Jade Serpent's Tongue

She unwound her legs from his waist and pushed him back gently until he slid out of her, his cock slick and shining with her juices, and she rolled over onto her stomach and rose up on her knees with her cheek pressed to the pillow and her ass lifted high toward him. It was a magnificent ass, full and heart-shaped and plush, with a single dimple at the top of each cheek. She reached back with both hands and took hold of her cheeks and pulled them apart.

"Here," she said, looking back at him over her shoulder with her warm brown eyes. "Have you ever been here before?"

He had not. He had thought about it. The Earth soul in him had watched it on screens a thousand times. But neither of the twins had ever offered, and he had never thought to ask, and now he knelt behind Lianhua with his heart pounding and looked at the small, dark-pink pucker of her anus between her spread cheeks, smooth and clean and faintly glistening with some oil she had already worked into it, and his mouth went dry.

"No," he said.

"Then taste first," said Lianhua.

He bent and pressed his mouth to her. Her skin was warm and smelled of jasmine. He licked her once, a long slow stroke from the bottom of her pussy up through her crack to the top, and she shivered all over. He did it again, and then he put the tip of his tongue against her anus and circled it, slowly, around and around the tight wrinkled ring, and felt it flutter against his tongue, and heard her breath catch.

Slrrp.

He licked her harder, flattening his tongue against her, then pointing it and pushing until the tip slipped a little way inside, and Lianhua moaned into the pillow and pushed her ass back against his face. He held her cheeks apart with both hands and buried himself in her, licking and sucking and probing, and she rocked back against him, and her pussy dripped onto the sheets below his chin, and her moans climbed higher and higher until she was shaking.

"Now," she gasped. "Now, now. Put it in."

He knelt up behind her. His cock was so hard it ached. She reached back and smeared a palmful of oil from a jade bottle at the bedside along the length of him, then took hold of his shaft and set the head against her slick, loosened anus, and held it there, and breathed out slowly.

"Slowly," she said. "Then not slowly."

He pressed forward. For a moment she resisted, a tight hot ring of muscle pushing back against him, and then her body opened, and the head of his cock slipped inside her with a sudden, shocking give that made both of them gasp. She was impossibly tight. Tighter than any pussy, a burning clenching grip around the head of his cock that squeezed and squeezed.

He held still, shaking. Lianhua breathed out again, long and steady, and he felt her relax around him, and he pushed deeper, inch by slow inch, watching his cock disappear into her ass, until his hips were pressed against her round cheeks and he was buried in her to the root.

"Oh," said Lianhua faintly. "Move."

He moved. He drew back slowly, watching her ring cling to his shaft and stretch as he pulled out, and pushed slowly back in, and she moaned, low and deep. He did it again. The grip of her ass was unlike anything he had ever felt, hot and tight and smooth, and every slow stroke dragged a groan out of his chest.

She reached under herself and began to rub her clit with two fingers. He sped up. Her plump cheeks rippled each time his hips struck them, and the oil made obscene wet sounds as he drove in and out of her.

Plap! Plap!

"Harder," she said. "Not slowly now."

He gripped her hips and fucked her ass hard, slamming into her, his balls slapping against her dripping pussy, and Lianhua cried out into the pillow and clawed the sheets, and her ass clenched around him in hard, rhythmic squeezes as she came. That finished him.

He drove into her one last time to the hilt and held there and came with a hoarse shout, pulse after pulse of hot cum pumping deep into her ass, so much of it that he felt it spread around his cock inside her, and the green serpent on her belly blazed briefly bright as jade in sunlight.

He knelt behind her panting, still buried in her, his whole body shaking. When at last he pulled out, slowly, her anus clung to him until the last moment and then let go, and a thick white rope of his cum welled out of her stretched pink hole and ran down over her pussy and dripped onto the sheets.

On the other side of the screen Wang Xuan let out a long, bellowing groan like a bull at a fair, and the bed there stopped creaking, and Ruolan laughed breathlessly and said something too low to hear.

Lianhua rolled over onto her back, flushed and glowing, her chestnut hair wild across the pillow, and looked at him.

"Your first time," she said. "In there."

"Yes."

"Then I'll remember it." She reached for him. "Come here. You're not finished, young master. I can feel it. That hungry qi of yours." She curled her fingers around his softening cock and squeezed, and it twitched and began to fill again in her hand. "Into my pussy, this time."

He was hard again within a few strokes of her hand, harder than he would have believed possible. She opened her thighs. He sank into her pussy, which was hotter than before, slick and swollen and hot from her orgasm, and she wrapped her legs around his waist again and pulled him down against her heavy breasts and kissed him for the first time, her long serpent's tongue sliding into his mouth and curling around his own.

He fucked her slowly at first and then not slowly at all. The ripple came again around his cock, and again, milking him, and the thread of heat flowed out of him into her, and he let it go. She came first, shuddering under him with a long, shivering wail, her pussy clenching and fluttering around his shaft, and the feel of it dragged him over the edge after her.

He buried himself deep and came again, a second hot flood pouring into her, and felt her womb drink it.

He collapsed onto her and lay there for a long time with his face in her neck, breathing jasmine.

When he finally rolled off her, she sat up and pushed him gently onto his back and knelt between his legs. His cock lay spent against his thigh, slick with her juices and his own cum. She bent over it. The long pink tongue came out and curled around him, and began, very slowly and very thoroughly, to clean him.

It was the strangest sensation of his life. Her tongue wound around his shaft in a tight wet spiral and slid up and down the length of it, polishing, then unwound and flicked into every crease and fold, around the base, over his balls, lapping up every trace of what they had made together. It curled around the head and cleaned the sensitive rim beneath it with tiny fluttering strokes.

It wound around him again and squeezed. By the time she was finished he was hard for the third time, and she looked up at him along the length of his body with her warm brown eyes and dimpled at him.

"Hungry," she said again, approvingly.

The second round was slower and lazier, a long rolling fuck with her riding him on top, her heavy breasts swinging in his face, her chestnut hair coming down out of its knot and falling around both of them like a curtain. Beyond the screen Wang Xuan had found his second wind too.

Yan Chi could hear the bed groaning under his weight and Ruolan's long low moans, and once, quite distinctly, Wang Xuan's voice saying, "Again, again," and the slap of a palm on a bare taut cheek, and then his bull's groan as he emptied himself into her a second time. When Yan Chi came at last, deep in Lianhua's pussy with her riding him through it, she threw her head back and laughed, and the serpent on her belly glowed like a lamp.

Afterward they lay tangled in the silk sheets while the incense burned down and the music from the lower floors drifted up through the boards. Lianhua lay with her head on his chest and her chestnut hair spread over him and drew idle circles on his stomach with one fingertip, tracing the lines of his meridians as if she could see them through the skin. Perhaps she could. On the other side of the screen Wang Xuan was snoring.

"You have a very strange qi," she said again, thoughtfully. "Dense. Hungry. And it gives back. Most young men who lie with me, I drink and drink and they are empty by the second time, and they go home and sleep for a day. You gave me more the second time than the first." She lifted her head and looked at him with real curiosity. "What method do you cultivate, young master?"

"A family secret," Yan Chi said.

"Mm." She did not believe him, and did not press. Women of Jade Serpent Peak, he suspected, learned more by not pressing. She laid her head back down. "Well. Whatever it is, come back. I'll keep my nights open for you."

There was a soft knock, and the door slid open, and Madam Qin came in with two young attendants behind her carrying lacquered trays. If the sight of two naked young masters sprawled across two beds with two naked courtesans troubled her in the least, it did not show on her calm face. She bowed. The attendants knelt and set the trays on the low table between the beds.

"For the young masters," Madam Qin said. "Since it is Young Master Yan's first visit. The house offers a few small comforts."

On the trays were rows of tiny porcelain bottles and jade boxes, each labeled in neat brushwork. Yan Chi sat up and read them. A pill to restore spent yang essence overnight. A balm that promised a man three more rounds before dawn. A tincture that would make a woman's skin unbearably sensitive to touch for the length of an incense stick.

A powder to be sprinkled on the tongue that the label described, with no shame whatsoever, as for a long and grateful kiss. Each one had a price beside it in gold, and each price made Yan Chi's head spin.

Wang Xuan, woken by the knock, sat up in his bed with Ruolan draped across his belly and squinted at the trays. "The restoring pill," he said. "Two. And the balm. Put it on my father's account."

"Your father's account is very long this month, young master."

"My father's account is very long every month," Wang Xuan said serenely. "It's why he works so hard."

Madam Qin smiled faintly, set the chosen bottles aside, and withdrew with her attendants and the trays. The door slid shut. Wang Xuan swallowed his restoring pill dry, tossed the second to Yan Chi, who caught it, and lay back against the pillows with Ruolan's long black hair spilled across his chest and an expression of perfect contentment on his moon face.

"You see, brother," he said, "this is why I love this place. Everything is honest. Gold for flesh is honest. You pay, she plays, everyone gets what they came for, nobody cries, nobody lies, nobody's father comes after you with a sword." He waved a lazy hand at the ceiling. "Out there, it's all games. Out there, a beauty looks at you and you don't know what it costs. Here they write it on a tablet."

Ruolan laughed into his neck and bit him lightly, and he yelped.

Yan Chi lay back beside Lianhua and turned the little pill over in his fingers and thought about that.

Gold for flesh was honest. He had just spent the most extravagant night of either of his lives. He had fucked a Qi Consolidation courtesan in both her holes, been cleaned by a tongue like a living ribbon, had more pleasure in two hours than in all of his first life put together, and Wang Xuan's father had paid more for it than a peasant village would see in a generation.

Beneath the warmth and the drowsy satisfaction, there was a strange stillness in the back of his mind where the System lived.

It had not chimed. All night, through the rimming and the anal and the long slow rides, the golden windows had stayed dark. That was not like it. It had paid him for a glimpse of his mother's breast at the banquet. It had paid him for watching the twins sleep.

It had paid him twenty, an hour before, for looking at a soaked young woman stepping out of a lake. Now it was silent, and the silence had a weight to it, like an accountant bent over a ledger with the brush paused, counting.

It's waiting, he thought. Adding it up.

He tried to guess the total, and could not. And underneath the guessing a thought began to take shape that he did not much like the look of. He thought of the lake. Of five hundred points blazing gold in front of his eyes, for the sight of a single bare ass bent over in the shallows.

And then he thought of Lianhua's ass, which was every bit as beautiful, which he had not only looked at but licked and fucked and filled, and for which the System, so far, had not paid him one point.

He did not want to finish the thought, so he swallowed the restoring pill instead, and it went down warm and spread through his belly in a slow golden glow, and by the time it reached his cock Lianhua had noticed and was smiling.

They left the Pavilion near midnight, through the glowing hall where the music had grown slower and the tables emptier and the men who remained at them more drunk, and Madam Qin bowed them out at the gate with the same serene courtesy she had shown on the way in. The night air in the street was cool after the incense.

Yan Chi breathed it in and felt light as a cloud, his legs pleasantly weak, his whole body loose and warm and humming from the restoring pill. Behind them, the seven-storey tower glowed red and gold and green against the stars like a lantern hung up for the gods.

Wang Xuan stretched on the steps until his spine cracked, belched with great contentment, and slung an arm around Yan Chi's shoulders.

"Same time after the exam prep?" he said. "Once we've studied ourselves half to death. We'll need it."

Yan Chi thought of the dark, silent ledger in the back of his mind, the brush still paused over the page.

"Sooner," he said. "I think my points are about to get interesting."

"Points?"

"Cultivation points. A figure of speech." Yan Chi grinned. "Let's just say I'll want to come back."

Wang Xuan laughed his booming laugh and did not ask again. They walked together as far as the canal bridge, and there they parted, the fat young master swaying off toward the merchant quarter with a cheerful wave and a promise to do it all again before the exam ruined them, and Yan Chi turning the other way, toward the Yan district and home.

---

Cao Ning had not flown home. She had run, the whole way, through the forest and along the willow road and in through the western gate, so fast that the gate guards saw only a blur of pale blue and silver, and she had not stopped running until she was through the side door of the Cao compound and up the stairs and inside her own room with the door barred behind her.

Then she stood with her back against the door and shook.

The bath was still half full from the morning. She did not call for hot water. She stripped off the dress, the two pale blue strips and the jeweled waistband and the skirt panels that had betrayed her so completely, and threw it all into the corner, and climbed into the cold water and sat down in it up to her chin and stayed there, scrubbing at her skin with a cloth until it was pink all over, as if she could scrub the afternoon off it.

She scrubbed her thighs where Wang Xuan's hands had clung. She scrubbed her breasts where he had crushed them. She did not scrub between her legs, because the moment she touched herself there she found she was still wet, wetter than the bathwater, slippery and swollen and aching, and she snatched her hand away.

She had been seen. Both of them had seen. Wang Xuan from below in the water the whole way across, and Yan Chi from behind in the shallows, standing in the reeds with his fists clenched and that look on his face, the look of a man who has been struck by lightning and liked it.

Her oldest friend. He had stood in the reeds and looked at her bare ass, and her pussy, and her anus, everything, all of it, with her bent over in front of him like a — like a —

The purr in her meridians rose up warm and stretched.

She put her hand back between her legs.

She did it slowly, with her eyes closed and her head tipped back against the rim of the tub. She thought of Yan Chi's face. She thought of his eyes.

She thought of standing there bent over in the knee-deep water with her legs braced wide and her cheeks spread and the warm afternoon sun on her bare dripping skin, and of his gaze moving over every part of her, and she rubbed her swollen clit in small hard circles and felt herself grow hotter and slicker under her fingers until the cold bathwater around her hips seemed to warm.

She thought of Wang Xuan's thumbs creeping up the inside of her thigh. She thought, without wanting to, of her master's oiled hands and the long hazy afternoon of the widening, and all of it tangled together behind her closed eyes until she could not tell anymore which of them had made her wet.

Her hips lifted off the bottom of the tub. Water slopped over the rim onto the floor.

She came biting the back of her wrist to keep from crying out, her thighs clamped tight around her hand and her whole body shuddering in the cold water, and lay back afterward with her heart hammering and her cheeks burning and the purr curled warm and contented in her channels.

Idiots, she thought. Both of them.