Blue Dress Encounter

Two days later, on a bright afternoon, Yan Chi was taking a walk through Jinling, eager to explore his new world for a few hours without the twins or his family's shadow at his heels.

He had brought no one. Qiuyu had offered to come, and Dongyu had offered to come with her, and both of them had looked so hopeful that he had nearly given in.

But he had spent the last weeks shut in his courtyard with the Divine Cultivation Method, breathing and coiling and packing qi until his dreams were full of meridian charts, and he wanted, for one afternoon, to simply be a young man walking in a city.

So he slipped out through the side gate of the Yan mansion with a pouch of silver at his belt and nothing else, and let the streets take him.

Jinling still felt half like a game to him and half like a second chance he had not earned. It sat under demonic-clan control, and it showed it — crowded, loud, and prosperous in the sharp, hungry way that predator societies prospered.

Cultivators in black and crimson robes swaggered through markets where mortals haggled over cabbages. Spirit-beast meat sizzled on skewers over braziers, dripping fat into the coals in hissing bursts of fragrant smoke. Formations glittered faintly above the roofs of the wealthy districts, shimmering in the afternoon sun like heat haze.

Hawkers shouted over the rumble of carts. A juggler in a courtyard kept seven flaming knives in the air with qi-threads too fine to see, while a crowd of children cheered and a pickpocket worked the crowd behind them.

The air smelled of scorched sugar from a candy-maker's cart, where an old man pulled glowing amber threads into the shapes of dragons and cranes for a ring of children.

Under a striped awning a scribe sat with his brush behind his ear, writing letters for porters who could not write, and a line of them stood patiently with their hats in their hands, mouthing the words they wanted him to set down. A cart wheel splashed through a puddle by the gutter and sent a bright fan of water over the cobbles.

Yan Chi watched all of it with the hunger of a man who had died alone in a rented apartment on Earth and woken up inside a story.

He stopped at a corner to let a procession pass — a sedan chair carried by four burly servants, its silk curtains drawn — and while he waited he pulled up his status out of habit, the way he had once checked his phone at crosswalks.

[Status Window] [Name: Yan Chi] [Status: Weak] [Cultivation: Qi Refining — 4th Stage] [Pervert Points: 640]

Weak. Four stages into Qi Refining and the System still called him that; he had decided it was either a joke or a standard so high he could not see the top of it. Six hundred and forty points. He looked at the number for a while.

It was more than he had ever held at once before the night in Elder Li's house, and still not nearly enough for the fifth stage, and the System's shop was full of things he wanted. He closed the window.

The procession had passed. The System stayed quiet, as it usually did when nothing perverted was happening, and he found the quiet oddly companionable, like a dog asleep at his feet.

The beauty standards in this world had been raised by cultivation itself. Qi smoothed skin and sharpened bones and tightened bodies; even mortals who lived near spiritual veins aged slowly and beautifully. Women who looked merely average to local eyes would have been idols and actresses on Earth, worshipped on billboards.

And they dressed for it. Revealing clothes were both policy and fashion in a demonic city: deep necklines that plunged to the navel, side slits that climbed to the hip, thin silks that clung to every curve, bare backs and bare thighs flashing in the sun.

Asses swayed under cloth so light it moved like water. Yan Chi was glad — deeply, shamelessly glad — to have been reborn inside a demonic clan that treated attraction like weather. His eyes never stopped working.

He bought a skewer of glazed thunder-boar he did not need, just so he could stand near a stall where three outer disciples of some demonic sect were arguing loudly over the grades of a pair of swords.

He watched a married woman in a crimson robe with slits to her waist bend over to pick up a spirit stone she had dropped, and the robe fell open along her thigh to the curve of her hip, pale and full, and his cock twitched in his trousers.

She straightened, caught him looking, and smiled at him over her shoulder with a slow, knowing curl of her lips before she walked on. He grinned at her back and took a bite of his skewer.

Two streets on, he stopped in front of a spirit-tool shop with a window full of treasures he could not afford: a jade bracelet carved with a defensive formation that would turn aside a Qi Refining sword, a bundle of escape talismans tied with red string, a small bronze mirror that the label claimed could show the true face behind any disguise.

He stood with his nose almost to the glass and did arithmetic. The bracelet cost more gold than the Yan branch spent on rice in a month. The System's shop, he knew, sold things far stranger for points instead of gold — pills that turned a man invisible, talismans that turned a woman's body to heat — and for a moment the absurdity of his situation struck him so hard that he laughed out loud and startled the shopkeeper.

The shopkeeper, a narrow man with an abacus hung at his belt like a sword, came to the door and looked him up and down with the weary courtesy of someone who had watched a thousand young masters admire what they could not buy. Behind him, small lamps burned in glass globes along the shelves, each one pooling a different colour over the jade and bronze and silk, and a bell over the door tinkled when the draught moved it.

Gold could buy a bracelet. Only perversion could buy what he really needed. He moved on before the shopkeeper could come out and try to sell him the mirror.

Jinling was a buffet. He reminded himself that he had the twins waiting at home, warm and eager and devoted. He reminded himself of his mother, whose every movement made his System sing. He reminded himself of the academy on the horizon, and the five doors, and the exam that was now only days away. And still his feet kept walking, hunting novelty, turning down street after street toward whatever the next corner held.

Near the Hall of Records he stopped in front of a great lacquered notice board where a crowd had gathered. A new proclamation had been pasted up that morning, the ink still glossy: the demonic academy's entrance examination would open at the main sect's mountain gate on the appointed day, five doors, five trials, all candidates of Qi Refining or above to present themselves with a clan token or a letter of sponsorship by dawn.

Below it someone had scrawled in charcoal, Yan Jing will eat dirt at the first door, and someone else had crossed it out and written Yan Jing's father will buy him the second. Yan Chi laughed out loud, drawing looks.

He read the proclamation twice more, the characters burning into his memory, and felt the date settle into his chest like a stone dropped into a well — heavy, cold, and somehow exciting. Days. Only days now.

He passed a teahouse where a woman sat on the balcony fanning herself, her robe open to the waist and her breasts bound in a strip of red silk so thin he could see the dark shadows of her nipples through it.

He passed a tailor's shop with a row of headless wooden mannequins in the window, each dressed in a design more indecent than the last, and stopped to study one with a skirt made of hanging silk ribbons that would part with every step.

A seamstress sat in the doorway with a mouthful of pins and a length of green silk across her knees, her needle flashing in and out in quick even stitches. She glanced up at him, took in his face, and went back to her work with the faintest smile, the way a woman does who has long since stopped being surprised by what men look at.

He passed a pair of young women walking arm in arm, sisters perhaps, in matching blue robes with open backs that showed the long smooth valleys of their spines down to the dimples above their asses, and he walked behind them for half a street before they turned into a jeweler's and he made himself keep going.

It was in the middle of a busy street near the western market that he saw silver hair, and the hunt stopped cold.

The woman was walking a dozen paces ahead of him through the crowd, and her dress was more revealing than anything he had seen all afternoon. Her ass moved under a short rear panel with a slow, mesmerizing rhythm that made men coming the other way walk into doorframes and stall poles; he watched one merchant stop dead in the middle of the street and get bumped from behind by a porter carrying a crate of melons.

Long legs, bare almost to the hip. A slim waist. Curves that seemed to have been drawn by someone with an unfair advantage. And that hair, falling straight and shining down her back like a river of moonlight.

He knew her before she turned. Cao Ning.

---

That morning, on the other side of the city, Cao Ning had stood in front of her clothes chest for a long time.

She had laid out three outfits on the bed. The first was a sensible practice robe in dark green, the kind she wore to lessons, cut deep in the demonic way but sturdy and plain.

The second was the dusk-blue silk she had worn to the arena, washed now, though she could not look at it without feeling the boards under her back.

The third was the dress her aunt had sent from the capital last spring as a coming-of-age gift, which she had tried on once in front of the mirror, gone scarlet, and folded away at the bottom of the chest: two narrow strips of pale blue cloth that crossed over the breasts, a jeweled waistband, and two short skirt panels slit to the hip.

Her aunt's note had said, For when you are ready to be looked at.

She picked up the dark green robe. She put it down. She picked up the blue dress.

The purr in her meridians stretched under her skin like a cat in a patch of sun.

She put the dress on in front of the bronze mirror, settling the strips over her breasts, fastening the waistband, smoothing the panels down over her hips, and the woman in the mirror looked back at her with flushed cheeks and bright eyes and a body that the widening had polished until it seemed to glow.

The strips covered her nipples and almost nothing else. The panels covered almost nothing at all. Her black string underwear lay on the bed beside the discarded robes. She looked at it. She reached for it.

Her hand stopped a finger's width away, and stayed there, and she listened to her own heartbeat and to the low, warm hum in her channels, and then she turned away from the bed and walked out of the room without it.

She told herself she had forgotten.

Her mother was in the courtyard cutting peonies, and looked up, and her shears stopped mid-snip. For a moment Cao Ying simply stared. Then a slow, complicated smile spread over her face — surprise, and amusement, and something that looked almost like recognition. "Your aunt's dress," she said. "I wondered when you'd wear it." She went back to her peonies. "Take a shawl if you go near the river. The wind is cold there."

Cao Ning did not take a shawl.

In the streets, the looks began at once. A porter carrying a sack of rice on his shoulder turned his head to follow her and walked into a doorpost. Two young men lounging outside a teahouse stopped talking in the middle of a word.

A woman selling hairpins from a tray looked her up and down with narrowed eyes and then, unexpectedly, winked. Cao Ning felt every gaze slide over her bare hips, over the sides of her breasts, over the short panel behind her that swung and lifted with every step, and every gaze landed somewhere under her skin and set the purr thrumming.

By the time she reached the western market her thighs were slick and her nipples ached against the thin blue strips, and she was walking slower than she needed to, and she hated herself, and she did not walk faster.

At the bridge over the Jade Canal, a patrol of city guards came the other way in their lacquered half-armor, six of them in a loose file, and the captain at their head was a broad grizzled man she half recognized from her father's banquets.

He saw her, and his eyes went wide, and then dropped, helplessly, to the slit of the panel at her hip where the whole long line of her bare thigh showed up to the jeweled band. His file broke apart behind him as the men craned around each other to see.

Cao Ning could have pulled the panel closed with one hand. She kept both hands at her sides and walked past them at the same unhurried pace, and felt their stares on her back all the way down the far side of the bridge, a hot press of eyes on the bare lower curve of her ass beneath the short swinging cloth, and the wetness between her thighs spread until she could feel it on the inside of her knees.

When she reached the far bank she let out a breath she had been holding since the middle of the bridge, and it came out shaky, and it came out almost like a laugh.

That was where Yan Chi found her.

---

He quickened his pace, threading through the crowd, and reached out to stop her with a light touch on her bare shoulder.

She spun around so fast her hair whipped across his wrist. Her face was flushed, her eyes a little too wide, her lips parted on a sharp breath, and for an instant she looked at him the way a startled deer looks at a hunter — and then she recognized him, and the startle turned into something more complicated that he could not read.

He gazed at her face. It was the same face he had known since the original Yan Chi's earliest memories, the face that had stood between him and a ring of jeering cousins more times than he could count, and it was more beautiful than he remembered.

But there was something strained in it, too, and the strain cut through the lust that had been building in him for the last half street.

"Are you okay?"

Cao Ning nodded, but she did not answer right away.

She felt uncomfortable in ways she could never have explained to him. Since Elder Chang's meridian widening she had grown stronger, and somehow more beautiful as well; her skin glowed, her curves seemed riper, and her qi moved through her like warm silk.

But something strange had come with it. Over the past two days she had found herself thinking perverted thoughts that she hated to name. She caught herself enjoying it when men stared at her ass as she walked away from them, or looked at her breasts with open hunger as she approached.

The looks aroused her. She did not understand why. She felt like a complete pervert walking around in broad daylight in two narrow strips of cloth crossing her chest, a short panel in front and a shorter one behind, with no underwear, and she still could not say whether she had forgotten to put any on.

If he knew the perverted things I've done, he'd think I was a cheap slut.

She remembered the window, her mother on her knees swallowing. She remembered the arena, her ass in the air and an old man's cock between her breasts. She remembered the table, the oil and the needles and her master's finger inside her. What came after the last needle was only a scatter of blurred fragments she had decided, firmly, were dreams, and that decision was the only reason she could meet Yan Chi's eyes at all.

When his fingers touched her shoulder, the strange energy in her meridians purred. It purred again now, as he stood close enough that she could smell the sandalwood soap on his skin.

Behind him, she could feel men in the street looking at her — at her legs, at the sides of her breasts, at the short panel over her ass — and the purr deepened with every look, warm and pleased and shameless.

She wanted to die of embarrassment. Her nervousness grew with every heartbeat.

Yan Chi had always had a weakness for Cao Ning, inherited from the original body's childhood love.

Those feelings had rooted themselves in him from his first day in this world, tangled up with memories that were not quite his: a little girl with silver pigtails and skinned knuckles, standing over a bigger boy who had pushed him into a pond; the same girl, a few years older, sitting beside him on the clan school steps sharing a sugar dragon, laughing with her mouth full. Those memories were clean and bright, and he kept them that way.

The woman standing in front of him now was eighteen and fully grown, and that was another matter entirely. Since arriving in this world he had met many beauties — his mother, the twins, the guests from the main clan — but Cao Ning remained in a league of her own, her stunning curves and innocent face set against each other in a combination that was frankly unfair.

He noticed her outfit then, really noticed it, and had to shift his stance discreetly to accommodate what happened in his trousers.

The dress barely covered her breasts. It was made of two strips of pale blue cloth, each no wider than his palm, that rose from a narrow waistband, crossed between her breasts, and passed over her shoulders, leaving the outer curves of both breasts completely bare and the inner curves bare too, deep into the valley between them.

Only the vertical strip over each nipple stood between her and indecency, and even that strip was thin enough that the faint outline of each nipple was printed against it. Her waist was slim and bare.

Below the waistband hung a short front panel and a shorter rear one, slit high on both sides, so that her hips were bare from waist to thigh, and when she shifted her weight the rear panel lifted just enough to show the lower curve of her ass. The whole outfit was far too tempting. His cock thickened against his thigh.

The old pervert soul of Yan Fan, curled up inside Yan Chi's skull, made a detailed inventory. The outer curves of her breasts were almost fully bare, smooth and full and gleaming faintly in the sun, with only that teasing strip of cloth running along the nipple line.

Her cleavage was so deep he could have poured a cup of wine into it and lost the cup. The high slits of her skirt panels showed pale hip and the beginning of her ass, and when she walked everything bounced with a heavy, innocent sexuality that made his mouth go dry.

He wanted to bury his face between those breasts. He wanted to ask what had happened to her cultivation, because she was practically glowing. He wanted, briefly and viciously, to know whether anyone else had touched her since his hand had landed on her breast in that crowded street two months ago. He smiled instead.

"Cao Ning," he said, keeping his voice carefully casual. "Why don't you walk with me? I'm exploring the city."

She felt a fresh wave of nerves, but she answered, "Why not," and looked down at the cobblestones in embarrassment. Even talking to her dearest childhood friend she could not fully control her thoughts; she found herself imagining the men around them staring at her ass as she walked beside him, and felt heat gather between her legs for it, and felt her bare pussy grow slick under the short front panel with nothing to catch it. Shameless. She fell into step beside him anyway.