Chapter 67 of 90
A Business Plan for Shi Dacheng
That afternoon, Li Yuguo went looking for Shi Dacheng with a business plan in his sleeve and the King of Thieves at his shoulder.
Neither of them said much on the way. Guan Yunfan walked half a step behind, as he always did, with his cloak drawn close and his one eye on the street. But twice Li Yuguo caught him looking at the side of his face and then looking away. And once, when Li Yuguo laughed at something a fruit seller shouted, the King of Thieves flinched as if he had been struck.
Li Yuguo pretended not to notice.
Five thousand points, he thought. Sworn brother bonus. He looked at the broad back of the man who had sat on his roof every night for a month, and felt something complicated turn over in his chest—anger, and something that was not quite anger, and under it, a tired kind of fondness he could not get rid of. You idiot. You don't even know I know.
He decided he would not say anything. Not yet. Not today.
They found Shi Dacheng where he always was at that hour: in the private room at the top of Heaven Lust.
The guard at the door bowed them in. The room was all red silk and gold lacquer, warm and dim, heavy with incense and wine and something muskier beneath. And in the middle of it, on a sofa the size of a small boat, sat the merchant himself.
He was half naked. His robe hung open to the waist, and his great soft belly spilled over the sash, white and round as a steamed bun. On either side of him, wound around him like vines on a fat tree, were two women.
They were stunning.
Li Yuguo had seen a great many beautiful women since he came to this world. These two would have stood out in any of those crowds. One was tall and long-legged, with a fall of black hair to her waist; the other was smaller and rounder, with a doll's face and an enormous bosom. Both of them wore what Heaven Lust called clothing: threaded underthings and tiny scraps of silk that hid almost nothing at all. Their bodies were pressed up against the merchant on either side, their bare thighs draped over his, their breasts squashed against his arms.
And Shi Dacheng had a hand on each of them. His fat fingers were sunk deep into their breasts, squeezing idly, the way another man might play with a pair of walnuts.
Where does this fat pig find them? Li Yuguo thought. He could not help it; he was jealous. Every time I come here, there are two new ones.
"Oh! Welcome, welcome, brothers!" Shi Dacheng beamed at them over the women's heads. "Brother Yuguo! What brings you to my little nest? What do you need to talk to me about?"
Li Yuguo dragged his eyes away from the doll-faced girl's breasts.
"Of course," he said. "I've brought Brother Dacheng a business idea."
The effect was instant. Shi Dacheng shoved both women aside—not roughly, but absently, the way a man pushes away a cushion—and heaved himself upright on the sofa. His little eyes had begun to shine. He could smell money the way a shark could smell blood.
"Oh, Brother! You always bring such brilliant ideas! Tell me, tell me!"
"There's no need to rush, Brother." Li Yuguo glanced, very deliberately, at the two women. "Let's talk sitting down. Properly."
Shi Dacheng understood at once. He called a servant and murmured something, and waved Li Yuguo and the King of Thieves toward the cushions.
A moment later, two more women came in through the beaded curtain. They were dressed exactly like the first two—which was to say, almost not at all—and they were just as beautiful. One of them sat down beside Li Yuguo and pressed herself against his arm, so that her bare breast squashed soft and warm against his elbow. The other did the same to Guan Yunfan.
The King of Thieves went rigid as a post. He stared straight ahead at the wall.
"Now," said Shi Dacheng, rubbing his hands together. "Let's talk, Brother."
Li Yuguo reached into his sleeve and drew out a mask.
It was a thin, pale, flexible thing, cool as skin, with nothing written on it at all. He had bought it from Alimama for two thousand taels of silver weeks ago and never used it. He held it up so Shi Dacheng could see it. Then he put it on.
His face changed.
It did not blur, the way the bar's masks blurred. It changed. The bones moved. The skin thickened and slackened. The jaw softened into a double chin; the cheeks puffed out; the eyes sank and narrowed into two small shrewd crescents.
Shi Dacheng found himself looking at his own face.
The merchant's mouth fell open.
Li Yuguo touched the mask again. The face rippled—and it was Guan Yunfan's. The scarred brow, the hard jaw, the eyepatch, the hooded single eye. Perfect. Natural. The body below it was still Li Yuguo's—slender, long-limbed, in his own pale robe—but the face would have fooled the King of Thieves' own wife.
Beside him, the King of Thieves made a small strangled sound.
Li Yuguo took the mask off and set it on the table, and his own face came back.
"Brother Dacheng," he said. "What if your waitresses wore masks like this? And looked like their customers' dream girls?"
Shi Dacheng's mind blew open like a door in a gale.
Li Yuguo watched it happen. Watched the merchant's eyes go wide and then distant, watched him see it: a room, a girl, a mask. Any girl. Any face. The neighbor's wife. The magistrate's daughter. The proud young mistress from the great house up the hill who would never in a hundred lifetimes so much as look at a fat merchant from the south. There were countless men in the world who dreamed of having women far out of their reach. And with a mask like this—
The dream became flesh.
"But Brother." Shi Dacheng's voice had gone hoarse. "One mask. How can we build a business on one mask?"
Li Yuguo smiled.
Under the table, behind his sleeve, he had already opened Alimama in his mind and found the listing. Face mask—replacement type. Two thousand taels of silver apiece. He bought nine of them. The silver went out of his account in a long silent flood, and nine thin pale masks dropped one by one into his hand out of the empty air.
He laid them out on the table beside the first. Ten in a row, like pale leaves.
"I can give Brother all ten," he said. "A hundred thousand silver each. One million for the set."
The price hit Shi Dacheng like a slap.
For a moment he just sat there with his jowls trembling. One million. It was an enormous sum, even for the richest man in Nalan City.
But it was not a sum he could not pay. And they were these masks.
He did not even haggle. He reached into his robe and pulled out a fat sheaf of silver notes and counted them out onto the table with hands that shook a little, and swept all ten masks into his lap before Li Yuguo could change his mind.
"Oh, Brother." He was laughing breathlessly, cradling them. "Brother, Brother. You always, always bring such amazing things."
"Here's what I'd do," said Li Yuguo, tucking the silver notes into his sleeve. Eighteen thousand taels out. One million in. He tried very hard to keep the smugness off his face and failed. "Make a separate room. A special room. Put waitresses in it, wearing these. Let them take the faces of the most beautiful women in the land. Then open it only to your most special VIP customers. Let them fulfill their fantasies."
Shi Dacheng's eyes glittered.
Li Yuguo leaned back against the cushions. The woman beside him had not moved away. Her breast was still pressed against his arm, soft and warm and heavy. He turned toward her, and took it in his hand, and found that it was every bit as soft as it looked.
He stayed a while longer after that. He enjoyed it. He let himself enjoy it. Across the table, the King of Thieves sat stiff as a carved idol with a girl draped over his shoulder, and did not touch her once.
When they left, Shi Dacheng was still sitting on his sofa with the masks in his lap, turning them over and over in his fat fingers, thinking.
That night, Li Yuguo decided to go to Heaven Lust himself.
He had never been. Not once. Not in all the weeks since he had handed Shi Dacheng those first four boxes of outfits in the market and smiled. He had sat in his guest room night after night and watched the numbers climb and imagined.
He could not imagine any more. He had to see.
He waited in his room with the lamp out until midnight. He heard her door open across the courtyard. He heard her soft steps on the covered walk, and the creak of the side door with the broken latch.
He gave her a quarter of an hour's start. Then he put on a black robe with a deep hood, so that he looked like any other shady man going out to do shady things in the dark, and followed.
He knew the way. He had walked it a hundred times in his head.
He went in at the front, paid at the door, and climbed the red lacquer stairs to the second floor. He did not let himself stop at the top to stare, although he wanted to. He crossed the long golden hall with his head down, between the red lanterns and the smoke and the music and the nearly naked women, and sat down at a table in the corner.
Table nine.
He knew it was hers. He had read it in the system's logs often enough. Table nine. Table nine. Table nine.
He sat with his hands folded on the table, and waited.
In the changing room at the back, Nalan Meng was finishing her outfit.
She tied on her mask. She went to the counter. The steward handed her the order book.
"Table nine," he said. "Again."
She walked across the hall toward it.
And when she saw who was sitting there, she stopped so suddenly that the waitress behind her nearly walked into her.
Li Yuguo.
Her husband. Sitting at table nine. In a black hooded robe, with his hands folded on the table and his face turned up toward her.
Shock went through her like cold water. Then heat, rushing up after it—into her face, her throat, her chest. She was standing in front of her husband in two tiny triangles of leather and a thread.
And he was staring at her.
Not at her face. At her. At all of her. His eyes went over her body like a starving man's—her breasts, her belly, her thighs, the narrow strip of leather between them—and back up, and down again. Hungry. Wild. As if he would never get enough of looking.
She felt it everywhere. It made her shy in a way that no other man's stare ever had. The others' eyes were a weight. His were a touch.
She was so ashamed she could hardly stand still.
He was sure. He had been sure from the moment she stepped out of the crowd.
A woman was walking toward his table through the smoke. Her breasts were bare except for two tiny black triangles that hid her nipples and nothing else—huge, full, perfectly shaped breasts that swayed up and down with every step, so heavy and so beautiful that men at the nearby tables turned their heads to follow them. Below, there was only a thread. A thread that ran down from her waist and vanished between her legs, covering the slit of her pussy and nothing more. Gold glinted at her wrists and around her throat. Her face was hidden behind a mask.
But even a blind man could have told she was a stunning beauty. Her body said so.
He was sure. He still could not believe it.
He called up the Secret Eye.
[ Name: Nalan Meng ]
Status: Horny, Shy, Fearful, Guilty, Immoral
Secret: Working as a lusty waitress in a bar.
Immoral. There it was again. The mark of his title. King of Cuckolds. All women related to the user will carry an immoral status.
He knew what it meant now. It meant that some part of her, deep down, would enjoy immoral things. Would answer them.
He watched her come closer. Her beautiful breasts—which he had only ever seen under cloth, under armor, once under the leaves in the canyon with her blood on his hands—were bare in front of him. Every step made them bounce.
"What would you like to order?" she asked.
Her voice. Lighter than usual, and lower. Disguised. It went through him anyway, straight down his spine, and he crumbled inside.
But he kept his face calm.
"The most expensive thing you have," he said, and smiled up at her.
She took the order and turned away.
He watched her go. He could not have done anything else.
Her ass. Her bare, round, flawless ass, moving away from him through the golden light. He had lain awake so many nights thinking about it. Under the crimson robe. Under the training skirt. That first day in the market, when he had come up behind her in the crowd and it had pressed against him and she had turned around and almost cut his throat. And now it was naked in front of him, rolling with every step, the thread buried deep between the cheeks.
He watched it until she was gone through the kitchen door.
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