The thought had been niggling at the back of his mind quite a bit lately. He wasn’t showing Shang Qinghua proper obeisance, was he? They’d grown so comfortable in their roles - Mobei-Jun as Shang Qinghua’s king, and Shang Qinghua as his dutiful servant - that they hadn’t thought to… stop. It was how it had always been. But things were different, now, weren’t they? They’d been different for a long time now. To ignore that wasn’t proper. That stops now, Mobei-Jun decides. His ancestors would be rolling in their graves to see him ignore the proper rites of courtship - the fact that he and Shang Qinghua were already mated besides. He was not raised to be some kind of country rube, as much as being sequestered so far up north might imply otherwise. Shang Qinghua was his partner, and, with all factors properly calculated, the more powerful of the two. It was only proper that Mobei-Jun display an appropriate level of submission to his better. -- Mobei-Jun realizes with increasing clarity that he wants to serve Shang Qinghua. Shang Qinghua does NOT pick up on it.

Shang Qinghua goes to take a self-indulgent peek at his baby protagonist son and gets a kick to the shrivelled heart for his troubles. He gave up on changing the story years ago! Yet he finds himself helping his protagonist son's adoptive mother anyway. Just this one change won't matter too much, right? One little change leads to more. Shang Qinghua never meant to care, but he becomes invested in making sure that his new family survives the looming plot. With the changes to the world cascading around him, with his position as a traitor pulling him between his sect and a certain ice demon, and with the protagonist growing up so quickly, how is one displaced author meant to ensure that everything turns out all right? A Pre-Canon to Canon Divergence story.

Shang Hua really lucked out being reborn as the much-coddled son of one of the most ferocious demon matriarchs of the north. There are only a few, minor, inconsequential downsides.