#because like. li xiangyi is dead? and di feisheng is STILL?? IGNORING HER???

[where-the-water-flows]

ok so I keep coming back to an au where like.

Instead of faking his death, Shan Gudao fakes Li Xiangyi's death, and still blames the Jinyuan alliance for it.

(and, because, y'know, what's the point of winning if you don't have anyone to see it, stashes poor Li Xiangyi in a convenient dungeon somewhere. if you don't start with your own captive audience, a shidi is fine.)

Shan Gudao thus becomes the head of the Sigu Sect, bc...like, he is second in command, and now he's got 1)prestige and 2)time to work on his ultimate goal of Becoming Emperor Of Everything Ever. Probably does the occasional 'expedition' to 'search' for his beloved shidi's 'missing body', by which I mean go and update poor captive Li Xiangyi on whatever new terrible step in the 'take over the world plan' he's up to, and/or do a bit of torture, psychological or otherwise.

Di Feisheng, on the other hand, is fully losing his shit trying to work out what in the actual fuck happened to Li Xiangyi, because someone has clearly murdered him. And on the one hand, he's now, kinda, the top of the jianghu, and on the other, he hasn't exactly earnt that, has he, and winning by default doesn't fucking count, that's not skill, that's random luck.

And sure, literally everyone in the damn world is out for his head because of the whole ' "murdered" Li Xiangyi' thing, but that's 1)more fights to test his skill in 2)not the point, he has to find out who Really murdered Li Xiangyi, if that means mowing through every idiot stupid enough to get in his way when he can't just lay low, so be it. (A surprising number of people are thrown off by a mask.)

all of which is to say: in this world the kinda sketchy and mysterious guy wandering the jianghu on a quest to find a corpse that Fang Duobing latches onto is Di Feisheng, who-- is initially tolerating this idiot in part because he's Li Xiangyi's disciple, which means he has just as much interest as Di Feisheng does in working out what the fuck actually happened a decade ago, and in part because --

well. ten years of looking for a dead man, let alone a famous dead man like Li Xiangyi, is an awful long time to find nothing at all. a suspiciously long time, really, like there's not actually a dead man to find.

like Li Xiangyi is still alive.

#mysterious lotus casebook #di feisheng #fang doubing #li xiangyi #also in the background saintess is FULLY losing her fucking mind #because like. li xiangyi is dead? and di feisheng is STILL?? IGNORING HER??? #has FULLY fucked off to do mysterious errands and has practically abdicated from the sect in favour of....looking for a CORPSE??? #anyway the number of AUs I am generating for this fandom is. uh #very a lot. it's very a lot.