Chapter 804- Do you want to save him?
The female servants, the attendants, moved. Their hands, on the princess’s arms, were there. The escort, the gentle but firm escort, was there. Yuexin, her dark eyes, the fury, the impotent, burning fury, was there.
’Father, you fool. You are playing into his hands. He wants me isolated. He wants me unable to help. He wants me... dependent on him.’
She was taken. To her chamber. The door, closed. The lock, engaged. The princess, imprisoned in her own palace, was there.
~~ The Chamber
The door clicked shut behind them, and the sound of the lock engaging felt final in a way that made Shen Yue’s stomach drop.
She had been inside grand rooms before — the Azure Cloud Palace was full of them. But this one felt different. The jade walls caught the lantern light and threw it back in soft amber ripples across the silk-draped bed, and the air carried something thick and masculine, a qi signature so dense it pressed against her skin like warm water. Tianlong’s qi. It clung to everything in this room. The sheets. The pillows. The very walls.
Her sister stood beside her, still in the torn, sweat-stiffened robes from the tournament. Shen Ling’s hand found hers and squeezed — cold fingers, trembling. Neither of them spoke. What was there to say?
Tianlong turned from the window where he had been gazing out at the three golden pillars of light still fading in the sky above the palace — those absurd, vulgar beacons of his that had announced to the entire capital what kind of man he was and what he had been doing. He turned, and his gold-crimson eyes settled on them with the unhurried patience of a man surveying a meal that had just been placed before him.
"Strip."
One word. No preamble, no negotiation, no pretense of politeness. He didn’t need to dress it up.
Shen Yue’s fingers went to her sash and fumbled with the knot. Her hands wouldn’t cooperate — the tremor had spread from her fingers to her wrists to her forearms, and the silk kept slipping. Beside her, Shen Ling was having the same trouble, her round face scrunched up with the effort of forcing disobedient hands to work.
’He said strip. So I strip. For Brother. This is for Brother. If I do this, he lives. If I don’t...’
The thought ran out before it could finish. Her body knew the stakes. Her body had always been quicker to accept reality than her mind.
The outer robe came undone and slid off her shoulders, pooling at her feet with a whisper of fabric. The inner layer followed. Then the thin cotton undergarment — the one she had patched twice this month because she couldn’t afford new ones, the one that was meant for comfort and nothing else. It dropped. She stood in her bra and panties, the simple white cotton kind, nothing ornate, nothing meant for another person’s eyes.
Shen Ling was a half-step behind her, her own clothes falling in a matching pile. Their eyes met for one terrible, shared moment — a look between sisters that contained everything they couldn’t say aloud — and then they both reached back and unclasped their bras at the same time, as if some unspoken sisterly coordination had taken over where courage failed.
The panties came down last.
Shen Yue stood bare under the lantern light, and the cool air found every inch of her exposed skin at once. Her nipples hardened immediately — not from arousal, she told herself, just the cold — and her arms twitched with the instinct to cover herself. She forced them down. She could feel his gaze moving over her body like a physical touch, starting at her collarbones, tracing the slope of her small, perky breasts, following the flat plane of her stomach down to the dark thatch of untrimmed hair between her legs.
Shen Ling stood beside her, slightly curvier in the way that sisters sometimes aren’t quite identical — her breasts were a shade fuller, her hips a fraction wider, the pink of her nipples a lighter shade. Her round face had gone blotchy from crying, and her lower lip was raw where she had been biting it.
Tianlong studied them the way a calligrapher studies a blank scroll before the first stroke. His expression carried neither hunger nor cruelty — just a calm, appraising interest, like he was noting where he would begin.
’Both eighteen. Both untouched. The perky one — her nipples are already stiff. Scared, but her body responds. The softer one — wider hips, fuller chest. She’ll be more sensitive.’ His assessment was clinical, almost detached, the way a predator sorts prey not by preference but by utility. ’Good. Both will serve.’
He laughed — a short, low sound that bounced off the jade walls — and his hands went to his own sash. The dark crimson robe came apart with a ease that suggested he had done this ten thousand times, and the silk slid off his golden shoulders and dropped to the floor in a pooling heap.
Shen Yue had imagined what he looked like beneath those robes. She was eighteen. She had eyes. She had noticed the way the fabric draped across his chest, the way the cloth strained at his thighs when he moved. She had imagined — in the quiet, guilty hours of the night, with her face pressed into her pillow — what it might be like to see more.
The reality made her imagination feel like a child’s doodle.
His body was carved. Not the bulky, exaggerated musculature of a body cultivator who trained for size — it was leaner than that, more dangerous. The kind of strength that lived in density rather than volume. His chest was broad, his stomach ridged with abdominal muscles that caught the lantern light like the facets of a cut gem, and a thin line of dark hair trailed downward from his navel.
And below that—
’Oh gods. Oh gods oh gods oh gods—’
His cock hung soft between his thighs and it was already bigger than anything she had ever imagined a man could possess. Thick, heavy, the shaft a darker shade than the golden skin around it, the head a deep flushed crimson even while flaccid. It rested against his thigh with a weight that looked almost absurd on a human body — but then, he wasn’t entirely human, was he? He was Divine Transcendent. He was something beyond.
Beside her, Shen Ling made a small, strangled sound in the back of her throat.
"I— it’s—" Shen Ling’s whisper cracked. "It won’t... that can’t..."
Shen Yue couldn’t even form words. Her mouth was open. She knew her mouth was open and she couldn’t close it.
He closed the distance between them in two unhurried strides, and his hands — large, warm, calloused at the fingertips from centuries of grip — seized both of their wrists simultaneously. Shen Yue’s right, Shen Ling’s left. He pulled, and the momentum carried both of them forward, stumbling, until their bare bodies pressed against the furnace-heat of his chest.
Four breasts flattened against golden skin. Shen Yue’s perkier mounds compressed against his upper abdomen while Shen Ling’s softer, fuller ones pressed lower, near his ribs. The sensation of skin on skin — his divine warmth against their cool, nervous flesh — sent a jolt through Shen Yue that started between her legs and climbed all the way to the roots of her hair.
"Emperor, please..." The words slipped out before she could stop them. She wasn’t even sure what she was begging for — mercy? More time? For him to pretend, even for a moment, that this was something other than what it was?
His hands descended to their asses. Both of them. One palm on each sister’s backside, his fingers digging into the soft, virgin flesh with a possessive squeeze that made Shen Yue’s hips jerk forward. His grip was firm enough that her cheeks deformed under his fingers, the flesh bulging between the gaps.
"Do you want to save your brother?"
Direct. No warmth, no softness, no seduction. Just the transaction, laid bare.
Shen Yue felt the tears spill over — she hadn’t even realized they had been building again. Beside her, Shen Ling was already crying openly, her round face crumpling.
"Yes," they whispered together, and the sound of their voices layered — one breathless and shaky, one thick with tears — filled the chamber.
He kissed Shen Yue first.