Chapter 27

Chapter 27: Chapter 27

He left Medicine Valley a little after midnight, while Bai Rou was asleep in her chair.

She had spent two full hours working on him. She had rebound his ribs, salved the angry burns across his chest and back, splinted two fingers, and drained his swollen eye with a long silver needle while he sat perfectly still and stared at the wall. Ruan Tie lay snoring on the next cot over with both massive feet wrapped thick in poultices, his stone-grey skin long since faded back to ordinary brown.

When Bai Rou’s chin finally drooped to her chest, Yan Shuo eased himself off the cot, picked up his boots, and walked out barefoot into the dark.

He went straight down the mountain. Down the lift, which the night crew worked for him without a single word, staring openly at his ruined face. Down gallery seven, past the empty watcher’s bucket, past the red markers, and through the narrow crawlway on his hands and knees with his cracked ribs screaming at every inch.

Into the burned chamber.

He didn’t light the lantern. He sat down on the scorched stone floor with his back braced against the wall and his knees drawn up tight, and stayed there in the pitch black.

’Brat,’ Qin Wuyue said quietly.

’Don’t.’

’You stood up seven times against a man a full realm above you, and you never once opened the riverbed. Gu watched you the entire afternoon and saw nothing. You did what you had to do.’

’I said don’t.’

She fell silent.

He sat in the dark and listened to his own breathing and saw it all play out behind his eyes again. The blazing palm coming down. The wall of ice. Lanying’s back directly in front of him, her arms spread wide. Chi Yao’s fingers closing over her wrist, the harsh gold light burning straight through white leather, her face draining to ash—and Yan Shuo on his knees behind her, doing nothing at all. Just holding his river still.

’Still mine’, Chi Yao had said.

Yan Shuo pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes until he saw stars.

The air in the chamber turned cold.

It crept in through the crawlway first, a thin, unmistakable draft of frost sliding across the stone floor. Then a pale light appeared in the rubble, swaying gently, and a lantern came through the opening ahead of a slender figure wrapped in a dark cloak.

Lanying straightened up inside the chamber and held the lantern high. Its glow fell across him, huddled against the blackened wall, and he saw her jaw tighten.

"You walked out of Medicine Valley," she said. "With a broken rib. Barefoot."

He didn’t answer.

"Physician Bai woke up and found your cot empty. She came straight up to Frost Lotus Peak in her sleeping robe and pounded on my master’s gate until I came out." Lanying’s voice was very level. "She said, ’I imagine you know where he is.’ Then she turned around and went back to bed."

She set the lantern down on the stone. In its warm light, he could clearly see the white leather bracer buckled around her left wrist, and the dark, scorched marks across its surface where Chi Yao’s fingers had clamped down.

He looked at those marks, and his temper broke.

"Go back," he said.

Lanying went completely still.

"Go back up the mountain, Senior Sister. Don’t come down here again." His voice came out flat and hard, scraping his raw throat, and he let it. "Today he burned you because of me. Right out in front of the entire sect, with his hand around your wrist, and I knelt on the floor and watched him do it." He forced himself to look up into her eyes. "Next time he’ll do worse. And I can’t stop him. I couldn’t even land a second blow today. I couldn’t even stand up on my own feet. Whatever this is, it was always going to end with you in Blazing Sun City wearing his brand—so end it now, while it only costs you a burn."

She said nothing.

So he reached for the cruelest thing he could find.

"You told me it was a cultivation necessity," he said coldly. "That it changed nothing. You were right. Go home, Senior Sister. We’re done."

The frost on the floor of the chamber began to spread.

It crept outward from her feet across the scorched stone, white and fast, climbing the black walls in jagged, branching ferns. The lantern flame shrank down to a tiny blue bead. Lanying stood dead straight in the center of the cold, and when she finally spoke, her voice was dangerously soft.

"You don’t get to decide that."

"Senior Sister—"

"No." The single word rang off the stone walls like struck iron. "You don’t get to sit here in the dark and decide what I am allowed to want. Everyone in my life has done that for me. My master decided. The Sect Master decided. He decided, and burned a leash into my wrist to make sure I never forgot it." Her voice shook, fierce and bright. "I will not let you do it too."

She crossed the chamber in three quick strides and dropped to her knees directly in front of him, close enough that the dying lantern light caught the wet shine in her pale eyes.

"I told you it changed nothing because I was terrified," she said. "Terrified of what it meant. Terrified of what he would do to you. Terrified of how badly I wanted to come back down here every single night."

She took his bruised face in both hands. Her palms were freezing cold. The scorched leather of her bracer pressed against the side of his jaw.

"There is no fire in my wrist tonight," she whispered. "No inspection. No dying vein to measure. I have no excuse at all for being here." Her thumbs brushed his cheekbones, aching and gentle, just beneath his swollen eye. "I came because I watched you stand up seven times today, and every single time you did, I couldn’t breathe."

Yan Shuo stared at her.

He had spent six long years whittling himself down into nothing, so that nothing could ever be taken from him. Now he had nothing left to hide behind. He was bruised, burned, and beaten half to death, and she was kneeling in front of him in the frost, refusing to leave.

"You’re shaking," he rasped.

"So are you."

She kissed him.

There was nothing clumsy about it this time.

It was angry. She kissed him the way she’d thrown up that wall of ice on the terrace, and he caught her hard by the waist and kissed her back the same way. Her lips parted beneath his, hot and demanding, and when his tongue swept into her mouth, she let out a muffled, desperate sound that vibrated straight down into his groin. Her fingers fisted in the torn front of his robe. His good hand found the silver clasp of her cloak and wrenched it open.

The resonance surged up between them before either of them could even reach for it, already a roaring flood, and he felt her fury pour straight into his chest, and his own pour back into hers, making them both gasp against each other’s mouths.

Then he felt what sat beneath her fury.

Fear. Hours and hours of it, sharp and sickening, stretching from the very first palm strike on the terrace to the moment she’d found his cot in Medicine Valley empty. And beneath the fear something she hadn’t yet found a name for, and wasn’t trying to hide at all.

She felt what sat beneath his.

He knew the instant she found it. She went still in his arms, her forehead pressed hard against his, as she touched the shame. Six years of it, piled up inside him like heavy ore in a cart. The thirteen-year-old boy who’d been told to be grateful. The man who’d knelt on the cracked stone today and watched her burn.

"Stop that," she whispered fiercely against his lips. "Stop it right now. You stood up seven times."

She pushed the cloak wide across the frost, and drew him down onto it.

She didn’t wait for him to lead. Straddling his thighs, she reached down and tore the ruined, scorched linen from his shoulders, her cool fingertips skimming over the tight bandages around his ribs before sliding down the hard, scarred planes of his stomach. When his good hand came up to the silk sash at her waist, he yanked the knot free and parted her outer and inner robes in one rough motion.

The pale silk pooled around her hips, leaving her bare from the waist up in the dim blue frost-light.

Yan Shuo’s breath caught in his raw throat. Her breasts were full and pale, flushed a deep, heated rose from the surging bond, their dark pink peaks already tight and pebbled from the biting cold of the chamber.

He reached up with his uninjured hand and cupped the heavy, soft weight of her breast, his calloused thumb dragging roughly across the stiff nipple. Lanying’s head fell back with a sharp, broken gasp, her spine arching to press herself deeper into his rough palm.

Driven by six years of starved hunger, he pushed himself up off the cloak, ignoring the sharp stab in his ribs, and buried his face against her chest. He kissed the fever-warm valley between her breasts before taking one aching peak straight into his mouth.

"Yan Shuo—" she choked out, her fingers tangling fiercely in his hair, holding him against her skin.

He sucked hard, swirling his tongue around the tight bud while his hand kneaded her other breast, rolling the nipple between his rough fingers until she was trembling all over and grinding down against his lap. Every pull of his mouth sent a jolt of pure heat straight down her spine, and through the wide-open resonance, he felt every spike of her pleasure echoing back into his own body, doubling the ache until his cock was throbbing painfully against his trousers.

He switched to her other breast, biting down gently on the sensitive peak before soothing it with his tongue, his free hand sliding down the smooth curve of her waist to shove the rest of her silk robes and undergarments down her hips. She kicked them away, frantic and shameless, and helped him tug the ties of his rough miner’s trousers loose.

When she sank back down onto his lap, skin to naked skin, they both groaned aloud.

She was already drenched, her slick heat coating the thick, hard length of him as she slid back and forth against his shaft. He gripped her bare hip, his blunt fingers digging into the soft flesh of her ass, and guided himself to her entrance.

Lanying braced her hands on his bruised shoulders, looked straight down into his eyes in the glowing blue dark, and sank down onto him in one slow, greedy stroke.

A ragged curse tore from Yan Shuo’s throat. She was impossibly tight and scaldingly hot, her inner walls fluttering and clamping around him as he stretched her open, taking him all the way to the hilt. The sheer physical relief of being inside her—of claiming her right over the ashes of the life they’d tried to force on them—nearly blinded him.

For a breath, she couldn’t move, her forehead dropping to his shoulder as she adjusted to the fullness of him, her breasts crushed flat against his bandaged chest. Then she began to ride him.

Slow at first, a deep, rolling grind of her hips that made her slick heat grip every inch of him, then faster, rising and slamming back down with a frantic, desperate rhythm. Her full breasts bounced with every sharp roll of her body, and he slid his hand between them to cup one again, pinching the swollen peak just the way that made her insides clench tight around his cock.

Growling low in his throat, he flipped her onto her back on the spread cloak, pinning her beneath him. He hooked an arm beneath her knee, pushing her thigh high against her ribs to open her completely, and drove into her with deep, heavy thrusts. The wet slap of their skin echoed off the frosted stone walls, mingled with her sharp, breathless cries and his harsh grunts.

He buried his face deep into the curve of her neck when the silver light rose beneath his skin, and she held the back of his head there with both hands, legs locked tight around his waist, spurs of her heels digging into his lower back to pull him even deeper.

The resonance opened all the way, and the frost covering the black walls blazed a blinding, moonlight white.

Their qi collided and braided together with every brutal, aching stroke. He felt his power flood out of him and into her as he hammered into her heat, warm and bright, racing down her left arm to her wrist and pooling there, soothing the raw, scorched flesh beneath the leather bracer. He felt hers rush back into him in answer, cold and impossibly clean, sinking deep into his burned back, his cracked ribs, and his swollen eye. It washed the agony away, replacing it with an unbearable, building friction that coiled tight at the base of his spine.

"Don’t stop," she panted against his ear, her nails biting hard into his bare shoulders as her body bowed up off the cloak. "More—give me all of it—"

He angled his hips, hitting that deep, merciless spot inside her over and over until she shattered beneath him. She cried out his name in the dark as her walls clamped down on him in a vise-like rhythm, milking him so fiercely that his vision whited out. With a choked groan, he drove in to the hilt one last time and came hard, pouring everything he had deep inside her while the bond blazed like a star between their chests, locking them together as the aftershocks wracked both their bodies.

For the very first time in his life, Yan Shuo let someone hold him together while he came completely apart.

Afterward, they lay tangled together beneath the wool of her cloak, the lantern burning low and the frost glittering softly across every inch of the rock.

Lanying had fallen asleep with her bare shoulder tucked against his side, her head resting on his chest and her burned wrist lying flat right over his heart. Her breathing was slow and deep. Beneath the white leather bracer, he could feel that the brand had gone entirely cold once more.

He lay awake in the quiet, staring up at the frost-light on the ceiling, his hand resting lightly on the bare, sweat-cooled curve of her hip.

"Don’t send me away again," she had murmured against his throat, right before sleep took her. Her voice had been drowsy, warm, and utterly stubborn. "I won’t go."

"I know," he’d whispered back.

He meant it. And that terrified him far more than Chi Yao ever had.

’Brat,’ Qin Wuyue said, very softly.

She had been gone for hours. He had half forgotten she was in his head at all.

’I’m listening,’ he thought.

’Good. Because I will only say this once, and I want you to remember it. You sat in this chamber tonight and told yourself you failed because you couldn’t beat that man alone. You were right. You couldn’t. And you never will.’

Yan Shuo’s jaw tightened.

’Not at the eighth layer. Not at the ninth. Not at Foundation, or Golden Core, or any realm after it,’ Qin went on, her phantom voice steady and clear. ’Chi Yao is nothing, brat. A young master at the bottom of the ladder, from one city in one corner of the Nine Provinces. Beyond this mountain there are cultivators who could snuff him out with a glance. But every one of them climbed the way he did, on spirit veins they own and pills they hoard and teachers paid in stones that boys like you dig out of the dark. The great sects have spent three thousand years making sure no one climbs alone unless they already own a piece of the ladder. That is how they keep their power. That is the cage they built.’

She was quiet for a long moment.

Then she spoke again, more gently than he had ever heard her say anything:

’You will never surpass them alone, brat. Not by yourself. That is the entire point of what you are.’