His eyes tracked down the pristine white silk of her tunic.
They hit the deep, saturated Szechuan Red collar and the center of the interlocking silver buckles.
And Elder Qin Changxu's three-hundred-year-old, preserved, touch-starved, emotionally repressed retinas locked onto the slender, neat, mind-shreddingly soft curve of her fitted waist.
Time completely stopped.
The spiritual pressure inside the petrified-wood privacy alcove flatlined.
Elder Qin's brain wildly attempted to run the incoming sensory data through the foundational logic matrices of the Heartless Dao sutras.
Premise 1: This is Lin Ji'an. A junior male disciple of the Drunken Peak.
Premise 2: Male disciples cultivate pure, Yang energy. Their torsos are blocky, straight, and unyielding as carved granite.
