Morning After

Morning came through the carved lattice of the eastern corridor in thin bright blades of gold that lay across the floorboards one after another, and Yan Chi walked through them with his hands in his sleeves and a sour unease in his stomach that a whole night of sleep had done nothing to wash away.

He had woken before the servants with the image of that lacquered tray still in his head, the faint bone-white rattle of dice under its lid as it was carried down the gallery toward the inner wing. Afterward he had lain in the dark for a long time listening to the house. He had heard nothing, which was itself a kind of answer.

His father's private sitting room was sealed with a noise-cancelling talisman whenever Yan Tian received guests there, and the silence that came from that direction had been so complete, so smooth and deep and unbroken, that it had sat on his chest like a hand until dawn.

He told himself that he was only going to make sure his parents were well. He told himself that a good son would want to know that the guests had been satisfied and the household was in order. He told himself a great many convenient things as he walked, and did not believe any of them.

Halfway along the corridor the path turned past the guest wing, and his feet slowed of their own accord outside a door of pale cedar with a main-clan seal hung above the frame.

It was Han Fei's room. Yan Chi remembered the steward's words at the banquet doors last night, delivered with a bow and an apologetic glance: by order of the family head, as a mark of the branch's hospitality, the maids Qiuyu and Dongyu would attend the main clan's disciple for as long as the visit lasted.

He had not seen either of the twins since. They had not come back to his rooms in the night, and they had not been in the kitchens when he passed, and when he reached for them through the ring, he felt only two faint warm pulses somewhere very close by, slow and heavy and deeply asleep.

He stood outside the door for a long moment with the ring warm on his finger. Then, without knocking, he slid it open.

The smell reached him first, thick and close in the shuttered dimness of the room, a heavy blend of sex and sweat and spilled wine and, beneath all of it, the sweet jasmine oil that he had come to know on the twins' skin. The bed was a wreck of tangled silk.

In the middle of it, Han Fei lay asleep on his back, naked, with one arm flung wide across the pillows like a man who believed he owned not only the mattress but the room and the house around it.

Qiuyu lay curled on his left side, as naked as he was, her long black hair spilled across the pillow, one knee drawn up high so that in sleep her thighs had fallen open.

Yan Chi could see the pink folds between them, flushed and faintly swollen and parted just enough to show how hard and how often she had been used. Dongyu lay further down the disciple's body, with her cheek resting on his crotch and her lips almost touching the root of his cock.

Even asleep, Han Fei's shaft was half hard, thick and heavy, and it shifted against the curve of her pretty face with every breath he took. Dried pale streaks crusted both twins' breasts and the insides of their thighs. A fading handprint had bloomed on Qiuyu's hip.

They had been fucked all night.

His fingers tightened on the doorframe until the cedar creaked. He felt worry rise in him, and a hot possessive anger, and beneath both of them, ugly and honest and impossible to deny, he felt arousal.

The sight of Qiuyu's open thighs and Dongyu's cheek pressed against another man's cock was exactly the kind of picture that the Pervert System had been built to reward, and his body knew it even if the rest of him wanted to put his fist through the wall.

He made himself stop looking. He slid the door shut as quietly as he had opened it and walked away fast down the corridor with his jaw locked tight, telling himself that the girls had looked unharmed, that they had been sleeping peacefully, that an order of hospitality from the family head in front of main-clan guests was not something that a branch young master at Qi Refining could overturn in a single night, however much he wanted to.

He did not go on to the private hall after that. He went back to his own rooms and sat down on the edge of his bed with his cock hard in his trousers and his stomach cold, and waited for the morning.

Qiuyu's open thighs kept flashing behind his eyes, and Dongyu's face resting on another man's crotch. The twins were his. He had taken them back from Yan Jing with his own fists in front of half the market, and they had spent their first night free of that bastard in his bed, and less than a day later his father had handed them to a stranger like a pair of spare wine cups set out for a guest.

Hospitality, Yan Tian would call it. Politics. They were the demonic world's favourite excuses for anything at all.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his erection through his trousers and cursed quietly under his breath. The system stayed silent. There was no chime and no mission window and no tally of points, only the ordinary filth of a young master who had seen too much before breakfast and could not decide whether he wanted to drag the twins home or creep back down the corridor for one more look.

He stayed where he was. Whatever his parents had done behind that sealed door with Elder Xuan Wu and his wife, he was not ready to walk into the smell of it.

In the end he did the only thing he knew how to do with feelings he could not fight. He folded his legs beneath him on the bed, laid his hands palm up on his knees, and closed his eyes, and let the Divine Cultivation Method take him.

It came more easily than it had in the forest. The morning qi drifted in through the open lattice in cool pale threads, and he drew it down into himself along the paths the method had carved, through the meridians of his arms and down his spine and into the hot small furnace in his lower belly where his Qi Refining foundation sat turning like a coal.

He made himself follow each thread all the way down. He made himself feel the drag of it and the burn as it was refined, until there was no room left in his head for open thighs and dried seed and a stranger's arm flung possessively across his pillows.

For a while it worked. For a while there was nothing in the world but breath and heat and the slow steady turning of power inside him.

Then the ring pulsed on his finger, very faintly, as one of the two small warm hearts at the other end of it stirred in its sleep, and his concentration broke like thin ice.

He opened his eyes and sat looking at the ring for a long time. Through it he could feel them still, two slow heavy pulses a hundred paces away down the corridor, drained and drowsy and, beneath the lingering heat of the worms, oddly peaceful. They were not in pain. He was almost sure of that.

Whatever Han Fei had done to them through the night, the twins had not suffered it the way they had suffered under Yan Jing, and somehow that was worse, because it meant there was nobody he could blame except the order that had sent them there and his own weakness in letting it stand.

Qi Refining, first stage, he thought. Han Fei is a main-clan inner disciple. He's probably at Qi Consolidation. Father is at the Heavenly Realm. Xuan Wu is so far above that I can't even feel the top of him.

He called up the system without quite meaning to, and the panel unfolded in the corner of his sight with the same patient indifference as always, the same sixty points glowing beneath the same unflattering word. He looked at the shop for a while, at the pills and talismans and techniques listed there with their prices beside them, and closed it again without buying anything.

Nothing on it would let him walk down that corridor and take the twins back from a main-clan disciple without bringing the whole weight of the main sect down on his family's heads. Nothing on it was strong enough.

He shut his eyes and began the method again from the beginning, slower this time, and kept at it doggedly through the rest of the morning while the house went about its business around him. He did not hear the party leave by the front gate. Nobody thought to tell him.

---

In the private sitting room, Yan Mei woke slowly, and the first thing she knew was that something warm and hard was resting against her cheek.

It was thick and heavy, and it smelled faintly of musk and last night's wine.

For one confused, drowsy heartbeat she thought it was her husband. It was a familiar shape, she thought, the weight she had learned over twenty years of marriage, and her lips almost curved against it in the lazy half-smile of a wife waking late on a festival morning.

Then her sleepy mind registered the size of it. The head lay close beside her mouth, broad and dusky and faintly glossy where it had dried, and the shaft beneath her cheek ran on and on, heavy and ridged with veins, hot against her skin even in the cool of the morning. It was larger than Yan Tian's in every way. Her mouth already knew it. It knew it from hours she would have given anything to believe had been a dream.

She felt the pulse in it. Slow and strong, ticking against her cheekbone like a second heart, and every beat of it reached her a moment before the memory did. Her eyes opened.

She was lying naked on the polished floor of her husband's sitting room. Her hip ached where it had pressed all night against the cold boards, and one arm had gone numb beneath her, and the lacquer under her breasts was faintly tacky with spilled wine. Sometime during the night she had slid down from wherever she had fallen asleep until her head lay pillowed on Elder Xuan Wu's lap, her cheek against his bare thigh, her nose a finger's width from the root of him.

The lamps had burned out. Grey morning light leaked in at the edges of the shutters and lay across the wreckage of the room in pale stripes: the overturned cups, the scattered dice, the penalty cards fanned across the floor like fallen leaves.

Across the low table, Yan Tian lay asleep in a tangle with Xuan Wei. Both of them were bare. The other woman's full breasts were pressed flat against his chest, one dark nipple peeking out from beneath his arm, and one of his hands was still cupped possessively over the round curve of her ass, his fingers sunk into the flesh as though he had fallen asleep in the middle of squeezing it.

Memory came back all at once, like water through a broken dam.

She remembered the dice first, the dry bone rattle of them under the glass and the click of the cup coming down, and then the penalty cards, the way Xuan Wei had turned each one over with her painted nails and read it aloud in that low amused voice while the lamplight slid across the ink.

She remembered sitting on the old elder's cock with nothing between them. The thick blunt head had parted her slowly, and she had sunk down onto him a little at a time with her palms braced on his knees, feeling every vein drag along the inside of her until her bare ass settled against his thighs and there was no further to go.

She remembered the slow stretch of his thumb inside her asshole, how it had pressed and circled and then pushed in to the first knuckle while she sat full of him, and how her ring had fluttered around it as though her body could not decide whether to shut it out or draw it deeper.

She remembered his tongue there afterward. It had been warm and wet and shockingly patient, and she had pressed her burning face into the cushions so that nobody would see her mouth fall open.

She remembered being lifted into the air, his hands hooked under her thighs and her back against his chest, her legs spread wide for the whole room to see. He had fucked her up and down on his cock until the wet slap of it filled her ears, and then he had held her down hard on the root of him while his seed flooded her womb in long hot pulses that she felt all the way up under her navel.

She remembered being pulled down to her knees at his feet to clean him with her mouth. She had tasted herself on him, salt and musk and the bitter edge of his spend, and she had kept sucking slowly until he swelled again on her tongue and came a second time down her throat.

She remembered kissing Tian'er while another man thrust into her cunt from behind. Her husband's mouth had been hot and hungry on hers, his breath ragged against her lips, and every thrust from behind had rocked her forward into his kiss.

And she remembered watching her husband fuck another man's wife no more than an arm's length away, Xuan Wei's full breasts swinging beneath him and her moans twining with Yan Mei's own until she could no longer tell which of them was making which sound.

Heat flooded into her face so violently that her ears rang with it.

She had been used by this old man in front of her own husband.

She was still a little wet between her legs even now. She could feel it when she shifted, a slick warmth between her thighs and a faint tacky pull where dried seed had glued the fine hairs at the top of her mound. Her nipples had drawn up tight in the cool air. The inside of her cunt felt used and tender and strangely awake, as though it were still listening for something.

It had been the first time since her marriage that another man had made her body sing like that, and her body had not forgotten a single note.

She looked at the thick erection lying beside her lips. A bead of clear fluid had gathered at its tip in his sleep and trembled there, catching the grey light.

Her pussy clenched once, treacherously, all on its own.

Then she sat up carefully, so as not to wake him, and began to look for her clothes.

What she found was scattered across the floor among the dice and the cards and the dark stains of spilled wine.

One of the thin red strips that had covered her nipples hung from the edge of the table like a joke. The other lay under an overturned cup, damp and wrinkled. The golden waistband had rolled into the shadow beneath a cushion, and its two little panels of silk trailed out behind it like the tails of a kite brought down in a storm.

The tiny white scrap that had covered her pussy lay crumpled in a corner with its fine chain snapped. It had been torn at some point during the night, she could not remember when, and it was reduced now to a damp, useless rag that smelled of her.

There was nothing else in the room for her to wear. She had no spare robe here and no modest morning silk, nothing but the shameless matching outfit that Xuan Wei had forced on her before the banquet.

She dressed in it with shaking hands.

The golden waistband went on first. It settled low on her hips, and its metal was so cold from lying on the floor that she hissed between her teeth. It pressed against skin still faintly marked with the prints of another man's fingers, four pale ovals on each hip where he had held her and pulled her back onto him.

The two narrow panels of thin red silk followed, one hanging over her crotch and one over the cleft of her ass. They were unjoined at the sides, so that any turn of her thigh would flash bare skin from hip to knee.

Last of all came the two strips that crossed her nipples and covered almost nothing else. She fastened them to the chain at her throat and to the second chain that ran down between her breasts, and when she let go, the chains settled against her skin with a faint cool weight, like fingertips resting there.

Without the scrap of underwear, the front panel lay directly against the bare lips of her pussy.

The touch of the silk against that tender, overworked flesh made her draw in a sharp breath. It was so thin that she could feel the weave of it, every fine thread dragging across her swollen folds when she moved, and the faint dampness still clinging to her soaked into it at once and made it stick.

The rear panel was worse. It slipped into the cleft of her ass the moment she straightened up and vanished between her full cheeks as if it had been swallowed, leaving half of each round curve bare to the morning air. She reached back to tug it free. It slid straight back in the instant she let go.

Her breasts hung almost free, heavy and pale, swaying with every movement she made. Only those two thin lines of red held her stiff nipples, and the strips were so narrow that the dusky pink of her areolae spread out past their edges on both sides.

She looked down at herself, at the red lines and the bare white flesh and the silk already darkening between her thighs, and felt the heat crawl up from her chest to her ears.

This was how she would walk out of the room where she had been fucked by another man. It was all she had left to wear.

She crossed to the door and slid it open. Two of the mansion's guards stood outside, exactly where they had stood all night, and when they saw her, their eyes dropped and stayed.

She felt their stares like heat against her skin.

Without any underwear beneath the panels, the round white cheeks of her ass were almost completely exposed from behind. The thin cloth had already been swallowed up in the crease between them, and with each step her cheeks rolled against each other and parted a little and closed again, so that the silk looked less like clothing than like a red line drawn on her by a brush.

As she walked past the two men, both of them got a long, clear side view. They saw the pale line running down between those cheeks and the faint shadowed softness deeper in, and the curve of one heavy breast swinging free at the edge of its strip, and the damp red silk clinging to the plump mound between her thighs.

The younger guard's throat bobbed. The older one forgot to blink.

They had served in this house for years. They had seen Lady Yan Mei in elegant green and in ceremonial crimson and, once, long ago, in the white silks of mourning. They had never seen her bare ass like this, never this close, never offered so shamelessly by clothing that hardly pretended to exist.

The talisman had sealed the room all night, so they had heard nothing at all, and they had stood there in the dark imagining everything. Now the proof walked out past them on bare thighs, smelling of sex and wine, with another man's fingerprints still pale on her hips.

Both of them silently thanked Elder Xuan Wu from the bottom of their lecherous hearts for whatever had happened inside.

Yan Mei kept walking toward her own rooms with her face on fire, and did not look back.

Behind her, the sitting room stirred. She heard the whisper of silk and the creak of bodies rising from the floor, heard Elder Xuan Wu chuckle once, low and satisfied, heard her husband's voice murmur something rough and sleepy. Then Xuan Wei laughed, the easy lazy laugh of a woman who has woken naked and unashamed in someone else's house, and the sound followed Yan Mei down the corridor like a hand on the small of her back.