Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 112 - Reunion of Sisters

The wind at this elevation had no opinion about what it carried.

Cang cleared the last rooftop of Clearwater’s merchant district at a height that put the compound’s tallest watchtower at ankle level, and both women went with him—not draped over his shoulders, not slung like cargo—but wrapped around him with the involuntary conviction of bodies that had been taught, over the course of a very long night, that this was where their equilibrium lived.

Meiling’s legs had locked around his left side before the window was even fully behind them.

She didn’t know when she’d done it. Her mind had still been processing the cold morning air on her face, the sudden vertigo of open sky, the outrage of being carried—and then her thighs had simply found purchase against his hip and her arms had found his shoulders and she was holding on with the specific, undignified desperation of a woman who understood, at a purely biological level, that the alternative was falling.

Her face pressed against his chest. The silk of his robe smelled like wood smoke and the mineral clean of cultivation energy and something else she recognized from the previous night that she would have preferred not to recognize.

She did not let go.

Xiao Hua had her legs wrapped around his right side with both arms knotted at the back of his neck, red bridal silk streaming behind her in a banner of last night’s wreckage. The wind pressed against her face and she kept her eyes closed and her teeth pressed together and tried to remember the last time she had felt entirely inside her own body.

She could not remember.

Her hips jolted with the changes in his flight path. Each adjustment of his weight pressed him against her in ways that made her breath catch with the oversensitized rawness of a body that had been thoroughly educated and was now incapable of neutrality. Her inner thighs ached. Her chest ached. Even her arms, locked at his nape, ached.

She held on tighter.

His hand was still at Meiling’s breast.

Not aggressively. Not with the purpose of the previous night. Simply resting—palm curved around the full, heavy weight of her through the silk with the proprietary ease of a man who has filed his claim and sees no reason to remove his hand from what’s his. His thumb moved once in a slow arc.

"Ahn~—" Meiling’s sound was swallowed by wind and altitude and the profound indignity of her own throat producing it. Her arms tightened. She pressed her face harder against his chest.

Stop, she told herself. You are a merchant’s wife. You have a position. You have a household. You have—

His thumb moved again.

"—Nnh~—"

She gave up on that line of thought.

Below them, the Clearwater compound shrank. The roads became lines. The market stalls became colored dots. The window where she knew—she knew—her husband and his son were still standing became indistinguishable from the rest of the wall, from the rest of the building, from the rest of a life she was moving away from at speed with a cultivator’s hand on her chest.

She closed her eyes.

The wind was cold. He was warm. The two facts arranged themselves around each other without her permission.

The forest came up fast.

Old growth—the kind of trees that had been old when the village was new, trunks wide as houses, canopy so dense the morning light arrived in fragments. He dropped through a gap in the green ceiling with the precision of something that had been navigating vertical space its entire life, and the forest floor rose to meet them.

He landed without sound. Feet finding earth like he’d merely stepped off a low stair.

Both women’s legs unlocked simultaneously—muscle memory releasing its grip the moment solid ground returned—and they came down on either side of him in a near-simultaneous controlled stumble. Meiling caught herself against a nearby trunk, thick fingers spreading across the bark, head bowed while her legs rediscovered their function.

Xiao Hua’s knees went first.

She caught them before they fully buckled, one hand finding Cang’s sleeve, the other pressing against her own thigh, breathing carefully through her nose with the concentrated effort of someone negotiating with their own body.

Her legs were shaking. Not from the landing.

She straightened slowly. Tugged her red bridal dress back into approximate order. Turned to look at him with the particular expression she had been wearing since approximately midnight—a complex, layered thing that occupied the intersection of resentment and exhaustion and something she did not have a name for that kept arriving anyway.

He was not looking at her.

He was looking through the trees.

Xiao Hua followed his gaze automatically, which was a habit she was apparently developing, and frowned at the dappled mid-morning forest that offered nothing immediately obvious. Her ears, less cultivator-sharp than his, caught nothing. She opened her mouth.

"Xiao Hua."

The voice came from her left.

She turned.

And then the word that came out of her throat was not a word at all—a sound that bypassed language entirely, a noise she had last made at age seven when she’d lost Song Mei in the market and found her again behind the grain stall—pure relief and fury and love compressed into a single syllable:

"Jie—"

Song Mei hit her at a run.

The elder sister crashed into Xiao Hua with both arms open, and the impact nearly took them both to the forest floor—Xiao Hua’s red bridal dress tangling with Song Mei’s simpler travel clothes, both women clutching each other with the grip of people who had spent the last two days operating on the assumption that the other might be dead.

"I was so worried—" Song Mei’s voice was muffled against Xiao Hua’s hair. Her arms had locked around the younger girl’s shoulders and showed no signs of releasing. "They told me you were at the compound, I couldn’t get there, I tried to—are you hurt? Are you—"

"I’m—" Xiao Hua started.

She stopped.

The accurate answer to are you hurt was long and required vocabulary she hadn’t needed before yesterday, and her sister’s face was right there, worried and searching and here, and Xiao Hua pressed her face against Song Mei’s shoulder and breathed.

"I’m here," she said instead. "I’m here."

Song Mei held her tighter. Her eyes had found Cang over Xiao Hua’s shoulder—dark and direct and performing a rapid assessment that landed somewhere between gratitude and interrogation.

"She was at the compound," Cang confirmed, before the question formed. "She’s been with me."

Song Mei’s eyes did not soften.

"She has a bruise on her collarbone," she said.

"She has several," Cang agreed. "They’ll resolve. Her constitution accelerates it."

The elder sister’s jaw moved. She held Xiao Hua slightly back, hands on her younger sister’s shoulders, scanning her face with the focused clinical attention of a woman who had spent her childhood checking her sibling for injuries and had never quite stopped.

Xiao Hua, for her part, had opened her mouth to begin explaining—the compound, the merchant’s son, the night that followed, all of it—and found that she had no idea where to start.

Her mouth closed.

Then opened again.

"Jie," she said carefully. "Why do you know this man?"