Chapter 42 of 90
Two Thousand Taels for a Face
Shi Dacheng climbed the stairs with his robe tied loosely over his belly and his face pink and shining like a boiled ham. He did not look back. He went to his private room and poured himself a cup of wine and drank it in a single swallow, and laughed, softly, to himself.
"Open the hall," he told the manager.
For a few minutes there was nothing.
Then she heard them.
Footsteps. A great many of them. Coming down the back stair, crowding into the hall, the boards groaning. Voices. Laughter. The thick, slurred laughter of men who had been drinking on the first floor for hours. Someone belched. Someone said which one's got a girl in it? and someone else said the second one, the light's different and a third voice said I'm first, you bastard, I've been waiting since the hour of the dog—
Her beautiful face went white under the mask.
Something came through the hole.
It was a smaller cock than the first. Thinner, and half soft, and it stank.
The man had come straight from the latrine. She could smell it the moment it was in front of her—sharp and sour and ammoniac, the rank smell of piss, still wet on his skin. Her stomach turned over. She jerked her head back so fast that it struck the wall of the box behind her.
No. No, no, I won't—
The cock bobbed impatiently in the hole. Someone on the other side slapped the wood. "Come on, sweetheart."
The contract.
She took it in her hand.
She stroked it, the way she had stroked the first one, and felt it fill and harden in her fingers. The smell grew worse as it grew. She brought her face toward it slowly, slowly, every muscle in her neck fighting her. She put out her tongue. Her eyes were stinging. She touched the tip of her tongue to the head of a stranger's piss-wet cock, and tasted it—salt and bitterness and something worse—and her eyes filled with tears and spilled over behind the mask.
Then she put it in her mouth.
She licked it clean. She did not know what else to do. She moved her tongue over it and around it until the taste of piss was gone and there was only the taste of skin and sweat and the salt of his precum, and then she sucked. Hard, and fast. She did not care about anything else anymore. She only wanted him finished. A complete stranger, some distant part of her mind said. You don't know his face. You don't know his name. You are tasting a man you'll pass in the street tomorrow and never know it.
He did not last long. Hardly at all. Thirty strokes of her mouth, perhaps fewer, and she felt his cock twitch and jerk and she pulled back by instinct—and he came on her face.
It hit her across the nose and the cheek. It hit her eyelid, and she flinched, and it ran into her lashes. Thick, hot strings of it, sliding down the mask, over her lips, off her chin. The smell of it was everywhere. Her eyes were half shut, glued with it.
And between her legs—
She noticed it then. Sitting on the leather stool, her thighs pressed together in the dark. A slick, hot dampness under her. Her pussy was wet. Dripping. She had not touched herself. Nobody had touched her. And she was so wet that she could feel it spreading on the leather beneath her.
No. No, that's the shame, that's only—
Another cock came through the hole.
After that she counted. Every one, the way she counted the dead after a battle.
A long, thin one that curved upward and kept knocking against the roof of her mouth. A fat, short one, uncut and smelling of onions. A boy's cock—it had to be a boy, it was so smooth and so quick, and he came in her mouth after a dozen strokes with a high, startled cry that she heard right through the wood. An old man's, soft and loose, that took forever, that she had to work at with her hand and her mouth together for so long that her jaw went numb and her wrist burned. One that smelled of horse. One that smelled of perfume, of all things—a clerk, maybe, or a shopkeeper's son. One whose owner kept talking the whole time, slurring, good girl, good girl, all the way, take it all the way, and pushed his hips so hard against the box that it rocked.
They lined up outside. She could hear the line. She could hear them laughing and arguing about who was next, the jostling, the slaps on the wood. One went in and came out and the next went in. There was no rest. Not even long enough to wipe her face.
Some came fast. Some lasted and lasted. Some came in her mouth, and she let it run out. Some came on her face, and some on her breasts, and some she missed altogether and it splashed against the inside walls of the box. It ran down her body in the dark. Over her breasts, in thick hot rivulets, down the soft hollow of her belly, into her lap—into the crease of her thighs, into the crack of her pussy, where it mixed with her own slick wetness until she could not tell any more which was which.
The box filled with the smell of it. Thick and heavy and animal. Cum and sweat and her own arousal, sealed in a little wooden room with no air. She breathed it in with every breath. It was in her nose, her mouth, her hair.
Somewhere around the fifteenth, her mind went quiet.
She was not fighting any more. She noticed that the way one notices, at the end of a long march, that one's feet have stopped hurting—not because they have healed, but because they have gone past pain into something else. A cock came through the hole, and her hand closed on it, and her mouth opened for it, without her ever deciding anything. She sucked it. She sucked it eagerly. Madly. The smell had gotten into her head and was rattling around in there, and it was not disgusting any more, or it was, but the disgust and the heat had wound together into one thing, and between her thighs her pussy was clenching on nothing, wet and swollen and aching, and every time a man groaned on the other side of the wall it throbbed.
The City Lord of Nalan City, said a small cold voice somewhere at the bottom of her. Look at her.
She did not look. She sucked.
Twenty-three.
She had sucked twenty-three different cocks. Twenty-three different sizes and shapes and smells. Her lips were swollen and numb. Her jaw throbbed with a deep, bruised ache at the hinge. Her tongue was raw. Her belly was full—full—a hot, heavy, sloshing weight, swollen with all the semen she had swallowed, whether she meant to or not, and it pressed against the inside of her ribs, and she kept wanting to be sick, and she would not let herself, she held it down with what was left of her strength, because if she vomited in this box she would have to sit in it until dawn.
Her eyes were full of tears. Not from crying. Not exactly. From the cum running into them. From the choking.
And then there was a sound behind her.
The bolt. The narrow door at her back, opening.
"Time's up," said a voice.
It was one of the servants. A young woman in a plain gray dress, who had been working in Heaven Lust long enough that her face did not change at all when she looked inside the box. She had seen it before. Many times, maybe.
Nalan Meng tried to stand.
Her legs would not hold her. She had been folded on that stool for hours, and when she unfolded them they shook like a newborn foal's. She swayed. The servant caught her by the waist without a word and held her up.
She stepped out of the box.
Cum dripped from her. She heard it—small, wet, pattering drops, falling from her chin, her breasts, the tips of her fingers, and landing on the boards. It ran down the insides of her thighs. Her hair was matted with it. It was drying on her shoulders in a stiff, sticky glaze.
The hall was empty now. Twenty-three men, and not one of them was left. Only the benches, and the lamp on its hook, and a trail of white drops across the floor following her as the servant half carried her toward the door at the back.
"Bathroom's through there," said the servant. "There's water."
There was a mirror in the bathroom.
A long bronze one, the kind they had upstairs. The servant left her in front of it and closed the door, and Nalan Meng stood there with both hands braced on the edge of the basin and looked.
She was covered.
All of her. Her face, the mask on her face, the stranger's face the mask had given her—streaked white, glazed, crusted at the edges where it had begun to dry. Her hair. Her neck. Her breasts, heavy and shining, painted with it, a thick pearly smear in the valley between them, drops still hanging from the tips of her nipples. Her belly—and her belly was not flat. That was the thing she could not stop looking at. There was a soft, small, rounded swell below her navel that had never been there before. A little bump. From what she had drunk.
And below that, between her thighs, wet and white and glistening, her own pussy.
She did not know this woman.
Not long ago, she had been the untouchable tigress of Nalan City. The Luo Sha Nv. A woman whose husband had not been allowed to touch her hand. And now she was a waitress in a wine house, standing in front of a mirror with the cum of twenty-three strangers drying on her skin.
She ran water into the basin. She began to wash.
It took a long time. The water went cloudy. She changed it, and changed it again. She scrubbed her face until it stung under the mask. She worked her fingers through her hair. She washed her breasts, her belly, the insides of her thighs. When she was done she was clean, or as clean as water could make her.
She put her clothes on. The plain black dress. The breast-cloth. The underthings.
The smell would not come off.
Not from her skin—from her mind. She could still taste it. She could still smell piss and cum and the hot air of the box. She closed her eyes and she was back in there, in the dark, with a stranger's cock pushing through the rubber ring toward her face.
And her body—
Her tigress heart would not accept it. It raged. It wanted to go back into that hall and break every one of those boxes into kindling, and find the twenty-three men, and break them too.
But her body was honest.
She was dripping. Under the clean dress, under the fresh cloth, her pussy was still soaking wet—hot and swollen and throbbing, aching so hard that she could feel her own pulse in it. It had been aching all night. It had never stopped.
She could not help it.
She leaned back against the bathroom wall and pulled up the skirt of the black dress and pushed her hand down between her thighs.
Her fingers slid through her lips as if through oil. She was so wet that they made a sound. She found her entrance—her pink, tight, untouched pussy, which no cock in the world had ever entered—and pushed two fingers inside herself.
Her head fell back against the wall with a thud.
She had never done this. Not like this. Not with her whole hand, not with her fingers buried inside herself up to the knuckle, not in a public place with a door that did not lock. She did not care. She curled her fingers and pumped them. Her thumb found her clit, swollen and slick and burning, and rubbed it in tight hard circles, and her hips came off the wall to meet her own hand. She thought of the box. The holes. The smell. The line of men outside, laughing, waiting their turn for her mouth. The first one—that enormous, faceless cock, filling her mouth until her jaw cracked—
She moaned.
It came out loud. Much too loud. She did not stop. She could not. She was out of her mind with it, fucking herself with her fingers against the wall of a bathroom in Heaven Lust, moaning like the girls she had heard through the walls on her first night—
She came.
It tore through her. Her whole body seized. Her pussy clamped down on her fingers and pulsed, and pulsed, and she felt something hot and wet gush out of her—a spray of it, warm, soaking her palm, spattering her thighs and the floor between her feet—and she cried out once, high and broken, and then slid down the wall onto the wet tiles with her hand still between her legs.
She sat there until her breathing slowed.
Then she wiped her hand, and stood, and fixed her dress.
She put on the black robe with its deep hood, and went out by the back door, into the cold hour before dawn, before anyone could see her.
Nalan City was asleep. She walked fast through the empty streets with her head down. At the side gate of the City Lord's Mansion, she slipped through, and crossed the dark courtyard, and went silently into her own rooms, and shut the door behind her.
She did not light the lamp.
In another room, on the other side of the house, Li Yuguo was awake.
He had not been sleeping either. He had had a long day, and there was a longer one coming—he had felt it in his bones since sunset, the way he always felt the turn of a plot before it came, the creak of the floorboards before the villain stepped on them. And somewhere around the hour of the ox, a window had opened in front of his eyes, and then another, and another, one after another for most of the night, until he had stopped counting them and only sat and watched the total climb.
Now it had stopped.
He looked at it for a long time.
[ Cuckold Points +700 ] [ Cuckold Points +50 ] ×22
Tonight: +1800 Current Cuckold Points: 4700 Cuckold Bar: 47%
(Converted to life span.) Remaining Life Span: 110 days
A slow smile spread over his face. It was not a nice smile. If anyone had seen it, they would have said the King of Soft Rice looked exactly like what Lord Yama had made him.
A villain.
Twenty-three, he thought. Twenty-three men in one night. And one of them worth fourteen times the rest.
He did not know what she had done. He knew it could not be sex—the second floor did not allow it. But a man did not get twenty-three windows in one night from a waitress carrying trays.
His cock was so hard it hurt. He ignored it. He had had practice.
There was a new pop-up underneath the total. Gold, and edged in red.
[ New Title Unlocked: King of Cuckolds ]
Description: All women related to the user will carry an immoral status.
He read it twice.
Immoral status. He knew what that meant. He had written enough systems in enough novels. It meant a flag—a hidden tag on every woman connected to him, that the world itself could see and respond to. It meant doors that would open that should have stayed shut. It meant that the plot would bend toward a certain kind of scene whenever one of them walked into it.
He thought about it for a moment. Then he closed the window and looked at the others.
Next to his skill, "Tell Me Your Secret!", a small button had appeared. [ Upgrade ].
He pressed it.
Upgrade "Tell Me Your Secret!" for 2000 Cuckold Points?
[ Yes ] [ No ]
Yes.
The numbers rolled down. Current Cuckold Points: 2700. The bar did not move; it never did when he spent. And the old skill dissolved into gold dust and re-formed into a new one.
[ Skill: Secret Eye ]
Description: Can look at a person's secret and status.
Status. Not only the secret. Now he would be able to see what a person was, at a glance—what they carried, what they were. He thought of Li Yutang's smiling face. Of Zhang Wei. Of everyone in this city who was lying to him.
Tomorrow he would need every advantage he could buy.
Last, he opened Alimama and scrolled until he found what he was looking for, in a section of the catalogue he had bookmarked days ago.
A face mask. Not like Shi Dacheng's disguise masks, which only blurred a face until nobody could hold onto it. This one replaced it. Put it on, and you became another person—another face, another build, another voice. Your own mother would pass you in the street.
Two thousand taels of silver.
He bought it.
It dropped into his hand out of the empty air: a thin, pale, flexible thing, cool as skin, with nothing written on it at all. He turned it over in his fingers in the dark.
And he smiled again, slowly, like a man who has just found the last piece of a plan.
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