Back to the Imperial Palace (4)
Steam curled in lazy ribbons from the bowls as Zhao Gu and Li Xin plied their chopsticks with single-minded hunger.
The two of them had ridden without a pause from Wuchang in Huguang all the way to Yingtianfu — a thousand li and more — and their bellies had drawn so tight the skin stuck to their spines. Even so, as they shoveled white noodles and milky broth down their throats, their minds were somewhere else entirely.
"Junior Sister."
"Senior Brother, this one's mine. He's a man, after all."
Senior Brother Zhao Gu and Junior Sister Li Xin were trading sound transmissions over Jin Myeong, who had just stepped inside the shop.
"This is different, Junior Sister. He possesses pure yang and pure yin at the same time! You don't get to hog all the fun just because he's got a man's equipment."
"Heung! You always say that, Senior Brother."
Zhao Gu and Li Xin had needed only a glance to recognize the pristine yang energy and yin energy coiled inside Jin Myeong.
Pure yang and pure yin were precisely the forces the two of them needed most desperately. For a pair who had spent their lives stealing true qi from the opposite sex to swell their own martial power, the boy was as good as a living elixir.
"We're in the same boat and you know it. If you take him all for yourself, what am I supposed to do?"
"You said the same thing over those Wudang brats. Honestly. Greedy husband."
Four days earlier, in Wuchang, Zhao Gu and Li Xin had abducted two disciples of the Wudang Sect, drained them of their true qi, and dumped the corpses. They would have preferred not to lay a finger on a prestigious orthodox sect like Wudang — but their situation had grown too urgent for preference.
The unraveling had begun. Old age had started to dissolve and scatter their true qi.
Over the past thirty years, the inner power they had stolen through the Star Absorption Great Method amounted to a full three Jiazi — a hundred and eighty years of accumulated force. But because they had never crossed the threshold into the Transcendent Realm, they could no longer hold aging at bay. And aging meant the gradual loss of everything, true qi included.
When the vessel itself — bone, sinew, meridian — fell into decline, how could the true qi poured into that vessel remain whole? A decaying body could not keep a grip on such overwhelming power.
The only way to overcome it was enlightenment: to break through into the Transcendent Realm.
The Mad Demon of three hundred years past had been a genius of his age, a grandmaster who had invented the Star Absorption Great Method itself. Zhao Gu and Li Xin had merely stumbled across the secret manual by chance and learned the art from its pages. Their native talent ran shallow, and they had never grasped any higher martial principle. They could never reach the realm of Overcoming the Demon as the Mad Demon had.
"I'm going first. I will not yield on this."
"All right, all right. Wife, don't you trust your husband?"
"Hah. That's like leaving the fishmonger's stall in a cat's care."
Power stacked up through the Star Absorption Great Method was, by its nature, plundered from many different people — impure, never perfectly fused. It reacted to aging far more sensitively than orthodox inner power, which meant its practitioners met qi dispersal earlier than ordinary martial artists.
And once that dispersal began, qi deviation might come crashing down on any given day. A cultivator who had trained in only a single strain of true qi need not fear deviation as a consequence of dispersal. For one who practiced the Star Absorption Great Method, however, dispersal followed by qi deviation was a certainty — the dark underside of an art that seized, in a single instant, the true qi another person had spent a lifetime of blood and sweat to accumulate, and made it one's own.
Given all that, what martial artist in the world would sit idle and watch their realm collapse? A monk who had found release, perhaps, or a Daoist who had attained the Way. No one else.
The further the dispersal advanced, the more fiercely Zhao Gu and Li Xin clung to the Star Absorption Great Method. They were ordinary people, faithful to their desires. Thoroughly, perfectly ordinary.
The youth they had preserved with stolen true qi. The inner power that had made them fearless beneath heaven. The pleasures that power had bought them. They could not afford to lose a single one of those things. They did not want to.
"That said, the boy does have a face you'd like, Junior Sister. Doesn't look a day over twenty. What sect's disciple is he, to have cultivated both pure yin and pure yang at that age?"
"Hnn~! I've been holding myself back since the moment I saw him. I need to devour him right now."
Li Xin squirmed, her body flushed and fever-hot. A breathy, heated sound slipped from lips as red as blood, and her chest — swollen as if it might burst — rose and fell with her quickening breath.
She was past sixty, but the vast inner power she commanded let her pass for a woman in her early thirties. The coquettish display she put on would have been more than enough to melt the guts of most men who saw it.
Fortunately, the only other customer was Jin Myeong, and he was eating with Jin Ping in the back of the shop.
"No. This is Yingtianfu. Have you forgotten? The Jinyiwei are far nastier than those Wudang brats."
"Heung! Dogs of the magistrate. Who cares!"
Zhao Gu reined her in. Li Xin had been wound tight with excitement from the instant she laid eyes on Jin Myeong — a walking elixir, as far as she was concerned.
The reason pure yin-yang energy mattered so much to the two of them was that it slowed aging in its own right, and purified the tainted yin and yang they had already stolen.
"Don't forget what that same government did. They drove the Sacred Cult all the way into Tianshan and buried them there. If we get our tails stepped on here, everything we went through to reach this city will have been for nothing. Be patient. We don't even know which sect he belongs to. We wait until there's no one watching, and we finish it clean."
In raw volume of inner power, the two of them could claim to stand first under heaven — but that was all it was: volume. Their actual realm sat at Peak Realm, Late Stage, one step short of the Transcendent Realm. They had fled to Yingtianfu to shake the enraged Wudang Daoists hunting them for the murder of their disciples.
Even Wudang — of the old saying, Shaolin in the North, Wudang in the South — would not dare send a crowd of disciples pouring into the imperial capital where the Yongle Emperor sat. To march a large number of martial artists into the capital without prior arrangement with the Jinyiwei was to invite a charge of treason.
And it was settled wisdom in the jianghu that the Jinyiwei's eyes and ears were everywhere in the capital, sharp as drawn steel. Even the most reckless heretics of the unorthodox path preferred, if they could help it, not to set foot in Yingtianfu at all.
Which meant that if they meant to abduct Jin Myeong, it had to be done without a single witness. Without so much as a cry of pain. Quietly, naturally — so that no one would even suspect a kidnapping.
"And if we lose him while we wait…!"
Her body was already burning at the thought of a meal she had not tasted in far too long, and being told to wait was driving her out of her mind. Then, in Li Xin's impatient eyes —
Jin Myeong came walking out of the shop, as if on cue.
"Young Hero, does this establishment happen to have a privy?"
Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. A fine idea had struck her, and Li Xin seized the moment, calling out to Jin Myeong with a smile steeped in dizzying, bewitching allure.
"Ah — yes! This way, honored guest. Please follow me."
Li Xin stuck to him at once, terrified of losing him, then glanced back at Zhao Gu and gave a small, sly nod.
The two of them traded the same wicked smiles they had worn the first time they laid eyes on Jin Myeong.
A short while later, at the Guan Yu Temple in Yingtianfu.
"Nnh…"
"Are you awake?"
"Yes, this Grand Eunuch is thir— wait. What is this?"
I answered the voice tickling my ear half-asleep, and then I jolted fully awake.
I had tried to stretch. My body would not move so much as an inch.
Sealed pressure points? Some bastard sealed my points and paralyzed me. Who the hell—
No. Not a bastard. A woman. That woman.
A face at the Transcendent Realm. A figure at the Profound Realm. That woman!
The one who had poured off such lush, dripping sensuality that even the imperial palace — where palace maids piled on every charm they owned to catch the emperor's eye — rarely produced her equal!
The woman who had asked to be shown to the privy. The moment I remembered her—
"Grand Eunuch? Palace eunuchs? What are you talking about, Young Hero? You're so very… sturdy, right here. Heung~"
Her voice was right beside my face. Her breath brushed my earlobe, and a shudder ran through my entire body.
What is this? Why is everything suddenly this hot, with no beginning and no end?
And at my waistband, something I could only assume was her hand was in the process of confirming the existence of my most precious possession.
"Who are you? And where is this?"
"Where? Yingtianfu, of course. We saw the Guan Yu Temple and came in."
Wherever it was, it hardly mattered. Every word from those beautiful lips, every breath she drew, spilled such thick, languid coquetry and raw sensuality that it was hard to breathe. I had been steeled against a woman's looks to the point of callus — but the creature in front of me had something beyond mere beauty. Something that reached into the brain and twisted.
"Guan Yu Temple?"
"And this maiden's name is Li. Li Xin, Young Hero."
"Li… Xin…? Li Xin……? Li Xin!"
"You know me, Young Hero?"
"The Twin Seductress Fiends! You're the Sensual Concubine, Li Xin?"
Well, shit!
No wonder she had been so wickedly, unnaturally pretty.
They were those insane pervert sex-fiends.
The Twin Seductress Fiends. A paired title, a joint alias for two people who stood at the absolute peak of the jianghu in a single field. They occupied the lowest seat among the so-called Seven Evil Masters of the heretical path — and they were the common enemy of both the orthodox and the demonic factions.
As for what that "single field" was, there was no need to explain. The alias said it all.
They were a married pair of sexual predators. Famous for abducting people, violating them, draining their true qi, and murdering them.
One astonishing and peculiar fact: this pair were the current generation's inheritors of the infamous Star Absorption Great Method.
And there was something more astonishing still.
The reason these villains — practitioners of a forbidden art, who had raped and murdered thousands over thirty years — could still walk the world in broad daylight, alive and thriving.
That reason was the Huanxu. The Illusion Transforming Secret.
The legendary strange art of Gongling Gate, destroyed thirty years ago. The technique said to stand at the absolute pinnacle of body-altering martial arts. These two had learned it.
When someone changed their entire face on a whim, how was anyone supposed to catch them?
The Star Absorption Great Method, and the Huanxu on top of it.
If this couple had ever broken through into the Transcendent Realm, the current number one under heaven would not have been the Cult Leader of the Sacred Cult. It would have been these two deviant sex-fiends.
"Not bad, for someone so young. Heh-heh-heh! That's right. We are the Twin Seductress Fiends."
A rasping, thoroughly sinister voice. Zhao Gu's, from a little way off at the head of the bed.
The most notorious pair of sexual predators under heaven, Zhao Gu and Li Xin, in the same room — and I was lying here with my pressure points sealed.
The situation was perfectly clear. What these two intended to do needed no imagination.
A chill. A dagger flying at my chest, sinking in.
But I was not going to panic.
Thought is faster than true qi.
Hand over the purity I had been keeping intact for my future companion — to this old succubus hag?
Like hell.
No matter how I turned it over, there was only one way out. Harmony Qi Absorption. That, and nothing else.
At my current strength I could not weather so much as a single exchange from the Twin Seductress Fiends. Which meant I had to stake everything on Harmony Qi Absorption.
My life hung on Harmony Qi Absorption — the perfected form of the Star Absorption Great Method, its ideal made real.
To use it, I needed a method. A way to unseal the pressure points locking my body — and a way to draw Zhao Gu and Li Xin in close, together, at my side.
"This nameless nobody greets the Seven Evil Masters, whose fame resounds beneath heaven. Spare me, I beg you. I am far too young. At home I have a grandmother in poor health. Please…!"
I got my thoughts in order and opened the conversation at once, reaching for that eternal, east-west, ancient-and-modern truth: the sick old mother, the ailing grandmother, the duty to provide.
"Heh-heh! Quite attached to living, aren't you. Pity, though — my wife seems to have fallen for you completely."
"Heung~ Young Hero, don't you worry so. This maiden has something of a reputation in the arts of the bedchamber. It will be the finest experience of your life. And my, how is it that you are so strikingly handsome? Your skin looks even cleaner than this maiden's. Ho-ho-ho!"
A deviant sex-fiend hag past sixty, calling herself a maiden.
She's spoiling for a beating.
Now that I knew who Li Xin really was, the sensuality that had been merely oppressive a moment ago had curdled into something that made me want to vomit.
"One question. Which sect are you from? Your purity puts even those snot-nosed Wudang brats several ranks beneath you."
"Yes, do tell. To think there was a sect that refined true qi this pure. Orthodox, by the feel of it. A great clan, perhaps?"
One way or another, the pair's attention was locked entirely on me — and on the Sunflower Manual. Both of them had a bright, glittering hunger in their eyes.
These two predators were fishing for the location of a gold mine.
Feels like they've found an elixir warehouse, I bet. Sorry. There is no gold mine.
Still, I had needed something to stall with, and they had been kind enough to bring up martial arts first. That gave me a lure to throw.
"There is something I have been curious about, actually. Before I die, I would dearly like to ask you both, great heroes."
"And what is that?"
My respectful tone put Zhao Gu off his guard. He asked without thinking.
From here on, it was do or die.
"The Huanxu you two great heroes are said to have mastered. Is it the real thing? I have heard rumors it is a fake — that you both simply wear human-skin masks…"
"What? Human-skin masks? What addled fool said that? You're telling me our couple wore something as cheap as a human-skin mask?"
"I beg your pardon? A fake? Who said that? This woman would very much like to meet the creature who dares spout such slander."
The Twin Seductress Fiends boiled over, thoroughly offended.
To a martial artist, belittling their signature art was a line you did not cross. The wellspring of this couple's pride and self-regard was the Star Absorption Great Method and the Huanxu. Of course they would flare up.
Strip those two arts away, and these deviant sex-fiends were not special in the slightest.
Wait. The Huanxu. The Huanxu… That isn't as absurd as it sounds. If I play this right, I can work with this.
A thought flashed through my mind, sudden and complete.
A body-transforming art. The Sunflower Manual. The Huanxu. And—
Eunuch.
In a single instant, the word struck through my skull like a hammer.