the sleuth of ming dynasty (2020) // ep. 8

this scene is HILARIOUS. tang fan suddenly played blind when he realized that's not the wang zhi he knows. it was a good laugh. he's funny but also genius for doing that.

mdl comment section be like: any bromance in this one?

well, tell ya what, anything can be a bromance as long as you put your mind to it.

✨ big, a depressive pixie nightmare bodyguard ✨

Ooops...

tumblr not letting the 'kill me love me' tag be searched directly is getting old real quick 🙃

"You don't have to leave me tonight, stay a little longer I won't bite" ~

WIP Wednesday

Happy Wednesday! Have more of LLH's POV from my MLC longfic, in which LLH panics about what's wrong with a-Fei, and DFS resorts to desperate measures to reassure him.

(You can find earlier excerpts here.)

His meridians were unharmed. But his qi–

The great, howling tempest of level eight Beifeng Baiyang had been pinioned, reduced to a sluggish draft.

“How?” Li Lianhua managed, gripping a-Fei’s wrist as though the force could rile it up to its former glory.

A-Fei shook his head and looked away. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters!” Li Lianhua yelled. “You–a-Fei, this shouldn’t be possible! Not with the rate your qi replenishes. What did you do?”

A-Fei’s jaw clenched and he pulled his hand free. “What I had to.”

Li Lianhua gripped the bedding, his mind reeling. Even when he’d blocked a-Fei’s meridians with asura grass, a-Fei had meditated daily, refusing to let his qi become depleted even when he couldn’t possibly use it. And now A-Fei was too depleted to use qinggong. Or to defend himself. What could have possessed him to–

Oh. Oh Gods, no. “A-Fei,” Li Lianhua said, trying to force his voice to be steady, “tell me this isn’t from healing me. Tell me this isn’t from that procedure that you promised was safe for both of you.”

“It’s not from the procedure,” a-Fei said, still staring straight ahead and refusing to look at him.

“He’s telling the truth,” Xiaobao interrupted. “The procedure really is safe. There were just a lot of emergencies today that needed extra qi to address! And he brought you up a mountain with qinggong. Of course he’s running a little low.”

Li Lianhua couldn’t stop the almost hysterical laugh that burst free. “A little low? Having only ten percent of his neili left is not a little!”

“Wh-what?” Xiaobao asked, more breath than sound.

A-Fei’s arm twitched and his hand tightened around his dao.

 So a-Fei had lied to Xiaobao about how dangerous it was. “That’s it. You can forget about trying it again.”

“Xiaohua’er!” Xiaobao cried.

A-Fei whipped around to face him. “It wasn’t the procedure, Xiangyi. I give you my word.”

“Then what else was it, a-Fei? Unless you spent the last three months single-handedly fighting the entire jianghu or living off qi alone? Because nothing else makes sense.” 

A-Fei stared at him, unmoving, his too-regular breaths the only evidence of whatever war he waged with himself. At last, he swallowed, his throat bobbing with the movement, and closed his eyes. “I wasn’t fighting the jianghu,” he said quietly, as though there were something wrong with that.

Li Lianhua let a-Fei’s answer unravel and re-knit itself in his mind, then took a moment to breathe until the urge to pick up a-Fei’s dao and hit him in the head with it had passed. “I see. And why, exactly, did the great Di-mengzhu decide to forgo sleeping and try to live off qi alone? Is this some new strategy to reach a hitherto unknown ninth level of Beifeng Baiyang?” 

For a moment, a-Fei was so still Li Lianhua thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he squared his shoulders, opened his eyes, and stared straight into Li Lianhua’s. “I was looking for you,” he said, each word a promise.

Li Lianhua closed his eyes to force back yet more tears. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The letter should have prevented this. A-Fei was supposed to accept Li Xiangyi’s death and his own martial arts supremacy, and fight Xiaobao when he found himself missing their rivalry. Instead, a-Fei had run himself into the ground, relinquished the strength he had tried so hard to gain, all to chase after a ghost. A ghost who had selfishly abandoned him, who was harming him still by his inability to stay gone, hurting him just as much as if he had poisoned him with Bicha. “What were you thinking?” he asked, losing the battle against the ocean of tears as they crashed against his lashes.

There was a quiet rustle of clothes and sheets. Then warm, callused fingers cradled his face as though he mattered, with a hesitance and gentleness that spoke a language he didn’t want to understand. “My qi is replaceable,” a-Fei said, his thumb caressing Li Lianhua’s cheekbone with a touch too feather-light to wipe the tears away, succeeding only in brushing a faint wet streak from his nose to his ear. “You are not.” 

 Li Lianhua swallowed and shook his head, the words stabbing him harder than a-Fei’s dao ever could. A selfish part of him wished it were true, that a-Fei truly wanted him, not the ghost of Li Xiangyi a-Fei saw when he looked at him. But as much as it hurt to hear, as much as he hurt a-Fei by not making him face the truth, as much as he ought to brush off the declaration the way a-Fei had brushed off the tears, to say he was being ridiculous, sentimental, absurd, he couldn’t. Not when he knew what it had cost a-Fei to say that out loud, and with an audience: a sacrifice almost as great as the wangchuan flower had been. He couldn’t throw this gift away. Not now, at least. 

They’d discuss a-Fei’s destroying himself for a dead man later.

I'm cautiously hoping that this project will be good 🫣

Screenshots from the new trailer:

Looks like they filmed the scene from the novel where the male lead digs up the female lead’s “corpse” with a whip and carries it around town @pi-ying-xi 👀

Looks like our unhinged maniac male lead also gets tormented physically and psychologically in what the actress playing the female lead described as “an unconventional emotional massage” 👀

….and being dragged away while screaming like an evil villain (except you know he isn’t really evil this time, since he’s our protagonist and all ☺️)

And of course there is a gorgeous “(maybe) dying prettily in the snow” scene

do i ship them? no. do i think that them fucking would solve some problems for both of them? yes.

sorry to everyone in the heroes tag instead of any sensible meta about the parallels between them you get this

mlc favorite character/ship poll takeaways

so this poll ended recently, and i thought it would be interesting to do a little number crunching. image of the poll results and also a graphic of some ao3 ship tag stats under the cut.

general disclaimer that this is just for fun and i'm not an academic, etc.

no set scale so this is all vibes based really, given how styles differ etc

Kiss Meme (1/4)

A request from discord server