"How did it turn into this..."
Gu Ning lay there with a flush on her face that would not fade, her heart bounding about like a startled deer.
The Qingxiao before her now was nothing like the cold, ascetic master of her memory, but something more like a little girl who knew nothing of the world?
Looking at her master's thoroughly bashful face, Gu Ning had the feeling of having been invited politely into the jar.
The distinct feeling of having walked into her trap.
Gu Ning had assumed at first that her master simply missed her disciple too much, and wanted closeness in order to mend what was between them.
But the way things were developing had drifted further and further from what Gu Ning had reckoned on.
Master means to eat me clean off the plate!
But then, with both of them being girls, how could that sort of thing even happen?
Gu Ning had got that far when she remembered that she carried the Mystic Maiden Violet Yin Body, and was not like ordinary people.
It was a secret not even her closest master knew.
"But if she found out, would I not..."
The flush on Gu Ning's face deepened another shade, and she did not dare imagine what came next.
Just as the war between heaven and man was raging inside Gu Ning, Qingxiao leaned her body over again.
"Ning'er, why is your body so hot?"
Qingxiao's hand touched Gu Ning, feeling the heat coming off her, and she asked the question with concern.
"It is nothing, Master." Gu Ning fought to stay level. "The spirit water was merely a little warm, so some of the heat has stayed in me, that is all."
This was a lie.
But Qingxiao did not think further on it. Those lovely eyes blinked once, and she believed it.
The reason she had shifted nearer her disciple again was that she wanted to put more of the picture book's knowledge into practice.
'When master and disciple sleep, it is best that skin be joined to skin, which better promotes the deepening of feeling, known for short as — cuddling.'
Qingxiao believed it.
But she did not want to say so to Gu Ning as bluntly as that.
"Some days ago I read in an ancient text of a method that can improve the circulation of spiritual energy." Qingxiao spoke tentatively to the Gu Ning who was pretending to be asleep. "Would Ning'er care to try it?"
Hearing this, Gu Ning saw straight through the whole thing.
She had worked out what her master was scheming: first get her washed, then get her into bed, then hoover her up in one gale-force breath, or else get intimate.
Could she refuse? Obviously — she could not!
If she refused and left the wish unfulfilled, she would very likely pay it back afterward with interest.
"If it is Master, then anything at all is permitted."
Gu Ning answered in a low voice.
Since she had already walked into her master's snare, she might as well play along to the end and see what the woman actually intended.
Seeing Gu Ning agree, Qingxiao's eyes flashed and something quietly gleeful crossed her heart, though on the surface she kept her cool composure, as if this really were an ordinary circulation of power.
But she looked over the flowing cloud robes Gu Ning was wearing, and an expression of consideration came onto her face.
The lower body?
No. Far too blatant, and Ning'er would certainly never agree to it.
The upper body?
The face, the book said, had little effect. The neck... that seemed to be for... biting?
Qingxiao's gaze came to rest at last on Gu Ning's bare, flat lower belly.
The place lay very close to the Golden Core, and was besides the most sensitive and mortal spot on a cultivator. As a point of contact for cuddling it could hardly be bettered.
Having got that far in her thinking, Qingxiao stretched out a pale, slender hand and reached toward Gu Ning's body.
For the sake of realism, Qingxiao even ran her art, and thread upon thread of frozen-ice spiritual energy seeped out of her.
Fwup—
A pair of faintly cool hands settled onto her own warm lower belly.
Gu Ning's pupils contracted slightly at the strangeness of it against her belly.
It was like having a fever patch stuck on her as a child, cold and hot at once, raising a numb, prickling sensation.
"Hnnah~"
Gu Ning had not been braced for it, and a soft, suggestive whimper came out of her.
Realizing she had made a strange noise, she stole a hurried glance at her master's reaction.
Eyes lightly closed, wholly absorbed in running her art.
At the sight, Gu Ning set her mind at rest. Mercifully her predicament had gone unseen, and no misunderstanding had come of it.
But a thread of grievance rose in Gu Ning all the same. First Tao Yao had seized her and pinched at her lower belly, then Yu Ruo had spread medicine over that same lower belly.
And now here was her master laying these ice-cold hands over it.
Did the world have some quarrel with this particular part of her?
Qingxiao's lashes trembled faintly, plainly only pretending at closed eyes, though Gu Ning did not notice.
"So warm, so soft..." This was Qingxiao's first impression on laying them there.
It must be understood that Qingxiao was a Frost Soul Jade Body with an ice-attribute heavenly spirit root, and her sense of temperature was acute.
Slight as Gu Ning's frame looked, her lower belly had a fair amount of flesh to it, soft and yielding under the hand, like kneading dough.
For a moment Qingxiao did not want to let go, and held the position as it was.
Several minutes passed like that.
"How is it still... still not finished..."
Little by little, Gu Ning's face began to redden.
Because she could feel that the hand was no longer content to rest on her lower belly, and was going further...
"Why is she still feeling me up!" The corner of Gu Ning's eye twitched, and a thread of doubt rose in her. "Is this a proper cultivation art at all?"
Still, for all that Qingxiao was only pretending to examine her, she did use a little divine sense around Gu Ning's Golden Core.
It was very faint, but as a great cultivator of the late Nascent Soul, Qingxiao still saw the place where something was wrong.
Around Gu Ning's Golden Core there seemed to circle a thread of pale pink spiritual energy that did not belong.
"What is this?"
A thread of doubt surfaced in Qingxiao's heart.
It must be understood that a cultivator's spiritual power, and origin spiritual power above all, carries a strong personal mark.
Unless two cultivate arts of the same origin and stand at no great distance in realm, the two are exceedingly difficult to blend.
And for one person's origin aura to be left that clearly inside another's spiritual power, there were only two common routes
One was long-term dual cultivation, spiritual power merging into spiritual power.
The other was... one party using their own blood essence or origin as a guide to work an art of root-securing upon another, the two auras entangling deeply in the course of it.
Qingxiao's heart trembled. Could her disciple already have a dual cultivation dao companion?
But Qingxiao could see that this thread of pale pink spiritual energy had been fused in by force, and over so short a time that a state of rejection had set in, so that it only circled near the Golden Core.
So it could only be the second!
But that method, only the demonesses of the Joyous Union Sect could work.
Qingxiao's gaze darkened as one fact came to her.
While she had been sealed away in seclusion, her disciple had been lured off by a demoness of the Joyous Union Sect, and had her cultivation drained from her without ever understanding what was happening.
And the other party had poured her own spiritual energy into Ning'er's Golden Core besides, hoping to interfere with her cultivation.
Her disciple was surely kind-hearted, she reasoned, and had simply been deceived into it, and so had walked into the trap.
Qingxiao raised a hand and scattered that wisp of pink spiritual energy, then opened her eyes.
She felt rather more warmly toward that picture book now. Had it not been for what was written in it.
She would never have discovered that her disciple had suffered such a thing.
"These demonesses of the Joyous Union Sect are a malignancy, truly."
Qingxiao's eyes turned to ice. She had never had any interest in a sect whose stock in trade was the pleasures of men and women, let them keep to their bounds and that was enough, but now they had set their sights on her own disciple.
They had found their road to death.