The thick smell of rendered pork fat, fried garlic, and freshly cooked rice spread through the courtyard of the Yù family home, mingling with the warm wind blowing from the valley.
The silent mourning that had swallowed the morning after the visit to the graves in the bamboo grove was beginning to give way to the instinctive need of the living to keep breathing. In the rustic kitchen, Sū Huì dried the stubborn tears that still insisted on wetting her face and focused on her clay pots. Her daughters had returned. Her son‑in‑law had kept his promise. The house, which had felt so large and silent in recent weeks, now pulsed with an energy that made the very bamboo walls vibrate.
With a heavy platter of roasted meat in her hands, Sū Huì stepped out onto the veranda toward the large dining table in the covered courtyard. That was when she stopped, her eyes widening.
In the corner of the courtyard, near the small stable where the four colossal horses rested, there stood a motionless figure.
Sū Huì had not noticed her in the emotional whirlwind of the arrival. The woman stood with her hands joined before her body and her posture as straight as a blade driven into the earth. She wore a silver‑gray silk tunic with a high collar, embroidered with gold in a richness indescribable for the village. But what shocked the matriarch was the otherworldly beauty of the stranger. Her incredibly long, snow‑white hair fell perfectly aligned down her back, and her aristocratic face possessed a divine delicacy. Yet the structured clothing scandalously failed to contain the generous proportions of her full breasts and wide hips, exuding a voluptuousness that contrasted with her severe, reserved expression.
Intimidated by the aura of royalty the woman exuded, Sū Huì wiped her hands on her apron and approached cautiously.
"Miss?" Sū Huì called, her voice hesitant. "The sun is already high. The journey must have been exhausting. Please, join us for lunch. What is your name?"
The white‑haired woman turned her face. Beneath long snowy lashes, irises of a deep scarlet met the old mortal woman's eyes.
Instead of answering with a courteous nod or a polite smile, the aristocratic woman joined her feet, fixed her gaze on the earthen floor, and bent her torso in a formal, rigorous, incredibly deep bow, exactly as she would before an empress.
"This servant dare not be called miss by the mother of her Ladies," the melodious, unshakably polished voice echoed through the courtyard, laden with fanatical respect. "This servant is called Mò Yán. And I will not sit at the table. My duty is to stand and serve the meals to my Lord and his wives."
Sū Huì froze. The simple village woman's brain short‑circuited completely.
Servant?
Sū Huì blinked, incredulous. The woman before her had the appearance, posture, and clothes of a noble from the capital, perhaps even a princess of some powerful clan. And yet, she bowed to the ground, referring to herself as a mere maid.
But it was not only that which paralyzed the matriarch. The echo of the last sentence hammered in her mind. My Lord and his wives. Wives. Plural.
Sū Huì's mind spun. She looked at the open door of the main house. She remembered how Yù Méi had arrived: floating above the ground, her skin glowing like milky jade, her golden hair shining in the sun. The youngest was no longer the rustic, noisy girl who ran after the two through the bamboo grove. Her body overflowed with the ripe, voluptuous maturity of a full woman. And the way Zhì Yuǎn touched the youngest's waist, the way Yù Qíng's gaze—always so absurdly jealous and possessive—rested on her sister with a dark, satisfied complicity…
A mother's visceral intuition connected all the dots in a fraction of a second.
By the gods, Sū Huì thought, her face heating as the realization dawned. What happened on the road? What did those three do?!
Before Sū Huì could stammer any response, the sliding door of the dining room opened, and Yù Qíng emerged. The priestess glided gently to the veranda, her navy‑blue dress brushing against her thighs.
"Our mother's hospitality is an order in this house, little snow flower," Yù Qíng murmured, her voice sweet and velvety, but carrying that tone of utilitarian command that brooked no refusal. "You will not offend her table by standing like a stone pillar. Come in and sit."
Mò Yán trembled slightly. The immaculate skin of her nape tinged with a febrile pink, betraying the deep conditioning of her submission.
"A‑As the Lady commands," Mò Yán answered, her voice losing some of its dogmatic firmness before the blue goddess.
Sū Huì, still a little dizzy from the silent revelations of that morning, merely nodded hurriedly and guided everyone into the dining room.
The large round rustic wooden table soon became full. Yù Chéng brought two jugs of rice wine he had saved for festival days. The dense mood of the morning began to dissipate as they settled in.
Zhì Yuǎn sat at the head of the table. He did not need to speak or demand anything; the cosmic presence of his Inner Universe dictated the gravitational center of the room. Yù Qíng sat to his left, resting her hand gracefully on his leg beneath the table. To the god's right, Yù Méi wasted no time. The Brutal Blade piled her plate with three huge pieces of pork and a mountain of rice, her almond eyes gleaming with pure hunger.
Mò Yán sat at the far end, her back as straight as a board, her hands on her knees, her gaze fixed on her own bowl, breathing shallowly to avoid drawing attention to the undeniable tension of her full bust against the silk.
"Finally, real food!" Yù Méi exclaimed, biting into a chunk of meat with gusto, ignoring any trace of martial etiquette. She turned to her father, laughing with her mouth half full. "You have no idea what garbage the mercenaries eat on the roads! We had to cross a bunch of armed idiots in the north. They thought they could block our carriage. One of them jumped at me holding a hammer the size of an anvil!"
Yù Chéng nearly choked on his wine, his eyes widening at his youngest daughter.
"Heavens, Méi! What did you do? Did you run away?" asked the old miner, pale.
Yù Méi let out a genuine laugh, swallowing the food and pounding her own chest with her fist.
"Run away? I punched his stomach so hard the man flew over two carts and only stopped when he hit a stone wall!" she boasted, her eyes sparkling with the predatory memory. She wisely filtered out the part about blood gushing and bones turning to dust so as not to terrify her parents. "After that, the rest of the group ran away crying. They can't handle a single real blow!"
Yù Chéng blinked, slack‑jawed, looking at his daughter's soft muscles and jade skin, trying to understand how that voluptuous body hid such absurd strength. Sū Huì covered her mouth, torn between horror at the danger and relief.
Yù Qíng slowly rolled her eyes, pouring tea into Zhì Yuǎn's cup with delicate precision.
"The seed's ignorance is to think the thunder does the storm's work alone," Yù Qíng murmured, a subtle, poetic smile forming on her red lips. "You cracked the nutshell, little flower, but you scattered dirt all over the courtyard. If our husband hadn't nullified the rest of the group's presence, you would have spent the entire afternoon picking up trash on the road."
Yù Méi huffed, crossing her arms and tilting her nose up.
"You only say that because you didn't have to dirty your hands," the youngest retorted, but without the true irritation of the past. She picked up the softest piece of meat from the platter with her chopsticks and deposited it directly into Zhì Yuǎn's bowl. "Eat, husband. Mother put extra care into the seasoning today."
The casual, intimate use of the word "husband" by Yù Méi made silence fall over the table for a full second.
Sū Huì's eyes widened. Yù Chéng stopped with his wine cup in the air.
The old couple looked at Yù Qíng, expecting the storm of jealousy, the murderous look, the broken cup that the eldest daughter always displayed when another woman even breathed near Zhì Yuǎn in the past.
But Yù Qíng did none of that. The priestess merely smiled—a deep, dark smile laden with shared devotion. She tilted her head, agreeing with her sister, and used her own chopsticks to place a portion of cooked vegetables on his plate. The two women flanked him not as rivals, but as two pillars of a single altar.
Mò Yán, watching the scene from the other end of the table, felt her stomach churn in a mixture of fascination and blind hunger. The perverse, violent, impenetrable dynamic of that Trinity exuded a warmth that made her own immaculate Yin sob in the depths of her meridians, begging to be part of that closed circle.
Zhì Yuǎn picked up his chopsticks. The god did not make grand speeches or offer cosmic explanations to the old parents. The inscrutable abyss in his eyes receded, swallowed by a dense, warm, profoundly affectionate glow.
He accepted the food Yù Méi had offered him and turned his face toward the youngest. His large, calloused hand—the same hand capable of tearing rifts in space—rose with irrefutable tenderness and gently wiped a grain of rice from the corner of Yù Méi's mouth. The simple, warm touch made the Brutal Blade blush violently, melting her carnivorous warrior facade into a surrendered sigh.
Then his silent, protective gaze slid to Yù Qíng, thanking her for the tea with a slow nod that made the priestess lean her face against his shoulder, her eyes closed in pure adoration.
Sū Huì watched the scene, a mother's heart finally calming. She did not understand the paths of cultivation, did not understand the divine snow‑haired woman sitting at the end of the table, and certainly did not understand the forces that now inhabited her daughters' bodies.
But seeing the absolute, unshakeable tenderness in Zhì Yuǎn's eyes as he looked at the two women, Sū Huì knew that the world outside could collapse and burn to ashes. There, under the roof of that simple bamboo and clay house, her girls belonged to a fortress that would never be broken.
Yù Méi filled her plate again, her laughter returning freely.
"Mò Yán!" called the golden‑haired younger sister, waving her chopsticks lazily at the rigid diplomat. "Pass the spicy sauce over here, before Qíng starts reciting poems about how pepper purifies the soul or some nonsense!"
The table erupted in laughter. The heavy mourning of the morning was pushed away, drowned by the smell of hot food and the dense warmth of a core that had finally returned home.
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