ABCDMXTX - Day 5: E-Ming.

Your beloved pet, your favourite animal, that legendary beast you're obsessed with, the character you adore in animal form... Let me draw them!

€15 per animal, +€10 per addition (other animals, background)

Five slots open. First come, first served~

Order via KoFi or shoot me a DM if you want to discuss it further and/or pay via Wise. Thanks in advance for your support!

• Chapter 2: Climb

It's time for another Hualian modern meet-cute! Witness the blooming of the most convoluted (kinda?) parasocial relationship, featuring: -Air traffic mayhem -Mistaken clothes -Only one bed -Videoblogging -A gay wedding -Explosives?

Summary: Hua Cheng’s flight gets off to a bad start when the airline arbitrarily gives half of his first class couple’s pod to a stranger. To add insult to injury, he arrives back to his seat only to find that the intruder has mistaken Hua Cheng’s jumper with the plane’s pyjamas! Before he can kick up a fuss, though, something in this man’s face strikes him as familiar…

Wait a second, isn’t this the super cute guy from the last video that Hua Cheng watched while at the lounge before the flight?

• Chapter 1: Take off

Hi! 💜 For the wip ask game: please please please, tell me more about in memoriam 👀

Hi! Of course, let's see: both In Memoriam and Scars surged from my curiosity about how Wei Ying (and Lan Zhan, plus the rest of the cast) processed Wei Ying's change of bodies in the long run. The novel shows some of it, yes, but it's such a strange occurrence! Surely there's more to it than saying, "alright, this happened. Moving on~"

Specifically for In Memoriam, I thought about the people who used to know Mo Xuanyu. His family was killed at the beginning of the novel, and no one in the Jin clan cared about him, but there are more people in the world. Someone had to remember him dearly from his childhood years, right? I thought of their reaction upon learning that who they used to know as an odd yet sweet child of the local gentry is now a completely different person. What an unholy aberration it must look like for someone outside the Jianghu who can't even imagine the power of cultivation! That's why I chose a former nanny, someone humble who looked after the clan's kids when needed, isn't well-read nor has contact with the Jianghu—she might even be wary of cultivators. She's gentle and a little superstitious, and would definitely die of horror and shock if they told her what happened with xiao Xuanyu. Her last wish is to see him because she's had dreams of something terrible happening to him, and thus her family decide to lure Wei Ying to the Jin territory with an outrageous story in order to ask him privately to help, so the old lady can leave the world with no worries.

That said, I never planned to make the fic about their meeting, but rather, of the before and after, and the narration is a third person vaguely close to Lan Zhan's perspective. Wei Ying goes to see the nanny without giving it much thought, but the experience makes him face the fact that he was shoved into an already started life that had memories and significance and an identity, and he comes back pretty shaken. Most of the fic would be about how he and Lan Zhan come to terms with it together.

I find writing for MDZS pretty intimidating. The worldbuilding and characterization are both very solid, I don't find as many crevices to get in as with TGCF. I don't know if I'll ever post any of these ideas. Have a preview of what I have written, to compensate, and thanks for asking!

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“I am talking nonsense, aren’t I? I'm sorry, Hanguang-Jun,” he said and leaned on Lan Zhan’s chest, looking up at him with eyes filled in equal parts with mischief and adoration. “I really want to see them try to explain their scheme to my face, and they won’t dare doing so in front of you. They are not worth your time, anyway; it would even stain the reputation of the Gusu Lan Clan to meddle with such affairs, don’t you think?”

“They will try to kill you.”

Wei Ying smirked and stretched a bit in order to get close to Lan Zhan’s ear.

“Let them try,” he purred, malicious. “Let me have some fun.”

Lan Zhan could feel Wei Ying’s slender fingers slide across his chest, drawing his collarbones and making little circles around his burnt scar. He didn’t falter.

“I’ll behave, I promise.” Wei Ying smile turned into a kiss against Lan Zhan’s neck. “I’ll be good, very good. I'm only ever naughty with you.”

“Stop it.”

“I can’t fly on a sword, so I’ll take Little Apple with me. It'll be a good bonding experience.” Wei Ying sat straight to see Lan Zhan in the eye and offered him the most innocent, purest smile, exquisitely fabricated. “Your uncle will be happy to have some peace; maybe you yourself will remember how much you enjoy silence and how bothersome I am.”

“Wei Ying…”

“Isn’t it true that I am bothersome, and that I love to bother you, and that you love to be bothered by me?”

Lan Zhan couldn’t stop the smallest smile from briefly appearing on his face. Wei Ying noticed it, and he was delighted.

“It is true, it really is!” he said, and leaned forward to point one finger at Lan Zhan’s chest. “Yet don’t tell me you don’t feel at least a bit tempted to have one day of your little five-to-nine clan rituals without my sabotage.”

Lan Zhan frowned slightly. Perhaps Wei Ying was the one in need of a break. He had always been a walking terror, ill-adapted to discipline and routine. Maybe the night hunts were not enough to compensate for the rather domestic, uneventful rhythm of the Cloud Recesses. That was understandable, but why did he want to go alone? 

“Lan Zhan, are you pouting at me?”

—————— Back to WIP game main post.

ABCDMXTX - Day 17: Quan Yizhen.

Cardinal martial god of the West, the bravest of them all (and the one with the best hair!)

List of prompts.

It's been 83 years, but I finally updated my TGCF metal music AU. Come read about the adventures and misadventures of Hua Cheng living his own Y/N beach episode with Xie Lian at the Shi family's vacation villa!

Hualian Mix'n'Match, day 5 Fox Hua Cheng Wu Ming and Calamity Xie Lian

Prompt: Mystery

Xie Lian arrived to the ruined battlefield in search of resentful souls and found nothing but a single fox spirit that had already devoured them all. The jiuweihu wore a mask that Xie Lian understood it as a sign of subservience.

What a pity, but it'd do.

Event page || Organisers

This piece was vaguely inspired by the first arc of the c-novel Bai Yao Pu. A soldier boy saves an ash fox from death, and they become friends. Years later, the fox sacrifices his tail to save the now grown general from execution, and eats the spirits of all his victims to spare him from karma.

Bai Yao Pu has a donghua and a manhua.

Chapter 3 of "Rotting Waters", the second fic of my TGCF metal music AU series "Heavenly Damnation", is up!

To celebrate, let me share with you this portrait of Bai Wuxiang with his legendary eight-string guitar, Zhu Xin. Art by the equally legendary @ilymir_EZGbora, thank you so much!

Read here:

That's right, we have an update!

Thank you Tiira for this wonderful piece, everything you do for Heavenly Damnation is gold 🤟

The story of Heavenly Damnation, the TGCF Heavy metal AU by @yabancreations continues with the second part Rotting Waters! Here is a moment from chapter 4!

Ooh can I ask about "Clarity" 👀

Yes, you can, haha... ha /sweats

"Clarity" is an E rated, possibly dead dove, dubcon, top Xie Lian/bottom Hua Cheng project. Also known as "as far removed from what Yaban normally writes as humanly possible."

As I mentioned in the original description, the action takes place towards the end of the novel, and it's as close to canon as I can get with this premise. This means that the dubcon doesn't come from Xie Lian being a dark version of himself, but rather from a sort of "fuck or die" scenario. I make no promises of the smut being sexy —for starters, I haven't written smut since like 2011— because I'm more interested in Xie Lian's internal turmoil than anything. In fact, one of the tags I think I'll add is "this would be sexier if only Xie Lian didn't overthink so much."

I'm not sure of when the idea first occurred to me, but I've been turning it over in my mind for probably more than a year. Here's what I have written so far:

—————

Xie Lian waited until the last moment. He held on, and on, and on, watching how some flowers wilted and dried whilst others turned into fruit that ripened and fell, bursting over dead petals, making a mess of his front yard and the paths he’d painstakingly built from the base of Mount Taicang to his cottage. He had a hunch that Hua Cheng would be back before the flowering period was over, and he wouldn’t admit that such a thing happened until the very last bloom fell. 

One hot night of late summer, a sudden torrential rain shook the mountain, washing every single weak flower and most of the fruit away. Lightening felled a maple tree midway down the path, too, blocking transit. After assessing the damage in the morning after, Xie Lian resigned himself. Going back to the cottage, he picked a hatchet from his little trove of used farming tools and put on his new bamboo hat, given to him by a young man from Puqi Village who noticed he wasn’t wearing the original any more. The boy had asked what had happened to it, and Xie Lian had said that he’d given it to someone who needed it.

“But daozhang needs a hat too,” the boy had protested, reminding him of Hua Cheng.

This wasn’t a surprise, and it didn’t hurt. It was only natural that everything and everyone made him think of his beloved ghost. Xie Lian missed him dearly, so what was better than thinking about him to pass the time while he waited? He’d done so in many ways: dusting off his memories, visiting the places they’d shared, talking to Hua Cheng’s many subjects in Ghost City. Reading and wondering. Dreaming. Praying, once or twice, when he’d stumbled upon shrines dedicated to the Crimson Rain Seeking a Flower. That day, the circumstances invited him to reminisce about how swift and efficient Hua Cheng was cutting wood, the strength and elegance of every swing of his axe, and the way he cheekily pretended to sweat so he had an excuse to bare his snow-white, lean torso.

Xie Lian felt his face warm up and sighed deeply. Many days and nights of his heart and thoughts being spurred in dangerous directions by the memory of Hua Cheng’s scalding gaze and mischievous lips had made him familiar with this sort of agitation. In fact, he’d started to enjoy it, although he didn’t indulge much. The intensity of these new emotions and sensations was strong enough that, regardless of how scandalised he was at the prospect, he didn’t expect to preserve his path of cultivation nor the reserves of spiritual power attached to it once Hua Cheng came back. However, he was adamantly against allowing anything to break before that came to happen. After eight centuries and eight months that felt like a millennium each, he wasn’t going to succumb to his own imagination.

—————

When will I finish it? Who knows. I will focus on completing my ongoing fics first, but I'll keep taking notes and writing on the side. This is a very daunting project, so if inspiration strikes, I won't let it pass. Thanks for asking!

Back to WIP game main post.

The ByTheBi's Collection: Style Your 20cm Minidoll After Three Selected TGCF Fanfiction Stories

Yaban's Doll Atelier is proud to present the ByTheBi's Collection, an indispensable addition to the closet of your 20cm Minidoll. Re-enact three beloved stories by acclaimed fanfiction author ByTheBi with these exclusive sets of accessories.

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‘One Man's Treasure’ - A set worthy of love

Read the fic on AO3

Some habits are hard to break, even after millennia. Hua Cheng knows this best, as he always accompanies Xie Lian on his dumpster-diving adventures.

This set includes one raggedy fox plush, two poorly translated shirts, and a clean bin to keep things organised. The fox has already been taken care of, and his hand-embroidered eyepatch is removable to reveal Hua Cheng's signature red eye.

In honour of Xie Lian's scrap-collecting passion, everything in this set is made with recovered/recycled materials.

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‘Your Package Has Been Delivered’ - These toys are not for kids!

Read the fic on AO3

Hua Cheng's packages keep getting delivered to his cute neighbour, which is all fine and dandy until some special toys get mixed in the mail! While Hua Cheng is the one who sees the contents of Xie Lian's discreet package in the fic, here we picture the opposite because Yaban's Doll Atelier can't afford Hua Cheng's modelling fees seeing Xie Lian's reaction in that scenario would've been very funny.

This set includes two labelled black boxes, two invoices, two receipts, one bottle of lube, a cock ring and the infamously dubbed "Colon Destroyer" with its remote controller. Hua Cheng did his best to conceal the fact that he opened Xie Lian's box, but you can see some traces of the debacle if you look carefully.

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‘With Patience, With Love’ - A cosy set to eternal happiness

Read the fic on AO3

Hua Cheng is acting strange, and Xie Lian doesn't know what to think when he catches him lying. Deciding to trust him no matter what, his loyalty gets rewarded with a surprise made with the utmost patience and the utmost love.

This set includes a long ivory scarf, a thrifted mug that says "Coffee isn't my cup of tea", fairly lights, and 25 paper butterflies with the motives and colours described in the story.

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The ByTheBi's Collection is an exclusive, ultra limited edition made for @peachylixir as part of the Puqi Shrine Secret Santa 2024. Happy Christmas, Peachy!