Wine-Guessing Booth

The third stage was a wine-guessing booth.

It was a small curtained pavilion with its front panel rolled up so that guests could see inside, where a slave knelt blindfolded on a cushion before a row of seated men with their robes open.

Each man had a different wine poured over his cock from a little silver ewer, and the slave's task was to lick each shaft clean and name the vintage, and if she guessed wrong, she was spanked once for every mistake by all the men together. The slave inside was doing well, from the look of it.

She had a cock in her mouth and was humming thoughtfully around it with her cheeks hollowed, and when she pulled back with a wet pop and announced, "Southern plum, three years in the cask," the man whose cock it was roared with laughter and admitted she was right.

Fengrui laughed with him and stopped at the booth's mouth to watch the next round. While the slave inside moved on to the next shaft, he stood behind Yan Mei, let the chain hang slack, and slid both his hands around the front of her body.

One hand cupped her right breast and rolled the gold sun between finger and thumb. The other slid down over the warm swell of her belly to the silk at her crotch, where he began to rub her through the scrap in slow, firm, wet circles.

He did not hurry. He played with her the way he might have played with a string of prayer beads, idly, possessively, while he chatted to the man beside him about grain prices in the south. Yan Mei stood still. Her nipple tightened under his rolling thumb until the gold sun trembled.

After a minute or so the silk had soaked through completely and his fingertips were sliding over it, and when he finally pressed one fingertip directly over her clit and held it there, she let out a small sound that drew the heads of the nearest men.

"Ah," said Fengrui, delighted. "There she is."

He kept his finger there for a dozen more breaths, until her thighs began to shake, and then he took it away and patted her mound through the silk and walked on.

"Patience, beauty," Fengrui said, without looking back. "We're nearly there."

She had glanced back over her shoulder, just once, while he was rubbing her at the wine booth. Yan Chi had seen it. Her masked eyes had gone across the hall, past the guests and the stages and the swaying lanterns, to the far side where her husband sat on a low sofa near the swap platform with Wang Xuan's mother-slave kneeling between his knees and her head moving slowly in his lap.

Yan Tian had been watching. He had been watching his wife the whole time, over the bobbing head in his lap, with the steady, unhurried attention of a man reading his favorite poem. Yan Mei had looked at him for the space of one breath.

He stopped at last where a stage dense with bodies made going any further rude.

It was the largest stage on the floor, a broad square of dark polished wood raised to waist height so that a crowd could stand all the way around it, and the crowd standing all the way around it was the thickest Yan Chi had seen all night.

In the middle of the stage stood a single heavy table, padded on top with dark leather gone glossy from use. Above it, hung from two chains on a lacquered frame, glowed a tall ranking board painted in red and gold, its names and numbers written in fresh white chalk.

The words across the top of it, in elegant brushwork, read THRUST COUNT. Below them ran a column of names and tallies, and the line at the very top, written in big ugly proud strokes that someone had gone over twice to make bolder, said Xu Zhi — 526.

A masked counter stood at the corner of the stage with a little bronze gong at his hip and a long pointer in his hand, and his job was simple: count every thrust a man made into the woman on the table, loud enough for the whole hall to hear, until the man came. The total went on the board. Bragging rights went to the men who could last inside a rented hole. Humiliation, public and permanent and written in chalk, went to the men who could not.

On the stage now, a broad-shouldered young woman with her hair tied up in a high tail was bent over the table with her cheek on the leather and her hands gripping its far edge, and a muscular man in a half mask was fucking her from behind with grim, laboring determination. His hips slammed against her ass in a steady rhythm.

Her full breasts were mashed against the leather and squeezed out sideways with each impact, and her mouth hung open, and she was making short, high, breathless sounds on every stroke. His cock, glimpsed on every pullback, was thick and red-veined and shining with her juices.

"Two hundred twenty-nine!" the counter called. "Two hundred thirty!"

The man's face had gone purple. He was clearly thinking about something other than the cunt he was in, and just as clearly failing. Lewd sounds carried out over the crowd, the squelch of a full stroke and the meaty slap of belly on ass, and the woman on the table clenched around him and rolled her hips back hard into his next thrust with a wicked little laugh, and the muscular man's face crumpled.

"Two hundred thirty-four!"

He came with a groan that had been meant as a roar and fell well short of one, hips jerking, hands bruising her waist, and the crowd laughed at him even before he pulled out.

When he did, his cum followed his softening cock out of her in a thick white spill that ran down over her lips and dripped from the table's edge in sticky strings. The counter struck his gong and wrote 234 on the board, halfway down the column.

The muscular man cursed the board, the counter, the woman, and his own mother, pulled up his trousers, and stepped down off the stage to a barrage of jeers. The woman on the table stayed where she was for a moment, grinning over her shoulder at the crowd with cum on her thighs, and then let an attendant help her down.

"Next!" called the counter. "Who's next? Who thinks he can beat the great Xu Zhi? Five hundred and twenty-six, gentlemen! Five hundred and twenty-six thrusts!"

Wang Fengrui walked onto the stage with Yan Mei.

The cheer that met them was so loud that the lanterns above the stage seemed to shiver on their chains. The crowd had been following the mysterious beauty with its eyes all night, from the entrance to the race to the swap platform to the cage and the bench and the wine booth, and now here she was, walking up the steps onto the thrust stage itself on the end of Wang Fengrui's chain, and drunk merchants sobered up to stare and sober men went drunk on the fantasy.

The press around the edges of the stage tightened until the men at the front were shoved against the wood.

Two attendants took her from Fengrui's hand at the top of the steps with a reverence that was really greed and guided her to the table, still glossy and dripping from the woman before. They bent her over it with practiced hands, one at her shoulder and one at the small of her back, until her masked cheek lay on the warm leather and her breasts flattened against it, the gold suns pressing cold into her nipples.

They drew her hands forward to grip the far edge. They nudged her feet apart with their slippers. Then they stepped back and left her there, face down, spine curved, hips high, ass turned out toward the whole of Jinling like an offering laid on an altar.

The posture alone made the crowd lean in.

Her silk scrap had ridden up and twisted into a useless band that barely covered anything. Her ass, bent over the table, had spread wide of its own weight, and the jewel of her plug sat plain and gleaming between the two great cheeks, framed by Zhang Haotian's three handprints, which had cooled from flaming red to a deep rose and stood out on her pale skin like brushwork on paper.

Below the plug, the drenched silk had slid aside and her cunt showed bare: plump, smooth, hairless lips swollen and shining and parted a little in the middle, so wet that the light caught in her. The crowd drank in the sight.

Plump and pale and marked and plugged and dripping, it was more than most of them had ever seen in one place, and they began shouting for more before Fengrui had even touched his belt.

Pressed against the warm leather, Yan Mei could smell the woman who had been bent here before her, a sharp musky trace of another cunt and another man's seed soaked into the table, and she could feel the faint stickiness of it under her breasts. The smell told her plainly what this table was and what was about to happen on it.

She could hear the counter clearing his throat.

She could hear the creak of the frame that held the ranking board, and the chalk-white numbers swaying gently on their chains above her, and beneath all of it the vast restless breathing of the crowd. Somewhere in that breathing was her husband. She did not try to find him. She knew he was there the way she knew where her own hands were.

He untied his belt and dropped his trousers behind her.

The hall's reaction was immediate and furious. Instead of the beauty's ass, half the crowd now had a view of a fat merchant's wide, pale, dimpled one blocking the prize, sagging over the backs of his thick thighs.

"Move!" somebody bellowed from the back. "We paid for her, not your cheeks!"

"Get your ass out of the way, Fatty!"

Fengrui ignored them. He grabbed Yan Mei's ass in both ringed hands and squeezed, hard, feeling the heat of the spank-marks and the weight and the give of all that flesh, his fat thumbs pressing in close to the rim of her plug until she whimpered into the leather.

He kneaded once, twice, slowly, his rings sinking into her, the way a man tests the ripeness of a melon he has already bought. Then he took hold of the jewel and pulled the plug out of her in a single long draw.

It came free with a wet pop that the front row heard clearly. Yan Mei jolted against the table and let out a moan loud enough to carry halfway across the hall. The plug was heavier than it had looked, a smooth tapered teardrop of pale jade, and it came out shining with her body's slickness.

Fengrui set it on the table beside her hip, where it rocked once on the leather and lay still. Behind it, her anus stayed open for a long breath, a small pink ring gaping and fluttering around the emptiness, and then began, slowly, to close.

"Show us!" the crowd roared. "Show us too! Spread her!"

Fengrui obliged them like a man selling tickets to heaven. He stepped aside so the front row could see, took her cheeks in his hands again, and pulled them wide apart for the hall, so wide that the stretch tugged at her cunt as well and parted her swollen lips with a faint wet sound.

Her pink anus, still loosened from the plug, winked open and showed a hint of its slick interior. Below it her pussy spread open in the lantern light, plump hairless lips glossy with juice that had been building since the crawl, the inner folds a deep wet rose, her entrance clenching visibly on nothing.

Desire hit the crowd in a wave that Yan Chi could see, a wave of men leaning over the edge of the stage, stroking openly, cursing, bargaining with gods they did not believe in. Someone shouted that he would pay a hundred gold for a single thrust.

Someone else shouted that he would pay more than that for one taste of that cunt. A waitress standing near Yan Chi pressed her thighs together so hard that her tray shook.

Yan Mei lay with her cheek on the leather and her husband's eyes somewhere out there in the crowd and a fat merchant spreading her ass wide open for half of Jinling, and the crowd howled.

Fengrui held the spread long enough for the memory to burn into every watching eye, his thumbs digging into Zhang's handprints. Then he let go of her cheeks and took his own cock in his right hand.

It was thick, like the rest of him, a short stout club of a cock with a dark swollen head, already wet at the tip with impatience. He set the blunt head against her soaked lips and rubbed it up and down the seam once, twice, parting her with the shaft, until her juices painted him and the head glistened.

"Begin!" called the counter, and struck his gong.

Fengrui pushed in. It took one thrust, easy and slippery, and her cunt swallowed him to the root with a liquid sound that carried to the back of the crowd like a slap. Yan Mei moaned into the leather, a long, low, shaken sound, as the fat shaft spread her and filled her and pressed the breath out of her lungs. Her fingers clawed at the far edge of the table. Her toes curled in her sky-blue slippers.

"One!"

Fengrui gripped her ass hard enough to renew the red of Zhang's handprints and began to fuck her. He moved in deep rolling strokes, his round belly slapping against the backs of her thighs in a slick, meaty rhythm, and every inward stroke shoved a gasp out of her veil. Every outward stroke dragged her lips with him.

Her cunt clung to him on the way out, the swollen pink lips stretching along his shaft, and the front row could see it, and groaned. Fengrui had fucked countless beauties in his life, bought with association coin: trained courtesans, purchased moans, night-market virgins unwrapped like birthday gifts. This was something else.

The flawless ass filling his hands. The hot, clutching cunt that seemed to suck at him on every retreat. And beneath it all, the knowledge that Yan Tian had walked this gem into the party on a leash and then lost her in a draw that Fengrui had bought with one gold coin.

"Ten, eleven, twelve!"

Plap! Plap! Plap!

"Thirty! Thirty-one!"

Fengrui's rhythm stuttered and then recovered. Sweat had broken out across his broad back.

"Thirty-five!"

His precum and her juices had mixed into a froth that was beginning to ring the base of his cock and drip from the table's edge between her thighs. A man at the front of the stage had his robe open and was pumping his own cock in his fist in time with the merchant's hips.

A waitress had abandoned her tray on the edge of the stage and pressed two fingers against the cut-out crotch of her leather trousers, and she was biting the strap at her collar to keep quiet and failing.

Yan Chi had stopped pretending to serve anyone. He stood at the edge of the crowd with the jug forgotten on his tray and his cock so hard in its silk window that the cotton over it had soaked through at the tip in a dark wet stain that mapped the head for anyone dishonest enough to look, and several guests near him were.

He did not care. He was cataloguing variables, the way the System liked him to. Public penetration of a listed woman. Multiple angles. A crowd of hundreds. A husband absent from the chain by a temporary swap and present in the crowd by choice.

A childhood friend of her son's somewhere in the hall with a red-haired slave on his cock. Merchants laughing. The city lord's handprints still visible on the very ass being gripped. Every variable was a coin, and every coin was cultivation.

Shame tried, briefly, to draft a speech in the back of his mind about the previous host's mother. Lust filed the speech under unpaid bills and went on watching.

"Forty!"

Yan Mei's fingers whitened on the table's edge. Without the plug, her anus fluttered empty above the cock that was splitting her, winking with every thrust, and her cunt did all the work, stretched around merchant girth, her inner walls rippling in long milking pulls that Fengrui felt all the way up his spine.

He cursed under his breath, a single word that sounded very much like Yan Tian, lucky bastard, as if the patriarch's luck were an insult aimed directly at him. He fucked harder, as if jealousy could become stamina, and it could not.

"Fifty!" called the counter, already bored, already smelling the end.

Fengrui tried to think about ledgers. About grain prices. About the tax dispute with the city lord's office, the late silk shipment from the southern provinces, anything at all that was not the silky drag of her cunt along his shaft or the way her lips seemed to kiss the head of his cock every time it slid out of her.

The thoughts melted like wax. Her ass filled his hands. Her cunt sucked at him. The crowd's laughter hung over him like a blade waiting to drop, and he could feel the flood rising in his balls anyway, unstoppable.

"Fifty-five!"

"Fifty-seven!"

He came. Cum flooded her in thick pulses that made his knees dip and his fingers bruise her hips, and he groaned through his teeth and shoved himself as deep as his belly would let him and held there, jerking, emptying himself into her. When he pulled out, he pulled out too fast, and his semen followed his cock in a white spill that ran down over her hairless lips and dripped onto the table and the insides of her thighs in long thick lines.