Five Veiled Beauties

In the inner mountains of the demonic sect, three hundred li from Jinling as the crow flies, Grand Elder Lan was hosting a small banquet.

The hall stood near the summit of his peak, a long room of dark old wood and black stone pillars, with one wall open to the night so that the stars hung close above the mountains outside like a scatter of ice. Braziers burned along the walls.

Four inner elders of the sect sat on heavy carved chairs along the two sides of the room, each with a low table in front of him, and at the head of it, on a broad seat that was more throne than chair, sat Lan himself.

He was very old. Age had stopped being a weakness for him centuries ago and had become a kind of fashion instead: his hair and his long beard were pure white, but the body under the black ceremonial robes was still carved hard as an oak root, broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest, and his eyes, deep-set under heavy white brows, were bright and black and dancing with a devilish humor that made disciples across the whole sect lower their voices when they spoke his name.

He sat at his ease with one hand on his knee, and the pressure of his cultivation filled the hall the way the weight of the mountain fills the air at its foot, so huge and so still that a man stopped noticing it after a while, the way he stopped noticing the ground.

Food and wine had been ordered. The elders were making polite conversation about nothing in particular. They were waiting.

One of them, a thin sharp-faced man from the northern peaks, spoke of a new batch of outer disciples who might survive the year. Another, broad as a barrel, complained about the price of spirit-iron from the southern forges. Xuan Wu listened with half an ear and thought of Jinling, of a Heavenly-realm wife on a gambling-house floor, of a husband who had watched and smiled. Lan said nothing. He rarely needed to. His silence filled the hall more effectively than other men's speeches.

Then the side door opened, and five veiled young women came in carrying trays, and every one of the four elders stopped talking in the middle of a word.

They were naked from the waist up.

Thin veils of white gauze hung from fine silver circlets across their faces, from the bridge of the nose down, leaving only their eyes uncovered. Below the veils they wore nothing at all above the hips, and their breasts swayed and bounced with every careful step: five pairs, each a different weight and shape, each crowned with nipples of a different shade, all of them carried with the same perfect poise.

Around their waists, fine silver chains held two square panels of white silk, one hanging over each hip, which left the front of them and the back of them bare to the inside of the thigh, so that with every stride the shadow between their legs was half revealed and half hidden in a way that was crueler than nakedness.

Their bodies curved like drawn bows. Their cultivation pressed on the air of the hall, deep and dense and very strong. Outside this mansion, any one of them could have had a crowd of admirers following her down the mountain. Inside it, tonight, they were serving the wine.

They were Grand Elder Lan's five direct disciples, the jewels of his peak.

Yan Ling walked in the middle.

She was twenty-one, and the most beautiful of the five by any honest count. Her black hair was bound up high on her head in a warrior's knot pinned with silver, baring the long pale line of her neck, and above the edge of the veil her eyes were large and dark and long-lashed and as cool as winter water.

Her body was her mother's, the famous body of Yan Mei, but harder and leaner, refined by years of brutal training on this mountain into something that looked less like a flower and more like a blade: a narrow waist ridged faintly with muscle, long strong thighs, high firm breasts, full and pale, that rose and fell with her even breathing, their pink nipples small and neat.

She carried her tray of roast spirit-pheasant as steadily as she would have carried a sword, and she did not look at any of the elders, and every one of them looked at her.

On her left walked Li Ying of the Li family, twenty-three, with brown hair coiled at her nape and brown eyes above the veil, innocent, gentle eyes that did not match at all the slow knowing sway of her hips or the lush ripe swell of her breasts.

On Yan Ling's right walked Wang Yue, twenty-four and the eldest of them, from a cadet line of the Liu family: black hair, a calm, mature, serious face, and the largest breasts of the five by a wide margin, heavy pale globes that bounced with every step no matter how carefully she walked, their wide nipples already drawn tight in the cool night air from the open wall.

At the far left was Liu Ying, twenty-two, whose light purple hair spilled loose over one bare shoulder like a waterfall at dusk, whose long body was hot enough to start a war between sects, and whose eyes above the veil were narrowed and amused, hiding a smile that looked dangerous even when you could not see it.

At the far right walked Li Na, the youngest, twenty, with golden hair flowing to her hips, a face so sweet and open that it seemed to belong to a temple painting, and a body as fully, lavishly ripe as any of the others, a contradiction that made old men ache in their seats.

They served the banquet. They moved down the two rows of tables setting out dishes, roast pheasant and stewed spirit-deer and pale crystal dumplings and bowls of rice glistening with fat, and poured the first cups of wine, and leaned between the elders to do it, so that bare breasts swung within a finger's breadth of four old faces, and the elders made polite conversation over the top of them and pretended that their appetite was for the meat.

When the food was all set down, the five stepped back to stand in a line against the wall beside the braziers, their hands folded in front of them over the hip-panels, their bare breasts lifted, their eyes lowered above the veils, while the old men ate.

Elder Xuan Wu sat among the four and counted his luck.

He had come down from Jinling only weeks ago with the taste of Yan Mei still on his tongue and the memory of her husband's hungry smile still fresh, and now here he was again at Lan's table, and tonight the rotation of service had set Yan Ling beside his chair. In past gatherings she had been given to other elders; tonight she was his.

He ate his pheasant and drank his wine and watched her from the corner of his eye, and every time she shifted her weight against the wall her high firm breasts moved a little, and he felt his cock thicken under his robes.

When the eating ended and the serious drinking began — the moment every man in the hall had been half-hard waiting for — Grand Elder Lan lifted one white-browed eye from his cup and nodded once.

The five beauties came forward and climbed onto the elders' laps.

Yan Ling mounted Xuan Wu's chair with a grace that was half practice and half visible embarrassment, kneeling up so that her bare breasts rose level with his mouth. She knew the rule. He knew the rule. His hands came up and gathered her tits, pressing them together until the pink nipples nearly touched, and he sucked.

She tipped her cup and poured the wine into the valley of her cleavage, and it ran down between her breasts in a shining stream and pooled at the nipples, and he drank it from her flesh, tongue and lips taking wine and woman in the same swallow.

Around the hall the same ritual bloomed. Li Ying had her brown hair gripped lightly while wine ran between her tits into another elder's mouth. Wang Yue's enormous breasts nearly drowned the cup's pour, her elder laughing into them like a man blessed.

Liu Ying endured a pinched nipple with a small sound she turned into a serving murmur. Li Na leaned in with her golden hair brushing an old cheek, looking almost like a daughter if you ignored the naked chest and the hard cock under her chained hip.

The wine ritual lasted longer than thirst required. Xuan Wu's hands never fully left Yan Ling's breasts even when he pretended to listen to a neighbor's comment about exam quotas. He sucked, released, squeezed, sucked again, mapping the exact weight and spring of flesh he had envied from afar during earlier banquets.

Yan Ling kept her face composed behind the veil's edge, pouring when commanded, breathing through the heat of it the way she breathed through meridian drills. Embarrassment was a spice now, not a poison. She could feel wetness gathering under the square hip-panels and hated that the other four would smell it on her if they stood too close.

The wine was sweet and strong, a spirit-fruit vintage from Lan's own cellars, and it ran warm over her skin and into Xuan Wu's mouth and back again when he kissed the valley of her breasts between swallows. His tongue was rough. His hands were large and greedy and very practiced. She poured when he tipped his chin, and held still when he sucked, and felt her nipples tighten under his lips until they ached.

Across the hall Liu Ying caught her eye above the veil for half a heartbeat — comrade, rival, fellow servant — and the look that passed between them was old and wordless and full of things neither of them would ever say aloud in daylight.

An elder two chairs down made a joke about the coming academy exams. The table laughed. Yan Ling poured more wine into her own cleavage and felt Xuan Wu drink it, and the wetness under her hip-panels spread until the silk stuck to her.

An hour of politics followed, spoken over the scent of breast and fermented fruit: entrance exams, sector allocations, which outer disciples might survive the first year. The women stood aside again afterward, nipples wet, thighs pressed tight, listening to men decide futures while their own futures had already been decided in this hall years ago.

When the elders rose to leave, none of them wanted to walk out with erections obvious under their robes. Grand Elder Lan offered no invitation to stay. They left anyway, disciplined by hierarchy if not by virtue, and the hall emptied until only Lan and his five half-naked disciples remained. He stood. They followed.

The bath mansion waited down a corridor of dark wood and dim light: a pool large enough for a dozen, water clouded with fragrant liquid that smelled of herbs and heat. Steam rose from its surface in slow white veins. Lan stopped at the shallow corner.

Yan Ling and Liu Ying stepped forward and undressed him with the efficiency of long practice — robe, sash, underlayer — until the Grand Elder's body stood bare and hard in the steam, his cock already risen in thick demand, heavy as a club, the head flushed dark. The other three stripped themselves. All five entered the water.

Soap found breasts. Breasts found skin.

Yan Ling took his front. Li Ying worked one flank. Liu Ying's soapy tits dragged down his back in long slow strokes. Lan stood in the shallows like a statue that breathed, enjoying young flesh against old power.

Yan Ling's thighs closed around his cock and rubbed, her pussy lips sliding along the shaft as she moved up and down, her tits crushed to his chest, her nipples scratching muscle that still put young male bodies to shame. Outside they were legends. Inside they were servants who clung like snakes and called it cultivation.

Liu Ying's purple hair floated on the fragrant surface around Lan's hips. Li Ying's brown eyes were half-lidded with concentration as she soaped the hard plane of his flank. Wang Yue pressed her enormous breasts against his other side and worked the soap in slow circles, her nipples dragging across his ribs.

Li Na, youngest and boldest in the water if not on the mountain paths, ducked under the surface and came up behind Yan Ling's thighs to soap the place where cock and pussy met, her golden hair streaming dark with water, her fingers deliberately brushing Yan Ling's clit as if by accident.

Yan Ling moved a little faster on Lan's shaft, and the friction of her lips along that thick length sent a pulse of heat up into her belly that she swallowed without a sound.

They knelt when the washing moved lower.

Yan Ling faced his erection — always huge, always hard when she looked at it — and wrapped both hands around the shaft. Her tongue found the head. Liu Ying slid in from the side and licked along the length toward the heavy balls.

Two beautiful mouths fought politely for the same cock, saliva and precum mixing into shining strings that connected tongue to tip whenever they pulled back for air. Lan watched from above with the calm of a man who had fucked countless women across a lifespan measured in realms, not years. These five were stunning. Against him they were still amateurs. He enjoyed amateurs.

At the pool's edge the other three stood in water to their thighs, watching Yan Ling and Liu Ying.

Yan Ling focused on the cockhead, licking the precum as it beaded. Liu Ying worked the shaft and the hairy sac beneath. Wet sounds filled the fragrant steam. Lan's hands finally tightened in their hair. His cock pulsed.

Thick semen flooded Yan Ling's mouth faster than she could swallow; it overflowed her lips and spilled down her chin into the pool. She drank what she could. When he finished, she released him, and Liu Ying licked the rest clean until the massive cock shone — and still stood rock-hard, ready for more.

Grand Elder Lan looked down at his two kneeling disciples, at the three beauties beyond, and smiled the devilish smile that had made a mountain peak into a private garden of flesh.

"Enough rest," he said mildly, as if announcing tea.

The night, for them, was only beginning. The pool's shallow corner still held heat. His cock still stood like a pillar that had not noticed climax. Yan Ling and Liu Ying already knew, from a hundred previous nights, that a single load in a mouth was only the opening stroke of his appetite. They stayed kneeling in the water, waiting for hands to lift them, arrange them, use them.

Steam rose. Somewhere beyond the bath mansion, outer sect disciples cultivated under cold stars and dreamed of catching a veiled glimpse of these peak goddesses on a festival day.

Yan Ling, once proud enough to terrify branch-family bullies on her little brother's behalf, rested her tongue briefly against the still-hard tip of her master's cock. Training had many names. This one tasted like semen and fragrant herbs and the quiet knowledge that her little brother in Jinling still imagined her as a sword hanging protectively over his head.

She was a sword.

Liu Ying's mouth found the side of Lan's cock that Yan Ling had left shining, and the two of them worked him together in the steam without speaking, the way they had learned to work him over a hundred nights: one on the head, one on the shaft, trading places when he twitched, never fighting, always sharing.

Li Ying and Wang Yue and Li Na watched from the edge. Lan's white beard dripped fragrant water. His hand rested on Yan Ling's wet black hair with something that was almost fondness, the way a man rests a hand on a favorite blade.

She thought of her letters home. Eat properly. Stop embarrassing the family. Train harder. She thought of Chi'er walking the streets of Jinling with his new strength and his old tender heart, and she did not think of what she was doing with her mouth, because thinking of both at once was a kind of pain she had trained herself out of years ago.

She was also, in this pool, a sheath.

On the mountain, Yan Ling swallowed the last bitter-sweet ghost of her master's cum and lifted her eyes for the next order. Liu Ying's shoulder brushed hers under the water — comrade, rival, fellow tongue. Grand Elder Lan's shadow fell across both their bare backs as he reached down.

---

Yan Chi lay awake between his twin maids for a long time after they had fallen asleep.

The master ring on his finger pulsed faintly with their two heartbeats. Through it he could feel the warm, drowsy, contented hum of their lust worms, quiet for the night. He thought of Dongyu's voice saying a woman, and of Qiuyu's stiff shoulders when she heard the word Pavilion, and of the way both of them had scrubbed him until the jasmine was gone. Possessive, loyal, and his. And now slotted into a skill that would pay him if anyone else ever touched them again.

The lamp had been pinched out, and the only light in the room came from a thin silver thread of moon through the shutter, lying across the quilt and across Dongyu's bare shoulder. The room smelled of cedar and soap and the clean sweat of sleeping women. In the eaves a gecko clicked twice and went quiet. Qiuyu's hand lay open on his chest, her fingers twitching with some dream, and her breath stirred the fine hairs below his collarbone.

He opened the skill window in the dark and looked at the four glowing names.

[Cuckold Partner — Slots] [1. Dongyu] [2. Qiuyu] [3. Yan Mei] [4. Cao Ning] [Current earnings: 0]

Zero. The trap was set and empty. He closed it and stared at the ceiling beams above him, and let his mind run ahead into tomorrow. City streets, accidents, arrangements. Anything that put a listed woman into other men's eyes while he breathed nearby and collected the runoff. Twenty points would become two hundred. Two hundred would become two thousand. The wheel had mocked him with a legendary name, and he intended to make the mockery expensive.

He thought of Cao Ning's bare ass bent over in the shallows, and of the five hundred points that had printed gold in front of his eyes, and of the way Wang Xuan's face had looked when they shared that one silent glance. He thought of his mother walking ahead of him in the garden clothes his father bought her, and of the guards' eyes on her, and of how the skill would have paid him for that if he had had it then.

He thought of Elder Chang, and of Cao Ning's pink ears on the willow road when she said he's very thorough, and of the hazy end of an afternoon she would not describe, and he filed that thought away in a dark corner where he did not look at it.

Twenty points, and the fifth stage. A legendary skill that half of him still wanted to spit on.

He turned his head and kissed the crown of Qiuyu's hair, then Dongyu's, and closed his eyes.