Chapter 62 of 90
Snake Spring Massage
The armor came off. Then the belt of hidden weapons, which he made her set on the desk where he could see it. Then the black dress, which she peeled down off her shoulders with her back to him and her face scarlet, and stepped out of, and left in a pool on the floor.
She lay down on her front on his bed.
She put her cheek on his pillow, and her nose was full of him at once. His smell was in the quilt, in the pillowcase, in the faint warm hollow where his head had lain the night before. Ink and tea and pine soap and something underneath that was only him. Her face went hot all over again.
She had never in her life lain in a man's bed. And this man—she had known him three days. Three days, two nights, two failed assassinations.
The moonlight came in through the window and lay across her back.
He had not realized, until that moment, that skin could shine. But hers did. A faint pale luminescence, as if there were a lantern somewhere very deep under it. Her back was long and smooth and utterly flawless, without a freckle or a scar, curving in at the waist so narrowly that he could have spanned it with his two hands. Her shoulder blades moved under the skin like the folded wings of a crane. Her breasts were crushed against the mattress beneath her, and where they pressed out at her sides he could see the soft white swell of them bulging past her ribs.
And below the waist—
She had kept on only her underclothes. A scrap of black silk, cut very small, that covered the mound of her pussy and ran back between her legs in a narrow band. It hid her sex. It did nothing at all to hide her ass. Her ass rose up out of the small of her back in two perfect pale curves, round and high and taut, with the black band disappearing into the deep cleft between them.
She knew exactly how she looked. He could tell from the way her toes had curled.
He uncorked the Snake Spring and poured a little into his palm. It was cool and slippery and glowed faintly blue between his fingers, like oil made from moonlight.
"Are you ready?"
"Be—be gentle." Her voice came out muffled. She had buried her face in the pillow. "I'm afraid of pain."
Heaven, thought Li Yuguo, looking down at her. She has no idea what that sounds like.
He put his hands on her back.
The first touch made her jump.
His palms were warm, and the Snake Spring was cool, and the contrast went through her like a tiny bolt of lightning. He spread it slowly over her shoulder blades, both hands moving in long, firm circles, and then down along the valley of her spine. And under his palms he let his own Qi rise—not much, only a thread of it, the way the Poison Emperor had taught him on the mountain—so that it went into her skin with the Snake Spring and carried the medicine down into her channels.
It tingled.
It was like being touched by a thousand tiny cold needles that did not hurt. Her legs went straight. Her toes clenched together. She took a deep, shaking breath to steady herself—and her lungs filled with the smell of his pillow, and she lost her breath all over again.
What is this, she thought, dizzily. Why does it feel like this.
He worked down her back, inch by inch, and she felt every inch. The heels of his hands pressing into the long muscles on either side of her spine. His thumbs rolling in small hard circles over the knots she had not known were there. The glide of the oil. The heat of his palms sinking into her and spreading outward, like ink dropped in water.
By the time he reached the small of her back, her skin was glowing blue in the moonlight from her neck to her waist, and she was breathing in short, uneven little gasps into the pillow.
He should have stopped at her waist.
He knew that. The meridians that mattered for a cold body ran up the spine and through the lower back to the dantian. The rest was—optional.
But there was her ass. Right there. Two round white hills rising under the moon, a hand's breadth from his fingers.
Nobody, he thought, could reasonably expect a man to stop here.
He poured more Snake Spring into his palm and laid both hands flat on her ass.
Yun Xianchen went rigid.
His hands covered her completely. One palm on each cheek, warm and slick and heavy. And then they began to move—slow, deep circles, the same as on her back, kneading the oil into her flesh. Her ass was firm, the muscle trained by ten years of sword forms, but the skin over it was soft as cream, and it gave under his fingers. Yielded. Swelled up between them when he squeezed and settled back when he let go. He squeezed again, harder, and watched the white flesh bulge out between his knuckles, and felt her whole body give a little jolt on the bed.
She did not say anything.
She pressed her face into the pillow and did not say one word.
It's treatment, she told herself fiercely. It's medicine. He's spreading medicine. Her ass was burning where he touched it. The tingle of the Snake Spring had gone down into the muscle and was sitting there, cold and bright and alive, and under it was the slow heat of his hands, and the two together were making something happen low in her belly that had nothing to do with her dantian.
His thumbs moved inward.
Each time he kneaded, they slid a little closer to the cleft between her cheeks. And each time he pushed her cheeks apart in a slow circle and let them come back together, the narrow band of black silk shifted. The oil made it slippery. With every stroke it slid a little deeper into the crease, until it was buried there completely, swallowed up in the cleft of her ass so that it might as well not have been there at all.
She felt it go. She felt the cool air touch skin that had never been touched by air in front of anyone.
She did not move.
His fingertips ran down into the crease. Slowly. Along the slick, buried band of silk. He felt the heat of her there, much hotter than the rest of her—felt the soft, secret skin on either side of the silk—and he felt her clench. Her whole ass squeezed tight against his fingers, trapping them for one second in the cleft, and then shuddered and let go.
Still she said nothing.
She isn't stopping me, he thought, and his cock was so hard against the front of his trousers that it hurt.
He let his fingers stay there a moment longer than he should have. Then, with an effort that felt like lifting a mountain, he drew them out and laid his hands flat on the small of her back again.
"I'm going to seal some points," he said. His voice was rougher than he meant. "Don't move."
He struck quickly—two fingers, six points, down either side of her spine, the way the Poison Emperor had shown him. She grunted softly into the pillow as each one went. Then he took the fire crystal in his right hand and laid his left flat over her lower back, just above the swell of her ass, over the place where her dantian sat cold inside her.
And he ran the Blazing Sun Divine Sword through his meridians.
It was the most yang technique he knew—a man's art, heavy with masculine fire. The crystal answered it at once. He felt the heat in the stone wake up and reach, like a dog hearing its master's voice, and he drew it up through his right arm and across his chest and down his left, and poured it into her.
The heat hit her dantian like a fist.
"Ah—!"
It burst out of her before she could stop it. A cry, high and startled. The cold lump that had sat in her belly for two years—the ice that had stopped her a hundred times—was being besieged. She could feel the fire pouring in around it from every side, hot and thick and relentless, battering at it, melting the edges, and the melt-water ran out through her channels like spring floods through a frozen riverbed.
"Ah… mmh… ahh…"
"Don't." His hand pressed down harder on her back. "Don't make that sound. If anyone hears, I can't guarantee my innocence."
"Your innocence?" She lifted her face from the pillow, outraged, her eyes swimming. "You're taking advantage of me and you still talk like that—mmmh—!"
Another wave of heat went through her, and she bit down on the pillow and shook.
It went on for a long time.
Long after the first shock, the fire kept coming. It was like lying in a hot spring with the water slowly rising. It soaked into her belly, her hips, her thighs. It made her sweat. A fine sheen broke out all over her back and mixed with the Snake Spring and made her skin glisten like a pearl. Her breasts were crushed under her, aching, and every breath she took dragged her nipples against his sheets.
And the heat had gone lower than her dantian.
It had pooled in her, down between her thighs, in the place under that buried scrap of black silk, and it was throbbing there in slow, heavy pulses, in time with her heartbeat. She could feel herself getting wet. She could feel the silk going damp against her. She pressed her thighs together on the mattress, hard, and that only made it worse.
It's the fire crystal, she told herself. It's the yang Qi. It's medicine.
Her mind said it very clearly.
Her body did not listen at all.
Slowly, she got used to it.
The fire settled into a steady warmth instead of a battering. The cold in her belly had shrunk to something no bigger than a pebble, and it was still melting. Her breathing evened out. She turned her face sideways on the pillow, so that she could see him out of the corner of her eye—sitting on the edge of the bed with his hand on her back and the crystal glowing red in his fist and his eyes half closed in concentration.
"Since you and the City Lord are husband and wife in name only," she said quietly, "why do you protect Nalan City like this? Everything in it?"
He did not open his eyes.
"A name is enough." His voice was low. "When I was at my worst, Nalan Meng took me in. Otherwise I'd have died on the street." He was quiet a moment. "You know, being a beggar isn't as nice as it sounds in the stories."
Then he did open his eyes, and looked at her.
She turned her face away quickly.
"With your talent," she said into the pillow, "and your cultivation, you could come to the True Yuan Sect. I believe the Sect Master would never treat you badly."
"Ha. Forget it." He shook his head. "In Nalan City I'm free. I can do whatever I want. In a sect, there'd be rules everywhere I turned. I hate rules."
The bottle in his other hand gave a hollow little gurgle.
He held it up to the lamp. Empty.
"The Snake Spring's used up." His face fell into tragic lines. "A whole bottle. Woo… a hundred thousand taels of silver, gone."
Yun Xianchen sat up so fast she nearly cracked her head on the bedpost. She had forgotten, for one second, that she was naked except for a scrap of soaked black silk. She clutched the quilt to her chest.
"Then—then that's not my debt! How was I supposed to know Snake Spring was that expensive?"
"Hey. Then you should pay up." Li Yuguo rubbed his hands together and put on the most wretched, greasy expression he could manage. "Otherwise… there are other ways to repay a debt, you know…"
"Don't even think about it!"
But even as she snapped it, something at the corner of her mouth twitched. And then—she could not stop it—she smiled.
"I promise you," she said. "I'll get you your place. Senior Brother Ximen is on good terms with you, and he's in charge of the trial roster. If I ask him for a place, he'll give it."
"Then it's paid in full." He stretched his arms over his head until his back cracked. "Why do you care so much about your cultivation, anyway? You're already one of the strongest in the True Yuan Sect."
She fastened her belt with her back to him. Her fingers were clumsy. Every time she thought about where his hands had been—her back, her waist, the cleft of her ass—a fever came up into her face.
"Do you really want to know?"
"Of course." He paused. "If you don't want to say, you don't have to."
"If I can reach Martial King," she said, "I can ask my family to cancel the engagement."
He remembered. The Yun family. One of the great houses of the capital, old and proud and rotten with politics. He pretended not to know.
"It seems your family is very stubborn. You obviously don't like him, but they insist you marry Ximen Lang."
"It isn't only me." She laughed, and it was not a happy sound. "Ximen Lang doesn't like me either. The one he likes is the eldest daughter of the Blood-Clothed Sect. Two people who don't want each other, tied together for the profit of two families." She sat down on the edge of the bed. She did not seem to be in a hurry to go. "Tell me. Is there anything more tragic in the world than that?"
She reached for the water cup on the bedside table.
"Here. Drink this instead."
He held out a bottle. It was made of some strange clear material, not glass and not jade, and inside it something dark brown hissed and seethed with tiny bubbles.
"What is it?"
"A kind of spirit liquid. It doesn't do anything. It just tastes good."
She took a small, suspicious sip. Her eyes went wide.
"It's sweet—and it's—there's something like a breath in my throat—" She broke off. "Hic."
She clapped her hand over her mouth, horrified.
"That's unhappy air," said Li Yuguo gravely. He opened a second bottle for himself. "This drink is called Fat House Happy Water. When you burp, it's the same as spitting out all the unhappiness in your stomach." He drank. "If the next few treatments go smoothly, your cold body should be cured. You should already feel your meridians moving more freely."
She did. That was the maddening thing. She could feel it. Her channels were humming. The pebble of ice was almost gone.
"You took advantage of me on purpose," she muttered into the bottle.
"I took advantage of you?" He looked wounded. "You took my first kiss. And I haven't even asked you to take responsibility for it."
"You—you're so shameless!" She stood up, one hand on her hip, the other snatching her sword up off the floor. "Obviously I'm the one who suffered! It was my first kiss too! And besides, you—you rubbed my whole back! All of it!"
"So you mean…" He lowered his eyes. His lip trembled. "You're not going to take responsibility for me?"
Yun Xianchen stamped her foot so hard the floorboards shook.
He decided that was enough. A joke pushed one step too far stopped being a joke.
"All right, all right. I won't tease you any more." He raised both hands. "I'll help you with your breakthrough. Properly."
"That's more like it." She slid the sword back into its sheath. "I should go. If my fellow disciples find out I didn't come home tonight, they'll talk until their mouths fall off."
"Pfft. You're not afraid that my mouth will fall off? Telling the whole True Yuan Sect?" He gave her his most wicked smile.
"You wouldn't dare!" She went to the window and put one foot on the sill, and looked back at him over her shoulder, flushed and furious and glowing faintly blue in the moonlight. "I'm not talking to you any more!"
And she was gone.
Li Yuguo stood alone in the middle of his room for a long time.
His lips were still tingling. So were his fingertips. He could still feel the slick heat of that buried silk under them. His cock was still hard. He sat down on the edge of the bed, in the warm hollow she had left in the quilt, and sighed deeply, and thought about all the things he still had to do before morning.
Then he got up and went to do them.
On the other side of the city, Yun Xianchen landed on the roof of the True Yuan Sect's lodgings and slipped in through her own window without a sound.
She lay down on her own bed in the dark. It smelled of nothing. Of clean linen and her own fairy-grass soap. She lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling and touched her lips with her fingertips. Then her cheek. Then, slowly, the small of her back, where his hand had been, where the heat of the fire crystal still glowed under her skin like a coal.
Her dantian was warm. For the first time in two years, her dantian was warm.
She turned over and buried her face in her pillow and did not sleep for a long time.
And on the second floor of Heaven Lust, under the red lanterns, a waitress in two scraps of black leather and a mask was carrying a tray of wine between the tables, her bare ass rolling with every step, the eyes of the whole hall sliding over her like hands.
Nobody looking at her would have guessed that she was the Lord of Nalan City.
Nobody did.
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