"Oh, cover your eyes, senior sisters," she called airily over her shoulder. She angled her sword toward the tree line. "We are landing briefly."

"WE ARE NOT COVERING OUR EYES," Meiren announced to the sky, with absolute finality.

The pine forest was dense and cool below the canopy. Shafts of afternoon light came down in bright columns between the dark trunks, catching the motes of dust and pollen drifting in the still air.

Suyin’s boots touched the soft earth first.

Wei Jiushan landed behind her, stumbling slightly off his sword because he was watching her instead of his footing, and catching himself on a low branch with the smooth recovery of a man pretending that had not happened.

She walked until she found a broad pine trunk, its bark rough and reddish-brown, its roots rising from the earth in thick arches. She stopped there and turned around.

Wei Jiushan stood a few feet from her, hands at his sides, ears still pink.

She stepped forward, closed the distance, and kissed him.

It was not a soft, tentative first kiss. Her hand went to his jaw, tilting his face, and she kissed him properly — warm and unhurried, tasting faintly of the spirit tea they’d shared at the last rest stop three days ago when he’d ’happened’ to be at the same roadside stall.

His hands rose slowly, like a man who could not quite believe he was allowed, and settled at her waist.

She pulled back just enough to breathe. His eyes were closed, lashes resting against his cheeks, expression soft and dazed in a way that made something in her chest pull with an affection she was not going to examine too carefully right now. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

’Cute,’ her mind offered, and she let it.

Her hand slid down from his jaw, trailing over his chest, over the flat plane of his stomach, and settled over the front of his robes. She could feel him beneath the fabric — the startled, immediate response of a young man who had been wanting this for months. Her palm pressed, feeling his length through the cloth, and she worked her fingers in a slow, deliberate massage.

She watched his face while she did it.

His eyes fell shut again. His lips parted, a soft, shuddering exhale escaping. The hand at her waist gripped tighter, fingers bunching into her robe. His jaw went slightly slack with the helpless pleasure of being touched by the woman he had been making a fool of himself for across half the eastern mountain range.

’Small,’ she noted, with her characteristic internal honesty. She had touched men before — three, across the years of her cultivation travels. Young men, senior brothers, one memorable outer elder with a reputation. She knew the range of what men carried. Wei Jiushan was modest by comparison, a clean five inches she estimated from the outline beneath her palm.

She did not mind.

She had never been the kind of woman who confused size with feeling. What lived in his brown eyes was something she had not found in larger men. That mattered more.

She bit his lower lip on impulse, drawing it between her teeth gently before releasing. He made a sound against her mouth — a small, punched-out sigh — and his hand moved from her waist to the small of her back, pulling her closer.

She pulled away, smoothed her outer robe, and turned to face the tree.

With practiced fingers she loosened the front lacing of her inner robe, letting the top fall open, sliding down over her shoulders, down the full curves of her chest, dropping to pool at her waist. The afternoon light touched her bare skin — the round, heavy weight of her breasts settling naturally, their tips already stiff from the cool air. The inner robe pooled further, over the sash, and fell to her hips, catching there, leaving her in only the white silk of her cultivation underpants.

She leaned her forearm against the rough bark of the pine trunk, resting her forehead there, and looked back over her shoulder at him.

"Show me what you’ve got."

Her voice came out quieter than she planned. There was a raw honesty in it she had not entirely intended.

Wei Jiushan stared at her.

The dappled light moved over her bare back, the full outward swell of her hips, the round, generous shape of her backside straining the white silk. Her thick thighs pressed together. The heavy curves of her breasts were visible from behind, the soft outer swell pressing out from under her arms.

He looked like a man who had walked into a room expecting a hallway and found a cathedral.

Suyin faced the tree again, closing her eyes.

A faint heat crept across her cheeks, and she let it.

’He is genuinely in love with me,’ she thought plainly, listening to the sound of his robes. ’The climbing of walls, the markets, the mountain passes. That was real. That was months of that.’

She felt a private, quiet tenderness settle over her as she waited, her body already warm from the kissing, the cool breeze catching the bare skin of her chest and raising goosebumps along the curve of her collarbone.

She thought, distantly, of the future. Of the Ascending Summit. Of standing beside him in that bracket and the two of them climbing together. She was from practical stock — her family modest, her cultivation earned through discipline, not wealth. He, she had gathered from small clues across their encounters, was from a wealthy sect family. Resources. Safety. A life that would not require her to fight for every spirit stone.

She thought: ’After today, when this is done, I want to carry his child.’

The thought arrived with a certainty that surprised her. But it did not frighten her.

She closed her eyes, breathed in the clean pine scent, and waited for the modest, honest weight of a man who loved her.

Something touched her.

Something wide. Something dense and heavy, pressing against the thin silk of her underpants with a slow, insistent pressure that her body registered immediately as wrong — too large, too thick, with a surface that was not smooth but ridged, textured in a way that sent a spike of cold confusion straight through the warm haze of her anticipation.

Her eyes snapped open.

"Wait — wait, wait, WAIT —"

It slammed home.

The scream tore out of her before she could stop it.

Her eyes blew wide, whites showing, tears erupting and streaming instantly down her flushed cheeks. The breath was knocked out of her chest in a single brutal expulsion, her mouth open in a raw, ragged cry that shook the pine needles above her.

Her hands scrabbled at the bark, fingers tearing for purchase, splinters cutting into her palms.

The sheer width of it was like being split by something that had no right to fit inside a human body. The ridged surface — those ’spikes’, God, those ridges dragging against her inner walls — made her whole lower body seize in a shock of blinding, tearing pain.

’Not him.’ The thought arrived in pieces. ’That is NOT him —’

Her belly pushed outward visibly, a bulge forming beneath her navel from the invasive depth of the intrusion, and she choked on another scream.

"SISTER!"