Chapter 84 of 98
A Dead Man's Face
My husband is behind me.
Nalan Meng thought it very clearly, with the barbarian's cock in her mouth.
He was standing there. Somewhere behind her, behind the chair or beside it, in that dead man's face. Watching. Watching her lips stretched around this thing. Watching her ass in the air with the chain between her cheeks. Watching her pussy, which she could feel was wet, wet and swollen and leaking slowly onto the golden chain—she could feel it running, she could feel the drop gather and slide down the inside of her thigh.
He had said it was a disguise. A uniform. Go along with it. No matter what.
She sucked harder. She did not know why. She told herself it was to finish it faster. She told herself it was for the plan. Her tongue went round and round the broad hot head of the barbarian's cock, and she tasted the first bitter salt of his precum, and her pussy clenched on nothing and she moaned, very softly, around him, before she could stop it.
Seductress, the window had said, in her husband's eyes. She did not know what the window said. She knew what her body said. More.
Yun Xianchen was not thinking about anything.
She had decided, in the little room, while she fastened the collar, that she would not think. That was how she had got through yesterday. Her Qi lay under the iron ring like coals under ash, and her mind lay under her Qi like a stone under water, and she did not let anything reach it. She licked the root of the barbarian's cock and felt the coarse hair on her cheek and smelled him and did not think.
But her body thought.
Her body remembered the overseer's cock tearing into her yesterday. The pain. And the heat that had come after the pain, and the shameful clenching. And now, kneeling here with her ass lifted to a cavern full of her own sect brothers, it remembered all of it, and her pussy throbbed, sore and swollen, and grew wet around the chain anyway.
Somewhere among them, Ximen Lang was kneeling and looking at her.
She licked up the shaft until her tongue met Nalan Meng's lips around the head, and the two of them kissed the cock between them, and she shut her eyes.
Luo Jin was lost.
Two tongues. Two mouths. Two of the most beautiful faces under heaven, side by side in his lap, working at his cock. He had had many women. He had never had anything like these two. The one with the brown hair—she had something in her. Some heat. Every time she touched him, it went into his blood like strong drink. His head went back against the chair. His big hands came down and rested on the backs of their two heads, and pressed, not hard, just enough. His eyes half closed.
He was not looking at anything. He was not listening to anything.
He did not hear the overseer move.
Li Yuguo moved very quietly. Two steps. Three. Around the side of the chair, behind it, while the lord's head lolled back and his breath came hoarse and slow.
He opened his inventory in his mind and reached into it, and his hand closed on a hilt.
It was a sword from Alimama. Not a great one. He had bought it two weeks ago and never used it. A plain straight blade with a talisman etched along the fuller to keep the edge. He had read the description. Sufficient against Martial Soul skin if the strike is true. He had thought at the time: There's that word again. If.
He looked at the back of the barbarian's thick neck. Above the fur collar, below the long greased hair. A hand's width of bare skin.
Below that neck, his wife's mouth was stretched around this man's cock.
He did not let himself think about it. He thought: Now.
He drove the sword in at the back of the neck with all his Qi behind it.
The edge went through skin like cloth. Through muscle like wet clay. Through the thick hard column of the spine with a jolt that went up his arms to his shoulders, and the talisman along the blade flared white—and then it was through. The point came out the front of the lord's throat.
Blood burst out of it like a fountain.
It came out in a hot red sheet over the two women kneeling in his lap. Over their faces. Into their open mouths. Down their throats and over their breasts, over the gold, running down their bellies in streams. It splashed across Nalan Meng's eyes and she flinched back with a cry. It sheeted down Yun Xianchen's white back.
Luo Jin did not understand what had happened.
His eyes opened. His hands jerked once on their heads. His mouth moved—there was nothing in it but blood. He looked down, puzzled, at the two red faces in his lap and the red point of steel standing out from under his own chin.
Then he died. Sitting in his chair. With his cock still hard and wet from their mouths, and his last load still in his balls.
Li Yuguo pulled the sword back out.
It came free with a long sucking scrape. The body sagged forward over the women, and Guan Yunfan was there—Li Yuguo had not seen him move—and caught it by the shoulders before it could fall on them, and lowered it back into the chair.
The cavern was utterly silent.
Then, from the kneeling rows, someone let out a breath. And another. And then a hundred men were looking at each other with their faces open and wild, and nobody shouted—they had been told not to shout—but every man of them clenched his fists.
One.
Nalan Meng knelt on the stone with blood running off her chin.
She could taste it. Hot and coppery and thick, mixed with the salt of him still on her tongue. Her face was wet with it. Her breasts. Her belly. It ran down between her thighs and mixed there with her own wetness, and she could not tell which was which.
She looked up.
Her husband stood over her in a dead man's face with a red sword in his hand. Breathing hard. His eyes were on her. Only on her. Not on the lord. On her.
Something went through her that she did not have a name for. It was not shame. It was not relief. It was hot and fierce and it went straight down to the bottom of her belly, and her pussy clenched once, hard, and she shuddered all over and did not know why.
Beside her, Yun Xianchen was wiping blood out of her eyes with the backs of her chained wrists. Her hands were perfectly steady now. Her face was white under the red.
"Is he dead?" she said. Her voice was quite calm.
"He's dead," said Li Yuguo.
Yun Xianchen nodded. Then she leaned forward, slowly, and spat on the barbarian's cock.
They worked fast after that.
Li Yuguo put the sword back where it had come from. Ximen Lang and Li Yutang and Guan Yunfan took the body up between them and carried it back through the deep tunnel and out through the hole into the forest, where the men in the trees would put it in the earth. The two house guards who had come up the track with their lord had been waiting at the tunnel mouth; they had not lived long enough to wonder why it was so quiet. The chair was scrubbed. Sand was thrown over the stone. The disguised miners went back to their picks.
In a quarter of an hour, the cavern looked exactly as it had looked that morning.
Nalan Meng and Yun Xianchen went to the bath to wash the blood off.
They went alone this time. Down the long tunnel, through the steam. The great pool was empty, the miners all at their picks. They stood under the hot spring and let it pour over them and watched the water run pink off their bodies into the pool, and then clear.
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
Then Yun Xianchen said, without turning around: "He watched."
Nalan Meng did not ask who. "Yes."
"Did you know he would?"
Nalan Meng thought about it. About the doorway, and the dead man's face, and her husband's eyes on her as the blood came down. About the heat that had gone through her.
"Yes," she said.
Yun Xianchen did not say anything else. After a while, she reached out and wiped a streak of blood from behind Nalan Meng's ear that she had missed, with her thumb, carefully. Then she turned back to the water.
They came back up the tunnel in their chains.
They had nothing else. The robes were in the little room. So they walked the length of the mine again, in gold, clean and shining—past the disguised miners, who were not real miners, and who all knew exactly who they were now, and who could not stop looking. Not at the backs of them. At their asses, swaying, as they walked away up the tunnel. At the gold between them.
A hundred men bent over their picks, and watched them go.
In the little room, they put the robes back on, and the six of them sat down again.
"One," said Li Yuguo. "Four left. And by tomorrow at the latest, someone down in that village is going to wonder why their lord hasn't come back from the mine."
"He came up here to fetch his slaves," said Ximen Lang slowly. "That's what everyone will know. He came up the track to get them."
"So he has to go back down the track with them," said Li Yuguo. "Tonight. In front of everyone."
They looked at each other.
That was the problem.
Someone had to go down into the village wearing Luo Jin's face. Walk into his hall, sleep in his house, sit at his table. In front of his people. In front of his chieftains, who were half a step from Martial Soul and had known the man for twenty years.
A mask could give a man another man's face. It could not give him another man's Qi.
"I can't do it," Li Yuguo said. "I'm Martial Teacher. The first chieftain who brushes against me will feel it. Luo Jin was Martial Soul." He did not look at anyone. "Nor can any of you. Except one."
Everyone in the room turned their heads, slowly, and looked at Li Yutang.
Li Yutang. First stage of Martial Soul. The only one of the men who was.
Li Yuguo looked at his adopted elder brother across the little room and thought about trust.
Trusting Li Yutang was like playing a game blindfolded. He knew that. He had written this man. He knew exactly what Li Yutang wanted: Li Yuguo's death, and Li Yuguo's city, and Li Yuguo's wife's body, very much in that order and sometimes in the other order. He had seen Li Yutang's eyes on Nalan Meng all afternoon. He had known what they were imagining.
He's the villain, he thought.
And then, with a little dry inward laugh: But who here isn't?
Not Ximen Lang, who had knelt in this mine yesterday and come in his trousers watching his own betrothed. Not Guan Yunfan, the king of thieves. Not himself. Certainly not himself. He was a man who had stood in a doorway and watched a barbarian spread his wife's cheeks with a gun in his inventory, and waited.
And Yutang won't throw away a crystal mine, he thought. Whatever else he is, he's greedy. This mountain's worth more to him than any woman. Even her.
He hoped that was true.
"Brother," he said. "You're the only one of us at Martial Soul. You'll have to wear the lord's face, and go down into the village. And take the plan on from there."
Li Yutang's face did not change.
But behind his eyes, Li Yuguo watched something start running. Like a man who has been handed the key to a treasure house and told to fetch one coin.
"Of course, brother," said Li Yutang warmly. "You can trust me."
And his eyes slid, slowly, to the two women on the bench.
It was settled. Nalan Meng and Yun Xianchen would go down into the village with the lord, as his slaves. The lord's slaves were known. The lord's slaves were expected. If he came down the mountain without them, every barbarian in the village would ask why.
At dusk, they gathered at the main mouth of the tunnel.
Li Yutang put on the mask. They watched it flow over his face, and thicken, and darken—and swell. His shoulders went out. His chest. His height came up and up until his head was brushing the roof of the tunnel. The long greased hair. The scar from temple to mouth.
And the smile. The smile was the worst of it. It was Luo Jin's crooked scarred grin exactly. But it was also, unmistakably, Li Yutang's.
Nalan Meng and Yun Xianchen took off their robes.
For the third time that day, they stood in the torchlight in nothing but gold. They fastened their collars. They did not look at anyone.
Li Yuguo picked up their two chains. He stood for a moment holding them.
Then he put them into Li Yutang's huge hand.
"Don't forget the mission," he said. Quietly. In his own voice, under Yan Qiu's face. "And don't do anything stupid."
Li Yutang's hand closed over the chains.
"Of course, dear brother," he said, and smiled down at them both. Inside, he was smiling a great deal more.
They went down the track into the dusk.
The huge dark shape of the lord in front, with the two gold-shining figures on their chains behind him. Their bare asses moving. Their hair stirring in the wind off the mountain. Down toward the lights of the village, and the smoke of the fires.
At the mouth of the tunnel, three men stood and watched them go. Li Yuguo, Guan Yunfan, Ximen Lang.
"Brother," said Guan Yunfan after a while. "Was that really the best plan? Sending him with my sister-in-law?"
Li Yuguo watched until he could not see the gold any more.
"We didn't have a choice," he said. "And he won't betray us. Not after he's seen this mine."
The system chimed, very softly, in the corner of his sight.
[ Cuckold Points +600 ] — Nalan Meng, Yun Xianchen: served Luo Jin before the city guard (witnessed)
Current Cuckold Points: 9700 Cuckold Bar: 65%
He closed it without reading it twice.
Then he turned around, and went back into the cave, where a hundred of his people were waiting in the torchlight with picks in their hands, and somewhere down the mountain his wife was walking into the dark on another man's chain. He sat down in the dead overseer's chair. Guan Yunfan brought him a cup of water from the spring, and he drank it, and asked about the watch on the tunnel mouth, and listened to the answer. And under the talk, the picks went on.
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