Banquet Entrance

The maids had brought Yan Mei a fresh gown for the banquet—the one she'd chosen days ago. Deep green brocade embroidered with gold peonies, a high crossed collar, long wide sleeves, a skirt falling to the ankle. Elegant. Rich. By demonic standards, almost modest. The kind of thing a clan leader's wife wore to receive honored guests without becoming the entertainment. Yan Mei had already stepped into the inner robe and was tying the sash.

Xuan Wei crossed the room and caught her wrist.

"What garbage are you wearing?" Her voice was light and pleasant.

Her eyes were not.

"Look at me and learn something. You have an amazing body. If you want people to admire it properly, you need to show it."

Yan Mei's pulse leapt under those fingers. "Sister Xuan, that's not my style. Please. Let me wear my own clothes."

Xuan Wei's face hardened all at once. The warmth drained out of it like a door slamming shut.

"What do you mean, 'not my style'?" She released Yan Mei's wrist, slowly. "Are you looking down on me? Is that it? If you respect me, you'll wear what I choose and accompany me as I am. Or do you want me to be the only woman in that hall dressed like this—so I look like some hired slut while the famous Yan Mei sits beside me in her virtuous silks, judging?"

The words landed like a slap wrapped in silk.

Yan Mei had no answer. She knew it in the instant before she opened her mouth—and closed it again.

She swallowed her protest.

Her cheeks burned with a shame that had nowhere to go—and the thread of Xuan Wei's Qi, still curled warm in her lower belly from the bath, drank that shame up greedily and turned it into something heavier. Something wetter.

Stop it. Stop it.

"Of course, Sister Xuan," she said quietly. "I wouldn't wish to offend you."

Xuan Wei's smile came back as if it had never left. "Good girl." She clapped her hands, and her own maid brought a second lacquered box. "I always travel with spares."

She dressed Yan Mei herself.

She sent the Yan maids out—all but one—and peeled the inner robe off Yan Mei's shoulders with her own hands and let it fall. The outfit was the same design. Forced matching.

First the collar. Cold gold closing around Yan Mei's throat.

Click.

A small, decisive sound. Like a lock.

Then the two thin strips of red silk, drawn down across her breasts. Because Yan Mei's tits were bigger than Xuan Wei's, the strips sat tighter—stretched taut across the fuller curves, digging into the flesh so it swelled out slightly on either side of them. Xuan Wei adjusted each strip with fussy, lingering care: laying it precisely over the nipple, smoothing it flat with her fingertips, pressing, stroking. And each touch sent a sharp, involuntary jolt through Yan Mei that she prayed didn't show. It showed.

Her nipples swelled under the silk until they stood out in two fat, shameless points, and the pink of her areolae peeked out at the edges of each strip because the strips simply weren't wide enough to cover them. The chain ran down between her breasts from collar to waist and tugged everything tight. The rest of each heavy tit was completely bare—white, full, swaying free with every breath she took.

Then the waistband. Xuan Wei fastened it at Yan Mei's natural hips, not as low as her own. But Yan Mei's thick thighs and big round ass made the hanging panels look even shorter than they were.

The front and back panels were thin, silky, red—just wide enough to cover her crotch and the very center of her crack. When Yan Mei turned to the mirror, she saw that from the side the front panel slid in between her thighs and bared the plump outer edge of her pussy lips.

From behind, the rear panel had already started to sink into the deep cleft of her cheeks, leaving half of each heavy, jiggling buttock completely exposed.

"Now the underwear," Xuan Wei said, and held up a fine gold chain with a tiny scrap of white cloth.

She knelt and fastened it herself.

The chain went around Yan Mei's hips under the waistband. Two thin lengths ran down and joined at the front with the white scrap hanging between them, and Xuan Wei positioned it over Yan Mei's pussy with two fingers—pressing it into place against her lips. Smoothing it. Pressing again, a little harder, right over the slit, so the warm thread of Qi inside Yan Mei flared and her hips twitched forward on their own.

"Mm," Xuan Wei hummed, looking up at her. "Sensitive."

Then she drew the rear chain up between Yan Mei's cheeks and hooked it to the back of the waistband. It settled into her crack—cool, thin, intimate as a finger. The scrap in front covered the center of her pussy and nothing else.

Xuan Wei sat back on her heels and looked up and let out a long, satisfied breath. "Heavens. You're going to kill half the men in that hall."

Yan Mei looked into the bronze mirror.

A nearly naked woman looked back.

A mature, full-bodied, nearly naked woman with gold at her throat and red silk stretched over her nipples, bare breasts heavy and swaying, a chain running down her belly, a scrap of white cloth pressed between her thighs. Her face burned so hot her eyes stung. She looked like a pleasure girl.

She looked like something bought for the evening. The only thing that kept her from collapsing into pure panic was the woman beside her in the mirror, wearing the same thing. Without that matching obscenity, she'd have looked like a whore summoned to dance for the main clan.

And she was nervous—sick with it—about what her husband would think. Yan Tian had always enjoyed her body in private. He liked her naked in their bedchamber with the lamps lit. He liked her on her knees, on her back, bouncing on his cock. But he had never once dressed her like this for a hall full of elders and disciples. She didn't know what his face would do when he saw her.

Low in her belly, right where that white scrap pressed against her, something was warm. Something was wet. The scrap was already clinging.

It's the bath, she told herself. Only the bath.

Xuan Wei rose, linked their arms, and smiled like a sister.

"Come," she said. "They're waiting."

---

The main hall was already full.

It blazed. Hundreds of red lanterns hung from the high black rafters and poured a warm, heavy glow over long tables of lacquered wood set with porcelain and silver, with steaming platters of spirit-beast loin and braised eel and glistening red-cooked pork belly, with towers of fruit and jars of black-sealed peach wine.

The air was thick enough to chew—food and incense and wine and the hot, crowded musk of a hundred bodies. A pipa player sat off to one side of the open floor, plucking something quick and bright that nobody heard.

Talk rose and fell in waves. Incense smoke hung in slow blue ribbons under the rafters, and the lacquer of the tables was polished so deep that the lantern flames swam in it like red carp.

Yan Tian sat on the raised platform at the head of the hall beside Elder Xuan Wu, the two of them on carved chairs at the main table. Grand Elder Yan Li and Yan Jing held a side table with a clear sight line to the high seats. The other elders filled the middle ground. Yan Chi sat with Cao Ning at one of those middle tables—close enough to see everything, far enough to be a son and not a decision-maker.

Cao Ning had come in a one-piece dress of pale blue silk with a deep, plunging neckline and high side cuts, and she sat cross-legged on the cushion beside him with the easy grace of an eighteen-year-old who knew exactly how she looked.

The silk fell open at the side cuts and showed her thighs almost to the hip—pale and obscenely smooth in the lantern light. The neckline showed the inner curves of her young breasts. She leaned toward Yan Chi when she spoke, so her shoulder brushed his, and she smelled of orchids.

"You look grim," she murmured. "Someone steal your sweets?"

"Someone stole my maids."

She followed his eyes across the hall.

At a side position near the platform, Han Fei lounged on a cushion with a cup already in his hand—and kneeling on either side of him in their low-cut pink silk were Qiuyu and Dongyu. Qiuyu was pouring his wine. Dongyu held a dish of sliced peaches. Neither of them looked up. Han Fei's hand rested on Dongyu's hip as if she were a piece of furniture someone had given him.

But Han Fei wasn't looking at either of them.

He was looking at Cao Ning.

His gaze crawled down her bare thighs and up into her neckline and parked itself there—open lust and open resentment mixed together, the particular hungry sneer of a young demonic cultivator who believed the world owed him a taste of everything beautiful and was personally offended to find anything beautiful sitting beside someone else.

Cao Ning met his stare for exactly one heartbeat, smiled very sweetly, and turned back to Yan Chi.

"I don't like him," she said.

Then the side doors opened.

Two women walked in.

Han Fei recognized his master's wife instantly. He'd been staring at Xuan Wei's body for years with the familiar, festering lust of a disciple allowed to look and never allowed to touch, and his eyes went to her on reflex—the same scandalous outfit, the same shameless walk, the waistband riding so low her bare mound showed above it. But then his eyes slid to the woman walking half a step behind her. And stopped.

It was Yan Mei, wearing the same design—and looking somehow far, far hotter in it.

The thin red lines over her nipples were stretched tight by her heavier breasts, and her nipples—rock-hard—stood out in two obscene bumps in the center of the fabric. Pink areola showed at the edges.

Everything else of her tits was bare: big, white, glowing under the lanterns, the gold chain between them dragging every eye down over her belly to the waistband on her hips.

The short silky panels clung and shifted against her thighs. With every step her breasts shook without any support at all, and the rear panel slid deeper into her ass crack with every sway of her hips.

She walked behind Xuan Wei with her face on fire and her eyes nailed to the floor. Shame poured off her like heat off a brazier. If Xuan Wei hadn't been walking ahead of her in the identical outfit, every soul in that hall would have assumed the clan leader's wife had been sent out as the evening's entertainment.

The noise of the hall died.

Talk broke off mid-word. Cups froze halfway to mouths. The pipa player's fingers slipped.

Twaaang.

A sour note shrieked across the floor and died. A hundred pairs of eyes swung toward the side doors and stayed there.

Then the silence broke—low and ugly, table by table.

Thok.

At one of the outer elders' tables a thick-necked man named Elder Gu slammed his cup down so hard wine slopped over his knuckles, and he didn't even notice. He leaned toward the elder beside him without taking his eyes off her.

"Twenty years," he said—not quietly enough. "Twenty years I've sat in this hall and watched that woman pour tea in robes up to her chin. Look at those tits. Look at them move."

The man beside him only grunted and licked his lips.

Further down, two inner disciples had given up pretending to eat. One had his chopsticks frozen over a dish of eel, a slice of it sliding slowly off and plopping back into the sauce. "Is that the Lady?" his friend muttered, thick and wondering. "Is that really the Lady?"

"It's her. Heavens, it's her. You can see her nipples through it. You can see the pink."

At the walls, the guards on duty had turned their heads in a single slow movement, like sunflowers following the sun, and one of the younger ones had his palm pressed flat against the front of his trousers as if he could hold his cock down by force. A steward with a tray of cups stood frozen in a doorway with his mouth hanging open. Near the back someone laughed—short, disbelieving, hungry—and someone else hissed at him to shut his mouth so he could look.

The looks that followed her weren't respectful.

They crawled. Over her bare breasts. Down the chain on her belly. Between her thighs. They lingered and came back, and the men wearing them didn't lower their eyes when she passed close to their tables. They wanted her to see them looking. One of the senior disciples of the outer hall—a broad young man who had once carried her parcels home from the market and bowed every time she spoke to him—said aloud to his table, "I'd kneel for a month to suck those once."

His table laughed low in their throats.

Not one of them looked away from her to do it.

Some of the men were hard before she'd crossed half the floor.

Yan Chi was one of them.

He felt sick and aroused at the same time, and the two feelings knotted together in his gut until he couldn't pull them apart. Fury twisted there, hot and sour. And his cock pushed up against the front of his trousers in a fat, shameless bump he could do nothing about except shift and drag his robe over it.

Inside his dantian the Pervert System stirred—a low, greedy hum—and his Qi, which should have been rising in rage, rolled downward instead, thick and hot, pooling heavy at the root of his shaft until it throbbed.

That's my mother.

He knew it. His body didn't care.

His eyes kept going to her breasts—the slow, heavy sway of them, the pink edge of areola peeking out beside the red silk—and he kept dragging them back by force of will, and they kept going back.

Beside him, Cao Ning had gone very quiet. She glanced at his lap. Then at his face. She said nothing.

He looked at his father.

Yan Tian sat beside Elder Xuan Wu and watched his wife walk toward him in clothes she would never in her life have chosen. For a moment confusion showed—a crease between his brows, his cup frozen in his hand. Then something else crept into his eyes: enjoyment.

The view. The fact that every man in his family, every elder and guard and disciple, was staring at his wife with naked lust and could not stop. Yan Tian had never imagined Yan Mei would wear something like this in front of so many people.

She had never been interested in that kind of display—in twenty years she had never shown so much as a bare shoulder at a banquet. He was enjoying it anyway. Yan Chi saw it in the slow settling of his father's shoulders, in the way he lifted his cup and drank without once taking his eyes off her.

Grand Elder Yan Li's gaze lay on Yan Mei like a weight. Yan Jing's was worse. He leaned over his table, mouth slack and open, hungry and spiteful all at once, a visible bulge tenting his trousers that he didn't even try to hide—and under the table Yan Chi's hands curled into fists until his knuckles cracked.

Elders. Guards. Disciples. Stewards against the walls. Men who had seen Lady Yan Mei for years in elegant robes and polite smiles were seeing her now as a nearly naked, ripe, mature beauty—tits bare, ass half-exposed—walking into their banquet like a sacrifice that had dressed itself. Deep down, every one of them had fantasized about seeing her naked.

The walk from the side doors to the high seats was long—the full width of the hall—and every single step of it was a performance.

Her breasts had nothing holding them. Nothing at all. With every step they jiggled and bounced—a heavy, rolling motion that started when her heel struck the polished floor and traveled up through her whole body into those full white mounds, so they lifted and dropped and swayed against each other.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

Flesh slapping flesh in the deep valley of her cleavage, a wet, intimate little sound that the nearest tables could hear. The left breast swung outward as her right foot came forward; the right as her left came forward. Between strides they shivered and quivered and settled for one heartbeat before the next step set them bouncing all over again.

The thin red strips rode on top of them like ribbons on rough water—shifting, sliding a fraction off-center with each bounce, then dragging back—and every time they slid, a little more pink areola showed at the edge, and a low, hungry sound rolled through the closest tables like wind through grass. The gold chain between her tits swung and glittered and tugged at her collar. Her nipples, rubbed raw by the moving silk with every step, stayed hard and aching and swollen.

Don't look at them. Don't look at any of them. Just walk.

From behind, it was worse.

The rear panel had sunk into her crack within the first few steps and no longer covered anything but the deepest line between her cheeks. Her ass was bare to the hall. Two big, round, pale cheeks swaying and rolling with her hips, rising and falling—the left one tightening and lifting as she stepped, the right softening and dropping, then the reverse—a slow, heavy, hypnotic roll that made the plump flesh at the bottom of each cheek quiver every time her foot came down.

The gold chain of her underwear vanished between them and reappeared at the waistband. She could feel the air of the hall on her bare skin there. Feel the lantern heat on it. Feel the eyes on it like fingertips trailing slowly down her crack.

And with every step, that chain sawed gently between her cheeks and the white scrap rubbed against her pussy, back and forth, back and forth, and the thread of Xuan Wei's Qi still curled in her belly answered each stroke with a hot, wet pulse.

She kept walking. Slow and even. Because the only alternative was running, and a lady did not run.