Spinning the Wheel

The System finished counting when Yan Chi was halfway home.

He was walking alone through the Yan district by then, along a quiet lane of shuttered silk shops where the only light came from the paper lanterns hung over the doorways, swaying a little in the night wind and throwing long, slow-moving stripes of red across the paving stones. The city had gone to sleep around him.

A night watchman's clapper sounded somewhere far off, two dry knocks and a pause. A cat crossed the lane ahead of him and vanished under a gate.

The perfume of the Pavilion still clung to his clothes, jasmine and sandalwood fading slowly under the ordinary smells of city dust and cold ash, and his body still hummed with the warm afterglow of the restoring pill, and every few steps his mind wandered back to the burning tight grip of Lianhua's ass around his cock, and the long pink ribbon of her tongue winding around him, and he smiled at nothing.

The silk shops on either side had their shutters pulled down and barred with iron pins, and the painted signs above them hung motionless in the still pockets between gusts: a spool of thread, a bolt of red cloth, a gilded moth.

A thin smell of lamp oil and cold tea leaked from the cracks of a tea stall where the last customer had left an hour ago. His boots made a soft, even sound on the stones, and he caught himself walking with the loose-hipped swagger of a man who had spent the night being adored.

Then the golden windows opened in front of his eyes all at once, so suddenly that he stopped dead in the middle of the lane.

[Ding!] [Reward Summary: Jade Fragrance Pavilion] [Total Pervert Points gained: 600] [Includes First Anal Sex bonus: 300]

Six hundred. He stood under a lantern and read the window twice, and then he began to laugh, very quietly, under his breath, and it was not a pleasant sound even to his own ears.

Six hundred points for a whole night at the most expensive house of pleasure in Jinling. Two Qi Consolidation courtesans, a fortune in Wang Xuan's father's gold, both of Lianhua's holes, three loads of cum, a second round, a tongue cleaning to finish.

And three hundred of that six hundred was a bonus for the first time he had ever put his cock in a woman's ass. Take that away, and the rest of the evening, all of the sweating and thrusting and moaning and flooding, had been worth three hundred.

He had earned five hundred for standing knee-deep in a lake and looking at Cao Ning's bare backside for the space of a few heartbeats.

He stood there in the empty lane with the lantern light sliding over his face and turned the arithmetic over and over, the way a money-changer turns a suspicious coin, and the shape of the truth came up out of it cold and clear.

It was not the flesh the System paid for. Lianhua's body had been as beautiful as Cao Ning's, in its own lush way. He had done far more with it. He had done everything with it. And the System had paid him for that night less than it paid for a single look at a young woman he had known since childhood, because Lianhua was nobody to him.

She was a stranger. A beautiful, skilled, generous stranger whose name he had learned three hours ago and would likely never say again outside the Pavilion. Cao Ning was not a stranger. Cao Ning was woven through the whole of this body's life. That was what the System valued. Not the act itself — the closeness, the feeling, the attachment.

The more a woman mattered to him, the more she was worth.

He walked the next stretch of the lane slowly, testing the theory against his memory, and it held everywhere he pressed on it. The accidental grab of Cao Ning's breast in the market, back in the first days, had paid fifty points, more than many far more explicit things since.

The twins had paid well from the very beginning, from the very first night, but the twins had been his since before he could remember; they had grown up at this body's side. And the largest payouts of all, the ones that had made him dizzy, the ones he had watched pile up while his hand moved in his own lap in the dark, had come from his mother.

Every great sum the System had ever printed for him shared the same spine. The woman mattered to him, or she mattered to the heart of the young man whose body he had inherited, or both.

The courtesans of the Pavilion were lovely and forgettable. The System forgot them too. What it remembered, and rewarded, and hungered for, was silver hair. Twin moans in the night. His mother's face when strangers' eyes were on her.

He tested the rule against one more memory, just to be sure. The night he had first fucked the twins — their first night under the master ring, their identical cries, the way they had clung to him — had paid well, but not as well as watching his mother exposed. Looking at a random forest beauty's chest once, early on, had paid a first-time bonus that still made him grin, and then never paid again. Pattern after pattern, the same cold spine. Closeness was currency. Distance was dust.

That meant his path upward did not run through endless paid pussy, however much Wang Xuan would have liked it to. It ran through proximity. It ran straight through the circle of women already drawn around his life.

The realization should have disgusted the soul that had died on Earth in front of a glowing screen. Some faint, distant part of it did. But the larger part of him, the part that had spent weeks now crawling up the cultivation ladder one filthy rung at a time, felt only the clean cold relief of a man who has walked lost through a forest for days and has finally been handed a map.

He stopped thinking about it before the thought could grow into something that needed a priest, and opened his status window instead.

[Status Window] [Name: Yan Chi] [Status: Weak] [Cultivation: Qi Refining — 4th Stage] [Pervert Points: 1760]

One thousand seven hundred and sixty. More points than he had ever held at once.

Beneath the window, the familiar small bar of light that showed his cultivation glowed faintly, and beside it the cost of the next breakthrough. He looked at the number and frowned, because it was not the number he expected. When he had broken into the fourth stage, the System had told him the fifth would cost twelve hundred and eighty, double the price of the stage before, the way every stage so far had doubled. Now the bar read nine hundred and forty.

He touched the number with his mind, and a small explanatory window unfolded beneath it.

[Breakthrough cost reduced] [Reason: Host's comprehension of cultivation has improved] [Real practice, real combat and real dual cultivation experience have deepened the host's understanding of the Dao]

He read it twice. Weeks of breathing and coiling and packing qi in his courtyard until his dreams were full of meridian charts. The fight with Yan Jing in front of the whole branch. The lake. Lianhua's slow, rippling pussy drawing his yang out of him in a warm thread, and the way his own qi had answered and flowed back into him twice as dense, which he had felt, and learned from, without even meaning to.

The System had noticed all of it. It charged a man less for a road he had already partly walked. Heaven, or whatever engine was pretending to be Heaven, respected understanding.

He did not even think about it. He spent the nine hundred and forty.

Nine hundred and forty points for the fifth stage of Qi Refining. A month ago the thought of spending that many at once would have made him sick. Tonight he barely hesitated. Points were a means. Power was the end. He had learned that the hard way, through poisoned childhood and a dead Earth life and a System that paid him for looking at the people he loved. He selected the breakthrough glyph with a thought and confirmed.

The breakthrough hit him where he stood.

It came up out of his dantian like a spring flood bursting a dam, a great roaring wave of hot dense qi that tore up through his body along every channel at once.

His meridians, which had felt so wide and roomy since the fourth stage, were suddenly narrow, suddenly too small, and the flood hammered against their walls and then pushed them outward, wider, and wider again, in a long burning ache that made him grit his teeth and brace one hand against the shuttered front of a silk shop.

His bones hummed like struck bells. Heat poured into his muscles, into his skin, into his scalp. His heart slammed, once, twice, and then settled into a slow, deep, heavy rhythm that he could feel in his fingertips. The noise of the night sharpened around him until he could hear the cat that had crossed the lane breathing under its gate thirty paces away, and the lantern flames muttering on their wicks, and the watchman's distant clapper as clearly as if it had been knocked beside his ear.

When the light faded he was standing in the same empty lane, breathing hard, at the fifth stage of Qi Refining.

He straightened slowly and took a long breath of the cold night air, and it went down into his lungs deeper than any breath he had taken in his life, and came back out of him in a long white plume. He flexed his fingers. He could feel the qi moving in them now, thick and alive, curling at his command.

His cock, which had been content and sleepy since the Pavilion, had stirred and risen half-hard in his trousers from the breakthrough alone, the way every reward this body received seemed to arrive tangled up with lust. He laughed again, more freely this time.

[Status Window] [Name: Yan Chi] [Status: Weak] [Cultivation: Qi Refining — 5th Stage] [Pervert Points: 820]

Eight hundred and twenty left. The Status line still said Weak. He decided not to take it personally.

He walked a few steps just to feel the difference. The paving stones under his boots felt sharper, as if the world had been drawn with a finer brush. His balance was better. When he jumped lightly onto a low stone step and down again, the landing jarred him less than it would have that morning.

He turned his head toward a sound and found he could place it exactly: a woman's laugh two streets east, a bamboo flute somewhere beyond the canal, the slow creak of a cart axle on the avenue he had left an hour ago. They had always been there. Now each one had an edge, and he could pick it out of the night the way he might pick one coin from a handful.

The smell of the lane sorted itself in the same way. Wet stone, lamp oil, a fishmonger's barrels, the sweetness of a flowering vine spilling over a garden wall.

Qi Refining fifth stage was not Heavenly Realm, and it was not even Qi Consolidation, but it was a real climb from the weakling young master who had woken up in this body weeks ago with poisoned meridians and a cock that would not rise. He thought of Yan Jing's face when he had beaten him in the courtyard, and smiled.

A dog barked somewhere behind a wall. He kept walking.

The lane bent left around a corner shrine, a little stone box with a clay cup of wine and three burnt incense sticks leaning in the ash. Someone had hung a ribbon of faded red cloth from its roof. He passed it without slowing, and the smell of old incense came and went, and the street opened ahead of him into the long blank stretch before the next lantern.

He was reaching to dismiss the window when another opened on top of it, wider and gaudier than the rest, its edges glittering with small gold sparks.

[New Function Unlocked: Spin the Wheel]

A round hologram bloomed in the air in front of him, an arm's length across, and began to turn slowly on its own axis with a faint tinkling sound like wind chimes.

It was a wheel, divided into nine slices of garish carnival color, scarlet and lime and violet and orange, the sort of thing he might have seen at a cheap fair on Earth, absurdly out of place here in a dark lane of a demonic city under swinging red lanterns.

Four of the nine slices were blank and gray. The other five were labeled in cheerful golden script: Skill. Skill, Item, Tool, Random Item, Random Skill. A little golden arrow sat at the top, waiting. Underneath the wheel, floating in neat black-and-gold characters, was the price.

[Cost per spin: 400 Pervert Points]

Yan Chi looked at the four gray slices. He looked at the price.

"Fraud," he said out loud to the empty lane. "Four empties out of nine, and you charge four hundred a spin. You're a gambling den with worse odds than Wang Xuan's father."

The wheel turned serenely and tinkled at him.

He knew he should close it. He had just been given a map to real power, and the map said: the women around you, closeness, patience. It did not say: throw your points at a carnival wheel. Four hundred points was a great deal. It was a breast-grab mission eight times over. It was a whole stage of Body Refining, back when he had begun. A sensible man would close the window, walk home, sleep, and think about it in the morning. He spun it.

The four hundred points left his total with a small, sharp tug that he felt behind his breastbone, like blood leaving a cut, and the wheel whirled up into a blur of carnival color. Scarlet, lime, gray, violet, gray, orange, gray, gold.

The little arrow ticked against each slice as it passed with a sound like a fingernail on a lacquered table, fast and then slower, slower, and Yan Chi found that he had leaned forward over it in the middle of the street like a drunkard over a dice table, his fists clenched, his breath held.

Footsteps sounded from a side lane, came closer, passed by the mouth of it and faded; no one else could see the wheel, but anyone could have seen a young master standing alone under a lantern and staring at empty air with his face full of hunger.

The lantern above him hissed faintly, and its red light lay across the back of his hand where it hung in the air, pale against the tumbling colors of the wheel. A drop of sweat ran from his temple to the corner of his jaw. He did not wipe it. His heart was going harder than it had in the middle of the breakthrough, and he noticed, with a flicker of disgust and delight, that his cock had stirred again.

The arrow ticked, ticked again, and stopped.

[Ding! Empty.]

He cursed the System. He cursed its ancestors to the ninth generation. He cursed the very idea of probability, and the man who had invented it, and the mother of the man who had invented it. Then he stood there breathing hard, with four hundred and twenty points left, and the wheel turned gently in front of him and tinkled, and for a long moment he almost walked away.

But he had read too many novels in his first life. He had read about cheat skills, golden fingers, heaven-defying techniques that fell into the laps of lucky protagonists and turned them from weaklings into gods overnight. He thought of the slice that said Random Skill, gold on violet, and felt the old hope rise up in him like a sickness.

He spun it again, because hope was a disease and he had caught it.

Scarlet, gray, lime, gray, violet. The arrow ticked and ticked and slowed, and it hovered for one agonizing heartbeat at the border between a gray slice and a violet one, and then with a last tiny click it tipped over into the violet.

[Ding! Random Skill.]

Joy hit him so hard and stupid that he actually laughed out loud. Random Skill. A sword technique that split mountains. A body that could not be harmed. A step that crossed a hundred li.

He pressed the glowing confirmation glyph with a finger that trembled, and the wheel folded in on itself and vanished into a blaze of golden light that lit up the whole lane, the shuttered shops and the swaying lanterns and the paving stones, and a single new window unrolled out of the light like a scroll.

[Rank: Legendary (Passive)] [Name: Cuckold Partner] [Description: Whenever a woman close to you engages in a perverted act with someone other than the host, you will earn Pervert Points.] [Only applies to women placed in the slots.] [Total Slots: 4]