The Main Clan Arrives

They arrived in the afternoon.

By then the entire house had arranged itself at the front gate in the long formal lines the Yan branch only ever used for weddings, funerals, and people it was terrified of.

The afternoon sun hung high and white over Jinling City, blasting the polished flagstones of the courtyard until they shone like still water and the air above them wavered with heat.

Banners of dark crimson hung from the gatehouse, the Yan crest stitched in black thread. Servants held lacquered parasols over the senior elders. Further back, the outer disciples stood in sweating ranks with their hands buried in their sleeves, trying very hard not to fidget.

On the eaves above, two shadow guards sat as motionless as roof tiles—and Yan Chi, who had only just begun to feel the world through the faint new senses of a Qi Refining cultivator, could feel them up there. Two small, cold points of watchfulness in the heat.

He stood in his place in the front line, one step behind and to the left of his father.

A week ago that place would have been unthinkable. A week ago he had been the family's embarrassment—the leader's son who couldn't cultivate, the cripple people stepped around in corridors as if he were a puddle.

Now he wore the dark formal robe of a young master with the crest at his breast, and when the steward set him there, no one had said a word. His legs had mostly stopped shaking. He kept his spine straight and his face blank and let his Qi circle slowly in his dantian to hold himself steady.

Beside him stood his mother.

He kept his eyes very deliberately on the gate.

Then the air changed.

He felt it before he saw anything. A thickening. A weight that settled over the whole courtyard like a broad, heavy palm pressed flat against the back of his neck. The heat shimmer over the flagstones seemed to slow. His Qi—circling so obediently a heartbeat ago—stuttered and shrank and pressed itself small against the walls of his dantian, the way a field mouse flattens itself into the grass when a hawk's shadow slides over it.

What the hell is that?

All along the welcoming line, knees trembled. One of the junior stewards actually swayed on his feet and had to catch himself. That was aura. Real aura. The unconscious, crushing weight of a cultivator so far above everyone present that simply existing near them leaned on their meridians like a mountain on a reed.

An old-looking man stepped through the front gates.

He wasn't tall. His hair was iron-gray, knotted back with a simple jade pin. His face was lined deep around the mouth and eyes in a way that suggested he had spent most of his very long life laughing at things other people found horrifying.

He wore robes of black silk embroidered in silver thread with the pattern of coiling serpents, and he walked with the slow, lazy ease of a man who had never once needed to hurry for anyone.

But it was his eyes that mattered—small, bright, black, terribly alive. They moved over the courtyard and everything in it with the casual attention of a buyer strolling through a market stall.

This was Elder Xuan Wu of the main demonic clan.

And then the woman behind him stepped through the gate, and the entire courtyard forgot the elder existed.

Behind her came a young man in white and gold, maybe twenty-two, handsome in a sharp, narrow, hungry way, with a prideful curl to his mouth and eyes that skipped straight past the bowing elders and started cataloguing every woman in sight.

Han Fei. Personal disciple of Elder Xuan Wu. Qi Consolidation, if the rumors were right—and from the dense, smooth aura he wore draped over his shoulders like a cloak, carelessly displayed, the rumors were right.

His gaze slid over the maids holding parasols. Over the female disciples in the back ranks. Over Yan Mei—where it stopped, and narrowed, and lingered with open interest—and then moved on without hurry.

All three of them wore pride like a second skin. All three looked at the courtyard—the banners, the polished stone, the lines of bowed backs—as though inspecting a minor holding that existed purely for their convenience. In the brutal arithmetic of demonic politics, that wasn't far from the truth. Everyone in the courtyard knew it. And the knowing hung in the air beside the elder's aura like a second weight.

The men of the welcoming party were supposed to be looking at Elder Xuan Wu.

Their eyes kept sliding to the woman at his side.

Xuan Wei was beautiful with a mature, ripe charm that hit far harder than any girlish prettiness. She looked perhaps thirty-five, and the years had been generous—filling her out instead of wearing her down. Full lips painted a deep, wet red.

Long, sharp eyes lined in black at the corners, so that they always seemed to be laughing at something even when her mouth was still. Black hair piled high and stabbed through with gold pins tipped in red stones, a few loose strands spilling along her neck.

Her body had been sculpted by years of dual cultivation and utterly shameless living: a narrow waist flaring into wide, full hips, thick, smooth thighs, and big, heavy breasts—every curve glowing with that faint, lush sheen that came from Qi drunk in through a thousand nights of fucking.

But it wasn't her figure that made the whole courtyard suck in a single, collective breath.

It was her dress.

If it could even be called that.

On top she wore only two thin lines of red cloth. They came down over her shoulders from a gold collar at her throat and passed straight across the middle of her breasts—each strip no wider than two fingers.

Narrow enough to cover her nipples and almost nothing else. The rest of each heavy tit hung bare to the afternoon. The white outer slopes. The deep inner curves of her cleavage, where a sheen of sweat was already catching the sun.

The round, pale undersides, swaying and bouncing with every single step, heavy and loose and completely unsupported. Her nipples pushed two small, firm bumps into the center of each red strip, and the faintest blush of areola peeked out at the edges where the cloth had shifted.

One heavy movement. One sharp turn of her torso. A breast would pop right out. Everyone watching knew it, and everyone watching was praying for it.

On the bottom, a golden waistband of thin linked plates sat low on her hips and glinted as she moved. From it hung two separate panels of red cloth, one in front and one behind, completely detached from each other.

They fell to mid-thigh and were narrow—so narrow that when she shifted her weight, the side of her crotch showed: the smooth, bare crease at the top of her thigh and the swell of her mound beyond it.

From behind, the rear panel covered only the very center of her ass. Half of each round cheek was exposed with every step—flexing, bouncing, gleaming faintly with whatever oil she'd rubbed into her skin that morning.

For people of the demonic sects, clothes like this were not unheard of. Demonic women wore what they liked, and some of them liked very little. But the woman wearing these was the wife of an inner elder of the main clan—one of the strongest names under Grand Elder Lan's shadow.

And everyone present knew Elder Xuan Wu's reputation. In his younger days he had been infamous across three provinces for the sheer number of beauties he'd fucked, for the concubines he collected and traded and gave away like jade trinkets, for the dual cultivation orgies at his mountain residence that people still whispered about in teahouses.

For the wife of a man that vulgar, that lustful, an outfit like this could almost be called normal. Almost.

Yan Chi's mouth had gone bone-dry. He swallowed. Beside him, one of the lesser elders had started breathing through his nose with a faint, wet whistle.

Waiting at the gate to receive them stood the core of the Yan branch. Family Leader Yan Tian—tall, broad-shouldered, his face set in the composed, faintly cold mask he wore for politics. His wife, Yan Mei, at his right hand.

Their son, Yan Chi, one step behind. Grand Elder Yan Li, white-bearded and heavy-lidded, hands folded in his sleeves. And then the line of lesser elders, whose names mattered less than their ability to bow at exactly the right angle.

Behind Yan Li stood Yan Jing, chin lifted, the bruises from Yan Chi's public beating faded to a sickly yellow along his jaw, his eyes flicking sullenly from Xuan Wei's tits to Yan Chi's back and back again.

Elder Xuan Wu looked over the welcoming party.

His lively black eyes stopped on one face: Yan Mei's.

He had heard about the beauty of the Yan family leader's wife. Rumors traveled farther than formal invitations, and in the demonic sects, rumors about beautiful women traveled fastest of all. That beauty was one of the quieter reasons he'd agreed to rest here instead of pressing on to the next city. Looking at her now, in the white blaze of the afternoon, he decided the rumors had been pathetically small.

She wore a dress of deep green silk, cut for a woman who knew exactly what she had and had decided, today, to keep most of it sheathed. The neckline plunged in a deep, narrow V that framed the upper swell of her enormous breasts, pressed together and lifted so that a long, shadowed line of cleavage vanished into the silk.

The fabric was cut close and fit skin-tight, clinging to every curve of a figure that was fuller and riper than Xuan Wei's. Thirty-eight years and one grown son had given Yan Mei the kind of body that made younger women look unfinished.

Her breasts were heavier, her waist supple and still neatly shaped, her hips wide, rounded, and fertile. And an ass—a high, full, heavy curve that the green silk clung to like water.

Slits ran high up both legs, nearly to the hip, and with every small, polite shift of her weight they parted to flash thick, smooth, creamy thighs against the green.

Her hair was arranged in an elegant crown of braids pinned with jade. Her face, lightly painted, held the careful courtesy of a clan leader's wife receiving dangerous guests: a gentle half-smile, lowered lashes, a stillness that gave away nothing.

She looked more beautiful than the stories.

To the old man staring at her, she looked delicious.

Elder Xuan Wu felt himself getting hard just from looking at her.

He didn't bother to hide it. Under the black silk of his robe his cock thickened and rose, and he let it, savoring the pressure the way a connoisseur savors the first sip of good wine. He had fucked countless beauties in his long life. Young beauties bored him now—all giggles and nerves and thin, unformed bodies. Mature women were his weakness: curves earned by years, a heavy softness young women couldn't carry yet, and that particular, exquisite pleasure of a respectable wife's resistance slowly cracking into something else.

Yan Mei was something above even that. She was fabulous, proper on the surface and ripe beneath it, yielding in all the places an old man's hands would want to sink. She was the kind of beauty that made a lustful elder begin calculating, very pleasantly, how many nights a "rest stop" might quietly become.

Yan Tian, he thought, you lucky, useless little man.

Yan Tian stepped forward and bowed. "Elder Xuan. The Yan branch is honored beyond words. Please—enter and rest. Everything has been prepared."

"Family Leader Yan." Xuan Wu's voice was dry and light, an old man's voice with a blade under it. He returned the bow by a precise, insulting fraction less than he'd received. "You keep a fine house. Finer than I was told." His eyes slid to Yan Mei as he said it and stayed there. Unhurried. Heavy. "And this must be your wife."

Yan Mei sank into a graceful bow. The green silk pulled taut across her ass as she bent, molding every inch of those full, heavy cheeks, and the deep V of her neckline gaped for an instant over the press of her breasts.

"Elder Xuan. Lady Xuan. Welcome to our home."

"Lady Yan." Xuan Wei smiled at her with those wet red lips. "I've heard so much about you. It seems the stories were modest."

Formal words. Measured bows. Grand Elder Yan Li introduced himself with a long-winded humility the guests very visibly didn't listen to. Han Fei bowed to Yan Tian with exactly the correct depth for a Qi Consolidation disciple greeting a branch leader—and somehow made the correctness itself feel like spit in the face. When his eyes passed over Yan Chi, they paused just long enough to register a First Stage Qi Refining nobody in the front line. The corner of his mouth twitched upward.

Then he looked away, as if he'd glanced at a chair.

Bastard.

It was the kind of politeness demonic clans used the way other people used knives: carefully, and always with the edge turned outward.

Then they moved inside.

The procession formed itself without orders. Yan Tian and Elder Xuan Wu at the front, side by side, the elder half a pace ahead. Yan Mei and Xuan Wei behind their husbands. Then Han Fei, then the Yan elders, then Yan Chi with the younger generation, then the servants. Which meant every man in that procession—every elder, steward, and disciple—had a long, clear, unhurried view of two women's asses for the entire length of the front courtyard, the covered walkway, and the inner garden.

Most of them stared at Xuan Wei's.

It was impossible not to. Those half-naked cheeks rolled and flexed with every step—round, oiled, gleaming—and the narrow red rear panel swung loose between them and threatened, with every stride, to slip aside entirely and show everything. Behind Yan Chi, one of the younger outer elders breathed, "Heavens," in a voice that was almost a prayer.

But Elder Xuan Wu was looking at something far more delicious.

Every few steps, while he chatted with Yan Tian about the state of the roads, his gaze drifted sideways and back—and settled each time on Yan Mei's ass as she walked behind him and to his left.

The green silk stuck to the rounded mold of her cheeks like a second skin. It moved with every sway of her hips—a slow, heavy, rolling shift of flesh, left and right, left and right, the fabric pulling tight into the crease under each cheek and smoothing again.

Decades of experience read a great deal from the way silk moved. There was no thick line of a proper undergarment beneath it. Something small, then. Thin straps, maybe, leaving faint narrow ridges at her hips. Something that would leave very interesting lines if that fabric ever shifted wrong.

A respectable wife, he thought, amused, wearing a whore's underwear.

His cock throbbed under his robe.

Yan Tian had already noticed the staring.

He'd have had to be blind not to. The elder made no secret of it—the tilt of his head, the slow drag of his eyes, the faint curl at the corner of his mouth—all perfectly legible to a man who had spent his whole life reading other men for weakness.

The family leader walked on as if he saw nothing. He went on talking about bandits on the southern road. His mouth was a flat line. His eyes, for anyone who knew how to read them, held something colder and more tangled than simple anger. Something that turned and turned and refused to settle.

Further back, Yan Chi saw his father's jaw flex once. Then go still.

He also saw exactly where Xuan Wu was looking.

He followed the old man's gaze without meaning to—and found himself staring at the same thing. His mother's ass in that tight green silk. The slow, heavy roll of it. The high slit on her left side parting with each step to bare the full, pale length of her thigh almost to the hip.

He ripped his eyes away. To the garden. To a carp pond. To anything.

His face burned. And his cock—which had only just settled after breakfast—gave a slow, fat, traitorous pulse against his thigh.

Not her. Don't you fucking dare.

His Qi stirred in his dantian, a hot little lick of it, curling downward instead of up, and the Pervert System gave a faint, interested hum somewhere behind his eyes.

His body didn't listen.

They entered the mansion.

Inside, the air was cooler and smelled of sandalwood and fresh wax. At the doors of the sitting hall Yan Chi peeled away from the procession with a bow to the guests that was exactly respectful enough to give no offense, and not one hair more. The younger generation wasn't needed for what came next. The tall doors swallowed the elders and the guests and swung shut on a glimpse of carved rosewood chairs and a low table laid with tea and sweet cakes.

He didn't go far.

He drifted into the outer corridor and stopped beside a lattice window, half hidden behind a potted pine, and listened. Through the lattice the voices came softened but clear. Ordinary things at first. Travel talk. The roads. The weather. The quarrel between two northern peaks that everyone in the demonic sects was pretending not to care about.

Elder Xuan Wu talked a great deal in that dry, amused voice and laughed at his own jokes, and Yan Tian laughed along at precisely the right moments. Then the arrangements for the welcome banquet that night. The great hall. The wine. The seating. The entertainment.

"And service," Xuan Wu said lazily. "I do hope the Yan branch knows how to serve its guests properly. My disciple is young. He has appetites. I'd hate for him to feel neglected under your roof."

"Of course," Yan Tian said smoothly. "Grand Elder Yan Li—perhaps your son could see to it?"

A chair scraped. Then Yan Jing's voice—too eager, the voice of a bully who has just been handed a whip. "It would be my honor, Uncle. I'll gather the most beautiful women of the family to attend our guests for the whole length of their stay. The finest we have. They won't want for anything."

"Good," Han Fei drawled, bored. "I don't like plain ones."

Yan Chi's fingers clenched on the window frame until the wood creaked.

Krrk.

One by one, people began to leave to prepare. The doors opened, and elders filed out in twos and threes, murmuring. Yan Chi stepped back behind the pine and watched. Yan Mei came out with Xuan Wei, the older woman's arm already hooked through hers with an easy, possessive familiarity, and the two of them went off toward the western wing together—Xuan Wei's bare ass cheeks rolling under their scrap of red cloth, Yan Mei's green silk swaying beside them.

At the doors, Elder Xuan Wu and his wife glanced at each other as they parted.

A tiny look. A smile across a corridor. It held an entire private language inside it.

Yan Chi didn't know what it said. He didn't like the smile.

Yan Jing came out last, trailing his father, and saw Yan Chi by the pine. He stopped dead. For an instant something flickered across his face—the market, the beating, the crowd laughing at him in the dirt—and he went pale under his yellow bruises. Then he remembered the house was full of main-clan guests, that his own father stood right beside him, and that he'd just been handed an errand that let him decide which women went where. His lip curled.

"Cousin." He savored the word. "Your father has a message for you. He wants your two little maids. The twins." He let it sit there and rot. "They're to serve the main clan's disciple. Hospitality, you understand. Senior Brother Han Fei needs attendants for his rooms and for the banquet, and Uncle thinks your pretty little pair will do nicely. I already told them. They're with the housekeeper right now, getting dressed up for him."

Yan Chi's Qi surged before he could stop it—a hot, violent spike that slammed up through his meridians—and the flagstone under his foot cracked.

Krrrk.

A hairline fracture, spidering out from under his heel.

Grand Elder Yan Li's heavy-lidded eyes shifted to him.

Just shifted. Nothing more. And the attention of a Spirit Realm elder dropped onto Yan Chi like a millstone, crushing the Qi in his meridians flat and grinding it back down into his dantian. Yan Li said nothing.

He didn't need to.

"My father ordered this," Yan Chi said. It wasn't a question.

"Your father ordered it." Yan Jing grinned. "Take it up with him if you like. In front of the guests."

He sauntered off beside his father, and his thin, nasty laughter floated back down the corridor.

Yan Chi stood very still by the potted pine until his breathing evened out.

He can't be refused. Not today. Not with the main clan here. Not with me at First Stage and Father's eyes like ice all week.

The twins were his. The slave ring sat warm on his finger, binding them to him deeper than any order ever could. But a ring did not outrank a family leader in his own mansion, and a hospitality gift could not be refused without shaming the whole house. He knew it.

He found them in the housekeeper's dressing room, a narrow chamber off the servants' wing that stank of starch and rosewater. Auntie Lu—lean and sour as a dried plum—was lacing Qiuyu into a maid's dress of pale pink silk that had very obviously been chosen to please a guest rather than to work in.

Cut low across the breasts. Tight at the waist. The skirt slit up both sides to the hip. Dongyu stood beside her sister in the same dress, already laced, while a younger maid pinned up her hair.

They'd bathed. Their skin glowed pink and clean. But their eyes were still glassy with the worm's slow fever, and when they saw Yan Chi in the doorway both of them lit up like lanterns—

—and then, a heartbeat later, remembered why they were there. Their faces fell.

"Master," Qiuyu whispered.

Auntie Lu bowed to him stiffly. "Young Master. The Family Leader's orders."

"I know," Yan Chi said. "Leave us a moment."

She hesitated. Then she took the younger maid and went out, leaving the door ajar.

The twins came to him instantly. They didn't speak. Dongyu pressed herself flat against his chest and Qiuyu against his side, and he felt their bodies through the thin pink silk—warm, trembling all over. He wrapped an arm around each of them and breathed the rosewater in their hair.

"You belong to me," he said quietly. "Whatever you have to do for him—pour his wine, wait on him, stand by his chair—you belong to me. Remember it."

"We'll remember," Dongyu breathed against his neck. "We'll only think of Master."

"He's Qi Consolidation," Qiuyu said, very low. "If he wants more than wine—"

"Then you come to me," Yan Chi said, "and I'll deal with it."

He didn't know how.

He said it anyway. And they believed him, and their belief sat in his chest like a stone.

He kissed them both. It was meant to be brief. Qiuyu's mouth opened under his instantly—hungry, wet, tasting faintly of mint tea—her tongue curling hot against his, her hand sliding down between their bodies and pressing flat over the front of his robe, right over his cock.

Dongyu attacked his jaw, his throat, the soft hollow under his ear, and ground her breasts against his arm through that low pink neckline until one of them nearly spilled out of it. Her breath came hot and quick against his skin, and the rosewater in her hair filled his head until the starch-stink of the room was gone.

Chu. Mmh. Nngh.

For a few seconds the narrow room was nothing but wet sounds and quick, panting breaths. He felt the heat surging in both of them, the worms stirring, their hips beginning to rock against him with that helpless, grinding rhythm he'd learned last night.

He made himself step back.

"Go," he rasped. "Before Auntie Lu comes back and finds you with your tits hanging out."

Dongyu tugged her neckline straight with shaking fingers. Qiuyu wiped her wet mouth with the back of her hand. They bowed, and their eyes clung to him all the way out the door.

Only a few hours remained before night. All over the mansion, people were scattering to dress, to bathe, to become the version of themselves a main-clan elder would expect to see. Yan Chi went back to his rooms, sat on the edge of his bed, closed his eyes, and called up the system.

Ding!

[Status Window] [Name: Yan Chi] [Status: Weak] [Cultivation: Qi Refining, 1st Stage] [Pervert Points: 60]

Sixty. The same number as this morning.

Han Fei was Qi Consolidation. Elder Xuan Wu was something so far above that Yan Chi couldn't even begin to measure it—he'd only felt the old man's aura press his Qi flat like a thumb snuffing a candle.

He dismissed the window, crossed his legs on the silk, and began to circulate. Slowly. Patiently. Drawing the thin Qi of the room into his meridians and feeding it down into his dantian, breath after breath, because there was nothing else in the world he could do with the hours.