#picking cucumbers

[sunderwight]

Shen Qingqiu gets hit by a rare wife plot.

And it actually is a rare one because Airplane didn't even write this one down! He toyed with the idea before ultimately dismissing it as being too controversial for the tastes of his readers, and adapting only a few of the same elements for a subsequent chapter of PIDW.

But apparently the System can pull inspiration even from the author's thoughts, especially when there's nothing to contradict the concept and even a few threads of it still to be found in the original, and somehow Shen Qingqiu runs afoul of this previously-unwritten plot bunny.

The core concept was a cuck scenario, of all things. One of the Luo Binghe's wives gets afflicted by a poison that can only be cured by dual cultivation, but specifically can't be cured by by dual cultivation with anyone who has mastery over demonic qi. Something something conflicting energies, something bullshit something. Peerless Cucumber would have ripped the chapter to shreds if it had actually made it to publication, not just for the insult of implying that Luo Binghe should let one of his wives sleep with someone else, but also because why would Luo Binghe -- able to use both kinds of cultivation -- somehow not be able to keep his demonic energies from influencing the situation just in this one case?

Well it turns out that in his specific case it's because sex gets him too worked up to keep things strictly separate, and the degree of control required to treat the affliction whilst dual cultivating is extensive enough that even a little slip-up would be fatal.

Of course, in the actual chapter of PIDW, this same plot device was altered and used to create a harem orgy where Luo Binghe oversaw several of his wives "treating" one another's "afflictions", but Shen Qingqiu just had to go and get a fatal of dose of the more severe version (he didn't realize the risk, because again, this version didn't even make it into the novel).

Anyway, of course this ends up with Shen Qingqiu trying to figure out another way to cheat death, while Luo Binghe goes through the five stages of grief before accepting that he's just going to have to let someone else fuck his husband. This leads to an argument because of course Shen Qingqiu's not going to cheat on Luo Binghe, and he's especially not going to force one of his martial siblings to sleep with him, come on now, and Luo Binghe trying not to cry tears of blood while bringing himself to explain that a fair few of Shen Qingqiu's sect siblings would be happy volunteers for this task.

Shen Qingqiu's just like, well of course you think that, for some bizarre reason you think everyone wants to sleep with me. Bias is what it is. Really it's flattering Binghe but obviously every other person we know is straight, that's just statistics, and everyone in the entire cultivation world knows that Qi Qingqi would sooner chew glass than have sex with a man!

Luo Binghe, weeping now: Shizun please. This is serious. I need you speak words that make sense in the order you're saying them.

They argue, they reach an impasse, the clock is ticking. So Luo Binghe reluctantly turns to the most reliable source of information (outside of himself) on Manipulating Shen Qingqiu to Do Things That Are in His Own Best Interests -- Shang Qinghua.

At first Shang Qinghua is like, well I'm flattered Junshang but I don't think I could shoulder the baggage of fucking Cucumber-bro for you. But then Luo Binghe is like no I need someone who is way hotter and more capable than you, if Shizun is going to fuck someone else at my behest they're going to be TOP TIER so that when I fuck him better afterwards he's really impressed with me. Liu Qingge, obviously.

Not Yue Qingyuan, Shang Qinghua asks? (He'd take the insult a little more personally but honestly he's just relieved that he's not being asked to navigate this social minefield.)

No, Luo Binghe says. He's not 100% sure he could beat Yue Qingyuan in a fight even to this day, which in his mind also translates to not being 100% sure he could do sex better than him either, so Yue Qingyuan is an emergency last resort. He's way more likely to cry on Shizun too and Shen Qingqiu is into that shit, it's too risky.

Alright, says Shang Qinghua, and he thinks about it, and then he comes up with the beautifully simple solution:

Luo Binghe has to fuck Liu Qingge first.

Because of course the crux of the issue is that even with permission, Shen Qingqiu doesn't want to cheat on Luo Binghe. But in the twisted annals of his mind, Luo Binghe himself is still entitled to a harem, even if Luo Binghe is also happily monogamous in this life. So if he shacks up with Liu Qingge first then Liu Qingge essentially joins Luo Binghe's harem, at which point if Shen Qingqiu sleeps with him it's not an affair, it's the gay version of those fanservice-y 3P scenes that the wives in PIDW did. Shang Qinghua translates the concept as best as he can to Luo Binghe, who -- though slightly dubious -- must accept that so far Shang Qinghua's wisdom hasn't steered him wrong with regards to his shizun's eccentricities.

Luo Binghe's mission: seduce Liu Qingge, or at least convince him to have sex, or possibly to lie and (convincingly!) tell Shen Qingqiu that they had sex. That last one is the longest shot so he's probably going to have to just fuck him (Luo Binghe still underestimates how willing his husband is to believe that just about anyone would have sex with him).

Shang Qinghua's mission: convince Shen Qingqiu that he owes his husband steamy threeway gay sex or something so that this plan he pulled out of his ass doesn't backfire and get him killed.

[unown]

picnic for you and me ^_^

[housecow]

Any weekend plans, you big soft cute cowgirl?

getting the garden ready for the spring!!!

i am choosing tomatoes to plant (yellow pear, juliet, celebrity, cherokee purple, and maybe a couple heirlooms in pots bc they don’t produce enough to justify using bed space. yellow accordion?), preparing walkways (weeding 👹), preparing to spread compost!! also need to trim trees. reinforce wire to keep deer out.

[prettydaisygirl]

Some pictures of my garden today! 🌸🌷🌸

[dyed-indigo]

How many wives did Luo Bingge have?

I see quite a lot of debate over this within the fandom, and this excerpt has been passed around quite a bit:

But I felt like I remembered Bingge being mentioned as having more wives within the text, so I decided to skim the books (CTRL + F on the Internet Archive PDFs worked wonders) to find as many references to Bingge's wife count as I could.

I was right that he was mentioned as having more wives (hundreds to be exact), on the back of the very first book in the series even. However, the backs of books are the domain of the publisher rather than the author, so this isn't really trustworthy info to go off of for canon purposes. Still, it made me curious to see if more wives were mentioned somewhere else within the series.

He is mentioned as theoretically marrying at least 100 women at once here, however this was purely speculation on what would have happened in Proud Immortal Demon Way if Luo Binghe truly aspired for marriage. He did marry many women in PIDW, however it's never made clear whether these marriages were out of love or were political (and for horny reasons, the stallion protagonist can never escape his libido).

613 is also mentioned as a number of wives, and seems oddly specific unless there's some Chinese number symbolism I'm missing here, however this is just an example of something that Madame Meiyin could predict with her fortune telling abilities. Her fortunes are mentioned to typically be about romance, so this could be Shen Qingqiu remembering an actual prediction she made in canon, however even if that were the case (which there doesn't seem to be evidence to support) it could simply be that Luo Binghe never got those wives within the novel, and was just implied to get them afterwards (cue Peerless Cucumber rant about Airplane's lazy writing).

There's mentioned to be dozens of women "barely glimpsed" within the harem, presumably in addition to wives like Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan who were more significant, but that still doesn't give us an exact count. If the initial harem count is accurate, it does imply that most of the women within it were just written to fluff the numbers a bit.

Bingge is mentioned to have "never refused" any requests to join his harem. RIP Bingge's understanding of boundaries, but, again, we have no clue how many women even asked to join. Demon Emperors are powerful, but also scary, and Shen Qingqiu is... perhaps an unreliable narrator when it comes to any version of Luo Binghe's appeal factor.

Bingge is mentioned multiple times to have had sex with hundreds of women, however, not all of the bedded were wedded. Madame Meiyin, for example, is mentioned as someone that Bingge slept with but never married, and there's no evidence that i could find that she was the sole exception in a sea of wives.

In conclusion, while manwhore Bingge is real, his count of actual wives is more than likely less than 100, as originally specified. (Though I wouldn't blame you if you thought otherwise, the emphasis on the harem size being "innumerable" and "uncountable" in the narration is quite a lot, and historically many Chinese emperors had a larger harem than Bingge.)

At least, he had less than 100 wives in the novel. In the donghua, on the other hand...

Well. That's a fairly definite amount.

[halfbaked00q]

i swear every clip or photoset or gifset I see is, like. Eugene is calm and collected, standing or sitting there hotly and looking on impassively. Lee is the saddest most pathetic wet cat you have ever seen in your life. I need that, but w 00q.

[taryn40k]

Look what you did, now Silux has to take care of the backline while Democles is handling two Emperor's Children with a baseline under one arm!

[alshaverpressbox]

inquiring minds (me) want to know about the plants you chose. btw.

hi em I definitely didn't forget you asked this at all. thank you for indulging me in my beautiful beautiful plant choices here because they're very important to me & also minnesota :)

all of them are state symbols & were lovingly sourced through my best friends, online university herbariums. needles from our state tree, the norway pine (Pinus resinosa) are on the spurge one & our state flower, the pink & white lady's slipper orchid (Cypripedium reginae) is on the one with kirill & flower. :)) I love her I have some 1969 botanical congress stamps featuring her framed in my home :)

the state fruit is the honeycrisp apple because it was developed & bred here at the university of mn so the one of fabes & zuccy features the blossom & leaves from the apple tree (Malus pumila). is the image I used from the honeycrisp cultivar specifically? probably not but I am limited by the resources available to me <3 & many of those resources do not list cultivars <3 did I struggle with the integrity of the choice to include this despite not knowing. who's to say

& last but not least the hartzy one features the state grain (Zizania palustris). vexing to me to include this one because, by virtue of being a grain, most preserved specimens are large & unyielding (for my purposes, at least) but. I made it work :) thank you wild rice for your service

state plants I love you :)

[cautiouslyyyoptimistic]

I personally think it would be funny that between books 1 and 2 AKA sqq's sexy widow era, airplane suggested writing as a way to get his feelings out. Since he was like ya know, grieving but he refused to call it grieving.

So shen qingqiu does it and he actually ends up liking it and just gets into a huge frenzy about it, writing purely for self indulgence. Like, the main character is so binghe coded its insane but he refuses to acknowledge it. There are many wacky and unhinged elements you wouldn't fully understand even if you were from the age of the internet. But then oops! It somehow gets leaked and copied everywhere and everyone reads it and its like a mega hit not just in the cultivation world, but also among civilians.

And everyone's like "wow great world building and charming characters, some character motivations were hard to follow sometimes, But overall a really original danmei concept! Hope the main pairing get together next book!"

And shen qingqiu is like "... I wrote danmei!?!?"

[chaos-potat]

The masculine urge to pick flowers and have a tea party

[thisisaheist]

Everyone else: normal tasks that people actually do

Sarah and Vito:

[urdeadbestfriend]

springsteen in the garden center

[honeytearays]

I've been at my grandparents' house the past 2-3 weeks, and man, I like gardening but I'm TIRED

[the-habitat-ring]

Cuuuuuuuuukes

[simptasia]

mum wasn't much into DS9, she didnt like it when it was airing, and only really started to get into it in the later years of her life. she loved quark. but still, i'm glad she got to see "dr. bashir i presume?" before she died

and she loved it

[acespeon]

I love how Usagi will have a random encounter with a kindly old woman or a dude and then have someone turn around and tell him they had died a certain time ago