The afternoon light came through the lattice of his window in long gold bars that lay across the lacquered floor and climbed the edge of the bed, and Yan Chi sat in the warmth of them with his elbows on his knees and thought, with a kind of stunned disbelief that had not yet worn off, about how unfairly rich this second life already was.
He had been in this body for only a few days, and already the world it had dropped him into seemed less like a place than like an invitation. He was surrounded by beautiful women in a house where beauty was worn openly, like jewellery. He belonged to a family powerful enough to keep the lesser clans of Jinling polite, and he had a mother who held him as though he were still a child, and a father whose name made merchants bow. And at the edge of his sight, patient as a loyal devil, the Pervert System waited for the next filthy act it could turn into strength. All he needed was enough cultivation to stop being the joke of the Yan branch, and he could live in this world like a king, because it had been built from the ground up for men who took what they wanted.
His cock stirred at the memory of Cao Ning's breasts under his hands.
He had not meant to grab her in the street, not really, but his hands had not cared what he meant. They had closed on warm heavy flesh through a single layer of thin silk, the first real breasts he had ever held in either of his lives, and he had felt them give under his fingers and felt her nipples harden against his palms in the half second before she understood what was happening and her face went from startled to scarlet and her hand came round to crack across his cheek. His face had stung for an hour. His palms remembered her far longer than that. Just thinking about the squeeze was enough to make him hard in his trousers. And somewhere across the city, he thought, with a sour twist in his stomach that was ugly and hot at once, Elder Cao Chang was probably laying his hands on those same breasts right now, in the steam of some medicinal bath, and she would not even know it.
Yan Chi licked his lips and dragged his mind away from that thought before he wasted the whole afternoon stroking himself raw on borrowed jealousy.
Other memories rose to take its place, older ones belonging to the boy whose body he wore, and they were not hot at all. They were quiet and sad, and under the sadness lay something angrier.
They were memories of two girls. In them, Qiuyu and Dongyu were small enough to trip over the hems of their servant robes in the mansion corridors, twin shadows in matching grey cotton who followed the young master everywhere a step behind him, always ready with a cup of tea or a clean cloth or a quiet word when his world turned cruel. As they grew, the grey cotton became pale jade-green silk cinched at the waist, modest by the standards of a demonic household, and they began to wear their black hair tied up in twin loops, Qiuyu's always a little higher than her sister's. They had the same bright eyes, which had softened every time they looked at him, and the same mouths, which had smiled at him through every humiliation Yan Jing poured over his head. Their loyalty had never been the polite kind that hired servants offered while they counted their wages. It had been the loyalty that comes from growing up in the same halls, from kneeling beside a weak boy in the training yard to wipe the blood from his lip after another of Yan Jing's games, from choosing him over and over when choosing him brought them nothing but harder work and the pity of the other maids.
He held those memories carefully, the way one holds something that belongs to someone else, and did not let the heat of the afternoon touch them.
And then, because Yan Chi had been useless, a cripple stuck in Body Refining with a body that did not work below the waist, Grand Elder Yan Li had smiled his thin elder's smile in a family council one morning and arranged for the twins to be reassigned. Yan Jing had needed attendants, he said. Yan Chi, after all, hardly needed two. It had been done with a few words and a nod from Yan Tian, and the two girls who had stood behind the weak young master for his whole life had been peeled away from him and handed to the bully who had kicked him between the legs and left him broken.
His hands curled into fists on his knees, and the lacquered frame of the bed creaked under him as he shifted his weight.
They had grown into beautiful women, both of them, beautiful in that matched and doubled way that made men look once and then look again until their necks ached. Their skin was clear and pale and seemed to hold its own light. They had full breasts that strained against the servant silk, and waists slim enough for a man's hands to span, and hips that swayed when they carried a tray down a corridor, and long thighs, and faces cut from the same mould. And in nineteen years under the same roof, the old Yan Chi had never seen either of them naked. He had never touched them or tried to. He had blushed whenever their fingers brushed his as they poured his tea, and looked away in summer when the heat pressed the silk to their skin, and he had been a virgin in every sense that mattered, and he had lost them anyway.
Now Yan Jing had them. The thought made his jaw ache. If the boy who had owned this body before him had been anything other than a coward, those two beautiful maids would be in this room with him right now. Instead that bastard Yan Jing was enjoying what should have been his, and every time the memory replayed itself, the anger burned hotter. He could see it all: Yan Li's polite decree, Yan Jing's triumphant grin across the council hall, the twins' bowed heads as they were led out through the door away from the only master either of them had ever wanted to serve. They had not been asked. They had simply been given away, their loyalty crushed beneath an elder's authority and the simplest law of the demonic world, which was that the strong took and the weak watched.
"I'm going to free them," Yan Chi said to the empty room. His voice came out low and rough. "Both of them. Fuck that bastard."
The words sat in the air, and he found that he meant them. Saying it aloud made it real in a way that thinking it had not. He was not the old Yan Chi who blushed when a maid's fingers brushed his and looked away from summer silk. He was a man who had died alone with his cock in his hand and woken up in a body that still remembered how to be weak, and he was done with both halves of that equation. The twins had waited on a useless boy for nineteen years. They would not wait forever. He could not move openly against Yan Jing yet. Until the academy's entrance ceremony he was a branch young master at the bottom of the Body Refining realm, and Yan Jing was a Qi Refining cultivator whose father was a Grand Elder, and there was nothing he could do in daylight that would not end with him on his back in the dirt again. But that did not mean he had to sit still tonight.
He called up the system shop with a thought, and the luminous panels unfolded in front of him, skills and resources and equipment laid out in neat glowing rows. He flicked through them with growing impatience until his eye caught on a small entry halfway down the resources tab and his pulse jumped.
[System Shop]
[Invisible Pill]
[Cost: 50 Pervert Points]
[Effect: Complete invisibility for one hour]
Fifty points. He checked his status, almost afraid to look. Find the original chapter at g.com.
[Status Window]
[Name: Yan Chi]
[Status: Weak]
[Cultivation: Body Refining, 5th Stage]
[Pervert Points: 85]
Eighty-five, between the Cao Ning grab and the leftover scraps of his earlier rewards. Spending more than half of it on a single pill hurt, the way handing over a month's wages for one night's entertainment would have hurt in his old life. But he did not let himself hesitate. He bought it.
Ding!
[Purchased: Invisible Pill]
[Pervert Points: 35]
The pill settled into his system storage with a faint cool weight, like a stone dropped into a deep pocket, and he sat looking at the number that remained. Thirty-five. He thought of Yan Jing's smirk across the council hall, and Yan Jing's hands, and Yan Jing walking away down the corridor with what used to walk behind Yan Chi. He did not know yet what he meant to do once he was inside that house. Look, at least. See what had become of them. Perhaps more than look.
He watched the gold bars on the floor slide slowly toward the wall and turn orange and then red, and thought that night had never in either of his lives taken so long to fall.
He spent part of that waiting going over the old Yan Chi's memories of Elder Li's mansion as carefully as a thief going over a stolen map. The boy had been there often as a child, before the poisoning and the long years of weakness, when the branch families still pretended to be one household and the children of every elder ran through each other's courtyards without asking leave. He remembered a back gate behind the stables where the kitchen carts came in at dawn, a long gallery hung with paintings of cranes, a pond full of fat red carp that Yan Jing had once pushed him into while the twins shrieked and fished him out with a broom. He remembered the main hall and the ancestral shrine and the training yard. He did not remember Yan Jing's bedroom, because nobody had ever invited the cripple there, but he remembered which wing the elder's family slept in, and that was enough to start with.
One hour, he told himself. Get in, find them, see how bad it is. Don't do anything stupid.
He knew himself well enough, across two lifetimes, to doubt that last part.
He spent the remaining hours of daylight pretending to cultivate. He sat cross-legged on the bed with his eyes closed and the Divine Cultivation Method humming through his meridians, drawing in the afternoon qi and refining it down into the small furnace of his foundation, and on the surface it looked as though he were doing exactly what a young master recovering from years of weakness ought to be doing. Under the surface, every breath was a countdown. He counted the sticks of incense burning in the corner of the room. He counted the footsteps of servants passing in the corridor outside. He counted the slow crawl of the gold bars across the floor until they climbed the wall and turned the colour of old blood. More than once he opened the system shop again and stared at the other pills and talismans he could not yet afford, and then closed it again before he did something stupid with the thirty-five points he had left.
Once, around the middle of the afternoon, a servant knocked to ask whether the young master wished for tea, and Yan Chi nearly snapped at her before he caught himself and asked, as casually as he could manage, whether anyone had seen Qiuyu or Dongyu lately. The girl went pale and looked at the floor.
"They serve Young Master Yan Jing now, young master," she said. "In Elder Li's mansion. We don't see them anymore."
"I know that," he said. "I asked if anyone had seen them."
She shook her head. "Not for weeks, young master. Not since they were taken."
He dismissed her and sat staring at the door after she had gone, and the anger in his chest sharpened into something colder and more useful. Weeks. Yan Jing had had them for weeks, and in those weeks he had turned two loyal maids into the oil-slick women Yan Chi was about to climb through a window to find. The afternoon suddenly seemed even longer than before.
He ate his evening meal alone in his rooms, because nobody had thought to call him to the family table and he did not want to sit across from his father's cold eyes tonight, and afterward he walked out along the covered gallery toward the kitchen courtyards to return the tray himself, mostly to have something to do with his hands.
The kitchens at that hour were full of steam and clatter and the smell of scorched oil, and the maids washing bowls at the long stone basins did not notice him in the doorway at first. He heard the twins' names before he had decided to listen.
He stopped just outside the doorway with the tray balanced on one palm and stood very still in the shadow of the gallery post. The kitchens had always been the one place in the branch house where nobody looked twice at the crippled young master, because cooks and scullery maids had no time for the politics of the elders, and the old Yan Chi had spent half his childhood hiding in the warmth by the ovens, sneaking sweet buns and listening to gossip that no one thought he understood. The memory came back to him whole, complete with the smell of red-bean paste and the sound of the twins laughing at the long table as they rolled dough, their sleeves pushed up and flour on their noses, and it hurt in a place in his chest that did not belong to Yan Fan at all.
"—both of them, every night," one of the older women was saying, scrubbing a pot with savage energy. "My cousin carries the water to that wing. She says you can hear it from the outer courtyard."
"Hush," said another, glancing at the door. "It's not our business."
"It was our business when they were here. Those two used to help me with the dumplings at New Year. Little Dongyu could fold them faster than anyone in this kitchen." The older woman set the pot down with a clang. "Now they don't come out of that house at all. My cousin saw one of them at the well three days ago and she wouldn't even look up. Just stood there with her eyes on the ground like something had been taken out of her. And that Yan Jing walking around with a smile like a cat that's got into the cream."
A third maid, younger, giggled nervously and was immediately glared into silence by the other two. Yan Chi stood in the doorway with the empty tray in his hands until one of them looked up and saw him, and then all three went quiet at once and bowed so low that their faces nearly touched the wet stone. He set the tray down without a word and walked away, and the anger that had been sitting in him all afternoon turned over like a coal that had been given air.
***
Darkness settled over the Yan branch residences at last, deep and thick, the kind of mountain dark that made the spirit lamps along the eaves look small and lonely. Yan Chi changed into dark clothes, left his rooms without telling anyone, and crossed the quiet gardens toward Grand Elder Yan Li's mansion. Night insects sang in the hedges. On the distant roofs, shadow guards shifted their weight from one foot to the other and paid him no attention at all; he was still the useless young master in their minds, not worth a second glance when he walked his own family's paths after dark. Elder Li's compound was not far. The two households shared the same mountain wind and the same thick demonic hush that made cruelty feel like furniture.
Near the outer wall, where the garden paths ended and the elder's courtyard began, he took the Invisible Pill from his system storage and swallowed it dry.
Cold spread from his throat out across his skin in a sheet of ice-fire. His hands vanished first, then his arms, then the rest of him in a clean ripple that left only the faint sense of his own breathing and the pressure of the earth under his boots. He looked down and saw nothing. The guards at the main gate stared straight through the space he occupied without blinking, spears idle at their sides, talking about dice games and women in low voices that drifted past his invisible ears. Yan Chi smiled a thin smile that nobody could see and walked between them as if the night itself had given him permission.
Inside, the mansion smelled of incense and expensive oils and the faint metallic tang of the accumulation arrays sunk into the walls. Carved screens lined the corridors. Spirit lamps burned low along the beams. He moved quickly, because one hour was one hour and the pill would not care how far he still had left to go when it ran out, and for the first few minutes the halls gave him nothing but silence and the brush of his own sleeves against air he could not see.
Being invisible was stranger than any story had prepared him for. His body still felt solid to him, his feet still pressed into the floor and his breath still moved in his chest, but there was nothing to see when he looked down, and every instinct he owned screamed that he was naked in the middle of a crowd. Twice in the first corridor he flinched aside from a servant who was not even looking his way. Once he brushed a hanging screen with his shoulder, and the silk swayed, and the maid walking past it frowned at it for a long moment before shrugging and moving on, and Yan Chi stood pressed against the wall with his heart hammering so loudly that he was sure she must hear it.
Slow down. Breathe. You're a ghost. Ghosts don't panic.
He made himself walk normally after that, placing his feet on the edges of the floorboards where they were less likely to creak, and the house slowly gave up its secrets to him: the clink of dishes being stacked in a distant pantry, the low drone of a disciple reciting sutras behind a closed door, the dry cough of an old steward counting coins under a lamp.
Then a noise threaded out of a side room, wet and rhythmic and unmistakable. A woman's moan, broken open by each thrust, climbing and catching and climbing again.
He followed it to a wide window latticed in dark wood, eased the latch with careful invisible fingers, and slipped into a luxurious chamber lit by low lamps and the glow of a warming array under the bed.
In the middle of the room, Grand Elder Yan Li was fucking a young concubine from behind.