On one side of the City Lord's Mansion, in a dusty guest room at the back of the house, Li Yuguo sat in the moonlight and burned.
On the other side, in the east wing, Nalan Meng could not sleep.
She had tried. She had lain on her big bed in the dark for what felt like hours, staring up at the canopy, listening to the cicadas finally fall silent and the night watchman's rattle go past on the street outside. The sheets were too hot. The pillow was too hard. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw a hundred taels of silver stacked neatly on a stone table—and a man on his knees, sweeping a floor.
At last she gave up, threw back the thin summer coverlet, and rose.
She was wearing only a long white sleeping dress, plain and loose, of soft unbleached cotton that fell to her ankles. Without the crimson silk and the silver helmet and the great sword, she looked smaller. Her black hair hung loose down her back to her waist. Her feet were bare on the cool floorboards as she crossed to the window and pushed open the lattice.
The moon was enormous. It hung over the rooftops of Nalan City like a great white shield, so bright that it washed the stars out of the sky around it, and its light fell across her face and her throat and the thin white cotton of her dress and turned all of it to silver.
She leaned her hip against the sill and looked up at it for a long time.
"Am I being too harsh on him?" she whispered.
The moon did not answer.
"Master…" Her voice was very quiet—the voice of a girl talking to the teacher who had trained her in her father's camps, long ago, and who was not here. "I really don't know what I should do. Did I do something wrong? What was it?"
She sighed. It was a faint sound, barely a breath.
She could not ask him. That was the trouble. She could not walk across the courtyard to that dusty room at the back of the house and knock on the door and say, Yuguo, have you changed? Have I been wrong about you? Was it my fault? Her pride would not let her. The words would not come out of her mouth. She had built a wall between herself and her husband, brick by brick, over years, and she did not know how to begin taking it down without the whole thing falling on her.
She put a hand flat over her heart, pressing against the thin white cotton, as if she could hold the struggle inside it still.
It did not stay still.
The next morning, the sun came up bright and hard and blazing, and Li Yuguo opened his eyes.
For a long moment he did not know where he was. The ceiling above him was cracked plaster stained with old water marks. Dust motes swam in the sunlight pouring through the open window. His back was stiff, his legs were numb from a night spent cross-legged on the floor, and he was soaked in sweat from head to foot, his thin robe plastered to his chest and stuck to his skin.
And he felt incredible.
It took him a moment to understand. Then he reached inward—the way he had on City Gate Avenue, probing for the silted, sluggish channels of this soft body—and nearly shouted aloud.
His meridians were open.
Not all of them. Not all the way. But the main channels through his chest and belly and arms, which yesterday had felt like irrigation ditches clogged with years of mud, now felt like streams in spring. Qi moved through them. Real Qi—hot, bright, coursing, the fierce red heat of the Lieyang Shenjian rolling through him like a river of warm wine. It pooled in his lower belly, in the dantian, not as a thin useless trickle anymore but as a steady, glowing ember. He could feel it pulse there with every beat of his heart.
He knew this feeling. He had written it. Every cultivator in his novel had described it at their first great breakthrough.
Martial Teacher.
He had reached the level of a Martial Teacher.
In one night.
Li Yuguo lay on the dusty floor of the guest room and laughed out loud, a wild, giddy, breathless laugh that bounced off the plaster walls.
Every stage of cultivation had a gap between it and the next—a gulf that ordinary people spent years, sometimes decades, trying to cross. The original Li Yuguo had spent ten years failing to cross even the first one. And he had just jumped clean over it between moonrise and sunrise. With a handful of seeds, a single cheap pill, and his own father's technique.
I'm not a waste. This body's not a waste. It was just never used.
He was still nowhere near Nalan Meng, of course. Not even close. She was a mountain, and he had just climbed onto the first foothill. But at least he was climbing. At least he had challenged himself, and won.
He sat up, still grinning, and looked at the windowsill.
His grin faded a little.
The Moon Spirit Grass was dead. The slender silver-green leaves that had glowed so beautifully in the moonlight had withered overnight into limp brown threads, curled and dry as old paper. When he touched one, it crumbled into dust. The pill was gone too, of course—burned up and refined into the ember in his belly.
"It seems," he said to the empty room, "that when I'm doing business in the future, I'll have to look for some elixirs. All the Moon Spirit Grass withered in one night, and there aren't any more Spirit Gathering Pills…"
He would need more. Much more. The first step had been cheap. The next ones would not be.
He shifted to get up.
And froze.
Something was very wrong with the front of his trousers.
He looked down. Sometime in the night—he had no memory of it—the heat of the Lieyang Shenjian had grown so intense that he had kicked off his outer robe and loosened the waist cord of his trousers, and the thin silk had slid low on his hips, sweat-soaked and clinging. And beneath it, rising from his lap in an absolutely enormous, exaggerated, shameless bulge, was his cock.
It was hard. It was harder than he had ever seen it, in either life. It strained up against the silk as if something were alive in there—as if a cat had crawled into his trousers in the night and was now trying to stand up on its hind legs. The cloth was drawn so tight over it that he could see the outline of the shaft and the thick, flared ridge of the head, and a small dark patch had soaked through at the very tip.
It throbbed. He could see it throb. It was full of the same fierce, hot, pulsing yang energy that was now coursing through every channel in his body, and it seemed to have decided that it was the most important channel of all.
Pure yang, Li Yuguo thought numbly. The Lieyang Shenjian ignites the yang energy of the whole body. I wrote that. I wrote that, and I didn't think about what it would—
His face went scarlet.
He scrambled to get up, trying to yank his loose trousers back up over his hips and get the waist cord tied before anyone—
"Yuguo? Are you awake?"
Nalan Meng's voice. Right outside the door.
Every hair on his body stood on end.
"D-don't!" he yelped. "Don't come in!"
The door was already opening.
He had gotten halfway to his feet. One hand was clutching at the waistband of his trousers. And in his panic, he had yanked at it in exactly the wrong direction, so that instead of rising, the loose, sweat-soaked silk slid down—over the swollen head, down the thick shaft—and his cock sprang free into the morning air with an almost audible slap against his belly.
There it stood.
Fully erect. Flushed dark red and glistening with sweat, the veins standing out along its length like cords, the swollen head shining wet at its tip, bobbing upward toward his navel in the hot bright sunlight streaming through the window. It was thick and long and stiff as an iron rod, and it was pointing directly at the door.
And standing in the door was his wife.
Nalan Meng had come in the crimson silk, her hair bound up, the great sword on her back, a tray in her hands with a pot of tea and two cups. She had obviously been meaning to say something. Her lips were still parted to say it.
Her eyes went straight down to his cock.
For one endless, silent heartbeat, she simply stared at it.
He watched it happen. He watched her eyes widen—watched them fix on that hard, red, glistening shaft standing up from his lap, and stay there, for far longer than they should have. He watched the color rush up into her face, from her throat to her cheeks to the very tips of her ears, a deep hot flush that bloomed across her white skin like red ink dropped into milk. He watched her throat move as she swallowed. He watched her fingers tighten on the edges of the tea tray until the cups rattled.
His cock, which had no shame at all, twitched. It jerked upward under her gaze, once, hard, and a fresh bead of clear wetness welled at its tip and ran down the underside of the head.
Nalan Meng turned around.
She did it sharply, in one motion, so that her back was to him and her face was toward the corridor. The cups on the tray clinked together.
"It looks," she said, and her voice was very cold and very even and only shook a tiny bit, "like I've interrupted your happy time."
"No—"
"Excuse me."
She walked away.
"Wait, wait—!" Li Yuguo lunged toward the door, clutching his trousers in one fist, his other arm flung out after her with the fingers spread, exactly like Erkang reaching after his runaway princess in the old television drama. Tears of pure mortification were springing into his eyes. "Wait, it's not what you think! I was cultivating! It's the Lieyang—it's the yang energy—wife, please—"
Her footsteps were already gone down the corridor.
He stood in the doorway in the hot morning sunlight with his trousers around his thighs and his cock standing proudly up in the air and his arm outstretched toward nothing, and he knew—knew—that she had completely misunderstood.
And he could not think of a single word that would fix it.
Nalan Meng did not get far.
She made it to the end of the corridor, around the corner, and then stopped behind one of the thick red-lacquered pillars that held up the roof of the walkway, and leaned her back against it, and closed her eyes.
Her face was on fire.
She could still see it. She could not stop seeing it. That thick, hard, angry-red shaft, standing up from his lap in the sunlight. Wet at the tip. Throbbing. Twitching, when she looked at it, as if it knew she was looking. She had seen men's bodies before—on battlefields, in army camps, washing in rivers—but never like that. Never so close, never so hard, never pointed straight at her like an accusation.
The tea tray was shaking in her hands. She set it down on the railing before she dropped it.
Between her thighs, under the thin crimson silk, there was a faint, warm, unwelcome ache that she refused—absolutely refused—to think about.
She clenched both her fists.
"Sure enough," she whispered furiously. "Sure enough, he's still a sex maniac. Moving to the guest room, living alone—and the first thing he does is—is that kind of thing!" Her cheeks burned hotter. "First thing in the morning! With the door unlocked!"
She had almost believed him. She had lain awake half the night almost believing him.
She pushed off the pillar, snatched up the tea tray, and stalked away toward the east wing with her back very straight and her ears very red.
Back in the guest room, Li Yuguo had tied his trousers, put on his robe, and sat down on the edge of the narrow bed with his face in his hands.
It took him a long time to recover.
Well, he finally thought, that's my reputation finished. Again.
It would take more than one good afternoon to change Nalan Meng's impression of him. He had always known that. Now it would take a little more. He would just have to take the long view.
He lifted his head, took a deep breath, and made himself think about something else.
Money.
That was still the most urgent task. A Martial Teacher's strength would not feed the slums. It would not repair the walls, or fill the granaries, or pay off a fat merchant's loan before that merchant decided to collect in some other way. The most effective thing he could do right now—the thing that would help everyone at once—was to fill the treasury of the City Lord's Mansion. Only when the City Lord's Mansion was rich could it truly do anything for the common people.
And the fastest way to do that was the way he had already found.
He would go back to the market. He would look for the merchants he had seen yesterday—Shi Dacheng and the others with the gaudy tents—and see what else they were hungry for.
He stood up, brushed the dust off his knees, and went.
It was nearly noon by the time he had crossed half the city. The sun had climbed straight overhead and was hammering down on Nalan City with all its usual fury, and Li Yuguo, who knew the main avenues only from his own book and from the hazy, half-drunk memories of this body, had taken a shortcut.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
The lane ran between the back walls of two long rows of warehouses, narrow and winding, the packed earth underfoot cracked into plates by the drought. High blank walls of mud brick rose on both sides. A few scrubby trees leaned over them, their leaves gray with dust. At the far end, the lane opened out onto a dry irrigation ditch and a rocky patch of waste ground where nothing grew.
It was very quiet.
He had walked for some time before he noticed exactly how quiet. No carts. No porters. No children. Not even a stray dog. The noise of the city—which on City Gate Avenue never stopped, not for a moment—had faded away behind him into nothing, and the only sound now was the crunch of his own boots on the cracked earth and the faint, dry rasp of the cicadas.
He slowed down.
This is wrong.
He did not know how he knew. But he had been writing web novels for years, and if writing web novels taught you anything, it was the logic of a scene. The rhythm of it. The way a story breathed in before it struck. A lonely road. Noon. Not a soul in sight. A character who had just, the day before, done something that made powerful people notice him.
When things go wrong, there must be demons.
He had written this scene himself. Probably a dozen times.
He slowed down even more, put his hand casually into his robe, and called up the panel.
"System."
The gold light bloomed. He did not look at the shop. He looked at his balance, and then at the silver in his robe—the forty taels he had kept back, the fifty Nalan Meng had let him keep, a little over ninety in all—and he made a quick decision. If he was about to be robbed, he did not want to be carrying it.
He drew the silver out in his fist and pressed it, hard, against the glowing surface of the panel.
Swoosh.
The silver vanished. His fist closed on nothing. And in the corner of the panel, his balance jumped up to a little over ninety taels.
It takes deposits. He let out a breath. Good. Nobody can rob me of what isn't in my hands.
He flicked quickly through the shop with one finger, still walking, still looking casually around at the high blank walls as if he were simply out for a stroll. He did not know exactly what he was looking for. Something—anything—that might be useful if this went the way he thought it was going to go.
In his old world, an online shopping platform would never have sold anything really dangerous. But this was not his old world. Here, it seemed, the rules were different. He scrolled past kitchen knives. Past crossbows. Past a page of firecrackers. Past—
He stopped.