Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 111 - Leaving with Two More Conquests
Cang withdrew his hands.
He looked at the two men.
The merchant’s son had lowered his hand from his face. He was staring at his mother with an expression that had left anger somewhere behind and was operating in unfamiliar country now—raw and young and stripped of its cultivation pride.
"You saw," Cang said. "I didn’t even need to use anything else. Just hands." His tone was the mild, observational register of a physician noting a clinical outcome. "Consider what they become when I put effort in."
Neither man spoke.
"Your women," Cang continued, rising—slowly, unhurried—to his feet, adjusting the drape of his outer robe, "have been very accommodating. Very thorough. They worked hard. I respect that." He glanced down at them both, still kneeling, still recovering. "I’m going to keep them. Not all of the time. I have other arrangements. But regularly. Consistently." He looked at the merchant. "Your wife will have excellent care. Better than she’s had."
The merchant’s jaw was one continuous locked muscle from ear to ear.
"And in due course," Cang added, almost as an afterthought, "both of them will be carrying what I’ve given them. Consider it a gift. My seed has—" He paused, appearing to search for the right term. "—cultivation potential. Your grandchildren will be remarkable."
The son’s chair scraped back.
"Don’t," Cang said, not looking at him.
The aura pressed down.
The chair did not move further.
For a long moment the young man sat with his palms flat on the armrests and his breathing audible and his eyes locked on the cultivator’s back with an intensity that had nowhere to go. His father sat beside him, and the two of them occupied the same awful silence in separate ways—the son burning in it, the merchant submerged in it.
Cang reached down.
He pulled Meiling to her feet first—his hand wrapping her wrist, drawing her up. She rose without resistance, silk falling back into place, head still bowed. She did not look at her husband. She did not look at her stepson. She looked at nothing that was in this room.
Then Xiao Hua. The bride came up on trembling legs, red dress rustling, small hands folding automatically in front of her. Her cheeks were still flushed. Her eyes were still wet. She looked at the floor.
Cang’s arms came around them both from behind. One hand at the curve of Meiling’s hip. One hand moving to the front of Xiao Hua’s dress—sliding over the swell of her chest through the red silk in a slow, deliberate grip that made the girl flinch forward and press her lips together.
"Nnnh~—" The sound leaked from Xiao Hua despite everything. Her hands went up to cover his automatically, fingers pressing over his grip with the helpless instinct of a woman trying to contain what cannot be contained.
Meiling pulled a short, sharp breath as his palm curved around her from behind, his hand settling over the full, heavy weight of her breast through her silk in a proprietary hold that would have been indistinguishable from an embrace if it had been anyone else, in any other room.
She didn’t make a sound. She closed her eyes.
Her husband was nine feet away.
She closed her eyes.
Cang stepped toward the window. Not the door—the window, because the door was for people who were leaving. He moved toward it with both women folded against his sides, hands still occupied, and the spiritual energy that gathered around him in the seconds before he moved was the same quiet, effortless mass of power that had been holding the son in his chair all morning.
The window opened without being touched.
Morning air came through it—clean and early and unaware.
The merchant’s son came to his feet the moment the aura lifted.
It lifted all at once, like a pressure change—the room felt suddenly larger, suddenly lighter, suddenly full of air that could be breathed. He stood, and his legs worked, and he crossed the room in three steps and got to the window just in time to see the cultivator clear the courtyard wall at elevation with the easy float of a man who finds the ground optional.
Both women were pressed against his sides.
Both women had their faces tucked against his chest. Not struggling. Not reaching back.
Clinging—arms wrapped around him, heads against his shoulders—not because they wanted to, but because the previous night had rewired something that was supposed to require weeks and years and choice, and their bodies had learned him in a way their minds hadn’t agreed to yet.
Meiling’s thick arms were wrapped around his left side. Her face was buried against his shoulder.
One of his hands was still curved around her breast from behind, kneading slowly, and the sound that reached the window—small, muffled, helpless—was the sound of his merchant’s wife moaning with her face pressed to a stranger’s chest as she was carried away over the rooftops of her own compound.
Xiao Hua’s small figure was tucked against his right, red bridal silk streaming with the height and speed. His hand was moving over the front of her dress.
Her fingers covered his but did not stop him.
Her small shoulders shook with something that could not be fully determined from this distance—grief or sensation or the particular devastation of having no longer access to the word no.
The son’s hands found the window frame.
They gripped.
He watched until the cultivator was a dark shape against the pale morning sky, growing smaller, still unhurried, still carrying both women with the ease of a man who has acquired things he intends to keep.
Then the shape was gone.
The courtyard was empty.
The compound was completely silent.
"Father."
The merchant had not moved from his chair. He sat with his hands on his knees and his face pointing forward and the particular stillness of a man who has been asked to absorb more than the structural limit permits.
"Father." The son’s voice cracked on it. He turned from the window. "Father, say something. Mother was just—they took mother and we just—can you not—" His jaw locked. He tried again. "Is there nothing we can do? Is there nothing? He takes mother and you just sit—"
"Sit down," the merchant said.
"I won’t—"
"Sit. Down."
The son sat. He sat because the voice that said it had no room left in it for argument—it was not commanding, it was not angry, it was simply a man operating at the floor of something with nothing underneath.
For a long moment there was only the sound of the morning outside the window. Somewhere in the compound a servant was moving. A door. A step.
The merchant raised his eyes from the middle distance for the first time since he had sat down.
He looked at his hands in his lap. He looked at the empty sofa across the room, at the indentation in the cushion where a cultivator had sat while doing things that had no name in any etiquette the merchant had ever studied.
He looked at the kneeling impressions in the carpet in front of the sofa, where the silk had pressed shallow grooves into the weave.
He looked away.
"Send for the household scribe," he said. His voice was level. The levelness of it cost more than the son would ever know. "I want a formal letter prepared. Sealed."
"To whom," the son said flatly. "To who, father. Who in this city has the rank to—"
"Not the city." The merchant’s hands folded over each other on his knees. "Write to the Ancestral Order."
A beat.
The son looked at him. "The Ancestral Order hasn’t moved on anything in six years. They don’t involve themselves in—"
"Write the letter." The merchant stood. He straightened his robe. He did not look at the sofa. He did not look at the window. He walked to the door with the careful, measured stride of a man putting one foot in front of the other by pure will.
"Send it by spiritual crane. Mark it urgent. Mark it—" He paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame. "Mark it as an incursion of demonic cultivation against civilian registered households.."
The son stared at his father’s back.
"And then," the merchant said, voice dropping to something flat and final, "send for a healer. For when they return."
He did not say if.
Because both of them knew how much those women enjoyed him, the probability of their returning was impossible.
’Fuck... I have to save my mother.’
