News of Guests

The Yan family mansion woke to noise.

It was not the soft, familiar noise of an ordinary morning in the branch house—the hiss of brooms over wet flagstones, the grunting rhythm of outer disciples drilling stances beyond the eastern wall, the clatter of the kitchens stoking their ovens before dawn.

This noise had teeth. Doors slid open and banged shut too fast. Stewards walked with the stiff, clipped stride of men who had been screamed at before sunrise and fully expected to be screamed at again before noon.

Somewhere in the eastern wing a senior maid was berating a junior one in a vicious hiss that carried through three courtyards, and the junior one was answering with hiccuping, tearful apologies, because she did not know what she had done wrong—only that the entire house had decided this was a day on which mistakes would be remembered and punished.

Messengers had ridden through the night.

The hoofbeats had come pounding up the long avenue from the city gate in the dead hour after midnight, iron-shod and urgent, and the gate guards had passed the sealed letters inward without being told what they held.

By the time the sun cleared the eastern roofs of Jinling City and laid its first pale gold across the tiles, every elder who mattered, every steward who kept a ledger, and every maid who had ever been trusted to carry a tray into the main hall already knew the shape of the news.

Guests were coming. Important guests. From the main demonic clan. People whose favor could smooth a decade of politics and whose displeasure could carve a branch family down to the bone and toss the bone to the dogs.

They were traveling somewhere farther and would rest here "for a while" on the way—and that while had not been defined, which in the language of the demonic sects was a message all by itself. They would be welcomed properly.

Relationships with the main clan were not things a family like the Yan branch left to chance, not when every resource pill, every allotment of spirit stones, every recommendation to the inner sect flowed downward from that mountain like water from a spring that could be dammed with a single word.

So the mansion scrubbed itself raw.

Banners that had not been unrolled since the last Grand Elder's birthday were hauled out of cedar chests and beaten free of dust in the yards. The great hall's floor was waxed until the servants could see the undersides of their own chins in it.

The cooks sent runners to the city markets for spirit-beast loin and fat river eels and the expensive peach wine that came sealed in black clay. The guest chambers of the western wing—the good ones, with private baths fed by the warm spring under the hill—were aired, perfumed, and laid with fresh silk.

Even the shadow guards, who were normally invisible, became slightly less so: a flicker on a roof ridge, a dark sleeve at the corner of a corridor, as if they too wanted it known that the house was watching.

Yan Chi heard the rumors over a late breakfast.

He heard them in fragments, the way a young master always heard things—through half-open paper screens and the gossip of servants who still assumed the boy who had been a cripple for most of his life didn't count as someone worth lowering their voices for.

An elder from the main clan. An inner elder. His wife is with him—they say she's shameless. And a personal disciple. Qi Consolidation already. They say the elder is one of Grand Elder Lan's dogs.

The words drifted in with the steam of rice porridge and the sour bite of pickled radish, and settled around his low table.

He was only half listening.

The rest of him was drowning.

Breakfast still tasted of the twins' mouths. That was not poetry. He had dragged himself out of the bathing chamber barely an hour ago on legs that shook like a newborn foal's, and the twins had followed him out—damp-haired, flushed pink from the hot water and from being fucked senseless, wearing nothing but thin robes they had thrown carelessly over wet skin. And they had served his breakfast the only way Yan Jing had ever taught them to serve anything.

On their knees. With their bodies. With an eagerness the lust worms coiled in their wombs refused to let cool.

Qiuyu poured his tea. Her hands trembled.

Tik. Tik. Tik.

The fine, constant vibration made the spout of the pot tick against the rim of the cup, over and over, a tiny frantic rhythm. It wasn't fear—he had learned the difference in one long, filthy night.

It was heat. Leftover lust-worm heat, the parasite's hunger pulsing through her meridians in slow, heavy waves and pooling low in her belly where it never had anywhere to go. Her robe hung wide open at the front.

The belt had come undone somewhere between the bath and the table and she had not bothered to retie it, so when she leaned forward to pour, her pale, full breasts swung free in the gap of silk—round, heavy, still flushed, the pink nipples swollen fat and puffy from his mouth. A drop of bathwater slid from her collarbone and ran down the deep valley between them.

She watched him watch it.

Her lips parted. She didn't cover herself.

"Is it hot enough, Master?" Her voice was hoarse, scraped raw from hours of screaming his name, and the word Master rolled out of her mouth like something she was tasting.

"It's fine," he said.

It was more than fine. That was the problem. His body had been milked dry four times in that bath, four times, and his cock was already—impossibly, shamefully—beginning to stir again under his robe.

Again? You're going to kill yourself, you idiot.

Dongyu knelt beside his chair. Nobody had told her to. She had simply folded herself down onto the floor cushion at his right side the moment he sat, and after a breath she had laid her cheek against his thigh, nuzzling into the thin silk of his robe like a cat rubbing itself against a warm hand.

Her wet hair spilled across his knee, heavy and cool. Her breath soaked hot through the fabric—very close to the place where his cock was slowly, stubbornly thickening—and she felt it.

Of course she felt it. She sighed against him and turned her face a fraction closer, and her lips brushed the cloth right over the swelling ridge of his shaft. A soft, dry press.

Not quite a kiss.

"Master is still hard," she murmured, almost wondering. "After all that."

"Master is not hard," Yan Chi said, and his cock twitched against her mouth while he was still saying it, calling him a liar.

Dongyu smiled into his thigh.

She didn't argue. She didn't need to. Her hand had already crept up beneath the hem of his robe and settled on his bare knee, fingers spread, her thumb drawing slow, lazy circles that drifted a little higher with every pass, as if the hand had a mind of its own.

The heat of her palm sank into his skin. He could feel the worm inside her, too—faintly, a tugging hunger in the air between them, a pull on the Qi in his own meridians.

Last night the Pervert System had shown him exactly what that thing was in cold, blue text: a parasite that drank a woman's restraint and fed on her climaxes and was never, ever full.

He picked up a sliver of pickled radish with his chopsticks and ate it and tasted nothing.

Qiuyu set the teapot down. Instead of stepping back, she sank to her knees on his left and leaned into him, pressing her bare breasts against the outside of his arm. They were warm and damp and impossibly soft, squashing against his sleeve, and he could feel her heartbeat hammering in them, fast and desperate.

She took his free hand—the one without the chopsticks—lifted it without asking, and laid it over her own breast inside the open robe, then pressed it there with both of hers, squeezing his fingers deep into her flesh until his palm overflowed with warm, yielding tit and the hard little nub of her nipple dug into the center of it like a pebble.

"Please," she whispered. "Just a little. It's burning again."

Burning.

He believed her. Her skin was feverish, hot as a stone left in the sun, and a fine sheen of sweat had broken out along her collarbones.

He squeezed—almost absently, the way a man tests ripe fruit—and Qiuyu's whole body shuddered, a long, rolling shiver that began in her shoulders and ended deep in her hips. She let out a small, broken sound and clamped her thighs together hard on the cushion, grinding them, trying to crush the ache.

Dongyu's hand reached the top of his thigh.

Her fingertips found the base of his cock through nothing at all—because under the robe there was nothing at all—and curled around it loosely. She held him the way one holds a sleeping bird. She didn't stroke. She just held, and breathed, and looked up at him with wide, wet, worshipful eyes.

And for a long moment, Yan Chi let himself have it.

He sat at the low table with sunlight slicing through the paper screens in pale bars, the air thick with porridge and tea and soap and the heavy, musky ghost of sex, one twin's breast hot and heavy in his left hand and the other twin's fingers wrapped around his cock beneath his robe—and he let the moment stretch until it ached.

He rolled Qiuyu's nipple between his thumb and the side of his finger, slow, cruel, feeling it tighten until it was hard as a pearl, and she gasped and swayed against his arm, her eyelids fluttering, a thin, needy whine catching in her throat.

Dongyu's grip tightened by a hair. Loosened. Tightened again. A slow, milking pulse that matched the blood climbing back into his shaft.

With her other hand she pushed the hem of his robe aside so the morning air kissed him and she could see what she held. She stared at it like a starving woman stares at rice.

Then she leaned in and pressed her lips to the side of his shaft.

Chu.

Just once. A soft, wet kiss halfway up.

Chu.

Then another, a little higher. Her pink tongue flickered out between her lips to taste him.

"Master tastes like the bath," she breathed against his skin. "Like soap. And Sister. And me."

Qiuyu made a noise of pure, naked envy and squeezed his hand harder over her breast.

Fuck.

He could take them both again. Right here, on the floor, among the dishes. His cock was screaming for it. It had climbed all the way back to full, throbbing hardness under Dongyu's mouth—flushed dark, veins standing out, aching—and she was already lowering her head over it, lips parting, her breath falling hot and damp on the swollen tip.

Slrrp.

Her tongue touched the slit and lapped one slow, wet circle around the crown. A bead of fluid welled up and she licked it away with a shudder of pleasure.

Yan Chi's thigh went rigid under her cheek. Air hissed out through his teeth.

But his legs still shook when he flexed them. His hips ached deep in the sockets. And his dantian—that small, newly lit fire of First Stage Qi Refining that he had only just begun to feel as his own—was sluggish and drained, the Qi crawling through his meridians like cold honey.

Four times in one hour on top of a night like that. There was hunger, and then there was stupidity. And the voices beyond the screen whispering about a main-clan elder made it brutally plain: today was not a day to be found wrung out and useless on his own floor with two maids slurping on him.

He took his hand off Qiuyu's breast.

It took more willpower than any sword form he had ever practiced.

"Enough," he said. "Both of you."

Dongyu froze, her lips a breath away from closing over him.

For one heartbeat the worm fought him through her. He saw it plainly—her eyes went glassy, her mouth stayed hanging open, her tongue stayed resting flat against the underside of his cockhead as if her body simply refused to believe the command. Then the training won.

Yan Jing's long, cruel training, which had beaten obedience into her before it taught her anything else. She drew back slowly, her plump lower lip dragging along the head of his cock as she went and leaving it glistening wet. She sank back on her heels. Her chest heaved.

"Forgive me, Master," she whispered.

Qiuyu was already fumbling her robe closed with clumsy, shaking fingers. Her nipples stood out sharp and obscene through the silk.

"Go and rest," Yan Chi told them, his voice rougher than he wanted. "Bathe again—properly this time, alone—and dress. Real clothes. Guests are coming from the main clan, and I don't want anyone important walking past these rooms and seeing you two naked and dripping all over my floor."

They bowed until their foreheads nearly touched the mat, and rose.

Dongyu's thighs were wet when she stood. He saw the shine of it on the insides of her knees—a slick, glistening trail the worm would not let dry—and he saw her squeeze her legs together as she walked to stop it. It didn't stop.

Qiuyu glanced back from the doorway with an expression that was hunger and devotion and something gentler he didn't have a name for. Then the screen slid shut behind them, and their footsteps faded down the corridor—slow, unsteady, like women wading through deep water.

Yan Chi dragged his robe closed over his aching, spit-slick cock and sat in the bars of sunlight and breathed until the swelling began, grudgingly, to fade.

His whole body throbbed with a sweet, heavy soreness. Hips, lower back, the long muscles of his thighs. He could still feel the ghosts of their tongues, their hands, the wet clench of their bodies. Sixty points glowed in the back of his mind like coals—every single one earned with his cock and his mouth in one night. And the next breakthrough still hung so far above him it might as well have been the moon.

He finished his tea. It had gone lukewarm, a few drowned leaves turning slowly at the bottom of the cup.

Beyond the screens, the servants kept whispering about the elder from the main clan, about his shameless wife, about the proud young disciple. He listened now, properly, turning the names over on his tongue like stones.

Xuan Wu. Xuan Wei. Han Fei.

The tea left a faint bitterness at the back of his throat. He set the empty cup down and went to dress.