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In fact, he doesn't notice he's dying.
For the second time. Not the first.
He think it was a sleeping pill-based poison. A peaceful death. And the best sleep he's had in years.
Perhaps his biggest problem is that he got up afterwards.
Because he had a job that no one but him would do; he wasn't so cruel as to give it to his shidi, the current head apprentice. The past Peak Lords had ascended two years ago, leaving behind a mess worthy of the name of hurricanes that turn into tornadoes of fire. Of course, it was the first, fourth, and twelfth peaks that took the brunt of it. Politics, logistics and espionage. Their masters are bastards who are either helpless babies or arseholes.
Shang Qinghua pulled the latter, his shixiong and shidi the former.
And the three of them worked like hell; he can't even remember when he's seen any of his other fighting siblings other than these two, missing his meetings of the Peak Lords when their cheesy supply systems left him weeping.
Shang Qinghua can't even name the approximate number of people he had to relieve from duties and ask to go out of the mountain with his belongings. The amount of negligence, crime and just plain nastiness was more than he ever wrote for his novella. And that's saying something, his protagonist (and thus the browser story of this humble author) had to be resourceful in his torment.
Of course, as he cleaned up the ranks, he expected assassination attempts; some were embarrassingly funny, some were close to success, some managed to be averted before anyone even got to him. And maybe he'd relaxed a little.
With the way his chief apprentice, a man he'd more or less known for ten years, was politely talking to him... yeah, he should have expected to be tried and betrayed.
After all, he was a traitor himself.
But that wasn't the most pressing problem.
Looking back, there were so many obvious signs that he was dead.
It was a strangely pleasant morning: his head was dizzy, but his body was light and rarely aching from any broken bone his king had affectionately tweaked. The sun was bright and the sky was cloudless. Blissful silence.
Shang Qinghua slept for the first time in years.
He slept through.
Abruptly jumping up as if he was being chased by all the Heavenly Demons he had created, he ran out of his rest home, ignoring the System pop-up of a fuzzy reddish hue without looking back or even thinking that he might have left something there. Like his body, for instance.
He found his panicked juniors, not noticing his chief apprentice stumbling on flat ground, and took command. Food deliveries and orders for peak arts and artefacts were due today, and if An-shimei just gave him one of those looks like he'd kicked a stray puppy, Shen-shixiong would skin him.
So Shang Qinghua began to work. And worked, worked, worked.
He didn't feel tired and didn't need a break; his body didn't ache from endlessly running around, searching and lugging everything and anything by day, and his head didn't buzz from hours surrounded by dusty scrolls and candles in the dark, in the middle of his office at night. For the first time since he had set foot in Cang Qiong, he felt acceptable.
Nothing ached and he didn't want anything.
No food, no sleep, no rest.
And so the days passed.
And days turned into weeks.
The disciples were changing in two shifts and each of them thought at some point that he was resting or taking a break. His head disciple kept serving him the same tea, staying by his side, watching him, and Shang Qinghua praised him for his work; why does this shidi keep looking at him at all? And while he feels he has strength, he goes on his longest trips, which he avoided out of the thought that he would not survive them; however, he continues to miss the meetings of the Peak Lords, and sends them sweets as apologies.
And then the weeks turned into months.
It must have been three months before he realised something was wrong.
Something was terribly wrong.
At one point, Mu-shidi caught him because zhangmen-shixiong said he might not be feeling well; the sect leader should have been grateful that he was finally sorting out the work of their predecessors, rather than sending a doctor to his soul! Shang Qinghua stubbornly avoids having an experienced doctor check his meridians; he doesn't want to think that there might be residual traces of demonic energy there (by the way, when was the last time he saw his king?), and his shidi is extremely persistent.
"You're very pale, Shang-shixiong", Mu Qingfang remarks, frowning his perfect eyebrows; Shang Qinghua wants to smooth out that wrinkle that's starting to form; instead, he just waves it away.
"This shixiong is fine, shidi", he says easily; it's strange, but he's become more confident lately; his palms no longer sweat and his voice doesn't stutter; he's so at ease that it's almost euphoric. "I'd even say I feel just fine", he smiles at Mu-shidi, and really is like a breath of fresh air.
However, this only makes his shidi frown only more.
"When was the last time you ate?" continue to ask him, Shang Qinghua doesn't roll his eyes, although he really wants to, opening his mouth to answer, and—
He doesn't remember.
He realises that he can't remember when he wanted to snack on something, let alone a full meal. Inedia can't take away the feeling of hunger, only keep your body from suffering from a lack of nutrients. The golden core, especially in an immortal, is surprisingly strong.
But even it doesn't free you from sleep.
Shang Qinghua can't remember the last time he felt tired.
"I..." he draws in a breath; shouldn't his lungs have been burning from the time he held his breath? Mu-shidi looks more worried, but he avoids his caring hands by running away. "I have to go!"
Mu Qingfang tries to catch up with him, but he's faster (why is he faster? Has he always been this fast? Why can't he even feel the slight tension in his muscles?), and this is his peak, he knows all his paths and secret passages that even his shizun didn't know. Running away from the shidi is one thing; running away from his lack of understanding is quite another.
When did it start?
When did he stop feeling pain; when did he stop wanting anything to eat; when did he start working without regard for rest of any kind; when did he last see the System; when did he lose his sense of time; and... when was the last time he was in his holiday home?
His resting house — is his personal fortress, built on so many layers of protection and arrays that his An-shimei from the peak of artefacts and seals could cry tears of bloody envy that he made it all work; he needs locks to guard his secrets; his fact of betrayal and his king, who has a terrible habit of showing up at his house unannounced. Disciples and hall masters are forbidden to enter his house, even if the sect is on fire, and all his shisuns are hierarchically inaccessible, which is not so critical because he is in his own house once every three days to catch a five o'clock nap and take a bath.
His house, under layers of seals of illusion, is covered in ice.
It's not as bad as the smell.
He would recognise it anywhere.
Decomposition.
Shang Qinghua, Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky, still wasn't completely sure of what he expected to see; perhaps some part of him knew about it anyway; maybe that was why he chose not to breathe without needing to.
He has a terrible job; that first one, much less the second; he's seen death in all its forms; he's seen mutilated bodies that manage to find crevices in his mind to haunt him through exhaustion in nightmares.
Oddly enough, his own corpse isn't even in the top ten worst things he's seen.
The cold has done much to keep him alive, but apparently he came later than he should have, because the maggots have already eaten his eyes, and the skin on his face has withered like paper in the sun. Insects crunch in shards of ice beneath his soles, and the sun beating down on his face in the morning is hidden by the curtains. Dead men are rarely beautiful.
The white clothes — were what caught his attention the most. Someone had changed him. Given the cold, his own time distortion, and the vague question from the reports of uneasiness in the northern region of the Demon Realm, Shang Qinghua already knows the answer.
"My king", he utters; he has no vapour from his mouth; and he senses the portal before it opens.
His king is as beautiful as ever, though he seems wary; his king looks hurt, and it doesn't break his heart as much as he would like to feel.
Shang Qinghua smiles at him, exhausted and unsure; he doesn't know what he's even doing.
"Excuse this servant", it comes out so smoothly, without a single hesitation, that he wonders how he could have failed to notice the absence of his perennial excitement before, "but could you help this servant, my king?"
He needs to get rid of the body.
Mobei-jun hugs him, whispering and whispering his name as if conjuring him; the ice demon isn't as cold as he felt before.
He should burn the body and hide the ashes, he has three more meetings scheduled for today.
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They say to become Calamity one must have aspirations; one must have a desire and a will that would shame the celestials themselves; one must have grudges, hatreds and discontents; one must not know happiness or know evil too closely.
They say to become Calamity one must have an idea; an infallible absolute that mortals must not have; something that makes sense to no one else but this unfortunate soul.
They say to become Calamity is enough to be unstoppable in what you do; uncompromising, rigid, implacable for what you stand for; it's what anyone else might call obsession.
For some, it may be the duty of the job for which he killed for and killed him; the ideal of workaholism.