Gu Ning and Dumpling went back.
To keep Dumpling from cooking up any fresh nonsense, Gu Ning shut her in her own room and went on alone to her master Qingxiao's chambers.
The night had gone deep, and the moonlight ran like water.
Gu Ning stood before the sleeping palace, finished bracing herself, worked up her courage, and pushed the door open.
What met her eyes was Qingxiao at the bronze mirror, combing out that ice-blue hair, wearing nothing but a plain white robe, the collar fallen slightly open to show the curve of her collarbone.
For a moment Gu Ning was struck stupid by that flawless face. Her master by daylight had carried a certain bashfulness about her, as though veiled behind thin gauze.
But at this moment that flawless face was being worked to its absolute limit, cold-faced moe, the exact opposite of the sultry thing Yu Ruo and Tao Yao did!
Qingxiao seemed not to have reckoned on Gu Ning arriving this early, and inwardly she faltered.
Gu Ning came back to herself out of that dazed, besotted stare and spoke.
"Master, I have come."
Qingxiao looked at her cold, aloof disciple and judged that she was the same icy creature as ever, who would never think twice about how strangely her master was behaving, and let out a quiet breath of relief.
She said softly.
"Ning'er, it has been a long while since last we bathed together, has it not?"
Qingxiao's face colored faintly.
Gu Ning's brain gave one long buzz.
"What? Bathed?"
Gu Ning's mouth opened and shut, and inside she was mortified past bearing.
She had accepted the fact of having become a girl, true, and could just about look at a girl's body now without a nosebleed or a fainting spell.
But bathing was another matter, and she had shame left in her yet, let alone bathing with her master, who was a great beauty. She would very likely break form on the spot.
"But Master, since we took up cultivation our bodies gather far less dust and filth. To bathe would surely be superfluous."
Much as Gu Ning wanted to bathe with her master, the words she put forward were words of refusal.
Qingxiao's pearl-white teeth bit lightly at her lip, and something unwilling flickered through those eyes as clear as water.
She knew, too, that ever since she had left her disciple out in the cold, the girl had thrown herself at cultivation, casting off anything that might slow it, all for the sake of her realm.
But she wanted to change all of that, to change how her disciple saw her, to change what lay between the two of them.
"Ning'er." Qingxiao walked over and said softly to her. "A cultivator does indeed contend with heaven and struggle with earth, but she must not forget why she set out. If there is nothing in her but the immortal road, she will forget the root of being human."
As she spoke, Qingxiao leaned her face in toward Gu Ning, her nostrils flaring.
She narrowed her eyes, one corner of her mouth curving, and laughed lightly. "You see? There is a smell on you already, is there not?"
Gu Ning looked at that flawless face a hand's breadth from her own, at those phoenix eyes fixed on her, and was mortified past bearing.
And at the intimacy of the gesture, and words no ordinary master would say to a disciple, her face went red on the instant.
"Master, I merely forgot to change my robes, I..."
Gu Ning had not expected three or four words from her master to leave her red to the ears and unable to get a sentence out.
"There, you are flustered again."
Qingxiao had not expected Gu Ning to have such a little-girl side to her, and stretched out a hand to stroke Gu Ning's soft hair.
"Mnnh—" Gu Ning had not seen the head-pat move coming at her, and a mortified whimper escaped her throat.
Qingxiao's fingers were faintly cool, and she herself was like a cat being petted.
"How is this a master? This is plainly a mom!!"
Gu Ning swore that in her past life she had never once touched a certain game called Val. Absolutely never!
It was only that Master's mom-energy was far too strong!
By the time she came back to herself, she was already soaking in the bathing pool.
Gu Ning had coiled her long hair up and fixed it with a jade pin, and leaned against the rim with only her head showing, curled into a ball.
Before long, Qingxiao came in.
She walked barefoot across the floor, that head of ice-blue hair loose down over her body, and the pull of it was considerable.
Gu Ning sat as if on pins and needles, leaning against the rim.
Qingxiao lowered herself into the water as well.
But neither of them spoke, and something suggestive rose into the air of the room.
Qingxiao plainly had no intention of letting her off, and a trace of desire tinted her face.
She spoke with a thread of longing in it.
"Ning'er, let your master wash your hair for you."
Gu Ning wanted to refuse. She was not three years old, to need help washing her hair.
But seeing the expectation in Qingxiao's eyes, the refusal came as far as her lips and all that squeezed out was a single "All right."
Qingxiao bent slightly, her gentle breath spilling across Gu Ning's back, and a few strands of ice-blue hair brushed her snow-white spine, scratching at her like a kitten's paw, so that her whole body shivered.
Qingxiao, for her part, was looking at that smooth clean spine and snowy neck, the skin steeped in the steam and flushed a faint pink.
Her breathing quickened despite her, her mouth went dry, and her throat bobbed once.
"Master?"
Gu Ning noticed the pause behind her and turned her head a little.
"It is... it is nothing."
Qingxiao withdrew her hand and worked to keep her voice level, so that Gu Ning would notice nothing amiss.
Fortunately all stayed calm, and nothing strange happened.
Gu Ning got through her first bath in a haze, and a bath shared with her own master at that.
Not long after, the two of them changed into flowing cloud robes.
Qingxiao took hold of Gu Ning's sleeve and led her toward the bedchamber.
But Gu Ning was, after all, being a girl for the first time, and was not familiar with sleeping robes of this sort.
Under that outside pull it slipped, and she did not react in time, and only when it was nearly down past her chest did she clutch at it in alarm.
"Damn it!"
Gu Ning's yelp brought Qingxiao's eyes back around, and the pupils in those ice-blue eyes quaked.
"Ning'er, is this the first time you have worn one of these?"
Qingxiao spoke to take the edge off the awkwardness.
Gu Ning pulled the robe up in shame, her face one flush of red.
The two of them arrived at the bedside in this stumbling fashion.
Gu Ning lay down first, and Qingxiao followed close behind.
A cold, clean scent of wood and herbs drifted over.
It locked Gu Ning's whole body rigid.
Qingxiao's figure was better than her own, and taller, enough to cover her body over entirely, though for the moment she kept a fist's distance.
Qingxiao's own feelings ran in five directions at once, her heart thudding.
She could only think that what she had done today truly violated a master's virtue.
But all of it had been learned out of a picture book.
The story inside it went thus: a master who cultivated the Emotionless Dao was gravely wounded crossing her tribulation and her cultivation was spent to nothing, yet her disciple would not leave her, and confessed her love in the course of it, and the master, knowing that master and disciple were master and disciple and that both of them besides were women, refused her.
Then one day the disciple turned vicious words on her, something to the effect of "Master cannot put down her airs as a great cultivator after all, she is a useless immortal," and relations between the two of them soured.
After some long while, the master saw the once lovely, dear disciple grown haggard past recognition, with a pill held in her hand.
But the disciple's mouth showed no mercy even then, and she fed the pill to her master.
The master's vision blurred, but her body felt the disciple doing improper things to her.
Come the next day, the master's injuries began, miraculously, to mend.
She never saw her disciple again.
It was only years later that she learned the pill had been refined by the disciple out of her own spirit root...
Qingxiao knew perfectly well that this was only a picture book put together by idle people with too much interest in such things, but seeing the closeness between the two of them still left her red to the ears.
And the ending of that picture book was the very thing she did not want to happen between herself and her disciple.
So she had tried matching herself to the book's plot, and run through it once in practice.