There was one more thing to check. He almost didn't. His body certainly didn't want to; his arm hung at his side like a wet towel, heavy and unwilling. But his mind had always been the stubborn one, even in his old life—the part of him that opened the document at three in the morning when everything else wanted to sleep—and it pushed his hand back up.
Title. Titles in web novels usually came with effects. Bonuses. A little luck, a little charm. Maybe The King of Soft Rice came with something good. Women's favor. Wealth that fell from the sky. Anything.
He touched it.
> [ Title: The King of Soft Rice ]
>
> Description: The holder of this title cannot have sex with any woman until the Cuckold Bar is filled.
>
> Special Note: The holder may enjoy a woman's body freely, but may not put it in. Should the holder's cock penetrate a woman before the Cuckold Bar is filled, it will be sealed for one (1) year.
>
> [ Cuckold Bar: 0% ]
Beneath it, a long thin bar stretched across the bottom of the panel, delicately bordered in gold, completely and perfectly empty.
Liu Mang looked at it for a very long time.
Somewhere out on the avenue, the oil seller was still chanting. A dog yelped. The cicadas droned on in the willows. The world kept turning, and he stood in the shade of the arch and felt it turn without him, and from somewhere very deep inside him there rose a sadness so total and so pure that it seemed to belong not just to him but to the entire world.
Twenty-eight years.
Twenty-eight years without a girlfriend. Without a first date. Without a first kiss. Twenty-eight years of other people's love stories, read on a cracked phone screen in a room with a window that faced a wall. And then he had died and been judged and been thrown into a river and woken up in a body that looked like this—young, beautiful, the kind of face women dropped handkerchiefs for—with a wife. A real wife. A legal, lawful, living woman who was supposed to share his bed.
For about two minutes, standing at that pillar, a small, shameful, hopeful part of him had already started making plans.
The system had just taken those plans, folded them neatly, and filed them away under later.
He could touch. He could look. He could—his mind skated helplessly over the possibilities, his face heating—he could put his hands on her, his mouth on her, he could do every single thing except the one thing. The moment his cock slid into a woman, it would be sealed. A full year. Locked up like his precious Skill of Author.
And to unlock it, he had to fill a bar.
With cuckold points.
He did not want to think too hard about how a man earned cuckold points. He had a terrible feeling he already knew.
"Lord Yama," he said hoarsely to the empty air, "I take it back. You are as bad as I think. You're worse."
The panel did not answer. After a moment, as if it had decided he had seen enough, it shrank down into a tiny glowing point at the corner of his vision and dimmed, waiting.
That was when he heard the hoofbeats.
They came from up the avenue, from the direction of the inner city, and at first he did not register them. Horses were nothing unusual on City Gate Avenue. But these were moving fast—too fast for a street packed shoulder to shoulder—and the rhythm of them was hard and urgent and clean, the sound of a warhorse at a gallop, iron shoes striking stone like a drumroll.
And the noise of the crowd changed.
He heard it before he saw it: a ripple of sound running down the avenue toward him. Shouts. A clatter of baskets being snatched up. Someone yelling get out of the way, get out of the way!—not angry, but frightened. The oil seller's chant stopped dead in the middle of a word.
Then the crowd split.
It did not part politely, the way it had for the sect disciples. It tore—porters diving to one side, women yanking their children into doorways, a food carrier abandoning his whole shoulder pole in the middle of the street so that pork buns went rolling across the hot stone. The bustle of City Gate Avenue emptied out of the center of the road in the space of three heartbeats, as if a great invisible hand had swept it aside.
And down the cleared road came a horse.
It was a tall, deep-chested beast, blood-bay, its coat dark with sweat and gleaming like oiled bronze in the sun. Foam flecked its bit. Its hooves threw sparks.
On its back sat a woman.
Liu Mang only took her in all at once, as a single blow: a valiant, upright figure with a straight spine and a high chin, the reins gathered easily in one hand. Coiled in the other was a long whip, black and supple, its tail twitching against the horse's flank like the tail of a cat about to pounce.
She pulled up hard, ten paces from the arch.
The horse reared, shrieking, iron hooves pawing the air above the stones—and came down again, and stood blowing, and she did not so much as sway in the saddle.
Then she turned her head and looked at him.
Her eyes were fierce. That was the first word that came to him and the only one that fit. Not angry, not cold—fierce, the way a hawk's eyes are fierce, the way a drawn blade is fierce. Beautiful eyes. Terrible eyes. They found him in the shade of the arch and pinned him to the pillar as surely as if she had thrown a spear.
He felt it in his body before he understood it in his mind. Something in this flesh—some deep, old animal memory belonging to the real Li Yuguo—recognized that gaze and flinched. His shoulders hunched up toward his ears on their own. His knees bent a fraction. His stomach dropped and his spine went cold, all in the same instant, a full-body reflex so practiced and so complete that it was clearly the product of years. Of many, many lessons.
The woman smiled.
It was a half-smile. Just one corner of her mouth, curling up, slow and pleasant.
"My dear husband," she said. Her voice was low and clear and very calm, and it carried across the silent avenue without effort. "You want to sneak out again..."
Her mouth was smiling.
Her eyes were full of murder.
The look in them went straight through Liu Mang and froze him to the marrow, colder than any river.
He knew her.
Of course he knew her. He had written her.
Nalan Meng.
The ninth daughter of the Third Prince.
The name surfaced in his memory with everything attached to it—not just his own notes, scribbled at a plywood desk, but something else layered beneath them. The real Li Yuguo's memories, perhaps, seeping up through this body like groundwater. Liu Mang knew the facts the way the author knew them, and he felt them the way the husband did.
The Third Prince of Haotian Kingdom was called General Changsheng—the Ever-Victorious. He had spent his whole life at war, fighting for the throne on the southern borders and the northern ones, and he had never once lost a campaign that mattered. He had nine children. All nine were excellent in the martial arts. All nine had been raised in army camps instead of palaces, had learned to ride before they could properly walk, had been handed real swords at an age when other noble children were handed calligraphy brushes.
And of the nine, the most terrifying was the youngest.
Nalan Meng was nineteen years old.
At nineteen, she had already made a name for herself on the battlefield—not a name earned by riding behind her father's banner, but one carved into the memory of the enemy. The soldiers who had fought beside her called her one thing. The soldiers who had fought against her, the few who survived, called her the same thing in a whisper.
Luo Sha Nv.
The Rakshasa Woman. The female demon who eats men.
Before she was twenty, she had already reached a level of martial strength that most warriors in the Haotian Kingdom did not touch in a lifetime of training. Liu Mang could feel the edge of it even now, from ten paces away: a faint, steady pressure in the air around her, like the weight that had pressed down on him in Lord Yama's hall but younger and sharper and pointed. Her Qi did not drift. It sat coiled in her like the whip in her hand, ready.
And her husband—
Her husband was the famous King of Soft Rice. Li Yuguo.
Who had been practicing martial arts for ten years.
And had not made one step of progress.
Liu Mang felt that one in his body too. He reached inward, almost without meaning to, the way you probe a sore tooth with your tongue—and for the first time he felt this body's meridians. The fine channels running through the flesh, which in a true cultivator should hum with Qi like a river in spring flood. In Li Yuguo, they were... sludge. Silted up. Narrow, sluggish, half-blocked, like irrigation ditches no one had cleared in years. A thin trickle of Qi crept through them and pooled uselessly in his lower belly, warm and soft and going nowhere.
Ten years of training, and that was all there was to show for it.
Cultivation: None.
The system had not been mocking him. It had simply been honest.
He knew the ladder. He had built it. He had typed it out once in a world-building document, tidy and numbered, so he could keep track of who was strong enough to kill whom:
Martial Warrior.
Martial Teacher.
Advanced Martial Teacher.
Martial Soul.
Martial King.
Martial Emperor.
Martial Ancestor.
Martial Lord.
Martial Saint.
Martial Sovereign.
Ten rungs. At the top, the Martial Sovereign—a level so high that in four hundred chapters only a handful of names had ever reached it, figures out of legend who could split mountains with a glance. At the bottom, the Martial Warrior, the very first step. The rank of farm boys who had practiced a few forms in a village courtyard. The rank of guardsmen and porters and hired muscle.
Li Yuguo stood at the bottom of that ladder.
Not even on the first rung. Beneath it. Ten years of sweating, failing, and being laughed at, and he still had only one toe on the threshold of Martial Warrior—so little Qi in him that the system had not bothered to give it a name. Every porter on City Gate Avenue who had ever carried a full shoulder pole up the hill had more fight in him than the city lord's husband.
And above him on the horse sat a nineteen-year-old girl who had already climbed further than most men ever would.
Liu Mang remembered the creed now. Li Yuguo's creed. He had written it himself, as a joke, in the original Li Yuguo's very first scene—a line of smug inner monologue meant to make the readers want to punch him:
Eating soft rice is refreshing for a while. Eating soft rice all the time is always good.
Why train, when your wife is the city lord? Why earn, when her treasury is open? Why fight, when the whole city is terrified of her? A man could live his whole life on a woman's rice, and it would be soft and warm and sweet, and he would never have to lift a finger. The original Li Yuguo had believed that with his whole heart. It was the single principle he had lived by—right up to the moment Ye Qiong's sword came down.
Liu Mang had laughed when he wrote it.
He was not laughing now.
I never imagined, he thought, with the hysterical calm of a man watching the floor give way beneath him, that I would actually cross over and become the King of Soft Rice.
The blood-bay horse snorted and stamped. The whip in Nalan Meng's hand uncurled a little, its tail sliding down to lie across the hot stones, and twitched once.
The whole avenue held its breath.
Every instinct in Li Yuguo's body was screaming the same thing it had clearly learned to scream over a great many years—head down, head down, don't meet her eyes, don't speak, don't move—and for once Liu Mang's mind could not find a single reason to argue.
He lowered his head.