The Crawling Race

Before the start, a second attendant walked down the line with a lantern on a pole and checked each slave's plug, as the rules demanded, so that no master could later claim his slave had been cheated by a loose fitting.

He did it with the bored professionalism of a man who had checked a thousand plugs, crouching behind each woman in turn, holding his lantern low, and tapping the base of each toy once with a gloved finger to make sure it sat firm. The red-haired beauty did not even twitch.

Fengrui's brown-haired slave let out a small composed breath. When the attendant crouched behind Yan Mei and held his light close to the jewel between her white cheeks, the crowd went silent, so silent that Yan Chi heard the faint wet sound the base made when the gloved finger pressed it, and heard Yan Mei's breath catch under the veil.

The attendant's eyebrows lifted above his mask. He tapped again, a little harder, as if he could not quite believe what he was feeling, and the plug did not move at all. Then he stood, cleared his throat, and announced to the crowd that all three were properly seated.

Somebody laughed. Somebody else said, "Properly? That one's seated like a temple pillar," and the laughter spread down the rails.

Yan Mei kept her head bowed and her hands flat on the wood, and the thread of qi she had wrapped around the toy since the carriage held as steady as silk on a loom.

The three of them went down onto their hands and knees together, and the crowd behind them made a sound like a wave breaking.

From behind, it was an obscene display. Three bare asses lifted toward the crowd in a row, each one a different shape of perfect: the red-haired beauty's high and tight and dusted with freckles at the top of the cheeks, the brown-haired slave's slender and pale with the narrow band of cloth running down her crack to the base of her plug, and in the middle, larger and rounder and creamier than either, Yan Mei's.

On all fours her ass spread of its own weight. The cheeks parted enough to show the full jeweled base of her plug seated in its pink ring, and below it the sky-blue scrap of silk had pulled taut between her thighs and sunk into the wet seam of her cunt so deeply that it might as well have been painted on.

Her plump lips bulged on either side of it, bare and swollen and glossy. Her breasts hung heavily beneath her, the gold suns dangling, the fine chains to her collar drawn tight by the angle. Her veil hung down from her face like a curtain. Her thighs were thick and full and trembled slightly on the wood.

"Heavens," somebody said behind Yan Chi, very reverently, and somebody else said "Shut up and look."

Yan Chi did not need the instruction. He had wormed through to the second row with his tray held high like a shield, and from there he had a view straight down the middle track at the woman who had carried the body he wore, and he understood, in the clean, simple way that cocks understand things, why the Pervert System had put her on a list.

The attendant raised a red silk flag. The crowd counted it down with him, three, two, one, and the flag fell.

The red-haired beauty sprang forward like a hound off a leash. She had done this before, plainly, and she moved with a crawler's craft: hands flat, knees close, hips low and steady so that the ruby in her ass barely shifted, the gold plates on her nipples swinging in small tight arcs.

Within a body's length she had a clear lead. Fengrui's brown-haired slave set off more carefully, back flat as a table, every movement small and controlled, her brown hair falling forward over one shoulder and the band of cloth between her cheeks tugging her plug with each shift of her weight. Twice the crowd gasped as the band pulled, and twice the plug held.

Yan Mei went slowly, because she was not built for this, and it showed. Her body was made for silk robes and high tables and the slow dignified walk of a clan matriarch, and on all fours it became something else entirely, all heavy rolling curves, every motion of her limbs sending a ripple through flesh that had never been asked to crawl.

Her breasts swung beneath her with each forward reach, the gold suns bouncing, the fine chains snapping taut and slack. Her wide hips rocked side to side. Her ass rolled and jiggled with every knee she put forward, the two great cheeks shifting against each other around the jewel, and with every shift the plug pressed and eased inside her, and Yan Chi saw her fingers curl on the wood.

She was holding it with her qi; he could feel it, a thin bright thread of power wrapped around the toy, but she could not make it hold still.

The crowd moaned at every jiggle. A man near the start line had his cock out in his fist and was pumping it in time with her hips.

"Look at it bounce," someone groaned. "Look at that ass bounce."

"She's losing," said someone else happily.

"Who cares?"

The sky-blue silk between her legs had become useless. With every forward knee the scrap shifted against her lips and sank deeper, and by the hump in the middle of the track, the silk had darkened from sky-blue to the color of a summer storm and a slow thread of her wetness had started to run down the inside of one thigh, glittering in the lantern light.

The men at the side rails leaned so far over to see it that one of them knocked a gold bell from its post. Yan Mei heard the bell fall and the crowd laugh and felt the heat of all those eyes along the inside of her thighs like a dozen tongues.

Her cunt clenched hard around nothing. The plug shifted. She bit her lip under the veil, reached forward with one hand, and kept crawling.

[Cuckold Partner: +40 Pervert Points — listed woman displayed to a crowd in a public slave race.]

The window flashed across Yan Chi's sight and his knees almost went. Forty points for a crawl, and the race was only half done.

The red-haired beauty crossed the red line first, by three full lengths, and sat back on her heels with her hands on her thighs and a triumphant little smile while the crowd cheered her. Fengrui's brown-haired slave crossed second, back still flat, plug still seated, and bowed her head with dignified satisfaction when her master clapped.

Yan Mei came over the line last and slowest, breasts swinging, thighs glossy, the jewel still winking from its place between her cheeks, and the crowd cheered her loudest of all, because every man in the hall had been watching her and not the race.

Wang Fengrui threw up his ringed hands. "Unlucky, Patriarch! Unlucky! But rules are rules. The city lord's slave won."

"Rules are rules," Yan Tian agreed. He did not sound like a man who had lost anything.

Zhang Haotian stepped forward, rolling up the crimson sleeve of his right arm. The forearm beneath was heavily muscled and scarred along the outer edge from some old fight, and his hand, when he flexed it, was the size of a serving plate. The crowd around the finish line drew back into a ragged circle without being asked.

Waitresses stopped moving. Wine went undrunk. The city lord looked down at the woman kneeling on the red line, at the bowed veil and the swaying gold suns and the vast white curve of her ass, and he smiled.

"Head down," he said. "Hips up."

She did as he said. She lowered her chest until her breasts pressed flat against the cool wood and the gold plates clicked on it, rested her masked cheek on her folded forearms, and lifted her hips high, so that her spine curved into a deep valley and her ass rose into the lantern light like an offering. Her knees parted a little to steady herself. The sky-blue silk pulled tighter. The jewel shone. Yan Mei's back rose and fell in slow, deliberate breaths.

Zhang laid his palm against her right cheek first, not hitting, only resting it there, and squeezed. Pale flesh welled between his thick fingers. He took his time with it, kneading slowly as a baker works dough, testing the weight and the warmth and the way it gave and sprang back, and then he slid his hand over to the left cheek and did the same, his thumb passing so close to the base of the plug that Yan Mei's whole body twitched.

The crowd made a low hungry noise. Yan Chi gripped his tray so hard the lacquer creaked.

Then Zhang lifted his hand and brought it down.

Smack!

The sound cracked across the hall like a whip. Her right cheek jumped and rippled outward from the point of impact in a wave that Yan Chi felt in his own teeth, and a wide red handprint bloomed on the white skin as if painted there by a brush. Yan Mei's head jerked up off her forearms and a sharp cry came out of her through the veil. The plug held. The crowd roared.

Zhang rubbed the mark slowly with his palm, spreading the sting until her hips squirmed against his hand, and spoke to her quietly, almost kindly. "One."

Smack!

The second landed on the left cheek with the same weight and the same terrible care, and this time her cry was louder, and broke at the end into a moan she could not hold back.

Her thighs shook. A fresh wet shine spread on the silk between them, and the men at the front could see it, and one of them said "She likes it," in a voice of pure wonder, and the city lord laughed low in his chest.

"Two."

He let her wait for the third. He let her wait long enough that the silence became part of it, his big hand hovering over the curve of her ass where she could feel its heat without its touch, long enough that her breath went short and fast and the crowd leaned in.

Then Zhang brought it down across the center of both cheeks at once, hard, the edge of his palm landing just above the base of the plug.

SMACK!

Yan Mei screamed into her forearms. The jewel bucked in her ass. Her whole lower body shuddered, a full long tremor that ran from the small of her back to the backs of her knees, and a little gush of wetness darkened the silk and dripped from its lowest edge onto the wood between her thighs.

Both cheeks glowed now, two red handprints and a third laid across them like a seal, and she stayed exactly where she was, head down and hips high, panting into her own arms.

[Cuckold Partner: +90 Pervert Points — listed woman spanked in public by another man.]

[Pervert Points: 160]

The crowd broke into applause, the way a crowd applauds a skilled performance at an opera, and Zhang Haotian took a small mock bow and rolled his sleeve back down over his forearm. Then he bent, close to Yan Mei's veiled ear, so close that only she and a waiter with very sharp cultivator's hearing two steps away could have caught it.

"Three, because those were the rules," the city lord murmured. "Next time I will not stop at three."

He straightened up, nodded to Yan Tian with the courtesy of one great man to another, and walked back to collect his red-haired winner, who rose from her heels and pressed herself against his side and looked back over her shoulder at Yan Mei.

Yan Tian walked forward and took up his slave's chain from the attendant.

He did not help her up. He did not need to. He gave the chain one small tug, the kind a rider gives a rein, and Yan Mei pushed herself up off the wood, first onto her hands, then back onto her heels, and finally to her feet in her sky-blue slippers, slowly, with the deliberate grace of a woman refusing to let her knees shake in public.

Her thighs were wet to the knee. The scrap of silk clung to her, soaked dark. When she turned to follow her husband, the whole crowd at the finish line got the view it had been hoping for: three red handprints glowing on her milky ass, hot and raised and spreading, framing the jewel of her plug like a gilded setting around a stone.

She walked away from them with her chin up and her hips swaying exactly as they had swayed when she entered the hall, and the handprints moved with her.

Behind her, the crowd sighed like men watching a feast being carried back to the kitchen.

Yan Chi drew back into the press with his tray and let the bodies carry him a few paces before he trusted his face. His heart was going like a drum. His cock was going harder than the drum, leaking now, a dark wet spot spreading on the cotton in his crotch window where any waitress who glanced down could see it.

One of them did, a young woman with a jade stud in the leather strap between her breasts, and she smiled at the stain and then at his mask and then walked on without a word. He did not care. He was busy reading numbers.

A hundred and thirty points in less time than it took to burn a stick of incense, and his mother had not even been touched by a cock yet.

He had done the arithmetic in the back of his head a hundred times since the breakthrough to the fifth stage and two greedy spins of the roulette had drained his balance to almost nothing. Thirty points was poverty.

Thirty points was a cultivator one bad week away from being nobody again, with the rest of the Qi Refining stages stacked in front of him like a mountain he had been climbing on his hands and knees. Now, in a single crawl and three slaps, he had more than quintupled it.

He looked across the floor at his mother's back, at the chain in his father's hand and the red handprints moving away into the lantern light, and the part of him that had been a lonely, horny, ordinary man on Earth whispered that this was wrong, and the part of him that had been reborn into a demonic clan with a lecherous System glued to his soul whispered back that wrong was the most profitable word in any language.

If a race and a spanking pay this much, what does the rest of the night pay?

He found out almost at once that he was not the only person whose night had been changed.

"Steward Han!"

Wang Xuan arrived at his elbow with his mother-slave in tow and his greasy face shining with sweat and delight under the mask. The fat young master took a cup off Yan Chi's tray without asking, drained it, put it back empty, and took another.

"Did you see that? Did you see that? Heavens and hells, brother, I've been coming to these since I was old enough to walk into the hall on my own feet, and I have never seen an ass like that in my life. Did you see it bounce? When the city lord hit it, it bounced like a pudding on a cart."

"I saw," said Yan Chi, in the flattest waiter's voice he owned.

"Your—" Wang Xuan caught himself, glanced around, lowered his voice to a whisper that would have carried across a temple courtyard. "The patriarch. I swear he's been keeping secrets. Where does a man even find a slave like that? She looks like—" He stopped again, and his eyes went across the floor to where Yan Tian and his slave were rejoining the VIP circle, and for a moment the delight on his face flickered into something more uncertain.

Then he shook his head hard enough to wobble his chins. "No. I'm drunk. She just has the figure. Plenty of women have that figure." He looked again. "Not many, though."

"Not many," Yan Chi agreed.

"I'd give a whole warehouse for a night with her." Wang Xuan sighed wistfully and patted his mother-slave on the head as though consoling himself with a lesser dog. The kneeling woman stayed where she was.

"Her daughter's in my father's alcove, did I tell you? Keeping warm for later. I'm going to put them on the sofa together after midnight and have them kiss each other while I watch. It's going to be glorious." His eyes slid back toward Yan Mei's ass across the floor, and his voice sank to a covetous mutter. "Not that glorious, though."

He wandered off toward the circle without waiting for an answer, already shoving his mother-slave forward with the chain, and Yan Chi let out a slow breath.

Across the floor, at the center of the VIP circle, Yan Mei had taken her place at her husband's side again, her hands folded in front of her and her spine straight. Her breath had steadied. Her ass was still burning.

She could feel each of the three handprints separately, the right and the left and the great broad one across the middle, pulsing in time with her heart, and beneath them she could feel the plug, still seated where she had held it with a thread of qi the whole length of the track, warm now with her body's heat and every slight movement of her hips nudging it against a place inside her that made her thighs want to press together.

She had not dropped it. That small pride sat in her chest beside the shame and refused to leave.

She had lost. She had come last by a wide margin in front of half the merchant elite of Jinling, crawled with her ass in the air and her cunt soaking through her silk, and then she had been spanked like a disobedient maid by a man who sat across from her husband at council and called her Lady Yan with a perfect bow.

She looked up at her husband through the blue silk of her mask.

Yan Tian was looking at her already. He did not smile. He did not need to. The lacquer hid most of his face, but she could see his eyes, and she knew that look from twenty years of marriage, from their wedding night and from a hundred nights since, from the secret corners of their life together that nobody else in Jinling would ever know.

It was the look he gave her when she had pleased him very much. He moved his thumb along the chain once more, slowly, from one link to the next.

"A good start," Fengrui announced to the circle, patting his round belly as if he had eaten well. His brown-haired slave stood at his side with her plug still seated and her strips of cloth framing her bare breasts, accepting quiet compliments from the merchants on her clean second-place crawl with a gracious nod. "A very good start. But races are for children. Shall we move on to something more interesting, gentlemen?"

"You always have something more interesting," said Xu Jie dryly, his long face unmoved. "It always costs someone else."

"That," said Fengrui, beaming, "is the definition of interesting."

The circle laughed and began to move toward the next stage, the raised platform with the two lacquered boxes, where a thin masked organizer in black and silver was already setting out four small numbered plates of jade on a tray.

The merchants went first in a loose knot, then the city lord with his red-haired winner, then Fengrui and his son, and last of all Yan Tian with his slave walking a step behind and to the left as a well-trained slave should, her chain gleaming, her gold suns swinging, three red handprints glowing on her ass for the whole hall to see.

Yan Chi took up the jug, refilled his tray, and followed them through the crowd at a waiter's discreet distance. His cock throbbed against the silk window with every step. His points sat in the corner of his vision like a lamp in a dark window.

[Status Window] [Name: Yan Chi] [Status: Aroused] [Cultivation: Qi Refining — 5th Stage] [Pervert Points: 160]

He closed it with a thought and kept walking. The night was young, his mother was walking toward a lottery table on his father's chain, and the tray stayed level on his palm.