Hua Tuo Feels Nothing at the Sight of Lady Zou Naked
While Lady Gan and Lady Mi were granted an audience with Emperor Xian, Lady Zou quietly pushed against the wall beside the entrance to the Imperial Audience Chamber.
What had looked like nothing more than one thick stretch of corridor slid open with a hush, and another darkened passage received her.
Lady Zou did not know how many such secret passages honeycombed the palace at Xuchang. She knew only the ones she had been permitted to know. Even among that spiderweb of hidden corridors, she had memorized nothing but the destinations the rules allowed her to reach, and she walked them by a prescribed sequence of turns.
Left twice. Right three times. Left once more.
Forget that sequence, and you would lose yourself in the dark—trapped until someone found you, or, if no one did, until you starved. The secret passages of the Xuchang palace were that clandestine, that labyrinthine.
But Lady Zou had the destination committed to memory, and she arrived as if she had been there dozens of times before.
...The operating theater of the master physician, Hua Tuo.
"Ah. It's you, Lady Zou. Did Lord Cao Cao send you?"
Hua Tuo was an old man whose hair had gone white—eyebrows and all.
Luminous pearls were set into the walls of the dark chamber, casting a faint glow through the gloom. Overhead, a precisely cut aperture in the ceiling funneled a shaft of sunlight onto an operating table just large enough for a single person to lie upon. That spot alone was as bright as midday.
Lady Zou had watched countless people scream on that table. Some of them had died there.
And today, it was her turn to climb onto it.
"What is it this time? Something to implant in your cunt? A tattoo on your thighs?"
"......"
Lady Zou said nothing. She simply folded her bangs back from her forehead.
The suture line carved into her scalp stood out in sharp relief.
"...Right. Time for a change, then... Did that one take properly? With hair that long, someone must have been yanking on it from behind..."
Lady Zou nodded.
When she had first appeared after the grafting—with straight hair that reached all the way to her feet—Cao Cao had claimed he wanted to check whether her scalp had healed. He wound her hair around a beam in his bedchamber and hung her from it.
Allowed only to stand naked on the tips of her toes, she spent the entire night twisting her beautiful body, unable to sleep, tormented by nightmares of her scalp tearing away with a series of wet, ripping sounds.
Cao Cao drained bottle after bottle of wine, using her terror-stricken body as his drinking snack.
At last, when her strength gave out and she collapsed with a scream, every orifice of her terrified body emptied itself of fluid—but her scalp held. It bore her full weight, revealing nothing but that vivid line of stitches.
"A masterpiece! A masterpiece! Hua Tuo's medicine is truly extraordinary!"
Cao Cao rolled up her trembling body and took her just like that, still dangling from her own hair. It was the so-called lift-and-fuck position—her upper body suspended in midair while he thrust into her.
He did not even bother wiping the holes that terror had soiled. Cao Cao did not care, and Lady Zou never begged him to let her clean herself first...
She did not tell Hua Tuo any of this. She only named the hairstyle Cao Cao wanted.
"...Lie down."
Hua Tuo laid the silent Lady Zou on the operating table.
"The top off, if you would..."
Lady Zou, who had lain down neatly, sat up and untied the fastenings of her upper garment with mechanical precision, opening it from the chest.
Light falling from above illuminated a dazzlingly white, exquisite body. Her upper half, revealed in the darkness, gleamed as if the skin itself were shining.
A slender nape. Deep collarbones. Smooth arms dropping from round shoulders. Breasts that spread in a soft, generous curve from below the line of her throat. Her slim waist remained wrapped in fabric, still hidden.
Hua Tuo looked upon this luscious nakedness with an expression of complete indifference.
When his hand suddenly reached for her breast, one might have thought that even he was, after all, just another male—but his gaze was fixed on the surgical scar hidden deep beneath the lifted flesh.
"...The pig lard seems to be sitting well in there."
Hua Tuo's hands lowered the breast he had lifted with the same clerical air of an office clerk flipping through a stack of documents.
The genius surgeon Hua Tuo had, already in the second century, reached a level where he could freely enlarge or reduce a woman's breasts using pig lard as an implant. And Lady Zou's chest had changed size any number of times, according to the whims of Cao Cao Mengde.
At present, her breasts were about two cup sizes larger than the modest ones that had originally suited her slender frame. And what sloshed and filled them was a mass of chest fat from a sow slaughtered in the Xuchang palace...
Pig of a woman.
Every time Cao Cao grinned and chewed on her breasts, words he had never spoken would ring through Lady Zou's head.
Having inspected the merchandise, Hua Tuo began removing the sutures one by one.
He administered the anesthetic, then started cutting into her scalp with a sharp blade...
In time, the skin to which Lady Zou's beautiful hair was attached was entirely incised, and a special drug of Hua Tuo's own devising seeped between the severed layers. The agent that separated adhered skin caused the scalp to come completely away from her head.
Like a clump of long hair clogging a drain, her wig was removed.
With scalp and hair gone, Lady Zou's skull took on the look of a bald alien. Even in that egg-smooth, hairless state, the pretty curves of her head somehow still looked beautiful—and only Hua Tuo understood just how devastatingly lovely she was.
Where the scalp had been stripped away, the skull covering the cerebral cortex, along with muscle and blood vessels, pulsed and twitched...
Hua Tuo deftly transferred the hair and scalp into a closet. Inside that closet, dozens—no, hundreds—of scalps were displayed, encompassing every conceivable hairstyle. It called to mind a wig museum of every color and cut.
"Let's see... A cut that doesn't pass the shoulders, falling straight at the ears... This should do. The hair color will come out a bit closer to brown. These were cut from southern barbarian prisoners..."
Hua Tuo took a scalp already shaped into a short cut, affixed it to Lady Zou's head, and reversed the procedure he had just performed, grafting the new hairstyle onto her...
"You're something else yourself... Still haven't killed yourself, I see..."
Lady Zou gave no answer. Hua Tuo had not expected one.
After the procedure, Lady Zou received a bundle of raw ingredients for the Contraceptive Decoction to be given to the two ladies, and retraced her steps.
"Zou. Zou."
Waiting in front of the Imperial Audience Chamber for the two ladies to emerge, she realized an unexpected voice was calling to her.
"Zou. Hey, Zou."
Lady Zou glanced around. The eunuchs had gone in to set out refreshments; there was no one in front of the audience chamber.
She pressed herself close against the secret wall she had just come through.
The voice was coming from inside the wall.
"Zou, why'd you come today? To the palace."
"Lady Dong Bai."
The voice from beyond the wall belonged to none other than the granddaughter of the Demon King, Dong Zhuo. A girl of misfortune, born at the dawn of this age of chaos, who had been permitted to remain alive in the palace until now.
Unable to show her face in public, she moved only through the palace's secret passages, and spoke only when someone she knew appeared on the other side of a wall.
"The wives of His Excellency the General of the Left, Imperial Uncle Liu, have come to have an audience with His Majesty. I am accompanying them."
"Imperial Uncle Liu? Ah, those straw-mat three musketeers? They still ain't dropped dead?"
"The eldest and the third are missing... The second is here in Xuchang with us."
"The second—that's the bearded blade-hand, right? Uncle Hua Xiong's enemy."
"...His name is Guan Yu. Courtesy name, Yunchang."
Lady Zou could feel the voice beyond the wall begin to tremble.
"The bastards who ganged up three-on-one on Big Sis Lü Bu like cowards. I've never forgotten it for a single moment. If it hadn't been for those sons of bitches—no, if they'd just fought one-on-one like men—Grandfather never would have had to give up Hulao Pass to that coalition of garbage."
"Lady Dong Bai... There aren't many warriors in this world who could last three-on-one against Lord Lü Bu."
Lady Zou, her expression troubled, could find nothing to say.
On some windswept plain in Ji Province, the three sworn brothers of Liu Bei had, during the Yellow Turban suppression, encountered Dong Zhuo's army—still operating in the shadows, not yet in command of the realm. Dong Bai, then still a young girl, remembered clearly the three brothers of Liu Bei who had shown up at camp calling themselves a volunteer army.
"So the straw-mat general's bitches are here, then?"