Summoned to His Chamber

After the third win, exhaustion finally caught Cao Ning by the wrist and reminded her that she was made of flesh.

She went down the platform steps before another challenger could find his courage. Unnecessary trouble could wait for another day; her lungs burned, her thighs trembled from locks and leaps, and her wrists throbbed where Old Gu's fingers had ground them into the boards.

At the foot of the steps she bent to pick up her practice slippers, and a hundred men watched her bend. She felt it like a change in the weather. She stepped into the slippers without straightening fully, one and then the other, and only when she stood upright again did she realize how long she had stayed bent over, and how slowly.

She walked toward the exit.

The crowd parted for her with reluctant hunger. Nobody looked at her swordless hands or at the silver hair stuck to her temples. They looked at her ass.

They looked at it the way men look at a temple they have just seen opened for the first time after years of walking past its closed doors, with awe and disbelief and something close to reverence, because they could not believe that the perfectly shaped cheeks swaying under that dusk-blue silk had been bare and lifted and spread in front of them only minutes ago, the string pulled aside, while she thigh-locked an old man into surrender.

Shock lived in their faces. Lust lived harder in the bulges still tenting their thin trousers. A man by the door pressed himself flat against the pillar to let her pass and closed his eyes as she went by, breathing in. It was a gift the lowly guards of the Cao compound would carry in their memories for a long, hard time.

Captain Hou held the door curtain aside for her. He said nothing. His eyes stayed fixed on the far wall.

Then she was outside, and the late-morning sun hit her full in the face.

As she left the training hall behind, an overwhelming nervousness rose through her like steam from a kettle. Her body trembled with a mixture of excitement and unease that she could not separate into its parts. The insides of her thighs were slick with what had leaked from her during the final hold, and the wetness had cooled in the open air into a tacky film that pulled faintly at her skin with every step.

It was the first time in her life she had felt her body answer a crowd like that. Her face reddened as she remembered it: her back bare, her ass raised in the air with the string tucked into her crack, the pink flesh around her nearly visible lips, an old guard's cock lying between her breasts and her own hands pressing them together around it.

She could not understand her body's response. Remembering made her aroused anyway. Her nipples stood erect and pushed two noticeable points against the front of her robe, rubbing against the silk with every hurried step.

She decided to go straight back to her room and take care of the situation with her own hands before anyone saw her like this.

She hurried along the compound paths. She went past the practice yards where junior disciples were drilling spear forms in neat rows, and several of the spearheads drooped as she passed. She went past a laundry line where sheets and robes hung drying in the sun and snapped in the breeze, and ducked between two of them to shorten her route, and the cool damp cloth slid across her face and chest like a hand.

The flagstones were hot through the thin soles of her slippers. A gardener knelt at the edge of a flower bed with a trowel, and he kept his eyes on the soil so hard that a line of sweat stood out along his jaw. From the kitchen yard came the clank of a lid and the smell of boiling radish, ordinary and domestic, and it made her cheeks burn that anyone was cooking a lunch while she walked with her thighs slick.

She went past a servant sweeping the flagstones who bowed as she approached and then, when she was past, turned and stared at her ass with his broom forgotten in his hands. Every step dragged the soaked black string through her swollen lips.

The friction sparked against her clit until her knees threatened to fold. She kept her arms crossed close over her chest to hide her nipples and walked faster, rehearsing excuses in case anyone asked why her face was burning. The sun. The heat of the hall.

The fights. Under the ordinary noises of the compound — birdsong, the distant ring of the forge hammer, the slap of her own slippers on stone — her heartbeat counted down toward the privacy she needed the way a drowning woman needs air.

She never reached it.

She was halfway across the bamboo courtyard, cutting the corner too sharply with her head down, when she slammed into someone coming the other way. The impact was like running into a wall. She bounced off, lost her footing on the smooth stone, and went down hard on her backside.

Looking up, she found Elder Cao Chang looking down at her.

He stood in the dappled shade of the bamboo with his hands folded inside his sleeves, his dark robe immaculate, his long hair bound with a plain jade pin.

The stalks creaked softly overhead, and a few narrow leaves turned in the air and settled on his shoulder, where he did not trouble to brush them away. Under the bamboo the air was cooler by several degrees, and it smelled of green stems and damp earth and the faint medicinal sandalwood that always clung to his sleeves.

His face was smooth and youthful, the face of a man of thirty, though she knew he had lived nearly sixty years; Spirit Realm cultivation had preserved him the way honey preserves fruit. His eyes were calm. His mouth was polite. He looked exactly as he had looked every morning for four years when she came to him for lessons.

Last night's window detonated behind her eyes. Her mother on her knees, swallowing. That same calm smile hovering above a tangle of white hair. That thick cock, shining with spit and cum, sliding out of her mother's mouth.

Heat flooded Cao Ning's face so fast she felt dizzy.

Then she realized that she had fallen with her knees up and her legs spread open toward him. The side slits of her robe had fallen away on both sides, baring her thighs almost to the hip.

The front panel still lay across her crotch, hiding the soaked string, but only just, and only because the silk was clinging there wetly instead of sliding aside. His gaze rested on that panel for exactly one breath. Then it lifted to her face, mild as ever.

She scrambled to her feet, straightened her robe with frantic hands, and bowed to her master. The bow made her breasts sway heavily inside the deep neckline, and she saw his eyes follow them down and back up, and she could not tell anymore whether he had always looked at her like that or whether she had simply never noticed.

"Master. Forgive this disciple. I was careless."

"You were in a hurry." His voice was level. "I heard you were in the east hall this morning. Three matches. All of the compound is talking about it."

Her ears burned. "It was only practice."

"Practice." He tasted the word as if it were tea of uncertain quality. "You know there are only days left before the entrance exam, and you are wasting your time rolling around with gate guards." He turned, the hem of his robe whispering over the stones. "Come. Follow me."

Cao Ning had no clean refusal that would not sound like guilt. If she said she was tired, he would ask why. If she said she needed to bathe, he would tell her to bathe afterward. If she said nothing and went to her room anyway, he would come looking for her, and she did not think she could survive him opening her door to find her with her hand between her legs.

So she followed him in silence, three respectful paces behind, watching the broad shoulders she had watched rolling above her mother's body by lamplight, and with every step the wet string slid through her folds and reminded her of exactly what she had been about to do.

---

They were crossing the covered walkway beside the main hall when her mother came around the corner.

Cao Ying carried a basket of embroidery silks on one arm, and she stopped when she saw them and smiled, the same gentle, ordinary smile she had worn at breakfast. "Elder Chang," she said, and bowed to him exactly as deeply as a lady of the house should bow to its senior elder, not a hair deeper. "Ning'er. Is it lessons already?"

"Your daughter has been brawling with the gate guards," Elder Chang said. "I am taking her to do something more useful with her talent. Meridian work. It may take the afternoon."

"Meridian work." Cao Ying's eyes widened with what looked like real gratitude. "Elder, that is too generous. Ning'er, thank your master properly." She turned back to him. "Please don't let her be stubborn with you."

"She is never stubborn with me," he said.

Their eyes met for a moment over Cao Ning's head. It was nothing — a glance between a lady and an elder, polite and brief. But Cao Ning saw the faint color rise in her mother's throat, and saw the corner of Elder Chang's mouth move, and understood that they were both remembering last night at the same instant, and that neither of them had the faintest idea that she was remembering it too.

Then her mother walked on toward the main hall with her basket, and the sway of her hips under the gray robe was so familiar that it hurt, and Elder Chang walked on toward his chamber without looking back, and Cao Ning followed him with her face on fire.

---

His chamber was cool and dim after the glare of the courtyard.

The curtains on the garden window had been drawn — the same curtains, she saw at once, the same narrow gap between them, now closed so tightly that no light passed through at all.

Lamps burned in their brackets though it was nearly noon, throwing a warm amber glow over the scroll racks and the serpent-shaped incense burner and the low tea table where she had knelt for four years of lessons. The air smelled of sandalwood and medicinal herbs and something else beneath them, faint and musky, scrubbed but not erased. She knew what that smell was now. Yesterday she would not have noticed it.

As she stepped inside, her eyes went to the bed before she could stop them.

It was the same bed. The quilt had been changed for a fresh one of dark green silk and smoothed flat, the pillows plumped and squared against the headboard, and it looked innocent and ordinary and impossibly large. She saw her mother kneeling on it with her face in the mattress.

She saw her mother rising on it, riding, white hair flying. Her face flamed so hot that her ears rang. Between her legs, still wet from the arena, the sight of those familiar sheets turned her ache into a slow, heavy throb, and she pressed her thighs together and felt the slick there squeeze between them.

She swallowed and made herself look away.

Elder Chang stopped in the middle of the room and turned to face her with his hands still folded in his sleeves.

"Entering the academy will be easy for you," he said. "Your talent alone will carry you through the gates. But entering is nothing. To be recognized inside — to be chosen by an elder of the main sect, to be given resources instead of scraps — you must become stronger than talent alone can make you." He studied her face with the same calm assessment he gave a sword form.

"Today I will guide you in harnessing your internal energy and widening your qi meridians, so that your energy can flow freely through channels large enough to carry the fourth stage and the fifth after it."

Meridian widening. The words went through her like a bell. It was significant. It was rare. It was dangerous if done wrong — she had read of disciples crippled for life when a master's qi tore a channel instead of stretching it, and of others who had gone mad from the pressure. Only a handful of cultivators in all of Jinling could perform it safely on another person.

Families paid fortunes for it, in spirit stones and favors and sometimes daughters. She could not understand why he would offer it to her so freely. Except that he was her master of four years. Except that the Cao family's hopes rested on her shoulders. Except that last night had proved that his interest in the bodies of Cao women ran hotter than duty.

She looked at him, and he looked back at her, and she could not read anything in his face at all.

She bent at the waist in a deep, formal bow. The neckline of her robe fell away from her body and her breasts hung heavy and deep in the opening, and she knew he was looking.

"Thank you, Master," she said to the floor.

When she straightened, she saw the table.

It stood against the far wall, exactly where it had been last night — the long wooden table she had glimpsed through the window gap and not understood. It was covered in a clean white cloth now, folded back at one end, and its surface had been wiped until the dark wood gleamed.

Beside it on a smaller stand his tools waited with clinical neatness: a roll of silk spread open with acupuncture needles fanned out in rows sorted by length, from slivers no longer than a fingernail to slender shafts as long as her hand; a squat glass bottle of amber medicinal oil with a wax-sealed stopper; a stack of clean folded cloths; a copper basin of warm water still sending up a thin ribbon of steam.

The wood smelled faintly of herbal soap. He had prepared this. He had prepared it yesterday, at the latest, before her mother came to his room. He had known she would be here today.

He finished aligning the last needle in its row with a fingertip, adjusting it a hair's breadth until it lay parallel with the others, and then he looked at her without blinking.

"Now remove all of your clothes," he said, "and lie down on the table."

She had known it was coming. In theory she had been prepared for it. Demonic medical cultivation had never cared much for modesty, and every story she had ever heard of masters guiding qi through a disciple's body involved the disciple lying bare under their hands; clothing blocked the flow, and cloth soaked up oil, and a master needed to see the skin over every meridian gate.

Theory did not stop her from hesitating. For half a breath she stood frozen with her thighs pressed together over the wet confession between them.

She looked at his back, at the broad shoulders and the jade pin in his hair. She thought about the academy, and the main sect elders choosing disciples, and the great families' heirs measuring her like a horse at market. She thought about the window. Her thighs were wet. Her heart was pounding.

She began to undress, standing beside the table, while he turned away and looked at the scroll rack.

Her fingers were clumsy on the ties. The sash at her waist had pulled tight during the fights and took three tries to loosen. When it finally came free, the dusk-blue silk slid down from her shoulders, catching for a heartbeat on the swell of her breasts before it slipped past them, over her hips, and pooled at her feet in a whisper of fabric.

The air of the room touched her bare skin all at once and raised goosebumps along her arms. For a moment she stood in nothing but the black string: a lewd little frame against her flawless pale skin, the tiny front panel soaked so dark it was nearly black, the rear string buried deep between her round cheeks.

She hooked her thumbs into the string at her hips and bent forward to push it down.

As she bent, her ass rose and filled out behind her. Her cheeks parted. For a long moment the pink wink of her anus and the plump rear swell of her pussy were offered to the room, glistening, before she straightened again and stepped out of the scrap of cloth and left it lying on top of her robe.

The cool air kissed her bare nipples, her bare ass, the bare wet lips between her legs. She shivered. She did not know whether he had turned to watch. She did not let herself look.

Completely naked, she climbed onto the table and lay down on her back.

The wood was cool under her shoulder blades and the backs of her thighs, smooth and hard, and it warmed slowly under her body heat. She spread her silver hair out above her head so it would not tangle beneath her, and laid her arms at her sides, and waited in a silence that buzzed in her ears like summer insects.

Her breasts settled into two full, heavy mounds on her chest that rose and fell with each nervous breath. Her nipples had tightened to hard pink peaks in the cool air. She could feel her heartbeat in them.

Between her thighs a bead of her arousal welled up and slid slowly down from her pussy toward her asshole, and she clenched to stop it and felt the tiny pucker tighten against the wood.