Choosing the Names

Yan Chi read it.

He read it again, word by word, in case the first reading had been some kind of mistake. It had not.

Then he started cursing again, louder this time, inventing combinations of filial insults that would have made a demonic elder proud, his voice bouncing back off the shuttered shopfronts.

"Are you mocking me? You damned System! This is what you call legendary? Fuck your whole family of systems. Fuck the wheel. Fuck the empties. Fuck the arrow, fuck the little bells—"

A shutter banged open two doors down and a furious old woman in a nightcap leaned out and screamed at him to take his drunken mouth somewhere else or she would empty her chamber pot on him. He apologized to her with a deep bow and great sincerity, and she slammed the shutter, and he stood there in the sudden silence with his chest heaving.

Cuckold Partner. Of all the things a lucky protagonist could have been handed, he had been handed this.

He had eight hundred and twenty points before the wheel, and two spins at four hundred each had cost him eight hundred, and now he was left with a pathetic twenty, and a legendary skill that paid him for watching other men touch his women.

He thought of the morning in Han Fei's room, the smell of jasmine and sex in the shuttered dark and the twins curled sleepily against the main-clan disciple's body, and the rage that had gone through him then, and the lust that had come tangled up in it. He thought of the gambling house. He thought of his mother.

And slowly, standing in the lane with the old woman's chamber-pot threat still ringing in his ears, he stopped cursing, and began to think.

Passive. That was the first word that mattered. He did not have to do anything. He did not have to be anywhere. Slotted women, and perverted acts. With someone other than the host. He read that line again and felt the shape of it change in his mind, the way an insult can turn in the hand into a weapon.

He did not have to be in the room.

He did not have to know. Whenever it happened, wherever it happened, the points would come.

His Earth soul, which had died in front of a screen full of exactly this kind of thing, recognized the shape of it with a horrified, shameful thrill. The young master's inherited heart flinched.

And the part of him that had just felt the fifth stage of Qi Refining roar through his body like a flood, and wanted the sixth, and the seventh, and Qi Consolidation, and the Heavenly Realm, and the strength to never be called Weak by anything ever again, looked at those four empty slots and thought, very calmly, Yes.

Beside the empty slots glowed a small golden plus. He touched it with his mind. A list unrolled.

[Eligible women] [1. Yan Mei] [2. Cao Ning] [3. Yan Ling] [4. Dongyu] [5. Qiuyu]

Five names, and four slots, and each name went into him like a blade.

All of them were close. All of them were tangled up with him by blood or by memory or by the master ring on his finger, or by that stupid, tender thing in his chest that still answered every time he saw a flash of silver hair across a street.

He chose Dongyu first.

He did it quickly, before he could think too hard about it. Then Qiuyu. The twins were already his, in body and in the master ring and in the long noisy nights in his courtyard, and they had been someone else's once, for one long night, by his father's command, and they might be again.

The branch was a demonic family. Guests came. Elders gave orders. If another man ever touched them again, he wanted to be paid for it. The thought was ugly and he knew it was ugly. He slotted them anyway, and the two slots filled with a small double chime, and two names glowed gold.

The third slot made him stop and swallow hard.

Yan Mei.

His mother. The most beautiful woman in the Yan branch, and the Heavenly Realm's pride, whose exhibition he had watched with his own eyes, from invisibility and from shadow, at the banquet, through the gambling-house games, under Elder Li's hands and Xuan Wu's, while his father watched and hardened and smiled.

The System had all but ordered him to harvest her already. Every great payout of his second life had her face somewhere behind it. Putting her name into a legendary skill called Cuckold Partner felt like signing a contract written in incest and gold.

He signed it. The slot accepted her with a low chime that sounded, to his guilty ear, like approval.

A part of him — the Earth soul that had once sat alone in a dark room and clicked through pages of exactly this kind of story — whispered that he had just made a very filthy choice.

Another part, colder and clearer, answered that he had already been unable to take any of it back from the moment he woke up in this body. The System did not offer refunds. Neither did cultivation. He moved on to the fourth slot before the guilt could find a better argument.

Then he came to the fourth slot, and he stood under the lantern for a long time.

Yan Ling or Cao Ning.

His sister's face rose up out of the memories of this body, very clear. Older than him by two years, sharp and beautiful and cold-eyed, the image of their mother refined by years of brutal training into something harder. The protector of his weak childhood, who had once broken a branch-family bully's arm for calling him a cripple.

The young woman who had entered the main sect's academy already at Qi Consolidation and made elders pause in the middle of their sentences to look at her, who had been taken as a direct disciple by Grand Elder Lan himself, and who now wrote him short, sharp letters about academy schedules and told him to eat properly and stop embarrassing the family.

Dominating, proud, and strong. The kind of woman who broke men, not the kind men broke. The idea of Yan Ling doing anything perverted with anyone felt like a joke told at a funeral.

Cao Ning, though, lived here, in Jinling. Cao Ning walked beside him. Cao Ning had shown him everything she had today without meaning to, bent over in the shallows with Wang Xuan in her fists. And her body was changing, he had seen it, in ways he did not understand. She glowed lately. She walked differently. She answered stares the way a flower answers the sun. If any woman close to him was going to earn him points through accident and proximity and sheer bad luck, it was her.

He slotted Cao Ning.

The fourth slot filled with a chime like a small silver bell. The list sealed. Four names glowed gold in a row, and the fifth, Yan Ling, dimmed slowly to gray and sank back into the unused pool.

He stood a while longer under the lantern, testing the new skill the way a man tests a new blade, turning it, weighing it, running a thumb along the edge. The skill window showed four glowing names and, beneath them, an empty space where the earnings would be recorded. Nothing yet. Of course nothing. The twins would be asleep in his courtyard, or waiting up for him.

His mother was somewhere behind the mansion walls with her new taste for being looked at. Cao Ning was presumably at home scrubbing lake water and fury off her skin. None of them, so far as he knew, was doing anything with anyone at this hour. The skill sat in his soul like a trap set in a dark forest, waiting for a footstep.

Twenty points. Useless for a breakthrough. Very nearly useless in the shop. He would have to hunt tomorrow.

And the legendary insult had done something else to him, something he noticed only now, with a slow uncomfortable heat spreading through his belly. It had made him hungry for exactly the kinds of scenes he used to tell himself shocked him. If his mother bent over in front of a guard, he would be paid. If the twins were ever sent to another guest's bed, he would be paid.

If Cao Ning ever bent for another man's hands, he would be paid. The morality of farming the women he cared about had not survived its first contact with a cultivation ladder that demanded points like a tax collector demands rice.

"Legendary," he muttered to the lantern, more quietly. "Fine. I'll make you legendary, and I'll make you pay interest."

A moth battered itself against the paper of the lantern above his head. He watched it for a moment, then walked on. The skill interface faded from his sight but not from his soul. Four names, four traps, and a city full of eyes.

He walked home through the quieter lanes after that, past a knot of outer disciples arguing drunkenly over arena odds on a teahouse step, past a pair of late-walking beauties in the demonic fashion whose bare hips swayed under split silk and earned him exactly nothing, because they were nobody to him. Closeness — always closeness. The System had told him its whole theology in numbers tonight, and he was converting.

A baker's boy was already at work in a lit back doorway, slapping dough onto a board with floured forearms, and the warm smell of yeast and sesame rolled into the lane and followed Yan Chi for half a street. A pair of night-soil carriers went by with their poles on their shoulders and their faces wrapped against the smell, and he stepped aside for them without thinking, and one of them grunted a thanks that sounded almost surprised. He liked how ordinary it all was.

By the time the gates of the Yan mansion recognized his qi and swung open for him, he had stopped thinking about his sister's name.

---

The twins had waited up.

They were sitting together on the step of his courtyard under the eaves when he came through the moon gate, side by side in their thin night robes, their black hair loose, sharing a single lantern between them, and they rose together as he came in with the same small glad intake of breath. Qiuyu reached him first and took his outer robe from his shoulders. Dongyu came close behind her, tucked herself under his arm, and turned her face into the side of his neck, and went very still.

She sniffed, delicately. Then again.

"Jasmine," she said into his collar. "And sandalwood. And a woman." She lifted her head and looked up at him with her sharp dark eyes and the knowing little smile she had always worn when she caught him out, the smile that meant she could read him like a ledger. "A woman," she said again, and it was not a question.

Qiuyu, folding his robe over her arm, went still too, and turned, and gave him a look of such betrayed and wounded indignation that he almost laughed.

"Two women, actually," he said. "Well, one for me. Wang Xuan had the other. At the Jade Fragrance Pavilion."

"The Pavilion," Qiuyu said, in exactly the tone she might have used for a rival family's poisoned well.

"The Pavilion," he admitted.

Dongyu pinched his side hard enough to make him yelp. Qiuyu turned on her heel and marched into his rooms with her shoulders stiff, and he heard her banging the washbasin and the water jug about with unnecessary force. Dongyu stayed under his arm, sniffing him again with a little frown, as if she were trying to memorize the stranger's scent so she could hunt her down later.

"Was she better than us?" she asked.

He thought about it honestly for a moment, because she would know if he lied. He thought of Lianhua's long, clever tongue, and her deep rippling heat. And then he thought of the System's cold ledger, and of six hundred points against five hundred for a single glance, and of what the numbers had told him tonight about what really mattered.

"No," he said. "She was good. But she was nobody."

Dongyu searched his face. Whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her, because the frown melted away and she smiled, and rose on her toes and kissed the corner of his jaw.

They bathed him together, the two of them, in the big wooden tub in his inner room, scrubbing every trace of jasmine off his skin with a fierce wordless thoroughness that was half jealousy and half claiming, their small strong hands working soap into his hair and over his chest and down his back. Qiuyu's mood thawed slowly in the steam.

The tub's cedar was dark with years of steam, and the water came in wooden buckets from the kettle on the brazier, Qiuyu pouring while Dongyu tested each pail against the inside of her wrist before she let it near his skin. Steam curled toward the rafters and clung to their hair in tiny beads. Dongyu's sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and a line of water ran down her forearm and dripped from her elbow onto the floorboards, one slow drop after another.

Dongyu scrubbed the side of his neck where the perfume had been strongest until the skin there was pink. When their hands slid lower and found him, they both paused, and looked at each other, and then up at him in surprise, because after two Qi Consolidation courtesans and a restoring pill he was as limp as a wet noodle.

"She drained you," Qiuyu accused.

"She drank me," Yan Chi corrected, sinking deeper into the hot water with a groan of pure contentment. "It's different. And I broke through tonight."

Qiuyu, who had been sulking with the wash-cloth, paused with her hands still on his shoulders. Dongyu's fingers, which had been soaping his chest, went still against his heart. The steam rose between the three of them. Outside the courtyard wall a cricket sang once and fell silent.

Yan Chi tipped his head back against the rim of the tub and felt the heat soak into his bones, into the new wider channels of his meridians, into the pleasant dull ache of a body that had been used hard and rewarded for it.

That changed their faces at once. They both felt for it through the master ring, he could tell, their eyes going distant for a moment, and then wide. "The fifth stage," Dongyu breathed. "Young master. The fifth."

"The fifth," he said, and closed his eyes.

They did not ask for anything more after that. They dried him and put him to bed and lay down on either side of him under the quilt, warm and close, one dark head on each of his shoulders, the way they had slept on so many nights since the master ring had come to his finger.

He lay between them in the dark and listened to their breathing slow and felt, faintly, through the ring, the drowsy steady beat of their two hearts. In the back of his mind four names glowed gold in a row, and a fifth lay gray and silent, and he fell asleep thinking that he had chosen wisely.