Chapter 82 of 90
Picks in the Mine
The system chimed once while he was digging. Then again. Then three times close together.
He did not open it. He knew roughly what it said. The bath, probably. Something with a lot of people watching.
He kept digging.
When he did glance at it, finally, wiping his hands, it said:
[ Cuckold Points +300 ] — Nalan Meng: bathed before the miners [ Cuckold Points +300 ] — Yun Xianchen: bathed before the miners
He closed it and went back to the earth.
Near midday, Guan Yunfan put up his hand.
They stopped. In the silence, through the last thin skin of soil and stone in front of them, they could hear it. The tock, tock, tock of picks. A man coughing. Someone laughing, harshly. A whip.
Li Yuguo set his palm on the rock and pushed a little Qi into it. Soft. Softer. A crumb of stone fell inward, and a needle of red light came through.
He put his eye to it.
A tunnel. Low and narrow, lit by torches and the glow of the crystal in the walls. Men working in it, a dozen or so, bent over the face. Along the wall, seven guards in barbarian leathers, bored, leaning on their spears. Martial Teachers, all of them; he could feel it from here. Not one higher.
And on the near side of the tunnel, squarely in front of the little hole, with their backs to it and their guards around them like a wall: Li Yutang and Ximen Lang.
They went in quietly.
Ximen Lang had seen the dust fall. He did not turn his head. He shifted half a step left, and Li Yutang half a step right, and their men closed in behind them, and in the screen of their bodies Li Yuguo widened the hole and slid through on his belly. Then Guan Yunfan. Then three of the strongest guards. No more. A hundred men in a narrow tunnel was not an attack, it was a riot.
The rest waited in the dark behind.
Li Yuguo stood up among the miners in his dirty clothes. Nobody looked at him twice. One more filthy man in a crowd of filthy men.
There were barbarians all through the village outside. Hundreds. The lord in his hall. His chieftains. If anyone raised the alarm now—if one guard got out of this tunnel shouting—it was over.
He leaned close to Ximen Lang and spoke in his ear. Not long. A few sentences.
Ximen Lang listened. Then he smiled. And Li Yuguo smiled back.
A minute later, Ximen Lang dropped his pick.
He clutched his stomach. He made a sound like a stuck goat. He staggered two steps, bent double, and fell on the rock floor, writhing, and began to howl.
Every guard in the tunnel came running.
That was their job. A sick miner was a miner not mining; a dead one was a body to drag out. All seven of them crowded around, spears in hand, peering down at him, one of them kicking at his ribs—
And from the dust behind them, Li Yuguo and Guan Yunfan and the three city guards came out with knives.
It was over in the time it takes to draw two breaths. No one shouted. Guan Yunfan's knife went in under an ear, and out, and in under the next ear before the first man had finished falling. A hand over a mouth. A wet sound. Seven bodies, laid down quietly on the rock.
The miners nearby stared, and opened their mouths, and found Li Yutang's men's hands over them.
"Quiet," Li Yutang said. "Quiet, and you'll see the sun."
They stripped the dead guards and dragged them out through the hole into the forest.
Li Yuguo took seven masks out of his inventory.
They were thin as a breath, grey, faceless—until you laid one over your skin, and then they drank. He pressed one over his own face and felt it flow, and settle, and harden, and when he touched his cheek it was a stranger's cheek, broad and bearded, with a broken nose. He passed them around. Guan Yunfan. Li Yutang. Ximen Lang. The three guards. Seven new barbarians stood in the tunnel in the dead men's leathers, with the dead men's spears.
They went back to their posts along the wall, as if nothing had happened.
"Where are they?" Li Yuguo said quietly.
Ximen Lang knew who he meant. He did not look at him. "In the small room at the back of the main cave. With the overseer. Yan Qiu." His jaw worked. "The faces you two are wearing—those were the guards of that room. Go now, before he comes back from his rounds. We'll see to the miners."
Li Yuguo nodded. He and Guan Yunfan shouldered their spears, and walked.
The little room was empty except for them.
The guards were gone—they were wearing the guards. Yan Qiu was gone—out on the floor somewhere, counting baskets. The bronze women were gone too.
And on the floor in front of the overseer's chair, on their hands and knees, chained by their collars to an iron pole set in the rock beside it, two women were waiting.
They were facing away from the door.
Li Yuguo stopped in the opening.
Their asses were toward him. Round and white and perfect, lifted on their bent knees, side by side. The little cloths at the backs of their waist-rings had fallen to one side. The golden chain ran down from each waist-ring between the cheeks—and sank there, and vanished in the soft deep crease, and came out again lower, shining, lying in the pink slit of each pussy. Their legs were a little apart for balance. Spread enough. He could see everything. Two small puckered assholes. Two pussies, plump and pink, with the gold pressed into the lips. Wet. Both of them. Glistening a little in the torchlight around the chain.
His cock was hard before he had decided anything.
Beside him, Guan Yunfan's breath went out of him in a long hiss. Li Yuguo did not look, but he knew. The thief king was hard too.
It could not be anyone else. There were no other bodies like those in the world.
Nalan Meng. Yun Xianchen.
Guan Yunfan moved. One step toward the pole. His hand going to the dead guard's keys at his belt.
Li Yuguo caught his wrist.
Guan Yunfan looked at him. The mask could not hide his eye. Why?
Because if they're gone when Yan Qiu walks in, Li Yuguo thought, he shouts. And the whole mountain comes down on us. That was true. That was the reason. He held Guan Yunfan's wrist and gave the smallest shake of his head, and let it be the reason.
He could have said something. Two words. It's me. Just to let them know they were not alone.
He did not.
If they knew—if they knew who was standing in the doorway, looking at them like this—they would be ashamed. They would try to cover themselves. They would kneel differently. Act differently. And Yan Qiu would see it.
That was true too.
He stood in the doorway in a dead man's face and looked at his wife's ass and did not say anything.
He had never looked at Yun Xianchen like this. Not truly. On the massage table, in the lamplight, he had had his hands on her back, and her robe had been down to her waist, and he had told himself he was not looking.
He looked now.
Her back was flawless. Long and white and slender, without a mark on it, the spine a soft shallow groove down the middle. Her waist went in sharply above the hips. Her ass was a little smaller than Nalan Meng's, higher, tighter, and the skin of it was so white it seemed to glow. Her asshole was a darker pink than the rest of her, small and tightly closed. Below it, her pussy was the soft pink of a flower petal. The lips a little swollen. Bruised, maybe. He remembered the window. Virginity.
She was every bit as beautiful as Nalan Meng from behind. He would not have believed it.
Who would have thought it? The two most beautiful women in this whole world, kneeling naked on the floor of a cave, waiting for a barbarian.
And he was standing here, hard, watching.
Footsteps in the tunnel.
Yan Qiu came in with a happy face. His rounds had gone well. Production was up. He passed between the two of them in the doorway without a glance—two guards, two spears, nothing—and went into the room.
Li Yuguo measured him as he passed. Advanced Martial Teacher. The same realm as himself. The same as all of them. He could take this man. They could all take this man. It was not this man who was the problem. It was the lord in his hall, at the Martial Soul realm—and under him, his chieftains, each of them half a step from it. Those were the ones they had to plan for.
Yan Qiu walked up behind the two kneeling women and slapped Nalan Meng's ass.
Hard. A flat loud crack that rang off the rock.
She jerked awake. They both did—they had been dozing on their hands and knees, the way animals doze—and for a moment their bodies tensed to rise. Then they remembered, and went still, and stayed exactly as they were. Bent. Lifted. Facing the wall.
On Nalan Meng's left cheek, a red handprint began to bloom.
Yan Qiu sat down in his chair. He stretched out his arm, and laid his big hand on that red print. And squeezed.
Her soft flesh swelled up between his fingers. He kneaded it. He pulled it a little to the side, and her cheeks spread with it, and her asshole was stretched open—just a little, just enough that the pink inside showed for a moment around the golden chain. He let go. It closed. He did it again.
Nalan Meng knelt with her face to the wall and her eyes shut.
She was already wet. She had been wet since she woke on the stone. The bath had made it worse. The walk through the tunnels, with every miner's eyes on her bouncing ass, had made it worse still. And now this rough hand on her—she could feel her pussy clench around the chain, could feel the wetness gather and slide, and her whole body wanted to push back into that hand. Into any hand. Every man in this mountain, her body said. Any of them. All of them.
No, she said to it. Through her teeth. No.
She held. Barely.
In the doorway, Guan Yunfan was shaking with anger.
He turned his head and looked at Li Yuguo. Looked at him properly, through the mask. That's your wife. That's my sister-in-law. A barbarian is slapping her bare ass and pulling it open in front of us, and you—
Li Yuguo was calm.
His face was calm. His hands were calm on the spear. He was not trembling. Guan Yunfan could not understand it. He had followed this man for loyalty, and for his brother's sake, and because Li Yuguo had saved his life. He had never thought him a coward. He did not think it now. But how could any man stand still and watch this?
He looked back at the room.
He could not help it. He watched the big rough hand on that soft white ass. The red mark. The cheek spreading, and the pink hole stretched, and closing. He watched with his teeth clenched and his cock hard in his stolen leathers. He hated himself, and he watched.
Li Yuguo was not calm.
He was thinking.
Under the thinking, there was something else, and he would not look at it. The system had chimed once, very softly, a minute ago, and he had not looked at that either.
Kill Yan Qiu, he thought. Quietly. Then put our men in for the miners, one at a time. Then wait for the lord.
He opened his inventory in his mind. The black thing lay there, small and ugly, among the masks and the pills.
He looked at Yan Qiu.
The overseer was not looking at anything but Nalan Meng's ass. His whole face had gone slack with appetite. His hand was squeezing. His eyes were fixed on the stretched pink hole. He would not have noticed if the mountain fell.
Perfect.
He let the pistol slide out into his hand under the cover of the spear shaft.
He raised it. He did not hurry. He had never fired a gun in his first life, not once; in this one, the system had sold him the knowledge along with the weapon, and his hands knew it the way they knew a brush. He laid the sight on the center of Yan Qiu's broad forehead.
He breathed out.
There was a small sound. A cough, almost. A book closing.
And a small dark hole appeared in Yan Qiu's forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.
He did not even look surprised. His hand stayed on Nalan Meng's ass for a moment longer. Then it slid off, and he tipped sideways out of his chair, and hit the rock floor, and did not move again.
For three heartbeats, nobody did anything.
Guan Yunfan stared at the body. Nalan Meng and Yun Xianchen had heard the chair go over and the heavy fall, and they twisted round on their chains, and stared at it too. At the overseer lying on his face beside them with his blood spreading in a slow dark pool on the stone.
None of them understood what had happened.
Li Yuguo put the pistol away. He reached up and took hold of the mask at his jaw, and peeled it off.
Nalan Meng saw his face.
She knew him. Of course she knew him. Her whole body knew him before her mind did—the line of his shoulders, the way he stood—and then her mind caught up, and she understood who had been standing in that doorway, and for how long, and what he had been looking at.
Her face went red. Redder than it had gone in the bath, or in the tunnels, or under Yan Qiu's hand. She was on her hands and knees with her ass in the air and her pussy dripping around a golden chain, and her husband had been watching.
Beside her, Yun Xianchen made a sound like a small animal.
Li Yuguo came forward and knelt and unlocked the collars from the pole.
As soon as Nalan Meng's chain came loose, she came up off the floor and threw herself at him.
Her arms went around his neck. Her bare body slammed into his chest, her breasts crushed against the dead man's leathers, the gold chains biting into both of them. She held on. She held on so hard he could feel her shaking.
"Why," she said into his neck. Her voice broke on it. "Why so late?"
He held her. He did not answer. He did not have an answer that he could give her.
Yun Xianchen had come up onto her knees, and turned, and seen the other guard.
A barbarian. In leathers. With a spear. Standing between her and the door.
Her body moved before she thought. The Qi under the iron ring surged, and her chained hands came up in the first form of the True Yuan palm, and she was rising to strike—
The guard pulled off his face.
It was the thief king. Guan Yunfan. One eye, and a scar, and a look of utter astonishment.
She stopped.
Then she understood that she was still standing there in nothing but golden chains, with her arms raised over her head and her breasts thrust out and her pussy bare, in front of him. Her face, which had been white, went red. Then redder. She dropped into a crouch and clapped her hands over herself, one over her breasts and one between her legs, and could not look up from the floor.
Li Yuguo saw it. He reached into his inventory again and brought out two robes, and handed one to each of them.
They put them on so fast the silk hissed.
It did not help as much as it should have.
They were the best robes Alimama had had in a hurry. Thin, fine, pale silk—skin-tight, cut to cling. They clung. They went over the chains, and the chains showed through them, every strand. The rings at the throat and the waist. The fine lines framing each nipple, the nipples themselves standing up against the silk like two small stones. The single line running down below the navel and vanishing between the thighs. It looked more indecent than the chains alone had. A woman in a robe, with the outline of a slave's harness drawn on her body underneath it.
Neither of them said so. They held the robes closed at the throat and kept their eyes down.
He told them the plan.
They listened with their faces to the floor. The tunnel to the forest. The guards dead and replaced. The miners, to be sent out. The disguises. And them: they would keep the chains on, under the robes. When anyone from outside came into the mine, they would take the robes off, and be slaves again. Until the lord was dealt with.
"Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Nalan Meng. Very quietly.
Yun Xianchen only nodded.
He went out onto the cavern floor and gave his orders.
The miners were gathered, quietly, tunnel by tunnel. Li Yutang's men went among them. Li Yuguo told them, in a low voice, what was happening. That there was a way out. That it led into the forest. That there were men waiting there to see them home.
The miners stared at him. Some of them had been in this mountain three years.
They did not cheer. They did not dare make a sound. But their faces did something that Li Yuguo would remember for a long time. Then the first of them was moving, quick and quiet, toward the deep tunnel. Then the next. One after another, in a long grey line, they went into the dark and out through Guan Yunfan's hole into the trees.
And from the trees, one after another, the city guards and the True Yuan disciples came in.
They put on the miners' rags. They picked up the miners' picks. They rubbed crystal dust into their hair. In an hour, there were more than a hundred of them in the mine—hundreds, in the end, guards and cultivators of the sect—and from the mouth of the tunnel it looked exactly as it always had.
A few of them, passing the little room, looked in at the two women in the clinging silk with the outline of chains on their bodies, and frowned, and wondered. Why are they dressed like that? And decided, after a moment, that it must be what the female miners wore here. Barbarians were strange.
Li Yuguo stood over Yan Qiu's body and looked at it for a while.
Then he took out another mask, and laid it over his face, and thought about the dead man.
The mask drank. It flowed. His jaw broadened. His shoulders thickened, his neck, his chest. His nose went flat and his brows heavy. When he looked down at his hands, they were the big rough hands that had squeezed his wife's ass half an hour ago.
He flexed them. Good.
"Everyone works," he said, in Yan Qiu's voice. "Everyone looks like a miner. Until the lord comes to this cave." He put two of his best men in barbarian leathers at the main mouth of the tunnel, where anyone coming up from the village would see them first. "Nobody leaves. Nobody enters without my word."
The plan was going smoothly. As smoothly as he could have hoped.
Before he went back into the little room, he opened the system, finally.
[ Cuckold Points +200 ] — Nalan Meng: spanked by Yan Qiu (witnessed)
Current Cuckold Points: 9100 Cuckold Bar: 59%
Witnessed, it said. As if it had needed to tell him.
He closed it. Inside the room, Nalan Meng was sitting on the edge of the overseer's chair in her thin silk robe, with her arms around her knees, and when he came in wearing the face of the man who had slapped her, she flinched.
Then she saw his eyes. The mask could not change his eyes.
She did not flinch again. She moved over on the chair, and made room.
He sat down beside her. Their shoulders touched through the silk. Across the room, Yun Xianchen sat against the wall with her knees drawn up, watching them both, and after a while she let her head rest back against the stone, and closed her eyes.
Outside, the picks went on. Tock. Tock. Tock. Like a heart.
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