Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 179- The continued all-night session

Chapter 179: Chapter 179- The continued all-night session

What it produced in the women who were sitting within a hundred-meter radius was not dramatic. Not the aphrodisiac catastrophe it would become at higher cultivation stages. Just the specific, low-grade, persistent warmth of a body that had been sitting in a room slightly too warm for the last several hours and had noted this and was not unhappy about the noting.

The young warrior against the wall had her knees together.

They had been together for some time.

Her expression was the expression of someone thinking about something that was not the wall.

Three fires over, two women were having a conversation about absolutely nothing in the specific, slightly distracted way of two people whose conversation was a social performance and the audience was their own attempt to maintain normalcy.

One of them had, at some point in the last hour, moved slightly closer to the other.

Neither had acknowledged this.

The sounds from the guest structure were intermittent now — not the continuous output of the early evening, the specific, settled rhythm of something in its final phases — but each time they arrived they arrived at sufficient volume that two women simultaneously forgot the thread of their conversation and then both, with the specific, practiced coordination of people who had been doing this for hours, found it again.

Somewhere in the trees, a patrol woman was also finding things.

Mostly the specific warm weight of her own body, which had developed opinions.

She was handling it with the warrior’s discipline.

The warrior’s discipline was doing its best.

The Chief’s husband had been in his own quarters for two hours.

He was not a man who spent a great deal of time examining his own thoughts. He had not built himself for that. He was built for decisions, for action, for the specific, clean practicality of a man who led alongside a powerful woman and had found his equilibrium in that arrangement through years of patient work.

But tonight the arrangement had shifted a fraction and he was aware of the fraction.

His wife.

She had come to dinner with the specific, distracted quality of a woman whose attention was on something that was not the dinner table. He knew this quality. He had been married to her for eleven years and he knew every quality of her attention. She was thinking about the visitor.

He was not a jealous man. He had decided this early in the marriage and had held the decision with the specific, muscular effort of someone who understood that jealousy was a tool that destroyed the holder more efficiently than the target.

But.

He was forty-three years old. The visitor was — something else. The visitor was the specific, unnameable category of person who arrived and rearranged the air around him simply by existing, who stood in the space of a conversation and changed the character of the conversation without doing anything in particular, who looked at you with eyes that had the depth of something that had been alive for a very long time.

He had spoken with the man that afternoon.

The conversation had been pleasant. Efficient. The visitor had been direct, had made his cultivation offer clearly, had asked nothing inappropriate, had been, in every measurable respect, a reasonable guest.

But he had looked at his wife.

Not inappropriately. Not lingering. The specific, assessor’s look of someone noting a thing that existed, filing it, moving on.

He had not liked it.

He had also noted that he had not liked it, noted this was not his finest quality, and had said nothing.

Now it was night and his wife was working late, reviewing the cultivation documents the visitor had provided, and he was here with his tea.

When the messenger arrived — not a runner, a cultivator, one of the guest’s people, or so she identified herself, with the calm, formal bearing of someone conducting official business — he was not entirely surprised.

"The senior requests your presence at the south discussion point. Tonight. Tenth bell. A matter of the cultivation arrangement."

He looked at the woman who had delivered this.

She was young. Seventeen, eighteen. Short hair, practical, cultivator’s bearing. Her expression was flat and professional.

"The chieftain—"

"The senior asks that this remain between yourself and him for now. The proposal involves you specifically. He said: ’The husband’s cooperation has value the wife cannot provide.’"

He looked at this for a moment.

Then he told the woman he would be there.

He told himself this was practical. It was probably practical. The cultivation offer the visitor had extended was significant. His wife had spent the evening reviewing it. If there was a component that involved him, it was sensible to hear it.

He told himself this.

He also put on his best outer robe.

The tenth bell had not yet come when the Chief arrived at the guest quarters.

She had not planned to come here.

She had planned to finish the cultivation documents and go to sleep. But the documents had a specific reference she needed to cross-check with a text that she had left in the guest structure’s common room — a small thing, a five-minute errand, the kind of thing she had done a hundred times without thought.

She approached the cedar structure.

The patrol woman against the wall looked up.

The Chief noted: the patrol woman had the specific, slightly assembled expression of someone putting themselves back together. Her knees were still together. Her hand was at her own thigh and had been somewhere else before it was at her thigh.

"Chieftain." The patrol woman rose immediately, correctly, with the warrior’s snap.

"At ease." She looked at the woman. "When did the senior return to his quarters?"

The patrol woman’s expression was the expression of someone choosing a careful answer.

"The senior has not left his quarters, chieftain. Not since—" She stopped. Started again. "Since returning from dinner."

The Chief looked at the cedar structure.

She had not been the one sitting against the wall. She had not been at the cooking fires. But she was the Chief, which meant she had the awareness of every thread of her village, and the threads had been reporting all evening, and she had filed what they were reporting with the specific, professional efficiency of a woman who ran a tribe.

She knew what was happening in there.

She was, if she was honest with herself, slightly curious about what was happening in there, in the specific way that a woman in her position and with her husband’s recent expression at the dinner table was sometimes slightly curious about things she was not going to act on.

She was not going to act on it.

She knocked.

Three times. The formal tribal knock. Because she was the Chief and the Chief knocked formally even at the door of a guest hut.

Silence.

Then, from inside, a sound.

She had heard sounds from inside this structure all evening. The patrol women had heard them. Everyone within a hundred meters had been hearing them.

She had processed them as: ’cultivation event in progress, significant, notable, not my business.’

The sound now was different. It was not the ambient output of an extended session winding down.

It was the specific, close-range, immediate sound of a voice, a particular voice, a nineteen-year-old warrior-woman’s voice, expressing something at close range and expressing it with the unmistakable honesty of a body that had not asked for this moment.

’—AHN~!—’