Ding!
A new panel bloomed in front of his eyes, brighter than the others, its edges faintly pulsing.
[Congratulations]
[Received: 5 Pervert Points]
[Reason: Voyeuristic gaze (Target: Yan Mei)]
Yan Chi lay frozen and stared at it.
Five points, for staring at his mother's back as she walked away. Five points for watching the red silk sink between those full round cheeks, for the bare line of her spine and the white flash of her thighs and the damp pink shadow of a nipple through wet cloth.
The system wasn't joking.
Perverted acts. Even looking counted. Even this counted: lying in a stranger's bed in a stranger's body, wanting the woman who was supposed to be his mother, wanting her the way he'd never been allowed to want anyone. The memory of her breasts against his face had earned him power.
A laugh tried to tear its way out of him. He clamped it down, shaking.
Heaven hadn't given him a righteous cheat. Heaven had given him exactly what he was.
Slowly, almost afraid to, he looked down at his lap.
The silk covers had risen.
A tent stood up under the sheet, unmistakable, the fabric stretched taut over a hard, thick shape that pushed upward from between his thighs and trembled faintly with every heartbeat. He stared at it for a long moment, the way a man stares at a letter from someone he had believed was dead. Then he threw the covers aside.
His cock was erect.
It was hard, fully and completely, straining so firmly against the thin silk of his inner trousers that the waistband had lifted away from his belly and left a gap of cool air over his skin. It was thick, thicker than his old one had ever been, and long, its whole shape printed through the cloth: the ridge of the crown, the cord of a vein running along the underside, the heavy root disappearing between his thighs.
The swollen head pressed up against the fabric and had already left a small dark spot where a bead of fluid had leaked through, and as he watched, the spot spread, the silk turning translucent over the flushed tip. The shaft throbbed. He could see it twitch with each beat of his heart, a slow heavy pulse, as if the blood flooding into it were being driven by a drum.
As if the year of limp humiliation had never happened. As if Yan Jing's boot had never landed.
The system connected.
It actually—it fixed it. It fixed me.
He reached down with a hand that wasn't quite steady and touched himself through the silk.
A groan escaped him before he could stop it, low and ragged. Sensation flooded back into him: heat, pressure, the hard eager throb of a cock that had finally remembered what it was for. It was so much more intense than anything he remembered from his old life, the difference between a candle and a bonfire. Every nerve along the shaft seemed to have been scraped raw and new, so that even the brush of his fingertips through the cloth lit him up from the tip to the base of his spine.
He wrapped his fingers around it through the cloth and squeezed. It pulsed back against his palm, thick and hot, filling his grip so completely that his fingertips barely met his thumb. The pleasure was so sharp and sweet that it shot down to his toes and curled them against the sheets.
He stroked once, slowly, from root to tip.
The silk slid over the swollen head, wet now at the slit, and dragged across the sensitive ridge beneath it, and he shuddered all over with his breath caught in his chest. His hips lifted off the mattress without his permission. Behind his closed eyes the red robe swayed toward the door again, and the deep valley opened in front of his face, and a stiff nipple dragged across his cheek through silk.
Mother's tits. Her ass in that red silk.
He stroked again, and a fresh bead of precum welled through the cloth under his thumb and smeared slick across the head, and the wet sound of silk sliding over it was the filthiest thing he had heard in two lifetimes.
No more dead weight. No more Yan Jing owning my future.
He made himself let go.
It took real effort. His hand didn't want to leave, and his cock throbbed in protest, hard enough to ache, jerking against the empty air as though it were hunting for the grip it had lost. But his mother was somewhere in the corridor, and the servants were just outside, and the glowing panel was still waiting in front of him with five beautiful points on it. He knew, with a clarity that cut through the heat, that there was something more important to do first.
He wet his lips.
"…Shop," he whispered.
The status window slid aside and a new interface unfolded in its place, wider than the others and divided into three neat columns.
[Shop]
[Skills]
[Resources]
[Equipment]
He touched Skills with a thought. The panel obeyed instantly, so smoothly that he almost forgot it wasn't a screen. A long list scrolled down. Nearly every entry was greyed out, sealed behind small glowing locks, with prices beside them that made him wince — three hundred points, eight hundred, two thousand — and one entry near the bottom was so dim he could barely read it, its price a number with so many zeros that he gave up counting them.
He had five.
He browsed anyway, hunger and caution warring in him. Names flickered past, some impressive, some absurd and some so filthy that he felt his ears heat even alone in the room. He filed them away in his memory one by one.
While he scrolled, Yan Chi's battered education rose up unbidden to explain what he was looking at.
Cultivation in this world was a ladder of realms. At the bottom was Body Refining, where a cultivator tempered flesh, bone and blood into a vessel strong enough to hold qi. Then came Qi Refining, where qi was drawn in from heaven and earth and refined within the body. After that, Qi Consolidation, where the refined qi was condensed and stabilized, and only those who passed it were considered true cultivators. Then the Spirit Realm, the Heavenly Realm, the Imperial Realm and the Saint Realm, each a leap so large that people at one level could barely imagine life at the next. The Emperor Realm and the Supreme Realm belonged to legends. At the very top was the God Realm, which most people believed was only a story told to children. Each realm was divided into five stages, and each stage was a wall to break through.
Yan Chi sat at Body Refining, third stage.
Trash. By any serious measure, trash. The servants' children in the kitchen courtyard were close to it.
Yan Jing was already in Qi Refining, a whole realm above him, and the gap between them wasn't a step so much as a cliff that the old Yan Chi had spent his life at the bottom of, looking up.
He switched to Resources. More locks, more impossible prices, more glowing names. Then, near the top, he found a single entry that wasn't greyed out. It glowed a steady pale white, waiting for him.
[Low-Quality Qi Potion]
[Cost: 5 Pervert Points]
[Effect: Minor recovery of qi and vitality]
It wasn't impressive. A child's medicine. In Yan Chi's memories there were dozens of potions like it in the family storerooms, handed out to injured guards like candy.
He bought it without hesitating.
The point counter on his status window dropped to zero. Something cool settled into a space that he could feel rather than see, a sort of pocket at the edge of his awareness, as if the system had opened a drawer in the air beside him and slid the potion inside.
Ding!
A new panel burst open, golden instead of blue, its edges shimmering.
[First Purchase Detected]
[Welcome Package Unlocked]
His breath stopped.
The golden panel unrolled downward like a scroll, and three lines of text glowed across it one by one, each brighter than the last.
[Skill: Divine Cultivation Method (God-Level)]
[Talisman: Barrier Entry Talisman (Can enter any barrier)]
[Equipment: Defense Armband (Defends against cultivators below Qi Consolidation)]
Yan Chi's hands began to shake.
He read it again to make sure. Then a third time.
God-Level.
A god-level cultivation method. In Yan Chi's memories, the Yan branch's most treasured technique was an earth-grade manual kept in the clan vault behind three layers of formations. Only Yan Tian and the grand elders were allowed to study it. Main-sect geniuses fought and died over heaven-grade techniques. Nobody he had ever heard of possessed anything at the god level. The god level belonged to the stories, to ancient immortals and lost inheritances that collapsed entire mountains when they surfaced.
And it had been handed to him for buying a five-point potion.
A talisman that could pierce any barrier, not just weak ones or ordinary formations. Any.
An armband that would stop blows from anyone below Qi Consolidation. Yan Jing was in Qi Refining. Every bully, every hanger-on, every guard who'd ever sneered at the useless young master was below Qi Consolidation.
Equip, he thought, half afraid it wouldn't work.
Cool metal closed around his left wrist.
He looked down. A band of dark silver hugged his forearm just above the joint, etched with fine lines that glowed faintly for a heartbeat. Then the band shimmered and vanished. He could still feel it, a cool, smooth weight against his skin, but when he looked, there was only his bare wrist. He pressed his fingers to the spot and felt the metal beneath them, hidden under some thin illusion that only he could see through.
Learn.
The Divine Cultivation Method sank into his mind like warm oil.
It wasn't like reading. It was like remembering something he'd always known. Diagrams unfolded behind his eyes, glowing maps of meridians and acupoints, rivers of light running through the shape of a human body. Breathing patterns arranged themselves in long rhythmic cycles. Inhale, hold, guide, exhale. There were patterns for drawing qi from the air, for refining it in the dantian, for pushing it through blocked channels and tempering bone and blood. Each one was so elegant and so complete that the clumsy techniques Yan Chi had struggled with for years looked like a child's scribbles beside a master's calligraphy.
He gasped and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes until the flood settled.
When it did, the method was simply there, folded neatly into the back of his mind, waiting.
The talisman went into the drawer in the air beside the potion. A slip of yellow paper covered in red script hovered for a moment at the edge of his vision before vanishing into storage.
Yan Chi lowered his hands and sat very still on the edge of the bed, breathing.
Then he swung his legs off the mattress and stood up.
The floor was cool and smooth under his bare feet, wide planks of dark wood polished to a low sheen. He took a step and almost stumbled; his legs were longer than he expected and his balance sat in a different place. He caught himself on a bedpost carved in the shape of a crane and stood there for a moment until the body settled around him.
Then he looked around properly for the first time.
The room was luxurious enough to shame his old apartment out of existence. Jade ornaments sat on lacquered shelves, small carved mountains and coiled beasts, glowing faintly green in the lamplight. A tall screen of carved rosewood stood near the window, its panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the shape of cranes taking flight. A writing desk of dark wood held brushes, an inkstone and a stack of cultivation manuals that Yan Chi's memories told him had been opened far more often than they'd been understood. The windows were framed in silk shot through with gold thread. Even the lamps were works of art.
Wealth. Power. A family that could afford beauty and cruelty in equal measure.
He walked to the bronze mirror standing in the corner and looked into it.
A young man looked back. He was slender, a little too thin, with pale skin that had seen too little sun. His face was handsome in a soft, delicate way, with high cheekbones, a straight nose and long-lashed eyes that his mother's beauty had clearly passed down. His black hair was long, tangled from sleep and falling past his shoulders. It was a pleasant face and a forgettable one. It was the face of a nineteen-year-old who had spent his whole life looking at the ground.
But the eyes were different now. There was something in them that hadn't been there before. Something hungry.
This is a demonic world. The thought came cold and clear out of Yan Chi's memories, and Yan Fan accepted it. The strong take what they want. The weak get poisoned. The weak get kicked in the balls and laughed at until they stop being funny.
I need strength. Fast.
He tied a loose outer robe over his inner clothes, his still-hard cock tenting the silk awkwardly until he adjusted the sash, and slid open the door.
The corridor outside was empty. Lanterns hung at intervals along the ceiling. The air was cooler and smelled of pine and something green and growing. At the far end the corridor opened onto a wide veranda, and beyond the veranda—
He stopped walking.
It was late afternoon. He hadn't known that, inside the shuttered room. The sky was clear and deepening toward gold, and beneath it, mountains rose in layer upon layer of blue, each range paler than the one before it until the farthest peaks were barely darker than the sky. Clouds clung to the summits like white robes, draped over the shoulders of the mountains and trailing down into the valleys. Between the mansion's outer walls and the first ridge, forest rolled deep and green. The tops of the pines swayed in a wind that carried their scent up to him, clean and sharp, mixed with the faint cold smell of running water from somewhere far below.
Birds wheeled over the trees, black specks against the gold. A temple bell sounded very faintly from somewhere in the city, one long note that trembled in the air and died.
Yan Fan had lived twenty-six years in a city of concrete and exhaust. He'd seen mountains like this only as desktop wallpaper.
He stood on the veranda with his hands on the railing and simply breathed. Demonic territory or not, the land itself was gorgeous.