Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 262: Training the Heroine

She swallowed the bitter taste lingering on her tongue, her throat working in a tight swallow. She said nothing, though the night breeze pressed the diaphanous silk of her robes against her skin, making her suddenly very aware of how little she wore.

"—He perished."

"—Yes."

"—Were you the primary wife, or—"

"—The seventh," she cut in. Her tone was brittle, dry as ash. "—He kept a harem of seven. I was the last. Curiously, I was also the only idiot who marched onto that blood-soaked field beside him."

The other six possessed a keen sense of self-preservation that I glaringly lacked.

She didn’t whine or coat the admission in tragic self-pity. She merely laid the humiliating truth bare. It was offered up like a cold, hardened artifact she had long since buried in the back of her mind.

He kept walking.

He casually laced his large hands behind his back. The shift in his posture was subtle but devastating—the straightening of his broad spine, the arrogant tilt of his chin. It was the innate, regal carriage of an immortal sovereign. Out of the corner of her eye, the mesmerizing shift of his latissimus muscles made her breath catch. The movement drew her gaze to the damp cloth clinging low on his hips. Somehow, wandering through a garden wearing nothing but a wet rag, he carried the terrifying majesty of a god adorned in emperor’s robes.

She quickly averted her eyes.

A treacherous heat rose in her cheeks, and a different sort of warmth pooled lower down as the chill wind caused her nipples to peak, straining into tight buds against her thin bodice.

She stared intensely at the shrubbery. At the glowing moss lining the paving stones.

But her gaze inevitably drifted back to the deeply carved, shadowed valleys of his abdominal muscles. They dominated her peripheral vision. It was impossible to ignore the moisture tracing the sharp V of his lower hips, or the way the low-riding towel threatened to slip with his powerful, rhythmic sway.

"—Seven wives," he murmured thoughtfully.

"—Yes."

"—And he dragged the youngest to the slaughter."

"—He brought the only woman whose sword-path flowed compatibly with his own art." She hesitated, the old sting biting at her chest. "—He also used me as a shield because my family held no political weight. I was the cheapest one to lose."

She stated the betrayal with the same emotionless detachment, though her chest rose and fell in a jagged rhythm.

He cast a dark, sidelong look down at her.

Catching the intensity of that stare, she lifted her chin. "—I have made my peace with my worth," she defended.

It was a flimsy lie stitched over a fragile truth, the kind of hollow comfort betrayed women repeated in the mirror.

"—Have you," he challenged. His voice dipped into a dangerous, silken register that sent an involuntary shiver down her spine.

"—I am not naive," she retorted, crossing her arms under her breasts, inadvertently pushing the soft swells upward. "—My plight is hardly unique. Harem women in orthodox sects are frequently traded and discarded like—"

"—I didn’t ask for a lecture on sectarian politics," he commanded, stepping smoothly into her space. The sheer heat radiating from his large body enveloped her. "—I asked if your soul had truly accepted being treated as disposable trash."

Startled by the sudden proximity, she looked up at him.

She stared openly at his profile. Her amber eyes mapped the harsh, beautiful lines of his jaw. She was a cautious woman, trying to calculate just how far this overwhelmingly dominant man was willing to peel back her psychological armor.

He wasn’t looking at her anymore. His attention had drifted to a massive, wide-canopied stone-tree looming ahead. Its ancient, pale trunk swelled outward at the base, forming a natural, polished seating area among the thick, twisted roots.

He strode toward the shadow of its branches.

He sat down.

The way he reclined was a study in pure, unbridled masculinity. The towel rode up his heavy thighs, performing only the barest minimum of its duties. It left a dangerous expanse of tanned, hair-roughened leg exposed, highlighting the thick cords of muscle. He rested his thick forearms casually across his knees, leaning forward. It was a pose deceptively relaxed, yet coiled with the predatory tension of an ancient beast resting in its den.

He tipped his chin toward her.

"—Sit," he ordered softly.

She eyed the sprawling root directly beside him. Then she glanced at the root a little further away, meticulously judging the safest distance her dignity would allow.

Giving a short nod, she made her tactical choice. She stepped toward the furthest curve of the wood, bringing her hand down to gather her skirts. The silk pulled taut across her backside as she moved to lower her hips safely out of his reach.

His large, calloused hand lashed out.

Fingers clamped around her delicate wrist. It wasn’t a painful grip, merely an inescapable shackle of warm, unyielding flesh. It was the undeniable clasp of a man who had made a decision on her behalf and bypassed conversation entirely to enforce it.

She gasped, staring down at his dark fingers wrapping entirely around her pale forearm.

He yanked her forward.

The effortless force of the pull tore her feet clean off the ground. She flew through the air in a panicked flutter of silk, crying out as the momentum sent her crashing directly into his lap. She landed hard, straddling his thick thighs with her own.

There was no warning. The heavy, soft crush of her feminine weight settled squarely over his lap, pressing the thin silk of her robes intimately against the damp terrycloth of his towel. Whatever massive entity that fragile cloth had been failing to restrain was suddenly sandwiched flush against her tender center.

She felt it.

Gods, she felt it right away.

The brutal, blunt ridge of his erection surged upward against the damp juncture of her thighs. It was shockingly thick, radiating a blistering heat right through the barrier of his towel and her thin undergarments. The friction coaxed a sudden, traitorous slickness between her legs. It twitched beneath her weight, swelling thicker and longer with terrifying speed, asserting its dominant, rock-hard presence against her most sensitive folds with zero ambiguity.

Her eyes blew wide open.

It wasn’t a delicate flinch of surprise. Her breath left her lungs in a sharp hiss, eyebrows shooting toward her hairline. The intimidating girth of the weapon prodding her cleft forcefully registered in her panicked mind, filling the space between her spread thighs.

"—Whhh—"

The protest formed on her lips. It died the second the rigid shaft pulsed between her legs.

She sat entirely frozen astride his lap. The high-altitude wind rustled the silver canopy overhead, chilling her flushed skin, yet all she could focus on was the terrifying, aching heat branded into her groin. She stared wildly at the side of his handsome face.

He merely gazed out at the moonlit blossoms. He looked profoundly bored and remarkably relaxed.

Meanwhile, the monster of a cock trapped beneath her delicate core strained upward. It pressed deep into her softening heat with an unapologetic, greedy patience. It possessed the blatant arrogance of a beast that had been raging all night and had gleefully found a fresh, tight new place to conquer.

She scrambled to find oxygen. Her mouth opened and closed like a stranded fish, her breasts heaving with each panicked, shallow breath.

"—Whhhaaattt—!?"

He finally shifted his dark eyes back to her flushed face. A slow, wicked smirk tugged at the corner of his chiseled mouth, his gaze dropping briefly to her trembling lips.

"—You were going to sit too far away," he murmured.

She tried to stand.

The specific, both-palms-pushing quality of a woman who has made a decision about where she is and has decided she is somewhere else — her hands going down to his thighs for leverage, her weight shifting forward, the beginning of the motion that would have put her back on her feet and a significant distance away from his lap.

His arms came around her.

Not grabbing — the specific, unhurried quality of arms that simply arrived, one across her collarbone, one at her waist, the full, warm, chest-against-back enclosure of a man who had decided she was staying.

"’—Remain,’" he said.

Into her hair.

Close enough that the word arrived warm against the crown of her head.

"’—Let me help you.’"

She stiffened.

"’—Help me with—’"

"’—Your meridians,’" he said. "’—They are cycling wrong. I read it on the slope. I read it now. You have been managing the fracture incorrectly for three months because your sect taught you a routing technique that assumes an intact foundation, and you have been trying to force a broken pattern through channels that cannot hold it.’"

She was still.

The arms around her were warm.

The thing pressing against her from below was also warm, and present, and absolutely not a meridian.

"’—A single session of external qi guidance,’" he said, "’—correctly applied at the fracture points, can stabilize the cycling until I repair the foundation properly. It is not complicated. Hold still.’"

She held still.

Partly because he had said to. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Partly because her cultivation base had just recognized the specific quality of what was emanating from him — Nascent Soul qi, dense and refined and warm, pressing against her body’s energy field the way sunlight presses against skin, and the response her fractured foundation had to the proximity of that quality of qi was the specific, involuntary response of a broken mechanism recognizing that the thing beside it could fix it.

His hand moved.

Down.

She felt it — the specific, present quality of his palm settling low on her abdomen, below the navel, the specific location that cultivators called the ’lower cinnabar field’, where the foundation’s primary cycling occurred, where the fracture originated.

He pressed.

"Hiekk—!"