Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 173 - Preparing Baits to Catch Bigger Fish
He did not specify what.
He did not need to.
The not-specifying was, in fact, the instrument of it. A specific ask with a specific answer was a transaction. A favor, unspecified, owed to a Nascent Soul Mid Stage man who had just given your wife an ancient herb — that was something Ruo’s mind would spend the rest of the day turning over, and the turning-over was the point.
Ruo looked at him.
He looked at the stream.
He looked at the path back to the village, where his wife was sitting at the center table, at the place of honor, with the amber eyes that he loved and the jaw like a statement and the six years of cultivation plateau that he had never been able to help her with.
He nodded.
"Tonight," he said.
He walked back up the path.
Cang stood at the stream for a moment.
He looked at the water.
’Evil Points,’ the System noted, with the specific tone of the blue interface registering an operation in progress.
He stretched again.
Rolled his neck. Let the Shadow Devourer’s muted darkness field expand once into the ambient Void Return residual in the soil, the blade’s field pulsing with the specific appreciative frequency of a weapon that was very comfortable in this territory.
He turned back toward the village.
He had covered half the distance when he heard the footsteps.
Two sets. Light.
The specific step of young women who had been moving with deliberate care, which meant they had been following and had been trying not to be heard, which meant they were close enough to the step-weight ratio that told him who it was before he turned.
Sora and Wren.
The two nineteen-year-olds stood at the treeline, the amber eyes bright in the cedar shadow, their expressions at the specific intersection of the decision already made and the nerve required to follow through with it.
Sora was slightly taller. Her hair was darker. She had the broader shoulders of the two and the specific, settled quality of someone who had been the stronger of a pair for long enough that it was just true rather than a competition.
Wren was beside her with the energy of someone who was here because her friend was here and had also decided she was here, the slight forward lean of a young woman who had made her choice and was not going back on it.
"Senior," Sora said.
The amber eyes. The Void Return bloodline echo running through both of them in the specific, warm frequency that the territory’s saturation expressed in its young.
"Senior," Wren said, one beat behind.
He stopped.
He looked at them.
"You called for us?" Sora said.
He had not called for them.
He had, however, seen them watching from the clearing’s edge during the herb presentation, and had noted the specific quality of their attention, and had not done anything to discourage it.
The herb integration passive was at its three-meter ambient range.
They were within two meters.
They had been within two meters since before he turned.
He looked at them for exactly the length of time the assessment required, and something in his expression settled into the specific, unhurried quality of a man who has found the next item of the morning.
"Strip."
Sora looked at Wren.
Wren looked at Sora.
The look between them had the specific, compressed vocabulary of two people who had spent enough years side by side that entire conversations had been reduced to a single exchange of amber eyes. ’Did he just say what I think he said.’ Wren’s expression answered: ’yes.’ Sora’s follow-up: ’that’s not— we’re not here for—’ Wren’s response, in the slight forward tilt of her chin: ’I know but also he’s.’
They looked back at him.
"Senior," Sora began, with the careful, measured tone of a warrior addressing a significant stage differential while also addressing a request that was not inside any category she had protocols for. "We came to— that is, we only wanted to ask whether you required anything for the—"
He moved.
The gap between them closed in the specific, unhurried way that Nascent Soul Stage movement closed distance — not fast, in the sense of visible speed, but present, and then ’here’, the way a tide arrives. One moment there was the comfortable width of three paces between them and the next his hands were at their chests simultaneously, the flat-palmed, full grip of both hands closing on both women at once.
Wren made a sound.
’—Aaah~!’
Sora’s inhale was sharp and contained and she grabbed his wrist — both hands, the warrior’s immediate grip — but the grip met the specific, unmovable quality of Dragon-scale structural fortitude and found no purchase.
He pulled.
Not the fabric — yet. His hands had closed on the leather of their training dresses at the chest and his fingers found the seams and he pulled outward, the specific directional force that went through the structural points of the garments rather than against them, and the sound the leather made was clean and absolute.
’Rrrip.’
Two simultaneous clean tears, left and right, the dresses opening at their fronts with the comprehensive finality of material that had been asked to contain something larger than its engineering had budgeted for.
"—Senior—!" Sora.
"—AH~!" Wren.
Both of them winced — not pain, the specific, full-body wince of surprise arriving at the same moment as exposure — and their hands went to themselves, the automatic cover-reflex arriving before anything else.
He put his arms around both of them.
The hug was not gentle.
It was the specific, comprehensive, forward-gathering embrace of something that had decided both of these people were going where it was going and had made the structural commitment to that decision — his arms coming around both of them at once, pressing each one against his sides with the flat, absolute authority of an architecture that did not ask.
The herb integration passive was at point-blank range.
Both of them were fully inside it now.
Sora pushed.
Her broad warrior shoulders drove back against his arm with the full Core Formation Early output — not nothing, a Foundation Establishment cultivator would have found it serious — and found a wall.
Wren’s pushing was less coordinated and more earnest, the full-body effort of someone who had not been doing this as long as Sora and was giving it everything she had with the compensating intensity of effort over technique.
His arms did not adjust.
He walked them backward.
Three steps. The specific geometry of a man walking forward and carrying two people who were also walking backward because the alternative was falling, and neither of them had decided to fall yet.
Then the Qi extended.
The clean, invisible arms of Nascent Soul Mid Stage telekinesis wrapping both of them at the waist with the specific, careful pressure of something moving people rather than objects, and the ground left both pairs of feet simultaneously.
Sora’s sound: ’"—Senior—WAIT—"’
Wren’s sound: ’"—Aah~! Put me DOWN—"’
The cedar room’s sleeping surface received them.
Both of them, together, landing on the wide bedding with the full, simultaneous impact of two substantial bodies arriving at a surface — the bounce of the sleeping material receiving their weight, the jiggle of everything that jiggled when a body hit a soft surface with momentum, the amber eyes of both of them going to the ceiling and then finding him immediately.
He stood at the bed’s edge.
He began removing his robe.
