Her voice paused for a moment.
“Chu Yang would laugh,” Nan Gong Jin said, “not mockingly, not smugly, but a kind of laughter that comes from the marrow of his bones—a laughter of absolute entitlement, because in his world, women kneeling at his feet isn’t the exception, it’s the norm.”
“It’s not conquest, it’s return. He was born standing in the position of the dominator. He doesn’t need violence to claim it, doesn’t need schemes to secure it. He stands there the way the sun hangs in the sky. Naturally.”
“But Shen Mo isn’t like that.”
A thin layer crept into her voice, like the first frost condensing on the surface of ice.
“His soul resonance reached its peak in that moment, but the nature of that fluctuation was completely different from Chu Yang’s. It wasn’t the composure of a dominator—it was the rebound of the repressed. Not entitlement—but cautiousness.”
She closed her eyes. “Chu Yang would never have the inferiority complex of ‘I can’t believe I’m allowed this, do I even deserve it?’ He always knew he could.”
“So,” Blood Orchid frowned, “he’s not?”
Nan Gong Jin opened her eyes.
“He’s not.” She repeated it.
“He’s not Chu Yang—that wanton, self-assured man who stood in the upper echelon as if it were his birthright.”
“Not that calamity who treated women’s hearts as chess pieces, the world as his chessboard, and everyone’s fate as playthings in the palm of his hand.”
“Shen Mo is just Shen Mo.”
“A man crushed by the rules of a female-dominated world for seven years, a husband who stood on the high platform of the Ten Thousand Flower Pavilion to save his wife, a person completely opposite to Chu Yang.”
“But if he’s not Chu Yang’s reincarnation, why did the calamity fate pattern choose him? Why is there really something sleeping behind that door in the depths of his consciousness? Why, when I pried with my spirit soul, did I feel from inside that door… a response?”
Her fingers traced up to her forehead.
Her fingertips were ice cold.
Night fell.
Su Wan’er’s injury flared up once more.
The soul devouring force clashed violently near her heart meridian.
Her entire body began to tremble violently, her lips turning blue-purple, and a thin layer of gray qi seeping out from under her fingernails.
Shen Mo pressed his palm to her wrist.
Her pulse was chaos—like a bundle of silk threads yanked apart, thundering like a war drum one breath, then fading to a whisper-thin thread the next.
He didn’t panic.
He placed his palm against her dantian and circulated the Moonlight Flowing Heart Technique.
A pale moonlight-white glow seeped out from beneath his palm, threading strand by strand into Su Wan’er’s meridians, like spring night moonlight falling across a frozen lake—unhurried, unwavering, simply shining on, steady and constant.
Su Wan’er’s dantian was as cold as a stone dredged from the bottom of a deep winter river.
That chill crawled up from the base of his palm, over his wrist, over his forearm, as if trying to freeze his blood solid along the way.
Shen Mo didn’t stop.
A second strand.
A third strand.
The moment his spiritual power threads touched something, both of the forces locked in mortal combat inside her body paused for a single breath.
Not suppressed—attracted.
Like two beasts tearing at each other, catching the scent of a third presence—a cold, clear aura carrying the pure yin constitution and an ancient fate pattern.
Both strands of demonic qi fell still at once.
It’s working!
The realization struck Shen Mo’s mind like a bolt of lightning.
His spiritual power was effective against the soul devouring force.
It shouldn’t be.
Spiritual power at half-step Foundation Establishment wasn’t even a mantis arm trying to stop a chariot before the soul devouring force.
The soul devouring force was the product of Nan Gong Jin’s thousand years of cultivation fused with the yin sha qi of the Demon Abyss.
Even Su Wan’er at Mid-Nascent Soul had been pierced through in a single strike.
His spiritual power before it should have been like a drop of water falling into magma—evaporated to nothing before it could even raise a wisp of steam.
But it didn’t evaporate.
Not only did it not evaporate, it even dispersed part of the demonic qi.
Shen Mo had no time to think about why.
He pressed his other hand on top of the first, stacking both palms over her dantian, pouring every drop of spiritual power he could mobilize into her.
Cold sweat beaded on Shen Mo’s forehead.
Tiny black specks appeared at the edges of his vision, like someone had scattered a handful of squirming black sesame seeds around his field of sight.
This was the precursor to spiritual power depletion.
He didn’t stop.
The blue-purple on Su Wan’er’s lips began to recede from the center—first turning deep purple, then dark red, finally returning to a pale pink.
Shen Mo’s breathing grew rapid and shallow.
Each inhale was like desperately gasping for thin air at the summit of an impossibly high mountain.
The sensation of being drained turned into a continuous dull ache.
Like a great hand twisting and squeezing some tendon deep inside his lower abdomen, over and over.
Outside the western wing room, dim green lamplight cast shadows across the paper window.
The shadow of the ginkgo tree swayed gently in the night wind.
Blood Orchid leaned against the pillar outside the main hall, a freshly picked green fruit in her hand.
She watched Shen Mo’s spiritual power finally run dry.
The white underrobe on his back was soaked through with sweat.
Shen Mo didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep.
When consciousness returned, touch was the first sense to recover.
He felt his foot was bare.
The sensation was strange—like a feather dipped in warm water, tracing the most prominent curve of his ankle bone, impossibly light and impossibly slow.
Shen Mo blinked his eyes open, groggy.
The ceiling of the western wing room was grayish white, with an unlit oil lamp hanging at its center.
Light squeezed through the gaps in the window lattice, casting thin stripes of light across the gray-white wall.
It took him several breaths to realize where he was.
Su Wan’er lay beside him against the wall, her breathing steady, her complexion better than last night.
Then his gaze traveled down his own body.
Chao’er knelt at the foot of the bed, knees together, calves folded beneath her hips.
She wore a satin dress, the hem short to a dangerous length, just barely covering the top of her thighs.
The fabric clung tightly to her still-slim, girlish body, tracing the curves of chest, waist, and hips into a silhouette that was wildly at odds with her age—a forbidden outline.
Beneath the hem were black silk stockings.
Gossamer-thin black silk stretched from her toes to where the fabric disappeared, wrapping every inch of her legs in a faint, elusive black mist.
Her heels were slender and high, arching the tops of her feet into a sharp, elegant curve.
Her kneeling posture drew a single fluid line from the tips of her toes to her waist, like a bow drawn taut to its limit.
Shen Mo’s body jolted.
He couldn’t move.
His limbs were pinned to the bed by a cold, supple force.
Dark red chains extended from his body, vanishing into the void at the four corners of the bed.
His body was stretched into the shape of the character “大”—limbs splayed wide, chest exposed, like a butterfly pinned to a specimen board.
“Chao’er!” His voice came out hoarser than he expected.
The clash of chains rattled through the small room as he struggled.
Clank—clank—
Like some ancient instrument of torture being calibrated.
Her lashes lowered, casting a small shadow across her cheekbones, her expression focused as if she were doing the most important thing in the world.
A flush crept up his face.
“Chao’er, stop.”
Chao’er’s lips paused at the middle of his shin.
She didn’t move away—just stopped.
“Master’s husband is awake.”
Her breath brushed against the fine down on his skin.
“You… what are you doing.”
Chao’er tilted her head.
“This disciple is attending to her master.” She lifted her chin.
The thin, grain-of-rice demonic qi chain was still around her neck, the collar pressed against her skin, the chain trailing down into the depths of her collar.
She shifted from kneeling to kneeling upright.
Her knees spread apart, the hem pulling taut at the top of her thighs, the black silk making a barely audible sound as the fibers stretched.
She braced her hands on either side of his body, hovering directly above him.
Her loose hair cascaded down, the ends sweeping across his collarbone, his chest, between his ribs, like a silent drizzle.
Her face hung inverted above his line of sight, the tip of her nose almost touching his.
“A dog should lick its master… should lick every inch of its master’s body clean. Should kneel at its master’s feet, and when the master wakes, ask ‘Did you sleep well last night, would you like this disciple to use her mouth to help master—'”
“Chao’er…”
Shen Mo cut her off.
The fire on his face had already spread to his neck.
He was fixed in a completely open position, with no choice but to face her head-on.
“This disciple knows—master’s husband thinks this disciple has gone mad.” Her voice dropped even lower.
“Maybe so. Since that night I saw Yun He pin master’s husband to the desk, this disciple has been mad… But master’s husband knew this disciple was mad, and still took hold of this disciple’s chain. Master’s husband said, from today on, I hold it. When you said those words, my heart pounded so fast, because I suddenly realized—you’re mad too.”
Shen Mo’s breath caught for an instant.
She suddenly dropped her head, pressing her lips against Shen Mo’s.
Not like before—not that tentative, touch-and-go graze.
This was pressing down, with her full weight, an unrefusable crushing.
Her tongue pressed against the seam of his lips. Not prying—licking.
Licking from the corner of his mouth to the cupid’s bow, from the cupid’s bow back to the corner, like tracing the outline of a door that had been sealed for a very long time, searching for the one crack even light couldn’t slip through.
Shen Mo clenched his jaw.
He could only turn his head aside, trying to avoid her.
Chao’er’s hand came up, cupping his face, turning it back.
Her lips pressed down again—this time with teeth.
She gently bit his lower lip—not breaking skin, just holding it between her teeth.
Like a young beast that had caught its prey by the throat—afraid to bite down, but unwilling to let go.
“Master’s husband.” Her voice came muffled against his lips, vibrating through his teeth until they went numb. “This disciple knows a secret.”