Breeze in the Garden

Beyond the colonnade the afternoon had gone a deep honey colour. Bees worked the flowering shrubs along the path, and the fountain at the centre of the garden threw up a fine mist that caught the light and turned briefly into small rainbows before it fell. Gravel crunched under the guards' boots, and the sound kept a slow steady beat for the walk.

Yan Chi stayed in the shadows of the colonnade, twenty paces back, and felt Cuckold Partner sitting in his soul like a second pulse. Thirty points was nothing. Confirmation was everything. He needed more. He needed the skill to print numbers while he slept. He needed, filthy and honest, for someone else to put their hands on the women whose names glowed gold behind his eyes.

The golden chains at her waist chimed faintly as she walked. Afternoon light through the garden lattice painted stripes across the bare curves of her breasts and the deep hollow of her spine. Yan Chi's cock pressed hard against his trousers.

From the colonnade he could smell the garden, cut grass and plum and the sweetish tang of crushed marigold where somebody's heel had bruised a bed of them. A bee blundered into the stripes of light between two pillars, hovered, and went away again. He stood very still, because moving felt like making a noise.

The Earth soul in him catalogued every detail with greedy precision: the way the side-panels clung when she turned a corner, the flush at the tops of her breasts where the silk did not reach, the two guards' failed discipline. The inherited heart in him remembered fever nights when this same woman had sat by his bed and wiped his forehead with a cool cloth. Both hearts beat in the same chest. Both watched her walk.

In the garden, little cousins and branch-family children played without care among stone paths and low flowering shrubs. Yan Mei saw them, smiled the warm maternal smile that still belonged to her — the smile Yan Chi's inherited heart remembered from fever nights and weak childhood mornings — and approached.

The older children bowed with proper fear of the clan leader's wife. The small ones kept playing, too young to understand beauty as danger. She bent down to speak to the ones sitting in the grass, voice gentle, asking who had won the last race around the fountain.

One little boy in a dusty tunic pointed proudly at himself. A girl with her hair in twin buns argued that she had won, and that he had cheated by cutting across the flower bed.

Yan Mei laughed — a real laugh, warm and unguarded, the laugh that belonged to the mother and not to the exhibitionist — and settled the dispute with the solemnity of a magistrate, awarding both of them a barley-sugar from the pouch at her hip.

The children cheered. The guards behind her did not cheer. They were watching the way the side-panels of her hip-cloths had ridden up when she crouched, baring the lower curves of both buttocks to the afternoon air, and they were dying a little with every second of it.

She stayed down on her heels a moment longer, one palm flat on the grass, while the girl with the twin buns explained the rules of the race, and the chains at her waist slid forward and pooled against her thighs with a faint clink. A few of the older children giggled at the guards' faces without understanding the joke.

The bend presented her ass like an offering.

The back cloth was already shrinking into her crack. A slow breeze from the left caught the panel and flipped it aside with the casual cruelty of weather. One full white buttock — perfect, round, yielding enough to make a man forget cultivation — came into clear view for the two guards standing behind her.

The other cheek remained half-veiled, which somehow made the bare one worse. They froze. Hands twitched at their sides. Pants tented in obvious, humiliating lines. Before either could commit suicide-by-touching, Yan Mei straightened and glanced back.

The guards jerked their stances, trying to hide the bulges with shifts of weight that fooled no one who had ever been a man. One coughed. One stared at a tree as if dendrology had suddenly become urgent.

The shorter guard pressed his palm flat against the front of his trousers as if he were checking for a coin and then snatched it away. The taller one's neck had gone red to the ears. Neither of them looked at the other, and for a few moments the only sounds in the garden were the fountain and the high bright voices of the children arguing over who would be the fox.

The glance was not accidental. She had felt the cloth flip. She had felt the air on her bare cheek. She had felt, through Heavenly-realm senses she could never quite turn off, the spike of lust in the two auras behind her, sharp as knives.

Her pussy answered with a fresh slick pulse that soaked the tiny scrap between her thighs.

Yan Mei's cheeks warmed. She knew. Of course she knew. Wetness answered knowledge. She turned back to the children with her smile still in place and finished her gentle words while her pussy clenched on nothing and her pulse beat in the tips of her barely covered breasts.

For a heartbeat, standing there in the garden with children's voices around her and two hard cocks behind her that she could feel without looking, Yan Mei felt the full shape of what she had become. Heavenly Realm first. Clan leader's wife. Mother of Yan Chi and Yan Ling. And also, now, a woman who grew wet when guards stared at her bare ass in front of children. The two truths lived in the same body.

She only smiled at the little girl with the twin buns and asked whether she wanted another barley-sugar, and felt her pussy clench again when one of the guards shifted his weight behind her with a sound that was almost a groan.

Yan Chi saw the whole thing from the shadowed walk.

[Ding!] [10 Pervert Points rewarded from exposure activity of a listed woman.]

Ten points. He almost laughed out loud. He bit it back. The two escorting guards were still adjusting their robes and pretending to study architecture; his mother was still speaking gently to a child about who had won the fountain race; and somewhere in the invisible machinery of his soul a legendary skill had just paid him for standing still.

He checked his status without opening a full window. Thirty points, fifth stage, four slots glowing. The arithmetic of his future rearranged itself around that single ten like iron filings around a lodestone.

Only ten — a trickle compared to Cao Ning's lake-bank fortune — but the trickle proved the pipe was connected. He had done nothing. He had only watched. The skill worked exactly as written — listed woman, perverted exposure context, someone else's eyes on flesh that should have been private — and paid him for breathing in the right direction.

A small number, and a huge confirmation. An evil smile found his mouth without permission. Plans unfolded behind his eyes in rapid filthy sketches: arrangements, accidents, invitations, hallway "chance" meetings, anything that put Yan Mei or Cao Ning or the twins into other men's hands while his slots drank the runoff like thirsty roots.

He thought of Cao Ning's lake bank and the five hundred points. He thought of the twins in Han Fei's bed and the rage-lust that had nearly broken him. He thought of his mother on the gambling-house floor under Elder Li's hands while his father watched. All of that had paid him before the skill existed, in ordinary pervert points for what he saw.

Now the skill would pay him for what he did not even have to see. The difference was the difference between hunting with a spear and setting a snare. He intended to become very good at snares.

Twenty plus ten made thirty — still poor, still smiling. He kept following.

Minutes later the little procession reached a broad hall with double doors and two additional guards posted like statues. Those gate guards opened for Yan Mei alone — wife of the patriarch, Heavenly beauty, woman whose presence needed no announcement — and shut the lacquered wood in Yan Chi's face with polite finality.

The two escorting guards remained outside. Yan Chi could not follow. Imagination tried to paint the interior: father, elders, politics, perhaps clothes coming off if Yan Tian's new hunger was running the meeting. Imagination failed into frustrated static.

He lingered a useless minute with his ear near wood that refused to help, then left with his ten new points and his smile, already hunting the next opening elsewhere in the city of his appetite.

He walked the outer courts first, past the training grounds where junior disciples were still sweating through spear forms in the late afternoon heat, past the kitchens where the smell of roasting spirit-pork rolled out into the lane, past the side gate that led toward the city. Nowhere offered him another listed woman in another man's hands.

Under the practice-ground wall a row of wooden dummies stood scarred and splintered, their padded arms wrapped in strips of cloth gone grey with sweat. An instructor with a bamboo switch walked behind the line of spear-wielders, tapping a back here and a wrist there without a word, and the juniors straightened as the switch went by and sagged again when it had passed.

The heat lay on the courtyard like a damp hand, and the smell of the kitchens rolled across it, pork fat and star anise and scorched rice.

The twins were in his courtyard, probably. Cao Ning was across the city. His mother was behind a shut door. He stood in the shade of a spirit-pine near the outer wall and opened Cuckold Partner's window just to look at the four glowing names and the single line of earnings: ten points.

He closed it again. Patience, he told himself. The skill was a snare, and snares worked while the hunter slept. He did not feel patient. He felt poor and hungry and newly certain of the shape of his path.

He did not go straight back to his courtyard. He walked out through the side gate instead, into the late-afternoon streets of the Yan district, and let the city noise wash over him while his mind turned the ten-point confirmation over and over like a coin.

Jinling at this hour was a living thing. Outer disciples hurried toward evening lessons. Merchant carts rattled over the cobbles with the day's last deliveries. A woman in demonic fashion — split skirt, bare hip, gold at her throat — crossed the street ahead of him and earned him nothing, because she was nobody, and the System's theology had never been clearer. He watched her go anyway, out of habit, and then looked away. Random beauty was dust. Listed beauty was gold.

The smell of the evening cooked itself out of every doorway, charcoal and chili oil and boiled millet, and from an upper window somebody was practising a flute, the same four notes again and again, never quite arriving at the fifth.

He bought a skewer of grilled spirit-eel from a stall near the canal and ate it leaning on the bridge rail, watching the water go by. Thirty points, fifth stage, four slots. The eel was hot and oily and good.

The stall keeper was a stooped woman with a scarred forearm and a voice like a rusted hinge, and she turned the skewers over a trough of coals with a pair of bamboo tongs while the fat spat and flared. The paper she wrapped his in was still warm. A boy on the far side of the bridge was selling lanterns shaped like carp, red and gold, hung from a pole so that they swayed over the water like a school of small lazy suns.

He thought about finding Wang Xuan and asking what the merchant heir knew about opportunities — parties, gatherings, anything that put beautiful women into other men's hands in rooms Yan Chi could enter. Wang Xuan would understand the question even if Yan Chi dressed it as curiosity. Wang Xuan understood almost everything that had to do with lust and gold.

He almost turned toward the merchant quarter then. The sun was still above the western roofs. He could be at Wang Xuan's gate before full dark. He could sit on the fatty's sofa and drink his wine and ask, carefully, whether there were any gatherings tonight worth a young master's eyes.

He did not. Something in him — caution, or the leftover jasmine of the Pavilion, or the simple animal sense that the night was already moving without him — turned his feet back toward the Yan mansion instead. He would find Wang Xuan tomorrow.

The canal had turned the colour of old brass, and a man with a long pole was lighting the lamps along its edge one by one, working his way down the bank without hurrying. Their reflections wavered in the water. Boats rocked at their moorings with a slow wooden creak, and somewhere a woman called a child in to supper.

Further along the bank an old man sat on an overturned crate mending a fishing net by the light of the new lamps, working a wooden needle through the knots, and a boy beside him held the loose end taut with both hands and yawned until his jaw cracked. A string of paper lanterns bobbed across the water on a moored pleasure-boat, and the first notes of a lute drifted off it, tentative, still being tuned.

Tonight he would sleep on thirty points and a legendary skill and the memory of his mother's bare ass in a garden breeze, and he would dream, filthy and filial and hungry, of snares.

A pair of city guards walked past on patrol. One of them glanced at Yan Chi, recognized the Yan young master who had beaten his cousin in the courtyard, and nodded with a respect that still felt new. Yan Chi nodded back. He finished the eel, wiped his fingers on the paper, and walked home through streets that were beginning to light their lanterns.

By the time he reached the mansion gates the sky was the color of a bruise, and the lanterns along the inner halls were already lit.