Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 147 - Meeting the Bloated Wives

The air settled back into the formation wake’s normal turbulence and the ship continued southeast and neither of its deck’s current occupants had looked in her direction once.

The horizon was very long.

Wei Lingyue pulled back, and the sound of it in the clean mountain air was the sound of something complete.

Her grey eyes came up to him with the expression that had stopped being an assessment and had been something else for thirty-three hours.

"’Mmhn—’" Chen Yun’s mouth was still working, unhurried, thorough. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

He gripped both their hair.

The finish hit the ship’s deck and both women’s faces and the afternoon light was specifically honest about all of it, and Wei Lingyue blinked with the composed precision of a woman receiving this result and deciding that receiving it with composure was the correct approach.

Chen Yun’s expression had the flat, complete quality of a sword cultivator for whom the outcome of a thing is simply the outcome of a thing.

He looked at both of them.

"That," he said, "is why the ship."

Wei Lingyue pressed her lips together.

Made the sound.

Chen Yun made a slightly different sound, the same category.

The ship flew southeast and the cultivation world was very beautiful from altitude and both women stayed where they were for three additional minutes because kneeling had stopped being an instruction and had become a preference, which was a development Cang noted and filed in the ledger under ’satisfactory.’

Ten days later.

The cave area had changed in the way that places change when someone with a spatial ring full of two-thousand-year-old formation elixirs has been spending time there.

The death valley corruption was gone—had been gone since he had purified it, the dragon corpse’s dark qi neutralized, the residual atmospheric contamination converted—and what remained was the specific quality of an area where the spiritual density was very high and had recently been freed from the thing that had been suppressing it.

The cave mouth was visible from the approach path: larger than the geography required, the stone around it showing the formation inscriptions he had laid before leaving, the spiritual herb concentration in the air detectable at approximately half a mile.

The path to it was clean.

He came down from the ship on foot, the shadow sword at his back, both women three steps behind him—a spacing that had developed organically over ten days of travel and reflected nothing except that three people with matching cultivation stages move at similar paces and sort themselves by preference—and he came around the last curve of the approach path and the cave entrance was ahead and—

Six women came out of it simultaneously.

Not coordinated. The coordination was coincidental—six people who had been in the same space and had all registered the same qi signature arriving at the same moment and had all moved toward it through the same exit.

The result was six women in a narrow cave entrance at once, which resolved itself with the specific social physics of people who know each other well and are collectively prioritizing speed over formation.

Zhen Ying came first.

Not because she was fastest—she was, easily, her Nascent Soul Early Stage output putting her at the front of the available speeds—but because she was ’first’ in the specific sense of the thing that had been waiting longest for the thing that was returning.

She came through the cave entrance in her human form, the white skin and the dark hair and the figure that three hundred years of serpent-spirit cultivation produced, and she moved across the path with the specific velocity of a woman for whom dignity was currently not the priority.

Her arms found him.

The grip—not a cultivator’s grip, not the careful measured contact of a Nascent Soul Early Stage practitioner managing their physical output—the grip of a three-hundred-year-old virgin-turned-First-Wife who had waited ten days for the person who had given her her arm back and taken her virginity and told her she was his and had meant it.

"’You’re late,’" she said, against his chest.

"Ten days is not late," he said.

"’I counted,’" she said. The specific flat tone of Zhen Ying when she is not going to be argued with about something she has decided is a fact.

Song Mei arrived second—she came through the cave at a near-run and stopped herself three feet away with the specific self-discipline of a woman who has been working on not being overwhelming, and then abandoned the self-discipline entirely and arrived in the same general vicinity as Zhen Ying with the soft, helpless warmth that was specifically Song Mei.

"’You’re back,’" she said.

"Yes," he said.

"’You’re really back.’"

"Yes, Song Mei."

She pressed her face against his shoulder and made a sound that was not words.

Xiao Hua arrived third at a pace that was trying to be dignified and was not managing it—her younger sister’s expressiveness, the particular quality of nineteen and Pure Body Constitution and ten days of accumulated waiting—and she stopped beside Song Mei and looked at him with the wide, luminous eyes that her constitution produced and said nothing because her sister was currently occupying the available shoulder space and she was waiting her turn with the patience of someone who has recently been informed about the concept of queuing.

Suyin arrived fourth—the MILF maid’s economy of motion, the specific competence of someone who had been managing the household in his absence and was providing a status report through the medium of her posture, which said: ’things have been adequately managed and I have a list of items to address.’

"’Everything’s in order,’" she said. "I’ve kept an account of the—"

"Later," he said.

She pressed her lips together and nodded with the expression of a woman who has been told ’later’ many times and has developed a relationship with it.

Xiao the maid arrived fifth—nineteen, the large bright eyes, the large everything else that the travel robes maintained a professional relationship with—and she arrived with the specific energy of someone who has been waiting for a person to come home and whose body has not fully received the message that composure is the current operating mode.

"’Sir Cang—’" she started.

"Hello, Xiao," he said.

Her face did something.

She pressed both hands to her own cheeks and stepped back one pace and composed herself with the focused efficiency of a nineteen-year-old who is aware that there are other people present and some of them are significantly more senior.

Madam Lin came through the cave entrance last.

She came slowly—not from reluctance, from the specific care of someone whose body was operating with additional considerations. The walk had the particular quality of a woman who has been moving carefully for some weeks, the hand that found the cave entrance’s stone frame doing so for balance rather than casual contact, the pace deliberate.

He looked at her.

His physician’s eye had registered the relevant information before she had taken two steps.

Then he looked at Zhen Ying, who was still against his chest, and his physician’s eye registered that the same information was present, and he looked at it differently than he had looked at anything else on this trip or in this Trial or in the thirty-three hours of the cave or in any of the ten days since.

Zhen Ying pulled back.

She looked at his face with the silver eyes—the snake-heritage eyes, the ones that read heat and movement and intent—and she found the expression on it, and something in her face went very still and very warm simultaneously.

"’You see it,’" she said.

He looked at her abdomen.

The curve was subtle—Nascent Soul Early Stage bodies maintained their constitution longer, the physical evidence of development not presenting the way it did in mortal women—but his physician’s assessment was exact, and exact said: fourteen weeks, healthy, cultivation-grade gestation proceeding at the accelerated rate that a Nascent Soul Early cultivator’s body produced.

"Fourteen weeks," he said knowing system distorted their time sense ability to make gesttaion 1 month, making them unable to keep time mental clarity.

"’Thirteen,’" she said. "’But close.’"

He looked at Madam Lin.

Madam Lin had arrived at the group’s edge with the specific composure of an older woman who had decided, in the ten days of his absence, exactly how she was going to receive his response to this information. The composure was doing considerable work. Her hands were folded in front of her, exactly over the place where the curve was visible to someone who knew to look.

"’Twelve weeks,’" she said. Before he could speak. "’The herb confirmed it. I asked Suyin to check.’"

"You’re a mortal," he said. "The cultivation requirements for the pregnancy at your age—"