Chapter 61 of 90
Yun Xianchen Falls Into His Arms
Yun Xianchen hung in his arms like a sword that had been dropped in water.
Her fingers had gone slack around the hilt. The True Yuan long sword dangled from them, its point scraping the floorboards, and then it slipped free altogether and fell with a dull clatter beside his boot. She did not even hear it land. The Fascination pollen had gone into her through the skin—through her wrists and her throat and the soft hollow behind her ears, wherever she was bare—and it was settling into her meridians now like warm honey poured into cold channels. Her Qi would not gather. Every time she reached for it, it slid away from her, sweet and heavy and unwilling.
Li Yuguo looked down at her and, for the first time since she had climbed in through his window, felt like laughing.
He knew exactly who she was. He had written her. The first beauty of Saibei, the ice-and-snow fairy of the True Yuan Sect, the girl whose name the outer disciples whispered the way other men whispered prayers. But the page had never told him how young she would look up close. Nineteen. Twenty at most. Two years younger than the body he was wearing. Under the beast-hide armor and the belt of needles and darts, under all that cold, carefully practiced majesty, there was a girl who had stuffed two balls of cotton up her nose and held her breath and still walked into his trap.
Twice.
Now she was trembling against his chest, flushed from her collar to her hairline, her lips parted, her lashes wet. Her body was soft where it pressed into him—soft at the breast, soft at the hip, heavy and warm through the armor—and her eyes were blazing with a fury that her flesh could not do one single thing to back up.
It was, he admitted privately, a very good look on her.
"You…" Her voice came out hoarse. "You bastard."
"I'm a bastard?"
He bent, slid an arm under her knees, and lifted her off her feet. She weighed almost nothing. He carried her the three steps to the bed and sat down on the edge of it with her across his lap, the way one might hold a sulking child, her legs dangling over his thigh and her shoulder tucked into the crook of his elbow.
"No matter how much of a bastard I am, Senior Sister Yun, I can't compare to you." He tilted his head. "I didn't plant those flowers for you, you know. I didn't light that incense for you either—well. All right. The incense was for you. But the first time, you walked into it like a stray cat walking into the kitchen. I let you go. And tonight you come back with a sword, to stab me in the backside while I sleep." He clicked his tongue. "Do you think I'm going to let you have your wish?"
"It's—it's not because of you—"
She was gritting her teeth. He could feel her whole body shivering faintly against him, a fine continuous tremor, like a plucked string that would not stop humming.
"Then is it because you like me?"
"Who likes you?!" It burst out of her, high and furious. "Ghosts like you! Dogs like you!"
Tonight's an account I can't settle, she was thinking—he could see it written across her face, plain as ink. My innocence won't be guaranteed. Maybe not even my life.
He laid her down on the bed.
He did it slowly, letting her feel it—the mattress coming up under her back, the pillow under her head, the quilt that still smelled faintly of the man leaning over her. Her hair spilled across the pillow, black as lacquer. She tried to lift her arm and it rose two inches off the quilt and fell back.
"Senior Sister Yun," he said gently, "a beauty like you. The first time, I let you go. Do you think I'll let you go a second time?"
Her eyes filled.
"Then kill me." Her chin came up, even lying flat on her back. "Since I failed, I deserve to die."
"Before I kill you, though… shouldn't I at least…" He let it trail off, and let his gaze travel down her. Slowly. Deliberately. Over the beast-hide plate molded to her breasts, the narrow cinch of her waist, the long legs in their black silk, the tips of her boots. Then back up again, lingering, as if he could see straight through every layer to the white skin underneath.
Yun Xianchen squeezed her eyes shut.
It did not help. With her eyes closed she could feel his gaze even more clearly—a heat crawling over her, settling on her breasts, her belly, the soft place between her thighs. Wolf's eyes, she thought. He has the eyes of a wolf. And she was lying under them with no Qi and no sword and no strength in her body at all.
He leaned down. His face came close to hers—close enough that she felt his breath stir the fine hairs at her temple—and he blew, very softly, into her ear.
Her whole body jerked.
"It really stinks in here," he murmured.
Her eyes flew open. "Stinks?" She was so outraged that for a moment she forgot to be frightened. "You're the only thing that stinks! I took a bath before I came out tonight—I—mmph—!"
She had turned her head to snap it at him.
He had not moved back.
Their lips met.
It was not a kiss. Not really. Not on purpose. It was an accident of angles—her head turning on the pillow, his face hanging an inch above it—and for one long, ringing moment neither of them moved at all.
Her lips were soft. Softer than anything he had ever touched. Warm, and very slightly parted with the shock of it, and they tasted of tea and something faintly bitter, like the herbs she must have chewed against the pollen. He felt her breath catch against his mouth. He felt her lower lip tremble.
The whole world seemed to stop. The lamp on the desk stopped flickering. The incense smoke hung in the air like a thread of gray silk. Somewhere outside the window, a cricket fell silent.
Then a tear ran out of the corner of her eye and slid down into her hair.
Li Yuguo jerked his head up as if he had been burned.
"I…" Yun Xianchen's voice was shaking so badly she could barely shape the words. "I'll kill you…"
"Your lips are bitter," said Li Yuguo.
He said it with a perfectly calm face. He got up off the bed and stood with his back to her and smoothed down the front of his robe, and inside, his heart was going like a war drum.
That was my first kiss.
Two lives. A bachelor of two whole worlds. Twenty-eight years of other people's love stories on a cracked phone screen, and three more in this body sleeping alone in a guest room. And just now, by accident, with a would-be assassin drugged on his own bed—
He had kissed a girl.
"You—you kissed me," Yun Xianchen said behind him, "and now you slander me—"
"I kissed you?" He turned around. "You're the one who turned your head. You attacked me. With your mouth. Senior Sister Yun, is this some secret technique of the True Yuan Sect? The Lip-Strike of the Snow Fairy?"
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
She knew. She knew perfectly well that she had been the one to turn her head. That made it a thousand times worse.
He saw her lower lip begin to shake, and decided that he had pushed far enough. A crying assassin was still an assassin, and the Fascination pollen would not last forever.
He reached into his sleeve.
"Well," he said. "Here. This is what you came for."
He held it up. A small glass bottle, no longer than his finger. Inside, something moved with a soft blue light of its own, like moonlight trapped in water.
Snake Spring.
It worked better than a slap. The tears stopped in her eyes. Her gaze fixed on the bottle and followed it as he turned it in the lamplight, and her breathing slowed, and some of the color drained back out of her cheeks.
"You'd give me the Snake Spring," she said slowly. She pushed herself up on one elbow, weakly, and leaned against the headboard. "Why? What do you want?"
"In half a month," said Li Yuguo, "the True Yuan Sect, the Blood-Clothed Sect, the Voodoo Sect, and the Saibei sect will hold their joint disciple trial. And then they'll all go into the Black Forest together."
Yun Xianchen stared at him.
"How do you know that?" It had not been announced. Not even inside the sect. Only the core disciples had been told, a week ago, behind closed doors.
Of course he could not tell her I wrote it. So he lowered his voice, and put on the faintly bored expression of a man who knows many things and is mildly tired of knowing them.
"Don't forget that I'm the consort of Nalan City," he said. "I'm better informed than you can possibly imagine. Help me get a place in the trial. Through the True Yuan Sect. I want to go too."
"I can't do that." She looked away from him. Her face was hot again. She could not seem to look at his mouth.
He took out something else.
A crystal the size of a plum, a deep throbbing red at its heart, so hot that the air above his palm wavered like the air over a summer road. The fire crystal. The one the whole True Yuan Sect had climbed Ling Snake Mountain to find, and gone home without.
Yun Xianchen's eyes went very wide.
"As far as I know," said Li Yuguo, as if he were not holding a treasure that half the sects of Saibei would have killed him for, "you need the Snake Spring because your cultivation has stalled. You're at the peak of Advanced Martial Teacher. And you can't break through to Martial Soul. Am I right?"
"Yes." Her voice had gone very small. "So what?"
"So every time you try to push through, your dantian gives off a chill. Like a lump of ice sitting in your belly. It freezes the Qi in your channels just when you need it most, and you fall back. Over and over."
Her heart turned over in her chest.
"Since you know," she said, "why are you asking?"
"Because I can help you break through that bottleneck. And fix your constitution while I'm at it."
"My constitution?"
"You have a cold body." He leaned back against the desk and crossed one ankle over the other. "It's not a rare thing. Plenty of women have it, a little. But yours is strong. Strong enough to block your meridians." He lifted an eyebrow. "Every month, when your time comes—doesn't your lower belly hurt so much you can't stand up straight?"
"You—!"
He had written it. A throwaway line in chapter forty-something, to explain why the ice fairy was always pale and always cold and always sitting out of the sparring on certain days. He had never imagined he would one day watch the real girl turn crimson to the tips of her ears because he had said it out loud.
He lit the second lamp on the desk, so that the room grew warmer and brighter.
"The Snake Spring alone can only suppress it," he said. "Push the cold down for a while. The root stays. But with this"—he weighed the fire crystal in his palm—"I can pull the root out completely. You'll never feel it again."
She bit her lip. "If you treat me, what's the price?"
"I already said. A place in the trial."
He meant it. In his outline, the quarrel with Ye Qiong was only going to get deeper, and sooner or later it would turn into a war. And Ye Qiong had the whole True Yuan Sect behind him—its pills, its manuals, its elders, its spirit stones. Li Yuguo had Nalan City, which was bleeding money every month just to stay alive. He could not match that. Not yet.
But the Black Forest held a great opportunity. And he was the only man in the world who knew exactly where.
"That's all?" She could not believe it.
He came closer, and leaned down with one hand on the bedpost.
"Or—could it be, Senior Sister Yun, that you're planning to repay me with your body? Of course, I wouldn't mind…"
"Don't even think about it!" She turned her head away so sharply that her hair whipped across the pillow. "And who knows if you're even telling the truth!"
He held up the crystal again, and let its red light play across her face.
"Don't forget. The Poison Emperor is my friend. The King of Thieves is my sworn brother. So why shouldn't I know the number one genius doctor in the world as well? The Medicine Emperor?"
"You mean…"
"I mean I can treat you. Right now. Tonight. But you have to agree to my condition first. Then I'll drive the cold out of you, guard your meridians while I do it, and see you through to Martial Soul." He straightened. "Well?"
Her breathing had gone fast and shallow. He could see her chest rising and falling under the armor.
Martial Soul. Two years she had been stuck. Two years of pain every month and failure every time she sat down to break through, and the elders' faces growing a little more disappointed each season, and Ye Qiong shooting up past her like a bamboo shoot after rain.
"I…" She swallowed. "I agree to this deal. But you're not allowed to tell anyone."
"Of course not." Li Yuguo laughed. "I have a bad enough reputation already. If it gets around that I've been treating you in my bedroom at midnight, you'll never find a husband—and then you'll come crying to me begging me to marry you. Wouldn't I be the one at a loss?"
"You—!" Yun Xianchen sat bolt upright, wobbled, and caught herself on the headboard. "Am I that ugly?"
He put on his most solemn face.
"I swear to Heaven, you're ugly."
Heaven, he added silently, looking up at the ceiling, please don't take that one seriously.
But the tears had come back into her eyes.
All her life, she had been praised for her face. By the elders. By her family. By every passing traveler on the mountain road. The first beauty of Saibei. No one, in all her nineteen years, had ever once called her ugly.
And then something in her snapped.
"So what if I'm ugly?" she burst out. "Ugly, ugly—do I eat your rice? Do I drink your water? I'm ugly, and I'm happy to be ugly! I like being ugly! It's none of your business!"
Li Yuguo choked.
"Pfft—" He turned away and pressed his fist against his mouth, and his shoulders shook. When he could speak again, his voice was unsteady. "Ugly. All right. But your figure's not bad." He waved a hand at her. "Come on. Take off your clothes."
All the blood drained out of her face.
"So you've finally shown your true colors." Her voice went low and vicious. "I've been planted here tonight. Fine. But I swear to you—even if I become a ghost, I'll haunt you for the rest of your life. You'll never have a single night's peace!"
Li Yuguo put his hand over his eyes.
"Why are girls' minds so dirty these days?" he asked the ceiling. "I'm telling you to take your clothes off so I can guide the fire crystal's breath and the Snake Spring into your meridians. Not so I can look at you. What were you thinking I wanted?"
Yun Xianchen's face went from white to red so fast that it was almost a trick of the light. Her cheeks puffed. Her heart was hammering like a startled deer's.
"I—I didn't know you meant treatment—you bastard—you're taking advantage of me on purpose!"
Then, slowly, the meaning sank in. Her lips began to tremble.
"Then I… I still have to… take them off?"
"Yes." Li Yuguo held the Snake Spring in one hand and the fire crystal in the other, and looked unbearably smug.
While she was sitting there with her face on fire and her fingers frozen on the first clasp of her armor, he let himself think about the Black Forest.
In the original book—the book he had written, in another life, at three in the morning—the disciples of three sects had gone into that forest to hunt beasts, and stumbled on a secret. A grave. The place where a Martial Emperor had died.
The Martial Emperor rank was something tremendous, even in the whole of the Haotian Kingdom. From Martial King upward, every breakthrough was a gamble. Fail the impact, and the backlash would eat your foundation; you would wither and fall short of your hundred years. And somewhere in the Black Forest, a Martial Emperor had made that gamble and lost. He had died there alone, in the middle of his breakthrough, with the whole wealth of his life piled up around him.
Nobody knew that yet. Not the sects, not the beast hunters, not the herb pickers who went in at the forest's edge. Officially, the disciples were going in to kill monsters, take their life essences, and trade them for spirit stones and pills.
Only Li Yuguo knew what was really in there.
How could he miss a fortune like that?
Alone, he would be walking into his grave. But with the True Yuan Sect's banner over his head and a hundred disciples around him, his odds were a great deal better.
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