep?”
“No!”
“Ever plan on having kids?”
Shang Qinghua looks down at his body, which, yup, is still male, and then looks up at Mobei Jun with a lost expression on his face.
Mobei Jun looks satisfied. “Good. Then that settles it. You’re better than all those other candidates anyway. I fail to see the problem here.”
“I…”
“Do you have any objections?” Mobei Jun asks, tilting Shang Qinghua’s face up gently. He takes Shang Qinghua’s silence as a tacit agreement, even though Shang Qinghua is genuinely just cosplaying a fish, with its mouth gaping open, and its eyes blank from information overload.
Mobei Jun hums with satisfaction and nods. “It’s decided then. I guess you’ll have a wedding to plan after all.”
After that, Mobei Jun doesn’t even turn his head. He leaves through one of his portals, and leaves Shang Qinghua with, impossibly, even more work than before.
So, as a result, in the weeks to come, Shang Qinghua finds himself dealing with a whole slew of assassination attempts as if he were the flavor-of-the-week favorite concubine in a harem.
And don’t get him wrong—he wrote several of these scenarios, enough to know exactly how these jealous potential demon wives will try to kill him. Invariably, there will be poison involved, and he is quite confident in his ability to detect and avoid poison. But why! Is! This! Happening?!?!?! TO HIM?!?! Why HIM?!?!?!
Granted, he knows why.
After summoning the entire Northern Court into a meeting, Mobei Jun had hereby announced Shang Qinghua as his intended bride. There would be a wedding ceremony. All of them would be invited. The hidden implication was that the target should be moved to Shang Qinghua instead of him. So far, it has been successful.
Shang Qinghua deals with all of them, naturally. The spurned brides try their best, naturally, but they don’t have very many moves left up their sleeves, especially now that Shang Qinghua knows what to expect from them. His daily meals become a routine of ingesting some new murder attempt, spending the evening documenting its new effects (it’s for research, he has a new book to put out, please), and then spinning up the antidote.
After several weeks of this, the spurned brides all freak out, calling him some master poisoner. Please! Get it right! He’s the one who came up with the poison in the first place!!!
Eventually, the string of assassination attempts slows down, then stops, because Mobei Jun ostensibly gets tired of it all and chases them all back to whatever hole they crawled out from. Shang Qinghua almost manages to feel grateful, despite this whole mess being Mobei Jun’s fault in the first place.
When he complains about this to Mobei Jun, however, Mobei Jun simply whacks him fondly and says, “Aren’t you the one always telling me? There’s an old classic Chinese riddle…”