Cao Ning herself could not have said exactly what she was feeling.
Her breasts still tingled where his hands had been. It was a strange bright prickling heat, as if his palms had left a print under the skin, and it had spread down through her belly and settled somewhere lower, between her legs, where it pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Her nipples were still so stiff they ached against the silk, and every breath dragged the cloth across them and sent another small jolt down to that same low place, and she was furious with them for it.
She had been touched before, by accident, in crowds and in sparring matches. Elbows, shoulders, once a careless hand on her hip in the market. It had never felt like this. It had never made her moan. The sound she had made in the dust replayed itself in her ears again and again, small and breathy and shameless, and every time it did, her face grew hotter and she felt the inside of her underwear grow a little damper against her.
It's Big brother Yan Chi, she told herself. Useless, harmless Yan Chi, who used to hide behind me.
But the body that had pinned her to the ground had not felt useless or harmless. It had been heavier than she expected and warmer, and there had been something hard pressed against her thigh that she refused, absolutely refused, to put a name to. The hands that had closed on her had not let go nearly as quickly as an accident should have. They had squeezed her twice. When she looked at him now, grinning at the air with that ridiculous red handprint on his cheek, she found that she did not know him at all, and that the not knowing made her heart beat faster.
***
"I'm sorry," he said, and meant at least half of it. "I really was trying to catch you. The rock, your ankle — I didn't aim for…" He gestured vaguely at her chest and immediately wished he had gestured at literally anything else.
"Don't point," she hissed. Her blush darkened, and she tugged the blue robe higher over her breasts with both hands, which only made the flesh swell against the neckline and nearly spilled her nipples into view. A passing mortal glanced over, went scarlet and walked into a barrel. Cao Ning made a small sound of despair and turned her back on the street. "Just… walk. And keep your hands to yourself."
"I will," he said.
He wouldn't. He already knew he wouldn't, given half a chance and a quieter road. But he fell into step beside her and folded his hands behind his back like a student, and she glanced at the posture and snorted despite herself, and the worst of the storm passed.
The fall had left its mark on her. A long smear of pale roadside dust ran down the back of her robe, from the small of her back over the full curve of her ass, and the blue silk there had been pressed so tightly into her by his weight that it still clung to the shape of each cheek, creased into the cleft between them as if someone had drawn the line with a fingertip.
She noticed it a few steps later, twisting to look over her shoulder, and made a small annoyed sound. Then she began to brush herself off with both palms.
He should have looked away. He didn't. Her hands swept down over her ass in quick, brisk strokes, and each stroke made the flesh bounce under the silk, the firm young cheeks jumping and settling, jumping and settling, the dust lifting off in little puffs that glittered in the sun. She slapped the last of it from the lower curve of her right cheek, and the cheek shivered from the blow and went still, and the silk peeled slowly out of the cleft as she straightened.
Pat. Pat.
When she turned back, she caught him watching. Her eyes narrowed. He looked at the willows with enormous interest, and heard her mutter something under her breath that sounded a great deal like pervert, and then, more quietly, a short helpless laugh.
The dust had found its way onto her chest too, a faint grey print on the bare skin between her breasts where his thumbs had pressed. She wiped it away with two fingers without thinking, and the flesh moved under her touch, and the faint pink marks his grip had left along the inner curves showed for a moment before the silk settled back over them.
"Young master," she said, smiling again despite the pink still in her cheeks, "there is an entrance ceremony coming in just two months. Do well in the exam. I'll do my best too."
He nodded. The words settled into him like a quest marker more serious than the system's. They decided to leave the roadside and the rock and the ghost of his hands on her breasts. They walked side by side again, with a little distance between them — not much, enough that her shoulder almost brushed his when the crowd thickened, and the almost was its own kind of torture. Read this novel at novelping dot com for the best experience.
On the path homeward, Yan Chi's mind turned to the entrance ceremony while Cao Ning walked half a step ahead, still pink-cheeked, still occasionally shooting him a look that was half scold and half something softer.
It was held every three years. On that day, the younger generation gathered to awaken their physiques — or to have their existing potential measured and displayed under the sect's cold, official light. Arrays would light. Elders would watch. Families would gamble years of resources on a single morning's verdict. After their potential was realised and ranked, five sectors within the demonic sect chose disciples for their factions. Careers, paths, power — or, for the unlucky, a public sorting into mediocrity that no amount of family begging could fully erase.
Five sectors, five doors into the sect's real machinery. First was Qi cultivation, the strongest among them, the path of meridians and spiritual force, of techniques that shattered stone and bent weather, of flying swords and killing intent thick enough to taste. It was the most prestigious and the most crowded with the ambitious, the sector that produced the names other sectors whispered.
Second was Physical cultivation, the body as weapon: muscle, bone, blood, the hard road of refining flesh until fists could break the same walls qi users cracked with spells. It was less glamorous and no less deadly. Yan Chi thought of his own Body Refining fifth stage and felt, for the first time, that this door might not spit him out.
Third was the Path of Alchemy: pills, cauldrons, the quiet power of those who could brew breakthroughs and poisons in the same afternoon, who never needed to win a duel if they could sell the winner his victory.
Fourth was the Path of weapon refining: artifact forges white with heat, spirit steel screaming as it took a soul-mark, the makers who armed the other four and took their cut of every war, every tournament, every private assassination that required a blade which would not talk.
Fifth was Yin cultivation. It was the most infamous, and female-only; male disciples were not suitable for the method, their yang cluttering the art. They practised charm techniques, seduction arts, the cultivation of yin force through allure and dual paths that the righteous sects called demonic with spit on the word. Known as a place of seductresses. They had trained powerful ones in the past — women who could stop armies with a glance and break will with a moan, who walked into enemy camps and walked out with generals on leashes. They accepted only the most beautiful girls; membership stayed small by ruthless design, beauty as entrance fee and weapon both. For men, the sector was spoken of like heaven on land: corridors of elite beauties, perfume and power, soft laughter behind screens, a paradise you entered only if you were invited or if you were prey.
Yan Chi walked beside Cao Ning and imagined her in that fifth sector — silver hair, blue robe, breasts half bare, learning to ruin men on purpose — and then imagined her in Qi cultivation instead, strong enough that no elder and no cousin could waste her on a bed she did not choose. The warmth in his chest sharpened into something like resolve. She had said she would do her best. He would do better than his best. The system would make sure of it, one perverted act at a time. He claimed the mission in the privacy of a blink.
Ding!
[Mission Complete: Grab a breast of Cao Ning]
[Received: 50 Pervert Points]
Fifty points bloomed in his total like sudden fruit, taking him from ten to sixty. His left cheek still glowed with her handprint. His palms still remembered the exact weight of her breasts, the exact hardness of her nipples, the exact breathy catch of her accidental moan. Somewhere ahead, two months waited with their ceremony and their five doors. Somewhere behind, Yan Jing still smiled with contempt.
Before they reached the fork, the avenue narrowed into a quieter residential stretch where the canal ran close beside the road and willow trees leaned over the water. Cao Ning slowed there, as if she did not want the walk to end quite yet, and Yan Chi matched her pace and found himself talking about the ceremony with a seriousness that surprised him.
"Qi cultivation," she said without hesitation. "Elder Chang says my meridians are suited for it. I'm already at the fourth stage of Qi Refining." She said it without boasting, the way she might say the weather was fine. "Mother wants me to consider Yin cultivation because of my face. I told her I'd rather break a man's arm than his heart."
Yan Chi laughed before he could stop himself. "Your mother must have loved that."
"She sighed for three days." Cao Ning's mouth curved. "Father pretended not to smile." Then she glanced at him, more carefully. "What about you? Physical? You've always been… body-focused."
She meant weak, and both of them heard it, and neither of them said it. He thought of the Divine Cultivation Method humming in his bones and the Pervert System waiting for the next filthy act, and of a boy who had died with porn on a screen and woken up able to feel five stages of Body Refining like banked fire.
"I'll take whatever door opens," he said. "And I'll be strong enough that it doesn't matter which."
She looked at him for a long moment, as if trying to match this version of him against the one in her memories, and then nodded once, slowly, as if she had decided to believe him.
For the last stretch of road neither of them spoke much. The sun had swung past noon and the shadows of the eaves had begun to lengthen across the paving, and the noise of the markets had fallen behind them, replaced by the quieter sounds of the residential quarter, the creak of a well-rope and the clack of a loom through an open window and a mother calling her children in to eat. Cao Ning walked close enough that her sleeve brushed his now and then. Each time it did, she glanced at him and then away, and the faint pink in her cheeks deepened and faded and deepened again, and Yan Chi, who had spent a whole previous life failing to understand women, found that he understood exactly what that colour meant, and kept very carefully quiet so as not to spoil it.
They reached the fork where the Cao compound road split from the Yan family's outer path. Cao Ning stopped and turned to face him, silver hair bright in the afternoon sun, the blue robe still slightly askew from the fall and the slap and the way she had tugged it back into place with shaking fingers.
"Don't skip the ceremony," she said. "And don't let those idiots at the practice hall get into your head. You're not useless. You never were. You were just… waiting."
He did not know what to say to that. The old Yan Chi's memories supplied a dozen frightened apologies. Yan Fan's habits supplied a dozen filthy jokes. He managed neither.
"I'll be there," he said. "Two months. I'll be ready."
She smiled, the real smile this time, the one that had followed him through childhood and still somehow existed after he had grabbed her breasts in the dirt of a public road. Then she turned down the Cao road, and he watched her go until the blue robe and the silver hair vanished among the tiled roofs and the banners, and the last flash of her thigh in the side cut was gone.
He stood alone at the fork for a long moment with sixty points glowing at the edge of his sight and the taste of dust still in his mouth and the print of her hand still warm on his cheek. A vendor pushed a cart of steamed buns past him. A pair of shadow guards from some lesser clan jogged by with messages sealed in black wax. The mountain wind came down the avenue and smelled of pine and distant rain. None of it noticed him. None of it knew that a dead man from another world was standing at a crossroads with a childhood friend's breast-weight still living in his palms and a system that paid for filth in the currency of power. He called up the status panel once more before he started home.
He thought about the way she had stood between him and the tall cousin, and the way she had laughed on the tea-house balcony, and the way her body had felt pinned under his in the dust, all three at once, and found that they did not sit comfortably together in him. The old Yan Chi had loved her the way a drowning boy loves the only plank in the sea. Yan Fan had known her for a few days and wanted her the way a starving man wants bread. And the system wanted her too, in its own cold way, as a column of numbers waiting to be added to his total. He did not know yet which of the three of them he was going to be when he looked at her next. He suspected the answer would be all of them.
[Status Window]
[Name: Yan Chi]
[Status: Weak]
[Cultivation: Body Refining, 5th Stage]
[Pervert Points: 60]
Sixty. From ten to sixty in a single accidental grab and a slap that still burned. The next breakthrough into Qi Refining would cost far more than that — one hundred and twenty, if the pattern held — but the gap no longer felt impossible. It felt like a distance he could walk, one filthy rewarded step at a time.
He turned toward home with the afternoon sun warm on the back of his neck and the sting still bright in his cheek, and the long road to the Yan residence unrolled ahead of him through the crowded city. The smell of grilled meat drifted after him from the avenue, and somewhere behind him, faint and receding, he could still hear the chain at Cao Ning's hip clicking as she walked away. He touched his cheek once, where her hand had landed, and found that he was smiling.