Chapter 23: The Cauldron

I woke up on fire.

Not a metaphor. My skin was burning. My belly was burning. Every vein in my body felt like someone had filled it with boiling soup and then shaken me.

I was lying on something soft. Silk sheets. A ceiling painted with cranes and clouds. Incense smoke, sandalwood, curling up from a bronze burner shaped like a turtle.

And a cool hand on my forehead.

"Don’t move," said Headmistress Hwang. "If you move, you’ll tear a meridian. Then you’ll be a very pretty cripple."

I didn’t move.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed beside me. Plum robes. Silver pin. Gray streak. In the lamplight she looked like a painting of a queen. A queen who was very, very annoyed.

"Where..." My voice came out like gravel.

"My private quarters. Behind the office. Nobody comes here unless I invite them." She dipped a cloth in a basin of cold water and laid it across my chest. It hissed. Actually hissed. Like water on a hot pan. "Five yins. Five women’s energy, raw, fighting inside a Third-rate body that was never built to hold that much. Do you understand what you’ve done?"

"...Had a really good week?"

She looked at me.

Then, for one half of one second, the corner of her mouth twitched.

"Idiot," she said, almost fondly.

[Yin overflow: critical.]

[Meridian damage imminent.]

Great. Thanks, system. Very helpful.

"Can you braid it?" Hwang asked.

"I tried. I can’t even find the strands. They’re all tangled."

"Of course you can’t. Cha Mi-ran taught you a technique for four. Not five. And not five like these." She pressed two fingers to my wrist. Frowned. "The water and the ink are calm. The wind and the coins are fighting. And the blade—" her lips went thin "—Cha’s blade is trying to kill all the others. That woman never could share."

She set my wrist down.

"You need to release it. Not refine. Release. Drain the excess before it cracks you open."

"How?"

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she stood up and walked to the window. Looked out at the dark academy. The lamp made a long shadow of her on the floor.

"When I was nineteen," she said, "my family sold me to a sect in the north. The Crimson Lotus. You won’t have heard of them. They’re gone now." Her voice didn’t change. Calm. Flat. "They practiced dual cultivation. Old style. The men took. The women were called cauldrons. You poured yourself into a man until there was nothing left, and then they found a new cauldron."

I stared at her back.

"I was a cauldron for six years," she said. "Then I learned the method better than the men who taught it. And then one night I used it on the sect master. In reverse." She turned around. Her face was perfectly calm. "The Crimson Lotus doesn’t exist anymore."

Holy shit.

"That’s why I’m the headmistress of a branch academy in a river town," she said. "Far away from anyone who remembers."

She walked back to the bed. Sat down. Looked at me for a long, long moment.

"When I felt you in my office," she said quietly, "I thought you were one of them. A taker. I was going to find out how you did it, and then I was going to end it." She touched my chest. "But then I saw the physician walk across my courtyard yesterday. Glowing. And the Gwak widow at the banquet last spring looked like a dried plum, and this week she looks ten years younger." Her fingers spread over my heart. "You don’t take from them, do you? Whatever you are. You give it back."

I didn’t know what to say. So I said the truth.

"I don’t even really know how it works," I said. "I just... I spent a whole life alone. Last time. Before this. Nobody ever touched me. I died alone in a dark room." I swallowed. My throat was so dry. "I don’t want any of them to feel like that. That’s all. I just don’t want anyone to be alone."

Hwang went very still.

She didn’t ask what I meant by last time. She didn’t ask anything.

She just took my burning hand in her cool one. And held it.

[Desire +20.]

"There’s a way," she said. "An old one. From the Lotus. The cauldron draws the excess out of the man. Through the body. Through... contact." She looked down at me. "I swore I’d never do it again."

[Yin overflow: critical.]

My back arched off the bed by itself. Pain shot up my spine like lightning. I bit down so hard I tasted blood.

She watched me. Her jaw was tight.

"Damn you, boy," she whispered.

And she reached up and pulled the silver pin out of her hair.

Her hair came down. Long. Black. That one gray streak running through it like a river of silver.

She untied her sash.

The plum robes were heavy and expensive and layered, and she took them off one at a time, slowly, the way a priest takes off ceremonial robes. Outer robe. Middle robe. Inner robe. Each one folded neatly and laid on the chair. Not rushing. Not showing off. Just... deciding.

Under all those layers, she was nothing like I expected.

All those expensive robes had been hiding a body that should be illegal for a woman in her forties. Long. Strong. Curves that went on forever. A scar across her ribs, thin and white and old. Another on her shoulder. She didn’t hide them.

"Don’t stare," she said.

"I’m dying. I get to stare."

She made a noise that might have been a laugh.

Then she climbed onto the bed and knelt over me.

"I’ll show you how," she said. "Do exactly what I say. Breathe when I tell you. Hold when I tell you. Don’t try to braid. Don’t try to control it. Just let it go where I pull it."

"Okay."

She put one palm flat on my dantian. The other flat on her own.

"Breathe in."

I breathed in.

She leaned down. Her hair fell around both of us like a tent. Her lips found mine — not a kiss, not really, just her mouth against my mouth — and she breathed out at the exact moment I breathed out.

Something moved.

A thread of heat. Just a thread. Pulled out of my belly, up through my chest, out through my mouth — into hers.

She shuddered. Her whole body. Like the heat went straight down her spine.

"Again," she breathed.

We did it again. Then again. Every time, she pulled a little more. Every time, the burning in my belly dropped a little. And every time, her skin got warmer, and her breathing got faster, and her body sank a little lower against mine.

The pain was going away.

Something else was taking its place.

"Good boy," she whispered against my lips. "Just like that. Slow."

I’d never heard anyone say that to me in either life. It did something to me that I can’t even explain.

She felt it. Right where she was kneeling over me. Her eyebrow went up.

"Mm," she said. "Apparently not all of you is in pain."

"Sorry."

"Don’t be." Her hand slid down from my dantian. Slowly. "Breath only drains the surface. For five yins this deep, I need more contact." Her voice had gone low and rough. Nothing like the headmistress anymore. "A lot more."

I looked up at her. Her hair. Her scars. Her dark lips. The hand moving lower.

"There’s only one way to drain this much," said Hwang Yu-seon, and she reached down between us to untie the last of my robe.

[Desire +25.]

[Overflow draining... 30%.]

She lowered herself toward me. Slowly. Her eyes locked on mine. Her breath hitched.

And the door slammed open so hard it bounced off the wall.

BANG.

We both froze.

Standing in the doorway, out of breath, hair half out of its bun, spectacles crooked, navy robe buttoned wrong, holding a lantern in one hand and a stack of sponsorship papers in the other—

Madam Gwak Ji-yeon.

She looked at me. Flat on my back, burning, robe open.

She looked at Hwang. Naked. Hair down. Kneeling over me.

The sponsorship papers slid out of her hand and fluttered across the floor.

For a long, long moment, nobody said anything.

Then Madam Gwak pushed her spectacles up her nose with one trembling finger, and said in a voice that could freeze a river:

"Hwang. Yu. Seon."

Hwang didn’t move from on top of me. She didn’t cover up. She just turned her head, very slowly, and looked at her rival of eight years over her bare shoulder.

"Gwak Ji-yeon," she said pleasantly. "You’re late."