Grand Elder Lan's Peak

Elder Xuan Wu left the Yan family behind him the way a man leaves a meal already digested — satisfied, a little heavy, already thinking about the next course.

Xuan Wei flew beside him on a borrowed spirit sword, travel robes snapping in the wind, and Han Fei followed half a league back the way a junior disciple followed when he knew better than to interrupt his master's thoughts. Jinling's walls fell away beneath them. The branch compound's gardens and training yards became a dark smudge and then nothing.

Xuan Wu did not look back. Looking back would have meant thinking about Yan Mei's face when he seated himself in her ass, and he had three days of travel in which to think about other things — or, more honestly, three days in which to think about that face anyway and pretend he was thinking about politics.

Three days of travel stretched between Jinling City's branch compound and the main demonic sect's sprawling mountains.

The first day was roads and spirit horses and the familiar boredom of a journey he had made a hundred times. They stopped at a roadside inn for wine and meat; Xuan Wei sat in his lap in a private room and sucked him off while Han Fei kept watch outside, and Xuan Wu came down her throat thinking about a black fluffy tail.

The second day the roads narrowed into mountain paths, and the spiritual density of the air thickened with every league until breathing itself tasted of old blood and older ambition. Spirit beasts called from the treeline. A patrol of outer-sect disciples bowed when they recognized his token and stepped aside.

On the second afternoon a mist rolled down off the ridges and stood between the pines like wet wool, beading on the manes of the spirit horses and on the silk of Xuan Wei's sleeves.

Han Fei dismounted to lead his mount over a washed-out stretch of path and came back with mud to the knee and a grin he did not bother to explain. They made camp that night in the lee of a split boulder, with a small smokeless fire and a pot of rice, and Xuan Wei sat close enough that her hip warmed his.

The third morning they passed the first of the academy's warning stelae, carved with the names of people who had tried to enter without permission and failed permanently. By the afternoon of the third day he reached the main city, and the crowd that met his eyes made him smile despite the fatigue of constant flight.

It was livelier than usual. Academy admission season always was.

Outer hopefuls jammed the streets with travel packs and nervous faces, some still wearing the dust of weeks on the road, others already dressed in the cheap outer-disciple blues they had bought too early and too hopefully. Vendors sold pills that promised more than they delivered and aphrodisiac incense that smelled exactly like what it was.

Banners snapped from poles on every corner: red for the Qi path, grey for the Body path, five colours for the five sectors, each stamped with a family seal. Mothers pressed bundles of dried plums into the hands of sons who were already pretending not to be their sons. A thin boy had fallen asleep sitting up against a stall post with his entry token clenched in his fist, and nobody had the heart to wake him.

Young men swaggered in new robes cut to show off cultivation they did not yet have. Young women walked with the careful grace of people who knew beauty was currency here and had already started counting the exchange rate. Banners for the entrance exam hung from eaves like bright threats.

The smell of grilled demonic beast meat drifted between stalls and mixed with the sharper smell of spirit wine sold by the cup. A pair of outer hopefuls argued over an entrance token price until a senior in gray robes slapped them both silent without breaking stride.

Somewhere a street performer demonstrated a body-refining form that was half martial art and half advertisement for a dual-cultivation house, and a small crowd of young men watched with their mouths open.

Elder Xuan Wu toured the city for a few hours — wine, street food, the pleasant spectacle of ambition colliding with itself. He walked through the outer market where hopefuls haggled over secondhand technique manuals and watched a street duel between two Qi Refining youths that ended with one of them spitting blood and the other collecting bets.

He bought a cup of strong spirit wine from a stall under a red lantern, drank it standing while the crowd flowed around him, and felt the familiar pulse of home settle into his bones.

A woman in dual-cultivation house silks brushed past him and smiled an invitation he did not take. A vendor tried to sell him a pill that claimed to double a man's endurance; Xuan Wu looked at the man's face, laughed once, and walked on.

Jinling had been entertaining. This city was hungry.

The wine burned going down and left a sweet aftertaste that reminded him, inconveniently, of Yan Mei's mouth — the way she had moaned around him, the way her asshole had clenched when he came. He finished the cup, set it back on the stall, watched an outer hopeful trip over his own travel pack and curse, and decided the real business of his return could not wait any longer.

He would visit his senior brother. Grand Elder Lan.

The man who had suggested the Yan family trip in the first place. The man whose personality Xuan Wu had admired for decades, whose footsteps he had followed into the ranks of the demonic hierarchy, whose appetite for luxury matched his own and then quietly exceeded it.

Lan was one of the five mountain heads of the academy, a Grand Elder whose word could make or break a branch clan without raising his voice. He had told Xuan Wu to go to the Yan family. He had not explained why. Xuan Wu had gone. He had fucked Yan Mei until her asshole leaked white. He still did not understand the gift.

He went straight toward Lan's mountain peak.

The academy's geography rose around him as he climbed: five vast mountain areas, each a kingdom of teaching and predation.

Outer disciple quarters clung to the lower slopes like barnacles — crowded, loud, smelling of sweat and cheap spirit wine and the particular desperation of people who had made it through the gates and were now discovering what the mountain actually cost. Training yards rang with shouted forms.

From the lower belts came the hammering of a smith's shop and the hollow knock of wooden practice staves. Laundry hung in long grey rows between the barracks, snapping in the thin wind, and a line of outer disciples with buckets on yokes trudged uphill toward the cisterns in a silence that looked a good deal like resentment.

A medical pavilion's doors stood open on a row of beds where last week's injuries were still healing. Someone was crying behind a closed door and being told to shut up by three other someones. Inner disciple residences occupied the middle belts, richer qi, quieter paths, better food, the kind of quiet that money and talent bought. The houses here had courtyards.

The robes here fit better. The people here looked at outer disciples the way outer disciples looked at hopefuls still waiting outside the gates. Core disciple halls and the Grand Elder's personal peak crowned the summit, where spiritual energy pooled so thick it felt like walking through warm water, and where the air itself seemed to hum with the presence of people whose names could end bloodlines.

Each mountain separated talent the way a butcher separated meat. Promotion from outer to inner to core was a knife-edged dream that killed as often as it elevated. Elder Xuan Wu himself was an inner elder — favored, closer to the Grand Elder than most, allowed into rooms other inner elders only whispered about after too much wine.

He climbed the last stretch of path with the ease of a man who belonged at this altitude, and the spirit trees chimed around him like a welcome.

Lan's luxurious mansion waited at the peak like a predator resting with its mouth open.

Black lacquer gates carved with interlocking serpents. Spirit trees whose leaves chimed faintly when wind moved through them, a sound like distant bells. A courtyard pond so clear the fish looked painted on the stones beneath. The architecture was demonic-sect luxury at its most honest: beauty arranged to intimidate, comfort arranged to remind guests they were temporary.

Incense drifted from a bronze burner near the gates — expensive, floral, with an undercurrent of something musky that made the nose think of bedrooms. Xuan Wu had visited dozens of times. It never stopped smelling like expensive incense and soft female perfume.

Beautiful women filled the grounds.

Servants in thin demonic silks that flashed thigh when they walked, hair pinned up with jade, eyes lowered in the practiced way of women who had learned what powerful elders liked to see.

Disciples in robes that clung when the mountain wind blew, some of them already carrying the marks of favor — better fabric, better qi, the particular glow of someone who slept in a richer room than her sisters. Soft laughter from a side pavilion where three women shared tea and glanced at him over their cups.

The wet sound of someone bathing behind a carved screen, water cascading, a woman's low hum. A pair of inner disciples practicing sword forms in a side courtyard stopped mid-strike to watch him pass, and one of them — tall, dark-haired, adult, maybe twenty-two — blushed when he nodded at her.

Xuan Wu walked among them with the easy stride of a man who belonged, and several pairs of eyes followed him with the complicated hunger of women who knew what powerful elders did after dinner. He ignored most of them. A servant with a tray of spirit fruit offered him one; he took it, bit, tasted mountain sweetness, and kept walking. His destination was the main door.

Two guards stood there in polished armor that still somehow managed to look ceremonial, spears crossed at rest, faces carefully blank.

They looked at Elder Xuan Wu. Recognition flickered. One of them — the younger, with a face that tried to be blank and failed — went inside to inform the Grand Elder. If the visitor had been anyone else, the guards would not have dared disturb Lan while he was with his personal disciples. Xuan Wu's name opened doors. The guard returned after a short eternity, voice nervous, posture stiff, eyes not quite meeting Xuan Wu's.

"You can enter inside."

His crotch area had a clear bump under the armor skirt.

Elder Xuan Wu understood at once. Senior brother was enjoying his private life. The guard had seen something that turned loyalty into an erection and fear into a stutter.

Xuan Wu told Xuan Wei to wait outside — she arched one brow, glanced at the two guards' hungry stares lingering on her mature curves under the travel robes, and settled against a pillar with the practiced calm of a wife who had waited through worse. One of the guards swallowed. She smiled at him without kindness. Xuan Wu entered alone.

The room beyond was luxurious and dense with rich qi, the kind of environment that made ordinary cultivators weep with envy.

Low lamps painted gold across silk hangings embroidered with demonic beasts in mid-pounce. Carpets thick enough to swallow footsteps, deep red, soft under the boots Xuan Wu did not remove because removing them would have meant acknowledging he planned to stay.

A large bed in the middle of the chamber, carved wood gleaming under oil light, the headboard shaped like interlocking serpents eating their own tails, sheets already rumpled into creased hills and damp valleys. A side table held wine and glasses and a small jade dish of spirit fruits.

A screen in the corner hid what was probably a bathing area. The air was warm — warmer than the night air outside, held at a temperature that kept naked skin comfortable and made clothed visitors start to sweat. The air smelled of sex, wine, and the metallic sweetness of dense spiritual energy so thick it almost had a taste.

An old man with a strong aura lay naked on that bed.

Grand Elder Lan looked sixty and was considerably older. His body was lean and hard in the way high-realm cultivators' bodies were, unmarked by ordinary age, the skin of his chest and belly still tight over muscle that could shatter stone.

His cock stood thick and dark against his stomach, shiny with spit, and the woman currently working on it had her back to the door so that the first thing Xuan Wu saw was her ass and the wet pink of her pussy and the long black river of her hair.

And five young women served him without wearing a single scrap of cloth.

Two bent beside his chest, tongues working over his nipples and the hard planes of his torso, breasts hanging heavy as they leaned. One had pale skin and heavy breasts that dragged against his ribs — Wang Yue, largest of the five — nipples dark pink and stiff from being pinched earlier, each drag of her tongue leaving a shiny trail across his skin.

The other was slimmer, sharper at the waist — Li Ying — her tongue moving in slow circles as if tasting spirit herbs, brown hair falling across Lan's stomach, one hand braced on the sheets so her breasts hung free and swayed with every motion.

Two licked his feet at the lower end of the bed, asses raised high, pink pussy slits occasionally flashing when they shifted, thighs trembling with the effort of the pose. Liu Ying's light-purple hair spilled across the sheets.

Li Na's golden hair caught the lamplight like a coin. One knelt in the middle and sucked his cock with wet, rhythmic devotion — lips stretched, spit shining on her chin, throat working around thick meat.

Xuan Wu stopped just inside the door and looked.

Five naked women. One old man. The arithmetic of demonic power written in flesh and spit and the wet sounds of service. His cock started hardening before he finished taking inventory, and he did nothing to stop it. In this room, an erection was a compliment.

They were the only five personal disciples of Grand Elder Lan. The entire sect looked up to them as inspiration. Heaven-defying beauties. Top cultivation talent. The kind of young women male disciples dreamed about while stroking themselves raw in outer dormitories, and the kind of young women those same disciples would never touch.

The room smelled of sex, wine, and the metallic sweetness of dense qi.

Grand Elder Lan was famous for accepting only beautiful females as personal disciples. Talent was required. Beauty was the key that turned the lock. These five had both — faces that stopped conversations, bodies that made elders forget their age, cultivation bases that justified the privilege of living on the main peak.

In the demonic sect, a gu worm system bound disciple to master: every disciple swallowed a worm that nested near the soul, and the master's higher gu held the leash. Officially it prevented betrayal. Unofficially it made luxury convenient. High authority did as it pleased. No one with sense questioned it.

Outer disciples on the lower slopes might imagine the personal five were cultivating in rich qi and writing profound insights by candlelight. Reality lived in this room, on this bed, with five gorgeous mouths and holes serving an old man's appetite until his appetite decided they could rest.

Right now those five beauties were playthings with perfect posture.

All five bent on the bed while they licked and sucked, asses sticking out in a line of pale, rounded curves that made Xuan Wu's mouth go dry. From the doorway he could see five pairs of bare feet, five raised asses, five spines arched in the same trained curve.

Wang Yue's was the heaviest, cheeks spreading under their own weight. Liu Ying's was high and round, purple hair trailing down one side. Li Ying's was narrower, elegant. Li Na's was the smallest of the five, still unmistakably a woman's, golden hair pooled on the sheets beside it. And in the middle, the best of them.