Chapter 173 | Dripping for the Wrong Man*

Chapter 173: 173 | Dripping for the Wrong Man*

Zhao’s footsteps did not resume.

The *thud* that stopped at the edge of the corridor stayed there, frozen, heavy, as if the disciple himself had pressed his back against the wall and was standing very still, listening.

Elder Liu’s breath stopped in her throat.

She lay on the cracked ice, bare and hollowed, his length still buried deep inside her, the warm glow under her skin pulsing slow. The chamber was silent. The only sound was the faint drip of melted ice pooling at the slab’s edge, and the two of them, breathing.

And Zhao, on the other side of the stone, not leaving.

The terror should have been the last thing she felt.

It was the last thing.

What came after it was not shame. It was not regret. It was a heat so clean and so deep and so entirely *forbidden* that it made her spine go hot from her neck to the base of her lower back, and her inner walls, which had just emptied themselves, began to clench again.

A fresh, heavy flood of slick soaked his length and dripped onto the cracking ice.

"Look at you, Matriarch."

His voice was low. Not mocking. Not triumphant. Just... watching.

He pulled back, slow, letting the drag of their connection stretch the sensation out.

"Ahhh—"

A thin, broken moan. Her inner walls fluttered, clenched, tried to hold onto the warmth as he retreated, leaving only the burning crown at her entrance.

"You dismissed the disciple who failed you with the cold, flat voice of a Matriarch. Told him to go. Told him to come back tomorrow with his report." His thumb traced the line of her jaw, slow. "And now you are dripping for the junior who took the Lotus from where his team dropped it."

She turned her face into the ice.

"Nngh... shut up..."

"Is it the heat?" He leaned down, his broad chest settling against hers, his scarred, burning skin pressing a fresh brand across her flushed collarbone. "Or is it the fact that he is *wrong*? That he is a junior, and outer-sect, and he should not be here, and he should not be inside you, and you cannot stop?"

"I don’t—"

"You can stop." He said it flatly. Easily. As if it were a choice she had made and was simply not making. "You have stopped before. You have stopped for a hundred and thirty-five years."

Her hips arched.

She did not mean to. Her hips arched up, off the ice, seeking the pressure of his crown, and her thighs pressed together around him, clenching, weeping, and the sound that came out of her was so small and so helpless that she wanted the stone to swallow her.

"It is just... your heat... it feels too good..."

"My heat." He let the words sit. "You have a Verdant Flame Physique. You have burned through four-star alchemy for three lifetimes. And now the only fire that matters is the one a junior is pushing into you while his shadow is on the other side of the door."

Tears pressed into the corners of her eyes. She squeezed them shut.

"I don’t care who hears," she whispered, and the words surprised her. She had not meant to say them. They had come out of somewhere deeper than thought, somewhere in the part of her that had been lying on the ice, naked and broken and *his*, for hours.

"Don’t tease me anymore." Her fingernails found his back, scratching faint, pink crescents into the scarred skin. "I don’t care about the door. I don’t care who is listening. I don’t care about the peak, or the title, or the one hundred and thirty-five years of—*"

Her voice broke on it.

"*—pride. Fuck the pride out of me, Lin Tian. I don’t want to be the Matriarch anymore. I don’t want to be anything. Just—*"

He buried himself completely.

"AHHH—!"

One long, slow, deliberate stroke, and he was inside her again, deep, buried, and the warmth that flooded her Dantian was so total, so clean, that the last stubborn seed of rot at the center of it pulsed, dimmed, and went still.

The Phantom Burns, quiet since the first purge, hissed one last time and faded. Black steam rose thin from her pores, the physical exhalation of the last of the poison, and it was gone in seconds, swallowed by the heat of his body.

Her jade-like skin, shot through with sickly green-gold for months, was clearing. The color was receding, replaced by a warm, healthy flush, and the glow under her skin was no longer a faint, stubborn pulse.

It was steady.

Alive.

"Yes...!" she sobbed, and her voice was wrecked, raw, stripped of every layer of elegance and authority she had ever worn. "Yes, Lin Tian, *yes*—"

She threw her arms around his neck and pulled his chest flush against hers, her face burying in the crook of his shoulder, her legs locking tight around his waist, ankles crossed, trapping him as deep as she could hold him.

He gripped her hips.

And he did not slow.

*Smack.*

She made no sound. Her mouth opened. Nothing came.

*Smack.*

"Nngh—"

*Smack.*

And a long, broken moan that started low in her chest and shattered at the end, her whole frame arching off the ice, her toes curling, her fingers digging into his back.

"Who owns this heat?" he asked, low, driving deep against the sensitive knot at the center of her Dantian, the one that had been the last stronghold of the rot.

She made no answer for two full thrusts.

Her face was buried in his shoulder. Her breath was coming in short, sharp, helpless pulls. Her fingers were fisted in his robe, not to keep him there, but because the warmth of his chest was the only solid thing left.

"You do," she said, finally. Her voice was a wreck. "It’s yours. All of it. The peak, the title, the—*"

"Say it."

He pulled almost all the way out.

She shrieked.

"I am yours!" The words tore out of her, weeping, feral, the last honest thing she had said in a hundred and thirty-five years. "I am your cauldron! Just— don’t stop— don’t you *dare* stop filling me—"

He set a steady, deep, relentless pace.

The chamber filled with the sound of their breathing, the wet, heavy slap of their skin, and the faint, slow crack of the profound-ice finally giving way beneath them, the slab fracturing, splintering, the cold stone surrendering to the heat.

The warm glow under her skin pulsed, slow, steady, clean.

Not all of the rot was gone.

The root of the Dantian still pulsed, faint, a single thread of dark, corroded Qi, thin as a hair, stubborn, alive.

It would need one more time.

The ethereal blue interface flickered in the dim, steam-thick air.

**[Devotion: 70% → 75% (Deep Obsession)]**

She collapsed against the broken ice, hollowed, heaving, her limbs trembling, the warm glow under her skin settling into a steady, living pulse.

She did not ask him to stop. She did not try to push him away. She simply lay there, bare and wrecked and warm, her fingers loosely curled in the fabric of his robe, her breath ragged and slow.

And in the corridor outside, Zhao’s boots shifted.

Once.

A single, soft scrape of leather on stone.

Then nothing.

The door did not open.

But it did not close, either.

It simply waited.?