Chapter 574- A Mother’s Pleading
Her clear, dark eyes moved from the bed to the walls to the single window overlooking the inner pavilion garden and back to the bed. She was eighteen years old and had been in cultivation training for four years and had a Foundation Establishment base she was proud of and ambitions she was not embarrassed about, and none of this had prepared her for a room that contained a king-sized bed as its primary feature and nothing else that explained why she was in it.
Wanchun stopped beside her.
The seamstress from the lower mountain village pressed both hands against her robes at her midsection with the instinctive, conservative gesture of a woman who had walked into a room that made her nervous and was managing that nervousness through posture. Her full mouth was set in the careful, polite expression she had been maintaining since the elder had guided her away from the tournament platform — the expression of a woman who had been well-raised and was going to conduct herself with dignity until she understood the situation, after which she would conduct herself with dignity based on the updated information.
Elder Caifen closed the door behind them.
Tianlong was seated on the bed.
He sat at its edge with one knee raised and his elbow resting on it, his dark hair loose over his shoulder, his cultivation robe open at the collar and chest — not disheveled, but with the specific quality of a man whose robe’s purpose was largely decorative. His gold-crimson eyes moved across the two women who had entered with the same patient, inventory calm he brought to everything.
Wufei stood to the left of the bed.
He had entered first, before the women, and had been standing with his sword at his hip and his cultivation base steady and his chin at the angle of a young man who had won today’s match and was holding himself correctly in a significant presence. He looked at the ancestor with the clear-eyed respect of someone who had been told his whole cultivation career that dedication and talent would be recognized, and believed it, and was now here.
Tianlong looked at him.
"Elder," he said, addressing Caifen without looking away from Wufei, "take this young man to the Purity Hill."
Caifen did not hesitate.
"Yes, ancestor."
Wufei blinked. "The Purity Hill?"
"The sect master’s personal training ground," Tianlong said. "You will sit there until I summon you. In stillness. In silence. You will hold your cultivation base at full extension and you will not let it waver." His gold-crimson eyes were direct and level. "If you cannot do this for the duration I require, the weight of what I intend to give you will break your meridians."
The young man’s jaw set.
The specific jaw-set of a young man who has been given a challenge framed as a test and whose entire cultivation personality is structured around not failing tests.
"I will not waver," he said.
"We will see," Tianlong said, without judgment.
Wufei bowed — correctly, deeply, with the precise angle of formal cultivation respect — and turned.
His eyes found his mother.
Wanchun had not moved. Her hands were still at her midsection. Her dark eyes had moved from the ancestor to her son with the quick, reading attention of a mother who is checking whether her child is alright, and Wufei’s expression gave her the answer, which was: ’I am fine, I am determined, please compose yourself.’
He touched her arm as he passed her.
"Wait for me," he said quietly. "It will not take long."
Wanchun nodded.
She watched her son follow Elder Caifen out of the room. She watched the door close behind them.
She stood in the room with the king-sized bed and the ancestor and the young woman who had also lost today’s match and was apparently here for the same reason she was, whatever that reason turned out to be.
Tianlong stood.
The movement was unhurried. He rose from the bed’s edge to his full height, and the room’s scale changed in the way a room’s scale changes when it becomes apparent that its central occupant is larger than everything around it. His robe opened further with the motion, the carved landscape of his chest visible, the specific architecture of a body that had been built past any human frame and maintained through cultivation at a level that produced results the human eye read as wrong.
Not frightening. Wrong in the way that extreme beauty is wrong — the way it bypasses the brain’s normal evaluation systems and goes somewhere older.
Lin Suya sucked in a breath.
The sound came out before she could prevent it — small, sharp, the involuntary intake of a young woman whose eyes had arrived at his abdomen and were traveling downward with the horrified, fascinated momentum of eyes that had been told they should not look and had not listened.
His robe.
Below the waist, his robe hung open.
His cock rested against his thigh in its limp state — ten inches of thick, dark-veined shaft, the broad crimson head visible at the base, its weight sufficient to pull it downward against his leg with the simple, declarative presence of something that did not require any additional context to understand its own scale.
She had been cultivating for four years.
She had read foundational texts. She had attended the dual cultivation theory lectures that the outer sect gave to disciples approaching their coming-of-age assessment. She had formed, from these sources, a general model of what male anatomy involved and what the cultivation texts referred to when they used phrases like ’jade pillar’ and ’divine staff’ with the circumspect vocabulary of documents written by cultivators who had decided certain things did not need to be direct.
Every piece of that model was currently being revised.
"A—" she started.
Her voice came out smaller than she intended.
"Ancestor, what—"
The pheromones hit her.
They had been present since she entered the room — the Horny God Physique operated continuously and the room’s ventilation was not designed for dispersal. But proximity changed the concentration, and Tianlong standing at full height three meters away was a different order of exposure from Tianlong seated at the bed’s edge.
Her head went light.
Not faint. The specific dizziness of a body receiving a chemical signal at a volume that exceeds its processing capacity, her Foundation Establishment cultivation base blazing with an involuntary warmth that went directly to her lower dantian and pooled there with the insistent, demanding warmth of the Plum Blossom technique activating without permission.
She pressed her thighs together.
Wanchun had gone a color.
She was not a cultivator. She did not have a Foundation Establishment base to misfire or a lower dantian to flood with involuntary warmth. She had a seamstress’s body and a mother’s instincts and forty-four years of experience with people, and every one of those years was currently telling her that she had walked into a situation that was not what she had been told it was.
"Forgive us," she said.
Her voice came out steadier than she expected, which she was privately grateful for. "Forgive me. I was — I was looking." She dropped her eyes to the floor. "I was mesmerized. I did not mean to stare."
"You were not staring," Tianlong said. "You were reading."