Second Floor

The moment they passed through the archway at the top of the stairs, the noise of the second floor struck them like a second crowd, lower and richer than the roar below.

It was a deep murmur of voices and dice and wet sounds that seemed to soak into the dark wood of the walls, the kind of sound a room makes when everyone in it is speaking a little more quietly than they want to. Somewhere a woman laughed, high and breathless, and the laugh broke off into a gasp, and nobody turned to look.

It was less packed than the first floor, but the people up here carried a different weight. High-ranking players of the demonic clans filled the open hall, men young and old, all of them masked and all of them giving off cultivation auras that made the air feel denser, so that walking through it was like wading through warm syrup. Yan Mei felt the pressure of those auras on her bare skin like the heat of a dozen stoves.

Their female partners stood or knelt beside them in erotic scraps of silk and face masks that hid who they were while advertising everything else, bare thighs and wet silk and breasts barely held in.

One woman sat sideways across a player's knee with her silk pulled down to her waist, laughing while he rolled a jade die across her nipple between throws as though she were part of the table.

Another knelt at her partner's feet with her cheek resting against his thigh and her bare back arched, a ribbon of red cloth tied around her throat and nothing else above her hips.

They carried themselves with the casual looseness of women who had already lost something downstairs and had come up hungry to lose more.

The smell was richer as well, expensive spirit wine and sandalwood and sweat and, beneath them, the sweet musk of aroused bodies that no incense in the world could fully hide. Dice still clicked against lacquered bowls and cards still slapped on felt, but here the stakes whispered in gold rather than copper. The moans rising from the side stages sounded less surprised and more practised, longer and wetter, the sounds of people who knew exactly which rule they were breaking and how much they had paid for the privilege.

Elder Li walked them along the edge of the hall as though he were showing guests around a famous garden, pointing out the side stages with small movements of his chin.

On the nearest, a woman hung in a swing of silk ropes with her legs held wide apart, turning slowly while masked players took turns throwing jade tokens at a target painted on the inside of her thigh. The ropes creaked with every slow revolution.

Her thighs gleamed with oil, and each time the swing carried her around to face the players, the lamplight fell straight between her spread legs and showed the dark pink of her, swollen and wet from the mouths that had already been there.

Every token that struck her earned its thrower a minute with his mouth between her legs while the swing went on turning, so that the lucky man had to chase her around in a slow circle on his knees, and she laughed down at him each time he lost his grip on her thighs.

On another, two women knelt face to face with their hands tied behind them and a single cock standing between their mouths. Their lips met around the shaft from either side, their tongues sliding against each other as often as against him, and their cheeks bumped and pushed as each tried to steal the head from the other.

The first to make its owner come would be untied, while the loser would be passed to the next table to begin again. The man standing between them had the dazed face of someone who had paid a great deal of money for exactly this and was finding it more than he could bear.

Along the far wall ran a row of curtained alcoves, some closed and some open, and from behind the closed ones came sounds that made Yan Mei's skin prickle: the rhythmic creak of a bench, a man's grunt, and a woman's voice rising in short broken cries that climbed and climbed and then stopped all at once.

"Up here the house only sets the rules," Elder Li said quietly, with the pride of a regular. "The players set the stakes. I have seen a sect inheritance change hands on that swing." He glanced sideways at Yan Mei as he said it, and his eyes lingered on her mouth.

Waitresses moved between the tables like living invitations. They wore almost nothing. A golden ornament hung from each nipple, and nothing else covered their breasts, no cloth and no strap, only the bare swing of flesh and the glitter of metal against stiff pink or brown tips that hardened further whenever the cool air or a customer's stare found them.

When a waitress bent to pour, her heavy breasts hung and swayed and the jewellery chimed faintly, a tiny bright sound like wind bells, and more than one masked player forgot the cards in his hand. The gold tugged the nipples down a little with its weight, stretching them long and dark, and when the girl straightened again they sprang back up, flushed and tight, the ornaments swinging in small glittering arcs against the undersides of her breasts.

Their skirts of black leather rode so short that the lower curves of their asses flashed with every step, and the thin underwear beneath sank into their cracks and pressed into the slits of their pussies like a second wet shadow, which made them look far more indecent than if they had worn nothing at all.

From behind, a passing waitress showed the full lower swell of both cheeks and the dark line of silk buried between them, the flesh bouncing with each brisk step.

From the front, the tiny panel over her crotch clung almost translucent wherever arousal or spilled wine had soaked it, so that the shape of her lips showed through like a seal pressed into wax.

Every one of these girls was a cultivator with at least a Qi Refining foundation. Outside these walls some of them might have been celebrated prodigies or the talented daughters of respectable families, names spoken with envy in academy courtyards. Inside the Heavenly Gambling House they were waitresses, bending to pour and smiling when an elder's hand brushed a bare hip as though the touch were part of the tip.

Yan Mei's pulse hammered in her throat. The second floor felt hotter than the first, the air heavy with incense and wine and the warm salt smell of skin, and the lamps hung lower here so that every bare shoulder and swinging breast glowed amber.

Her own outfit had seemed scandalous enough to burn when Xuan Wei first tied it on her that morning. Now, beside the waitresses' bare breasts and buried underwear, it suddenly looked almost modest, and the comparison twisted something low in her stomach.

When did this start to look modest to me?

It meant she had already moved some distance along a road she had never meant to take, and she could not find the place where she had stepped onto it.

Her breasts still strained the thin front strips, and her nipples still stood out plainly through them, two stiff points that rubbed against the cloth each time she breathed. Her plump ass still flashed around the sunken rear panel with every step. The wetness the first floor had drawn out of her still clung to the insides of her thighs, cool where the air touched it and warm where her thighs pressed together.

Without meaning to, she drifted closer to Yan Tian, as if his shoulder could hide what the house had already priced.

A waitress found them almost at once. She was a tall woman with a dancer's legs and a small mole beneath one eye that her half-mask did not quite cover, and she bowed to Elder Xuan Wu with the instinct of someone who had learned to read cultivation auras before she had learned to read prices.

She bent forward over the tray to offer them cups of chilled spirit wine. Her bare breasts hung down within a hand's width of Xuan Wu's face, full and pale and swaying, the golden ornaments at her nipples swinging and chiming.

Ting. Ting.

He lifted one of them between his finger and thumb as casually as a man examining a coin, and turned it to the light to admire the workmanship. The lamplight ran along the gold filigree and glinted in the tiny red stone set at its centre.

Then he gave it the smallest tug.

The waitress's breath caught. Her nipple stretched long and dark around the gold, stiffening under the pull until the whole areola puckered tight, and the heavy breast followed it forward a fraction as though it were being led on a leash. She kept her smile perfectly in place while he looked at her.

Only when he let go, and the nipple sprang back flushed and swollen with the ornament swinging beneath it, did a faint flush climb from her chest into her throat.

"Fine work," Xuan Wu remarked to nobody in particular, and took a cup from her tray. "The house has improved since I was last here."

The waitress bowed again and moved on to Elder Li, who took his wine without ever lifting his eyes from her breasts.

Then she came to Yan Tian, who thanked her in the stiff, polite voice of a clan leader at a formal banquet and then could not stop himself from glancing back at her retreating ass, where the black leather rode up over the lower curves and the thin silk beneath had vanished entirely into her crack.

Yan Mei took her own cup with fingers that were not quite steady.

The waitress smiled at her as she offered it, a small professional smile with something knowing behind it, as though she could see the wetness on Yan Mei's thighs and had already guessed how the rest of the morning would go. Her golden ornaments chimed once as she straightened.

Yan Mei drank the whole cup in one swallow just to have somewhere to put her eyes. The spirit wine went down cold and bloomed hot in her belly, and the heat spread outward into her chest and down between her legs.

Toward one side of the floor, a dense knot of people had gathered around a challenge stage where the oil lamps hung lower and the crowd pressed in tighter. The boards of the stage were raised waist-high and polished dark with use, and two pairs of marks were painted on them in red, one pair at each end, where the players knelt and stood.

The game, as Elder Li murmured to them while they watched, was simple and filthy. Two couples took part. Each woman had to make the other couple's man come before her own partner did. Both couples placed the same stake on a lacquered tray, and the winners took the whole pot plus a share of whatever the crowd had bet on them while the clock ran.

Only breasts and mouth were allowed. The lower body was forbidden entirely, so there could be no pussy and no ass, no grinding and no thighs squeezing a cock between them. Hands on breasts, lips on cock and tongues working, a cock wrapped in cleavage if the woman chose it, and the first side to empty the opposing man took the money and the pride in the same wet pulse.

Elder Xuan Wu watched for half a minute with his head tilted and his eyes bright behind the mask. Then he turned to Yan Tian.

"Yan Tian," he said, mild as tea, "why don't we see whose wife has better skills? Let's join."

He waited for the answer as if he had offered ordinary hospitality, the kind of thing one friend says to another over wine, and not something that would put Lady Yan on her knees in front of a hall full of strangers.

Yan Tian could not say no. The invitation had been framed as a casual thing, and refusing it would look like fear in front of a main-sect inner elder whose favour the branch still badly needed. Heat crawled up his neck.

He looked at Elder Li, the only other man from his own side among the guests, and Elder Li nodded beneath his mask with a tight jaw and eyes that were already sliding down toward Yan Mei's breasts. They could not afford to anger Xuan Wu. Not here, and not after last night, with the branch's politics still riding on this visit like a blade laid across a throat.

Yan Tian looked at the stage to buy himself one more breath, and that did not help him at all.

One woman was sucking a man's cock as though her life depended on the next pulse. Her head bobbed hard and fast, thick strings of spit flying from her lips and spattering her own collarbones, her eyes wet and unfocused and her throat clicking open with every deep stroke.

Her hands were clamped on the backs of the man's thighs to drag him deeper, and each time she bottomed out, her nose crushed against his belly and a wet choking sound burst out of her that the crowd answered with a cheer.

On the other side, a second woman had wrapped her heavy breasts around a shaft and was licking the head from above while she squeezed. She worked slowly, almost lazily, pressing the two full mounds together with her palms and rolling them in opposite directions so that the cock trapped between them was kneaded from both sides at once.

Spit shone in her cleavage where she had let it drip down from her lips to slick the way, and every few strokes the swollen head pushed up out of the valley and she caught it on her flattened tongue, utterly focused and utterly without shame.

Because only breasts and mouths were allowed, the scene looked cleaner on paper and was filthier in practice. Both women looked as if they had forgotten the crowd existed, and the men beneath their mouths looked as if they were trying to remember how to breathe.

The men in the crowd were betting on every stroke. An attendant moved along the rail with a slate and a stick of chalk, calling the odds in a bored sing-song voice that changed every few seconds, and each time the woman with the breasts made her man's thighs jerk, a dozen hands thrust coins at him at once.

Han Fei pressed in beside the rail to watch with frank professional interest. Xuan Wu stood behind him with his arms folded and made small judgments under his breath, the way an old swordsman watches two young students spar.

"The one on the left has a good throat and no patience," he said. "The one on the right will win. Look at how she breathes."

He was right. A few heartbeats later the man under the breasts gave a hoarse shout. His hips jerked up into her cleavage and he came straight up out of the valley of her breasts into her waiting mouth, the first pulse striking her tongue and the second catching her chin, and she kept squeezing and licking until the last of it had dribbled out of him.

Then she sat back on her heels with his seed on her tongue, showed it to the crowd, and raised her arms in triumph while the hall roared.

On the other side of the stage the woman who had lost pulled her mouth off her own partner's cock with a wet pop and spat on the boards in fury. Her husband, still hard and unspent, stood looking down at her in miserable confusion, as though he could not decide whether he had been loyal or simply slow.

Yan Mei felt anger and embarrassment strike her at the same time, so hot that they stung behind her eyes.

She had never done anything vulgar in a public place before today.

This morning she had already been laid bare on the first floor, her ass spanked and spread by a stranger's hands while the whole table stared at her white cheeks and the wet silk sunk into her crack. The man kneeling behind her, whom she still did not know to be Elder Li, had drunk five full minutes of her shame, and her cheeks still remembered the heat of his palm.

Now she would kneel on a stage and suck a stranger's cock and try to make him come before Xuan Wei could empty her husband.

She looked at Yan Tian. He met her eyes for a heartbeat through the slits of his mask, and she saw his throat move as he swallowed, and then she looked down at her own bare feet on the polished boards and let out a long slow breath.