Chapter 81 of 90
The Thief's Tunnel
At the edge of the forest, the system would not let Li Yuguo rest.
The windows had come all through the night and into the grey hour before dawn. Not a flood, now. A drip. One gold pane, then a long silence, then another. He had stopped flinching at them some time after midnight. He had not stopped reading them.
He sat with his back to the pine and his panel open on his knee, and he did sums.
Eight thousand three hundred. That was what he had left after the buying. Masks that could wear another man's face down to the stubble. Talismans of earth-softening, a whole stack of them, the kind a mason's guild would have killed for. Pills. A small black thing from Alimama's back shelves that the shop had described, with its usual cheerful lack of shame, as a mortal artifact of the transmigrator's homeland—silenced—six rounds—sufficient against Martial Teacher bone if the aim is true.
He had not expected to find a pistol in a cultivation novel.
He had bought it anyway. He had a writer's respect for a gun that turns up in the first act.
Union, the window from yesterday had said. And virginity, with Yun Xianchen's name in front of it.
He closed the panel. He opened it again. The bar had not moved. It never moved when he spent.
Current Cuckold Points: 8300 Cuckold Bar: 51%
He looked at the number for a while, and then he looked at the dark wall of the mountain, and thought: Hold on. Just a little longer. I'm coming.
And underneath that thought, very quietly, in a voice he did not like, something else said: Not yet. Not too soon.
In the mine, Li Yutang and Ximen Lang worked their picks and looked for weakness.
They were not thinking about weakness. Neither of them had slept. Every time Ximen Lang closed his eyes he saw his betrothed on her knees in that little room with a barbarian's hands spreading her ass and the red trickling down her thigh, and he opened his eyes again and swung the pick harder. Li Yutang did not close his eyes at all. He swung his pick and thought about Nalan Meng's pussy wet and dripping under a stranger's mouth, and his cock stood up in his hemp trousers like a tent pole, and he did not care who saw.
But their hands kept working, and their feet kept walking, and at the very back of the deepest tunnel, where the red crystal thinned out and the miners rarely bothered to go, Ximen Lang struck the wall and heard it ring.
Hollow.
He struck it again, softly. He laid his palm flat against the rock and fed the smallest thread of Qi into it, past the dull pressure of the iron ring on his finger. The thread went out and out and did not come back. Beyond the stone there was air. Cold air. The smell of moss and pine resin.
The forest.
He looked at Li Yutang. Li Yutang looked back.
For one second, the two of them were not lechers or rivals or anything at all. They were men who had found the door out of a cage.
That evening, from a crack high in the tunnel wall where the smoke went out, a single sliver of folded paper went fluttering into the dusk on a breath of borrowed wind.
Nalan Meng woke on stone.
She did not know where she was at first. Her cheek was pressed to rock. Her hip ached. Her shoulder ached. Every part of her that had touched the floor through the night had gone stiff and cold and sore, and there was grit stuck to her skin in a hundred places. She had never in her life slept on a floor. Not as a child. Not on campaign. There had always been a bed, a mat, a cloak—something.
Then she remembered, and opened her eyes.
The little room at the back of the mine. The overseer's chair, empty. Yun Xianchen curled on her side an arm's length away, her black hair spilled over her face, her chained hands drawn up under her chin like a child's.
And at the opening of the room, the two guards.
They were looking at her.
They had been looking at her, she understood, all night. They had not touched. They would not have dared to touch—these were the lord's slaves, and a man in bronze leathers did not lay his hands on gold. But they had stood there through the long dark and watched. Watched two naked women turn in their sleep. Watched thighs fall open. Watched an ass shift and a breast slide against the rock.
Nalan Meng drew her knees together. Too late. Hours too late.
Her face went hot. Not with anger. She looked for anger and could not find enough of it. She found the heat, low down, the familiar treacherous warmth that had started in Heaven Lust and had not left her since the morning in the bath with Luo Jin. The constitution. Whatever it was. It woke when she woke.
Stop it, she told it. Not now. Not here.
Beside her, Yun Xianchen stirred, opened her eyes, and went very still. Nalan Meng watched her remember. Watched it go through her body like cold water—the stiffening, then the small involuntary tightening of her thighs, then the wince.
She was still hurting. Down there. Of course she was.
Neither of them said anything.
Yan Qiu came back in the morning, rested and pleased with himself.
He had slept in his own house in the village, on his own bed, and he came striding down the tunnel with his whip coiled at his belt like a man coming to look at a horse he had bought. He stopped at the mouth of the little room and looked at the two of them on the floor.
They were filthy. Grey dust on their shoulders, on their knees, in the creases of their hips. Grit printed into the soft white skin of Nalan Meng's breast where it had lain against the rock. A smear of dirt down Yun Xianchen's thigh, running into the dried, darker stain.
His face changed. Not to pity. To alarm.
"Look at them," he said to the two bronze-chained women behind him. "Look at them. What if the lord comes and sees his slaves like this? Clean them. Now."
The bronze women came forward, took Nalan Meng and Yun Xianchen by their chained wrists, and pulled them up.
Their faces were very calm. Their eyes were not calm at all.
The bath of the mine was a cavern of its own.
It had been dug where a hot spring came up through the rock, and the barbarians had cut it into a great pool, wide and shallow and steaming, big enough for a hundred men at once. The miners were let in here at the change of shift, a few hundred at a time, under guard, to scrub off the crystal dust before it ate their skin.
At the far end, separated by a low wall of stone that ran out into the water and stopped a little below its surface, there was a second pool. Smaller. For the women.
Everyone could see over the wall. The wall was only there so that a man could say it was there.
It was the change of shift. The great pool was full.
Hundreds of naked men stood in the steaming water, or sat on its edges, or squatted on the wet rock scrubbing their arms. And most of them were not really bathing. They had been waiting. Every morning the overseer's slaves came to the women's pool to bathe, and it was the only time in a long grey day of dust and stone that a miner could look at a naked woman. Men who had finished an hour ago were still standing there, wrinkled and pink from the heat.
Then four figures came out of the tunnel mouth.
The sound in the cavern changed. A murmur. Then nothing. Then a long low breath let out by a hundred men together.
The lord's slaves. Both of them.
Nalan Meng stopped in the entrance, and could not make her feet go on.
She had been naked in front of men before. Many men, now. Heaven Lust. The party. The barbarians' hall. She had thought there was nothing left that could make her stop in a doorway.
She had not thought about this. A cavern full of steam and lamplight, and in it, more cocks than she had ever imagined in one place. Bare. Hanging, or half-raised, or rising as she watched—rising because she was standing there. A forest of them. Every one turned toward her like a flower toward the sun.
Behind her, she heard Yun Xianchen's breath stop.
The bronze women went on ahead without looking back. They had done this a hundred times. At the women's pool they stopped, unhooked the little cloths from their waist-chains, and stepped out of the chains themselves with the ease of long practice. Then they turned around, bare, and looked at the two newcomers.
Well? said their faces.
There was no help for it.
Nalan Meng bent and began to unhook her own chains.
Her fingers were clumsy with the cuffs on them. The neck-ring first. Then the fine strands that crossed over her breasts—three of them, framing each nipple—and she felt every man in the cavern watch her nipples come free of the gold and stand there bare and stiff in the hot wet air. Then the waist-ring. And last, the single chain that ran down between her legs. It had been there all night. It had sunk into her, pressed into the lips of her pussy and the crack of her ass until her flesh had grown around it. When she drew it out, slowly, it came free with a small wet sound that she was sure the whole cavern heard.
She stood there with nothing on but the iron cuffs on her wrists and the ring on her finger.
Beside her, Yun Xianchen did the same. Slower. Her hands were shaking. When the chain slid out from between her legs she shut her eyes, and the color went down from her face all the way to the tops of her breasts.
From the big pool came a sound. Not words. Just men.
Don't look at them, Nalan Meng told herself. Look at the water. Look at the wall. She walked to the edge of the pool with her back straight and her chin up, the way she would have walked into the city hall, and every step made her breasts bounce and her ass sway, and every step she felt it. A hundred pairs of eyes, on her ass. On her pussy. On the place between her thighs where she was—
No.
—where she was wet.
She stepped down into the water.
It was hot, almost too hot, and for one blessed moment it took everything. The ache in her hip. The grit. The cold of the floor that had sunk into her bones. She let it come up over her knees, her thighs, her waist, and the lower half of her body vanished into the steam, and she could breathe again.
Then the bronze women came to her, one to her and one to Yun Xianchen, with soap in their hands. And began to wash them.
They were not gentle.
They were not rough, either. That would have been too obvious; the overseer might hear of it. They were thorough. The one who had Nalan Meng soaped her shoulders, and her back, and her arms down to the cuffs. Then she soaped her breasts. Took them in her two hands and worked the lather into them, round and round, lifting them, letting them fall. Her palms slid over the nipples and stayed there a moment too long. And her eyes, the whole time, looked into Nalan Meng's face. Measuring. So this is what the lord wants. This.
Jealousy. Nalan Meng could feel it coming off the woman like heat off a forge.
She stood still and let it happen. Her nipples hardened under the slippery palms, and she could do nothing about it, and the bronze woman saw it and smiled a very small smile.
In the big pool, among the steam and the crowd, two of the naked miners were not washing at all.
Li Yutang had a guard on either side of him and Ximen Lang at his shoulder, and all four of them stood waist-deep with their hands under the water and their eyes over the wall. Li Yutang's cock was so hard it hurt. He did not touch it. He did not need to. He watched a jealous slave-girl's soapy hands slide over his sister-in-law's tits, and the City Lord of Nalan City stand there in the steam and let her, and he thought he might come just from that.
Ximen Lang watched his betrothed.
Yun Xianchen had her eyes fixed on the water. The bronze woman behind her was soaping her back, her waist, the curve of her hips. Her hands went lower. Under the water. Ximen Lang could not see what they did there. He saw Yun Xianchen's whole body jerk. Saw her lip go between her teeth.
He looked away. He looked back.
The bronze women noticed it. The nervousness. The way the lord's two prizes kept their eyes down and their bodies sunk to the shoulders in the water as if the steam could hide them.
They exchanged a look.
"Up," said the one with Nalan Meng. "The water's dirty here. We'll finish on the stones."
And they took them by the wrists and led them up out of the pool.
Out of the steam. Out of the water. Onto the flat wet rock along the edge, under the lamps, in plain sight of every man in the cavern. The water ran off them in sheets. Off their breasts, their bellies, down the insides of their thighs. Their skin was pink from the heat and shining with soap.
"Stand," said the bronze woman. "Arms up."
They had no choice. They lifted their chained hands over their heads.
And the jealous women washed them again.
Slowly. For an audience. The one behind Nalan Meng reached around her and took her breasts in both hands from beneath, and lifted them, and turned her a little toward the big pool, and squeezed—so that the soft white flesh swelled up between her fingers and the stiff pink nipples pointed straight out at the crowd. She rolled them. Pulled them gently forward. Let them go, so they bounced. Took them again.
Look, her hands said, to every man watching. Look what she is. A pair of tits. A slave, like me.
Nalan Meng stood with her arms over her head and her face burning and her breasts being shown to three hundred men like fruit at a stall, and she felt her pussy clench, wet and empty, and she hated it, and it would not stop.
I am the Lord of Nalan City, she thought. I have stood on the walls with a sword in my hand. I have—
The fingers pinched her nipples. She gasped. Out loud.
From the big pool, a groan went up. Somewhere in the steam a man swore, choked, and went quiet.
Beside her, Yun Xianchen was being turned the other way, so that the crowd could see her from behind. The bronze woman's soapy palm slid down the small of her back and over the round of her ass, and spread it. Just for a moment. Just enough. Then let it close.
Yun Xianchen made no sound at all. Her eyes were wet. Ximen Lang, in the water, saw them, and could not make himself look anywhere else.
It went on for a long time. Longer than any bath needed.
At last the bronze women seemed satisfied. Or bored. They rinsed them off with a bucket from the hot spring, briskly, like rinsing a floor, and handed them their chains, and dressed themselves.
The rock along the edge of the big pool had gone slippery. Not with soap. Men had been coming where they stood, into the water, onto the stone. Quietly, most of them. Some not so quietly. The miners nearest the wall stood with their hands still under the water and their faces slack, and watched four bare asses walk away up the tunnel—two in bronze, two in gold—and did not look away until the last of them was gone.
Clean, the golden chains looked worse.
The dirt had dulled them. Now the bodies under them were washed and pink and glowing, and the gold lay on that glowing skin like jewelry on a statue, and every strand caught the torchlight. The fine chains framing their nipples. The ring at the waist. The single line running down through the softest place on their bodies and out of sight between their cheeks.
Yan Qiu was sitting in his chair when they came back into the little room, and he got hard as soon as he saw them.
He did not even try to hide it. He sat there with his leathers tenting and looked at them, and Yun Xianchen felt a cold go through her from the scalp down. She remembered his hands. His weight. The tearing. She was still sore—she could feel it with every step, a raw bruised ache deep inside, and the chain rubbing over the hurt place every time she moved.
Not again, she thought. Please. Not again.
He stood up.
He came toward them. He took hold of their collar chains, one in each fist.
And led them out.
It was only an inspection.
He had to walk the mine every morning—count the baskets, check the faces, make sure no one had been crushed in the night where it would be inconvenient. And today he had the lord's slaves to walk with him. He wanted to be seen with them.
He walked them through every tunnel.
For the miners, it was hell. They had been told to work. The guards stood along the walls with whips, watching that they worked. And down the middle of the tunnel came the overseer, with two goddesses on chains behind him, wearing almost nothing at all.
Their breasts bounced with every step, jiggling bare between the fine chains. Behind them the little white cloths hung from their waist-rings and swung as they walked, and every time the air moved in the tunnel—every time a draft came down from the shafts, or a man swung his pick close by—the cloth fluttered up and showed the round white cheeks of their asses underneath. Showed them bouncing. Up and down. Left and right. The golden chain running between them.
It was not as if the miners had not seen them before. They had. Most of them had seen them only an hour ago, bare and soaped and squeezed on the stones. That did not help at all. Every time, it was as if it were the first time.
The men gripped their picks and bent over the rock and tried to work, and tried not to look, and looked.
In a side tunnel, Li Yutang leaned on his pick and watched them pass.
He watched Nalan Meng's ass go by, two arm's lengths from his face. Watched the cloth lift. Watched the cheeks move, and the gold between them.
If it were me, he thought, instead of that barbarian—
He would not waste one second. Not one. He would not be walking her around like a show horse. He would bend her over the nearest rock and fuck her day and night until she could not walk, and then fuck her some more.
He cursed his luck under his breath. Then he cursed it again, and went back to his pick, and kept looking.
On the far side of the mountain, under the dark of the trees, Li Yuguo and Guan Yunfan were digging.
The signal had come at dusk the evening before. Back wall, deepest tunnel. Hollow. Forest side. And a crude little map, drawn in charcoal by someone who could not draw, which Guan Yunfan had turned this way and that for a quarter of an hour before he grunted and pointed at a fold of the hillside.
They had been at it since.
The earth-softening talismans did most of the work. Li Yuguo slapped one against the slope and it sank in with a soft hiss, and the soil went loose and crumbling around it like old cake, and the strongest guards dug it out with their hands and passed it back. Then another talisman. Then another. Guan Yunfan went ahead with his one eye half shut, feeling at the rock with his palm, steering them. A thief's tunnel. He had dug a hundred of them.
Behind them, the rest of the force waited in the trees. A hundred men. A hundred and fifty. City guards and True Yuan disciples and Guan Yunfan's own people, with blades and bows and the talismans Li Yuguo had passed out of Alimama by the armful.
Li Yuguo dug and did not think. He was good at that. He had been a writer.
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