Chapter 63 of 90
Yun Xianchen Goes to Heaven Lust
Yun Xianchen came home from the consort's room before dawn with Snake Spring still glowing faintly under her skin, and slept like a stone for two hours, and woke with the sun in her face and her dantian warm.
She lay for a moment without moving and simply felt it. The lump of ice that had sat in her belly for two years was gone. Not suppressed—gone. Where it had been, there was only a soft steady heat, like a banked fire, and her Qi was moving through her channels in long smooth tides that did not stop anywhere or catch on anything.
He did it, she thought. That shameless, perverted, unbearable man actually did it.
She got up and dressed and went out to train.
The road from the disciples' lodgings to the training ground ran between two rows of pines, and every morning it was lined with men.
They did not line it on purpose. Of course not. They were stretching, or meditating, or polishing their swords, or discussing some fine point of the Seventh Form with great seriousness. But somehow they were always there when she walked past, and somehow their eyes were always somewhere other than her face.
She was not a fool. She knew where they were looking.
At her ass. At the way her white disciple's robe moved over it when she walked—the slow sway of her hips, the round high curves shifting under the silk, left, right, left. At her breasts, which no sash in the sect could flatten. At her legs when the wind caught the slit of her skirt. Liu Mang had written her that way, once, in another world: the most beautiful woman in Saibei, whose body made monks forget their vows. And the world had taken him at his word.
The outer disciples did it. The inner disciples did it. She had caught two core disciples doing it, and once—once—an elder, a gray-bearded man of sixty who had taught her the Frost Lotus Steps when she was twelve, standing at the edge of the practice yard with his hands folded in his sleeves and his old eyes fixed on her backside as she leapt.
That was the worst of it. When she practiced the jumping forms, they gathered to watch. She had heard the whispers. If you stand at the east corner when she does the Crane Ascends, you can see up her skirt.
She could not do anything about it. A woman could not draw her sword on a man for looking. So she held her face cold and her back straight and let them look, and pretended, with all the frost she had, that she did not feel every single pair of eyes.
When she reached the training ground, the crowd was already waiting.
She drew her sword without a glance at any of them and began the forms.
And today they flowed. Every cut came easier. Every leap went higher. The cold that used to drag at her in the last third of the forms, that made her wrists ache and her breath go short, was simply not there. She finished the full set of the True Yuan Sword without stopping and stood in the center of the yard with her sword lowered and her chest rising and falling and felt the Qi hum through her like a plucked string.
There was a murmur from the edge of the ground. She ignored it, sheathed her sword, and went back to her room to rest.
A messenger was waiting at her door. A thin boy from the inner hall, bowing.
"Senior Sister Yun. The Sect Master asks for you. At once."
The meeting hall of the True Yuan Sect's lodgings in Nalan City was not the great hall on the mountain, but they had done their best with it: a long dim room hung with scrolls, a raised dais, a brazier of sandalwood. The Sect Master sat at the head of it with three elders on either side. None of them were smiling.
"Yun Xianchen. I've been waiting for you." He gestured. "Sit."
She sat.
"You know that the sect is in a difficult position these days." He did not waste words. "The Red Fire Sect is planning to move against us. We don't know when, or how, or with whom. But our people have learned one thing. Their leaders meet regularly in Nalan City. At a place called Heaven Lust."
Yun Xianchen frowned. She had heard the name, faintly. A wine house. A large one, in the eastern quarter.
"Someone has to go there," said the Sect Master. "And stay. And listen. And report everything back to the sect." His eyes rested on her. "Those Red Fire dogs care for only one thing more than power, and that's beautiful women. Only a beauty like you can get close enough to hear them."
He held out a folded paper, sealed with the sect's red stamp.
"This is my order. Go to Heaven Lust. Serve there as the eyes of the True Yuan Sect. Only you can do it, Xianchen."
Every disciple of the True Yuan Sect swore the same oath on the day they were taken in. An order sealed by the Sect Master is the voice of Heaven. It is not questioned. It is not refused. She had sworn it at the age of nine, kneeling on cold stone, and never once broken it.
She took the paper.
Back in her room, she broke the seal and read it.
Go to Heaven Lust. Enter service as a waitress. Second floor.
That was all.
She did not know what the second floor was. But an order was an order. She put the paper in her sleeve and went that same night.
The man at the back door of Heaven Lust who took on new girls was a floor steward in a plum-colored robe, round-faced and soft-handed, with a ledger under his arm. When she pushed back her hood, he forgot what he had been about to say.
He stood there with his mouth slightly open, and his eyes went over her face, and then down over her body, and then up to her face again.
A cultivator, she saw him think. She could not hide her Qi from a trained eye, and his was trained. A cultivator this beautiful, wanting to work as a waitress? Here?
But he was a man of business. He did not ask questions that might frighten off a fortune. He wrote a name in his ledger—not hers—and handed her a black mask and a sheet of paper printed with rules, and a small brass contract-token that bit cold into her palm when she took it.
She felt it at once. A thin hard band closing around her meridians. Her Qi went quiet and heavy, like a river under ice.
"The house seal," said the steward. "So the girls don't hurt the guests. It comes off when your shift ends." He pointed down a corridor. "Changing room's that way. Your outfit's in the box with the red ribbon."
The changing room was small and warm and smelled of powder and perfume and something else she did not recognize.
She had thought it would be an ordinary wine house. She had thought she would carry trays and pour wine and keep her ears open. She had thought, perhaps, that there would be some leering, some pinching—she was not a child; she knew what drinking men were like.
She opened the box with the red ribbon.
And stood there looking into it, and could not breathe.
It was leather. Black leather, thin and soft and glossy. Two small pieces for the top—hardly pieces at all, just two little triangles on a cord, cut so small that they would cover her nipples and nothing else. The whole shape of her breasts would show. The undersides. The sides. Everything but the very tips.
And for the bottom—
She lifted it out between two fingers. It was a tiny triangle of the same leather, no bigger than her palm, that would cover her pussy. And from the bottom of the triangle, a single thread. Only a thread. It ran back between her legs and up between the cheeks of her ass to a cord at her waist.
That was all.
This is a garment? She stared at it. This is supposed to be worn by a person*?*
Her face went hot. Then cold. Then hot again. Why did I have to come to a place like this? Why me? What kind of shameless—
She thought of leaving. She thought of it very seriously, for almost a full minute, with the thread dangling from her fingers.
Then she thought of the Sect Master's seal. Of kneeling on cold stone at nine years old. Of what happened to disciples who disobeyed a sealed order: stripped of their cultivation, cast out of the sect, their names struck from the rolls. The Yun family would not take her back after that. No one would.
She put the thread down on the bench, very carefully, and began to undo her robe.
It took her a long time.
Her hands were shaking. She folded her disciple's robe and laid it on the bench, then her inner robe, then her breastband. The air of the room touched her bare breasts and her nipples tightened at once into small hard points. She tied the two little triangles of leather over them. They barely covered anything. Her breasts swelled out around them on every side, round and full and white, held up by nothing, and every time she breathed, they shifted, and she felt the leather slide.
Then she stepped out of her underclothes, and drew the tiny bottom piece up her thighs.
The triangle settled over her mound. The thread drew up between her legs—she felt it press into the soft seam of her pussy, a thin hard line—and then up, between her cheeks, until it sat buried in the crack of her ass and her whole ass was simply bare.
She turned, slowly, and looked at herself in the small bronze mirror on the wall.
She had never worn anything like this in her life. She had never even imagined it. She was almost naked. And it was worse than naked. Naked would have been simple. This—the two little triangles, the one small patch, the thread—only drew the eye. It said look here, and here, and here. It made every curve of her body into an invitation.
She was going to die of shame.
She put on the mask.
There was a second sheet of rules tacked to the inside of the door. She read it while she tried to make her hands stop shaking.
VIP 1: the guest may touch the waitress's breasts. VIP 2: the guest may touch the waitress's breasts and ass. VIP 3: the guest may require the waitress to sit beside him, or upon him, and enjoy her body within the rules of the floor. VIP 4: the guest may enjoy her pussy with his mouth and hands, and may use her body for his cock, save only that— Intercourse is strictly forbidden on the second floor.
She read it twice. Then she read it a third time, and felt the blood drain out of her face.
This isn't a wine house, she thought. This is a—
She did not let herself finish the word.
She gathered every scrap of spirit she had left, lifted her chin, and walked out to the hall.
What do I do, she thought, over and over. What do I do now?
The second floor was gold and smoke and red lanterns.
And there were women everywhere, in the same leather as hers. The same triangles, the same thread, the same masks. Carrying trays. Pouring wine. Sitting on men's knees. Every one of them was beautiful, and every one of them was nearly naked, and nobody in the whole long hall seemed to think anything of it at all.
For the moment, nobody was looking at her. That helped, a little. Every waitress was busy with a customer. And her face was hidden.
She went to the counter. The steward was there, and he took one look at her in the outfit and his eyes went straight to her breasts and stayed there, and a slow, pleased smile spread across his round face. He talked to her for a while—about orders, the kitchen, the tables—and he did not look at her face once.
"Take this," he said, and pushed a little order book across the counter. "Start with the tables on the east side."
She started walking.
And with the first step, her breasts bounced.
She had not expected it. Without a breastband they were free, and the little triangles did nothing to hold them. They swayed up and down with every step, heavy and soft, as if the thin cords would snap at any moment and let them spill out. Behind her, she could feel her ass moving too—both cheeks rolling, bare, shaking a little with every footfall like two balls of fresh dough.
She was walking almost naked through a hall full of men.
She was used to being stared at. She had been stared at every day of her life. But never like this. Never with nothing between their eyes and her skin.
And yet—she noticed it with a small cold shock—she did not hate it as much as she should have.
At the second table she came to, she stopped dead.
Two men were sitting there. One was short and narrow-shouldered, with a weak chin and a sparse mustache. The other was big and thick and long-armed, with a heavy brow and a wide flat nose and a jaw like a gorilla's.
Both of them were wearing the gray robes of True Yuan Sect outer disciples.
She knew them. Not well. She knew their faces from the edge of the training ground. Martial Teachers, both of them—one full great realm below her. Her junior brothers.
For one moment, she was so angry that she forgot what she was wearing. Junior brothers of the True Yuan Sect, in a place like this? And then she remembered what she was wearing, and the anger turned to burning, mortifying shame.
She was standing in front of two men from her own sect with her breasts and her ass bare.
They did not recognize her. She could see it in their faces. The mask did its work. They looked at her breasts first—both of them, at the same moment, as if pulled by a string—and then at her belly and her thighs and the little leather triangle between them, and finally, briefly, at her masked face, and their eyes slid off it without a flicker.
The gorilla-faced one laid a token on the table. Deep red jade, three lotus flowers.
VIP 3.
"Bring us food," he said. "Meat. And wine."
She went to the kitchen. Behind her, she heard them start talking before she was out of earshot.
"Hey." The gorilla-faced one leaned over the table. "Last week—did you get a look at Senior Sister Yun's underwear?"
Yun Xianchen nearly dropped her order book.
"When she did the Crane Ascends," he went on happily. "I was at the east corner. Red. Red silk. I didn't sleep all night. I jerked off till dawn."
"Hell, no," groaned the short one. "I missed it. I was on kitchen duty."
"Well, we finally got a VIP 3." The gorilla-faced one tapped the token on the table. "Do you know how many missions' worth of points that cost me? I'm going to enjoy it. Even if the waitresses here aren't as good-looking as Senior Sister Yun, they're hot as hell. Did you see that one just now? The one who took our order? She's got the same curves as our senior sister. Exactly the same."
The short one bristled. "No way. There's not a single woman in the world whose body compares to Senior Sister Yun's."
She came back with the tray. Every man in the hall seemed to be watching her cross the floor. She could feel their eyes on her bouncing breasts, her bare ass, the thread between her legs. Her face was burning under the mask.
She bent and set the food on the table.
"Sit," said the gorilla-faced one, and tapped the red jade token. "Here. Between us."
She had no choice. She had read the rules.
She sat.
The bench was narrow. They had left her just enough room between them. As she sat down, the thread at her back was pulled tight, and it sank deeper into the crack of her ass, and her bare cheeks came down flat on the cool polished wood.
She sat there between her two junior brothers, stiff as a sword, burning with anger.
The gorilla-faced one was already breathing hard. He did not waste any time. He reached over and put his big hand on her breast.
She had been touched there exactly once before in her life. Last night. In the consort's room, through her black dress, by a man she had come to kill.
That had been bad enough.
This was a junior brother. A gray-robed outer disciple who had stood at the east corner of the training ground to look up her skirt. His palm was broad and hot and rough with calluses from the practice sword, and it covered almost all of her breast. He squeezed. She felt her breast give under his fingers and swell up between them.
I'll break your hand, she thought. Very clearly. I'll break every finger in it.
She could not. The house seal sat on her meridians like a stone. Her Qi lay frozen under it. And the contract-token was in her sleeve-pocket in the changing room, and she had read the rules, and she was a VIP 3's waitress.
She sat still. She let him.
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