He stepped inside with Cao Ning at his side. Anger found them first. Several youths peeled away from the training lines and came toward them — Yan family, branch cousins and hangers-on, faces twisted with the particular disgust reserved for a young master who had never earned his title. Sweat shone on their arms. Practice swords hung loose in their hands. Their eyes flicked over Yan Chi, then locked on Cao Ning with open hunger and open resentment, travelling down her cleavage and the long flash of her thighs as if the practice hall's rules of focus did not apply to silver-haired beauties.
"Why are you hanging out with this useless man?" one spat. He was taller than Yan Chi, Qi Refining by the pressure rolling off him, and his smile was all teeth. "What a waste of such a beauty! Sister Cao, if you need a sparring partner, any of us would be honoured. Unlike him."
Another laughed, looking Yan Chi up and down with theatrical pity. "What are you here for? Child's play? Going to trip over a training post and cry for Mother?"
Laughter spread in a ring. Someone whistled. Someone else muttered about limp trash and poisoned weaklings loud enough to be heard. Cao Ning's smile had gone tight; she opened her mouth as if to speak, and Yan Chi shook his head a fraction. Not here. Not yet.
The old Yan Chi would have folded and left with his ears burning and his eyes on the dirt. The new one felt the armband cool against his wrist — the Defence Armband from the Welcome Package, invisible and waiting — and felt fifth-stage Body Refining heat coil in his fists, and for one dangerous second he measured the distance to the tall cousin's jaw. Then he measured the gap between Body Refining fifth and Qi Refining first, and the gap between a young master's tantrum and a public incident that Grand Elder Yan Li could use, and he made himself smile instead.
"I'm just looking," he said. "Don't let me interrupt your hard work."
The tall cousin's face darkened at the lack of fear. He took a half step forward, qi flaring faintly around his knuckles, and Cao Ning moved between them without seeming to, her silver hair brushing Yan Chi's sleeve.
For a moment the whole corner of the practice yard went quiet. Yan Chi could feel the cousin's qi pressing against his skin, the heavier, denser pressure of a Qi Refining cultivator leaning on a Body Refining one, and the old Yan Chi's nerves screamed at him to lower his eyes. He did not lower them. The Divine Cultivation Method hummed under his breastbone, and the fifth-stage heat in his muscles answered the pressure with a stubborn warmth of its own, and he held the taller boy's stare and let him see that there was nothing in it to feed on. The cousin's lip curled. His fingers flexed. Behind him the others had gone still, hungry to see the cripple flattened in front of the prettiest girl in Jinling.
"Cousin," Cao Ning said pleasantly, and her voice was very sweet and very clear, "if you strike the Clan Leader's son in a public hall, Elder Chang will hear of it before supper, and so will my father, and so will the Clan Leader. Is a waste of a morning really worth that?"
The cousin looked at her and then at Yan Chi, and then at the instructors on the far side of the yard, one of whom had turned to watch them with his arms folded. He spat in the dirt at Yan Chi's feet. "Another time," he said. "When you don't have a girl to hide behind."
"I look forward to it," Yan Chi said, and meant it more than he had expected to.
"We're leaving," she said brightly, as if nothing had happened. "The herb market closes early today. Young master, come on."
She took his elbow and steered him out of the compound before the cousins could decide whether to push further. Behind them the laughter followed for a few paces and then died, replaced by the barked corrections of the instructors, as if the interruption had never mattered. Yan Chi walked beside her with his jaw locked and his cheek still clean of any new bruise, and the anger sat under his ribs like a coal he would need later.
Out on the avenue, Cao Ning let go of his elbow and walked beside him in silence for a while, frowning at the paving stones. When she finally spoke, her voice was quieter than before. "They used to throw stones at you," she said. "Do you remember, when we were small? It was those same boys, and I used to stand in front of you with my arms out, and they would stop, because they didn't want to hit me."
"I remember," he said. The memory was there in the old Yan Chi's mind, clear as glass: a little silver-haired girl with her arms flung wide and her chin up, shouting at boys twice her size, and a skinny boy crouched behind her with his hands over his head. The boy had loved her for it more than he had ever loved anything. He had also been ashamed of it every day of his life.
"You don't need me to do that anymore," she said, glancing sideways at him. "Do you?"
"No," Yan Chi said. "I don't think I do."
She smiled, a little sadly, as though she were glad and sorry at the same time, and they walked on through the thickening crowd of the afternoon market, past a juggler tossing burning knives and a fortune-teller with a caged crow on her shoulder and a row of stalls selling cheap protective talismans to mortals who could not afford real ones. Cao Ning bought a little red talisman knotted on a string from one of them for a single copper and tied it around his wrist beside the hidden armband without asking, her fingers cool and quick against his skin. "For luck," she said. "You'll need it if you keep provoking Qi Refining cousins with that mouth of yours." He did not tell her that the armband already on that wrist could have turned aside her cousin's fist without his even feeling it. He let her tie the knot, and felt her fingertips linger for a heartbeat longer than they needed to, and said thank you.
He checked his status out of habit as they walked, a private flicker of the panel at the edge of his sight. Ten points. Body Refining fifth stage. The Defence Armband cool and invisible on his wrist. None of it would have been enough if the tall cousin had thrown a real punch in front of witnesses. He knew that. The knowledge sat beside the anger and did not cool it. Every laughing face in that practice hall had been a face that would one day look at him differently, or look at nothing at all. He filed the tall cousin's features away with Yan Jing's, in the drawer where this new life kept its debts.
"You didn't have to do that," he said once they were back on the avenue.
"I know," Cao Ning said. "I wanted to." She glanced at him sideways, and for a moment the childhood friend looked out from behind the grown woman's beauty. "They've always been like that. Don't listen." Visit novelping . com for the full chapter.
He listened anyway, and the words stuck under his ribs — useless, waste of a beauty — whether he wanted them to or not.
***
They walked on into a quieter stretch of road where the shops thinned out and the canal ran close beside the packed earth. Willow branches trailed in the water, and the noise of the market fell away behind them until he could hear the chain at her hip and the scuff of her sandals in the dust.
He was staring at her breasts from the side. From that angle the blue cloth barely contained them; each step lifted them and let them fall in a full, unhurried bounce, and where the silk dragged across the peaks he could see the faint shapes of her nipples shifting under it, catching and releasing the cloth. The bare inner curve of her left breast moved with every step, pale and smooth in the sunlight, and a single silver hair had stuck to it with sweat.
That was when the street betrayed her.
A loose rock, half buried in the dirt at the roadside, rolled under her sandal. Her ankle turned, her balance broke, and a small surprised sound left her throat as she pitched sideways.
Yan Chi moved without thinking, hand out and body forward to catch her. He misjudged everything at once, the speed and the angle and the sudden give of her falling weight against fifth-stage reflexes he hadn't learned to trust yet, and instead of catching her he went down with her.
They hit the packed roadside earth together.
Thud.
His body landed half over hers, one knee driving into the dirt between her legs, dust puffing up around their hips in a pale cloud. The impact knocked the breath out of both of them. For a heartbeat he lay there stunned, the dust settling over his shoulders, her body warm and yielding beneath him, her silver hair fanned out across the dirt and her breath hot against his chin.
Then he became aware of his hands.
They had flown forward to break the fall, and they had landed on the only thing in front of them. Both palms were pressed flat against her chest, his fingers spread wide over the blue silk, and under each hand there was a breast.
His fingers closed before his brain caught up.
He squeezed. Her breasts filled his palms as if they had been waiting for him all morning, full and warm and heavy, the flesh giving under his grip and spilling up between his fingers through the thin robe. They were firmer than he had imagined from watching them bounce, with a young, springy fullness that pushed back against his fingertips even as it yielded, and so big that his spread hands couldn't cover them. The deep valley of her cleavage folded around his thumbs, bare skin there, hot and faintly damp from the sun, and the edges of the silk panels bunched under his knuckles.
In the centre of each palm, something pinched.
Her nipples had hardened. Whether it was the shock of the fall or the sudden grab or something her body had decided without asking her, they had stiffened into two hard little peaks that pressed up into the middle of his hands through the silk. He felt their exact shape, the slightly raised ring of each areola and the stiff tip at its centre, and when his fingers tightened again without his permission, the silk dragged across them and they grew harder still, as if her body had answered the grab before her pride could.
A sound escaped her.
"Ahh…"
It was quiet and involuntary and shocked, a breathy little moan that came from somewhere low in her chest and slipped out between her parted lips before she could stop it. It was the kind of sound that went straight to a man's cock and stayed there.
Her thigh had come up between his legs as they fell, and it was pressed against his cock through their clothes. He felt himself swell against it, hard and fast and impossible to hide, and felt her thigh tense under the pressure.
He looked down at his hands.
The blue cloth was wrinkled and twisted under his grip. His squeeze had pushed the white upper curves of her breasts up out of the robe, swelling over the edge of the silk almost to the line of her nipples, and the left panel had slid sideways so far that a crescent of pink areola showed at its edge, framed between his thumb and forefinger. Her chest was heaving, lifting her breasts harder into his palms with each breath and letting them sink back, and every lift ground those two stiff points into the centre of his hands.
Then he looked at her face.
It was red from her throat to her hairline, red with shame and shock and something else, her goddess eyes wide and wet, her lips still parted on the ghost of that moan. Silver strands were stuck to her flushed cheek. She was staring at him as if she had never seen him before. This chapter was taken from NovelPing without permission.
For one filthy second he didn't let go.
Fuck. They're perfect.
He gave them one more squeeze, a small one that his hands did by themselves, and felt her nipples drag across his palms one last time and heard her breath catch in her throat.
Then he realised what he was doing, a heartbeat too late. Her palm was already rising.
Slap!
A red handprint bloomed on Yan Chi's left cheek. Heat and sting arrived together with the crisp crack of the slap, loud enough to turn a few heads at the far end of the road, and those heads politely turned away again, because in this city a beauty disciplining a man was not unusual enough to stop traffic. His ear rang. His head snapped sideways and his hands finally fell away from her, empty and still warm.
His cock twitched anyway, traitorous, remembering the weight that had just left his palms.
She scrambled out from under him and stood up in the dust with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, as if she could hide what his hands had already learned. Her face was so red that even her ears had gone pink beneath the silver hair. Her eyes were wet at the corners, anger and embarrassment braided so tightly that he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Her chest was still heaving, and the robe had shifted badly; one breast sat higher than the other, the panel twisted half off it, until she tugged it back into place with shaking fingers and the nipple vanished under blue silk again, still standing hard enough to show.
A passing water-carrier had stopped to stare at them. Two little boys at the canal's edge were giggling and pointing. She glared at all three of them until they fled.
He got up slowly, his cheek burning and his palms tingling.
"It was just an accident," he said quickly. "Right? I was trying to catch you. I didn't mean to—"
She made a pouty face and looked aside, cheeks scarlet, silver hair falling forward as if it could hide her. Her arms had crossed under her breasts by instinct, and that only pushed them higher in the blue robe, the pale flesh rising and pressing together until the cleavage he had just had his thumbs in deepened into an even darker line. It made the accident feel less like an ending and more like a preview. He tried not to stare. He failed. He could still feel the print of her nipples in the middle of his hands as clearly as the print of her hand on his face.
Ding!
A popup unfolded in front of his eyes, cheerful as a merchant counting coins.
[Mission]
[Grab a breast of Cao Ning.]
[Reward: 50 Pervert Points]
He stared at the task, then at the reward, then at Cao Ning's still-heaving chest, at the places his hands had just been and the nipples that still made faint bumps in the silk. The system's timing was either brilliant or cruel or both. It had waited until the grab was done and the slap had landed, and then held up a sign that said, more or less, good job, here is candy.
Doing anything perverted can give me points. Isn't that amazing?
He had already grabbed her breasts in both hands, accidentally and completely, with her nipples hard against his palms, and her quiet moan was still living in his ears like a tune he would replay later with his cock in his fist. And the system, shameless and perfect, had framed it as a mission and dangled fifty points like candy held out to a child. On top of the chance to feel those amazing breasts, he got paid for it. His cheek still stung. His cock was hard enough to tent his trousers if he wasn't careful with his stance. He was, against every rule of dignity, quite happy, and the happiness showed on his face before he could kill it.
Cao Ning was still glaring at him. His happy face made her angrier, her brows drawn and her pout sharper and her eyes shining, but seeing him happy was rare. In all the years of borrowed memory, Yan Chi's smiles had been thin, frightened things, the smiles of a boy waiting for the next kick. This one was stupid and filthy and real, and it reached her in spite of the slap still glowing pink on his cheek.
She forgave him. The anger loosened by degrees. Her arms uncrossed. A laugh escaped her, quiet and reluctant, and she shook her head as if scolding herself for giving in so easily. "You're impossible," she muttered, which was not I hate you and not never touch me again. She really was an amazing girl. Something warm moved in his chest as he looked at her, Yan Fan's hunger braided with Yan Chi's old gratitude, a feeling that wasn't pure and didn't pretend to be. He wanted to apologise properly. He also wanted to squeeze her tits again. He did only the first, in words, while his eyes did the second.