Chapter 6: The Siren's Lament
The hamlet embraced Xu Ling with firefly-lit paths and the susurrus of rice paddies. As his key grazed the clinic's oxidised lock, a neighbouring portal groaned—Liu Shuxiang materialised, her post-ablution form sheathed in moonlight and Chantilly lace.
Moisture-beaded tresses cascaded over collarbones sculpted by rural labour, the sodden silk of her negligee charting topography that mocked celestial modesty. Xu Ling's key screeched in protest as she arched backward, ebony locks sweeping across alabaster shoulders—a cartographer's fever dream rendered in living flesh.
"Little Ling", her reproach carried operatic pathos, vermilion-tipped fingers brushing imaginary sorrows, "dawn's chariot bore you county-ward without your humble handmaiden."
Xu Ling retreated, the clinic keys chiming a discordant alarm. "The nocturne breathes frost, Shuxiang-jie. Seek heart's refuge."
Her aqueous gaze kindled phosphorescent. "Does the metropolis' porcelain doll outshine this village bloom?" A lacquered nail traced her sternum's perilous gradient.
Before cortical intervention, Xu Ling's calloused thumb captured the saltwater illusion on her cheek—a primal response to Aphrodite's crafted grief. Lunar rays fractured in her upturned orbs, twin maelstroms of engineered vulnerability. ,
"All constellations dim before you," he rasped, the half-truth gilded by her musk of night-blooming jasmine. "County urgencies brooked no delay."
Her mirth cascaded—celadon windchimes steeped in clover honey. "Then let compensation commence." The key migrated between palms, her touch lingering like monsoonal humidity. "My lumbar regions rebel before the crimson tide. Your therapeutic ministrations…?"
She undulated against him, lace surrendering to gravitational truth. Xu Ling disentangled, retreating into the clinic's formaldehyde sanctuary. Behind sterilisation cabinets humming monastic vows, he duelled twin spectres—Hippocratic wraiths—and the insurrection beneath his peasant's trousers.
Liu Shuxiang's silhouette occluded the threshold, backlit into a Neolithic fertility idol. "Shall we initiate diagnostics, Healer?"
Nine kilometres hence, in a high-rise lair overlooking neon tributaries, Xie Yuxuan's brow furrowed at her navigation screen's pulsating marker. The chronometer glowed 21:47—witching hour's prelude.
Within the clinic's water closet, Xu Ling confronted his mercury-glass doppelgänger—apothecary versus bacchanal initiate. Through parturition-thin walls, Liu Shuxiang's contralto resurrected an agrarian ballad of plum rains and deflowered orchards.
The Pomological Ascension
Xu Ling stifled a sulphurous oath as corroded pipes groaned their aqueous chorus—a humiliating canticle should Liu Shuxiang's keen ears discern its provenance. Cosmic forces conspired to station this nymph-like temptress at his periphery, her arsenal of enticements refined through seasons of bucolic isolation.
"Little Ling~" Her mellifluous summons nearly upended him at the sanctum's ingress. "Therapeutic rigours demand your… undivided engagement."
The vision confronting him flouted Hippocratic decorum—Liu Shuxiang lay supine upon the examination slab, silk négligée adhering to hyperbolic contours defying Newtonian principles. Xu Ling's meridians thrummed with insurrection as his palms descended upon her sacral topography, each manipulative gesture skirting ethical perdition.
Ten aeons later, crystalline perspiration adorning his brow, Xu Ling retreated behind the lavatory's rice-paper rampart. "Eschew uncooked victuals during your lunar ebb!" he proclaimed through the partition, vocal cords betraying strain.
Liu Shuxiang ascended with pantherine fluidity, twin peonies of vexation blooming on her cheekbones. "Granite ascetic", she murmured, marvelling at her liberated vertebrae. "What arcana courses through those agrarian digits?"
Matinal rays discovered Xu Ling scrutinised Malus domestica inflorescences when crimson automotive vice materialised. Yu Mengna inclined across Nappa leather confines, her tailored blanc chemise murmuring of shareholder coups. "We're orchestrating a pomological renaissance," she decreed, the engine's vibrato echoing contented predation.
As pastoral thoroughfares unspooled beneath them, her revelation crystallised—"Tian Tian Xian stagnates in mediocrity's mire. Our nascent enterprise shall cater to epicureans versed in Wagyu marbling and Bollinger vintages."
Xu Ling's carotid rhythm accelerated. "Our arboreal portfolio demands biodiversity—Kyoto albino strawberries, Tasmanian citrus caviar…"
"Précisément." Her endorsement irradiated the cabin. "Yunshan's inaugural luxe fruit atelier—our patronyms engraved in agronomic annals."
Beyond the solar-reflective glazing, Xu Family Village diminished—its rustic groves transmuting into hothouses of agrarian insurgency. In the rearview's silvered plane, Liu Shuxiang's silhouette observed their exodus, lace straps surrendering to calculated negligence.
Within BMW's rarefied atmosphere, twin cosmologies collided: loam-scented ambition and Brioni-clad aspiration. Beneath the undercarriage, unseen cicada legions thrummed approbation.
The Arboreal Rebuke
The BMW hushed to stillness beneath gnarled arboreal sentinels. Xu Ling emerged, surveying his patrimonial orchard—a bucolic sanctuary demanding expansion to sate metropolitan aspirations. Yu Mengna materialised in artisanal espadrilles, her metropolitan poise discordant against agrarian simplicity.
Xu Ling's ocular trajectory charted the terrain of her tailored denim—a cartographer's fever dream of topology-defying rural pragmatism. Cicadas suspended their vespers as Yu's shriek sundered the pastoral tranquillity.
"Celestial guardians—what chthonic abomination?" She recoiled from a venom-filamented larva, vermilion-tipped digits anchoring in Xu Ling's sun-cured forearm.
"Urbanites venerate plush effigies," he observed, stabilising her tremulous form.
"Sable accoutrements, not animate toxin vesicles!" Her revulsion undulated through their conjoined extremities.
Their pomological reconnaissance devolved into a sarabande of evasion—tripartite lepidopteran progeny and myriad arachnid lattices later, Xu Ling navigated the grove as both pathfinder and human bulwark. When Yu's city-conditioned limbs faltered, he quasi-escorted her to the BMW's vitreous asylum.
"This Arcadia reeks of perfidy," Yu exhaled, onyx tresses adhering to her perspiring nape. A carmine stigma effloresced across her alabaster throat—nature's acrimonious imprimatur.
"Desist!" Xu Ling intercepted her marred hand mid-excoriation. His qi-suffused palm oscillated above the inflamed dermis. "This mandates—"
"Xiao Ling! The pomological magnate graces us and we've—" Xu Dong's proclamation evaporated as agrarian onlookers materialised like startled francolins, their oculars distending at the compromising tableau.
Yu Mengna's sternum blazed rhododendron-incarnadine as she disengaged. Xu Ling's therapeutic emanation lingered, equipoised between sanative puissance and communal mortification.
Beyond the orchard's periphery, larvae persevered in their hieratic procession across lunar-kissed foliage. The copse intoned its eternal verdict: metropolitan ambition remained neophytic before nature's inexorable pedagogy.
Orchards of Promise
The villagers converged like autumn wheat around the scarlet sedan, Xu Dong's furrowed brow mirroring collective unease. "Director Yu", he ventured, "word spread of your apple procurement..."
Yu Mengna's Valentino pumps tapped an impatient cadence. "Our current contract prioritises Xu Ling's premium cultivars. Market demand outpaces supply."
A ripple of dismay traversed the gathering. "But our orchards..." protested an elder, gnarled hands indicating sunburnt trees, "must we watch fruit wither unclaimed?"
Xu Ling interposed with calming authority. "Miss Yu's associates will commence village-wide collections within the fortnight. Her pledge bears the weight of jade."
As the crowd dispersed like wind-scattered chaff, Yu executed a corporate retreat, her BMW dissolving into amber dust. Xu Ling observed its departure, oblivious to the burgeoning folklore weaving his name with the metropolitan magnate's.
Wang Huifen descended upon him with the fervour of a rice-harvest gossipmonger. "The entire commune whispers of you and that city rose—" Her fingers pantomimed oscillating koi.
"Mother!" Xu Ling's nape flushed crimson. "She architects a pomological empire, not romantic entanglements!"
From the shadowed vestibule, Xu Wenhai's chuckle resonated with paternal knowing. "Honour her confidence, son. Our forebears observe from the celestial realms."
Beneath the persimmon tree's mosaic shade, Xu Ling unfurled his blueprint—expansion plans etched with tea-dyed fingertips. "Twenty mu minimally. Thirty for buffer yield."
His father's work-hardened palms mapped phantom furrows. "High-yield cultivars here, Golden Growth Elixir-enhanced species there..." Agrarian sagacity flowed through his gestures like monsoon waters. "Yet land tenancy..."
Wang Huifen already knotted her indigo headscarf. "Post-supper, I'll parley with Widow Liu—her fallow plots by the tributary—"
Xu Wenhai's dissent perished unvoiced. Let youth's ambitions soar. Should tempests arise, their ancestral coffin fund lay interred beneath the hearth—eight millennia of copper coins transmuted to paper promises.
As twilight gilded the compound in violet veils, cicadas resumed their metallic cantata. Xu Ling's fingers tightened around the BMW's embossed card—urban talisman in a peasant's palm. Beyond thatched eaves, larvae continued their methodical consumption of chlorophyll fortunes, nature's patient speculators in transformation's economy.
The Sapling Gambit
Xu Ling arrived at dawn astride his antiquated motorcycle, roaring into the county's largest nursery bazaar—a sprawling labyrinth rivaling twin coliseums. Convoys of lorries disgorged arboreal cargo, their gnarled roots weaving cryptic sigils across sun-baked asphalt.
A vulpine merchant descended upon him, coin-laden waist pouch clinking with ill-gotten gains. "Young patron, witness our celestial vines!" She brandished a grape sapling like Arthurian steel. "Sun-Kissed Rosé cultivar—the market's rarest treasure! Ten thousand per dozen!"
Xu Ling's vision sharpened. Through meridian-enhanced sight, the saplings' feeble rhizomes lay exposed—threadbare tendrils unfit for photosynthesis. "Elder sister presumes me a simpleton," he countered, fingertips grazing parched cambium. "These pedestrian Kyoho vines merit but ten yuan each."
The matron's grin soured. A finger snap summoned four brutes materializing like jackals from shaded crevices. Their chieftain cracked cervical vertebrae like festival firecrackers. "Two hundred sprouts—charity pricing for pretty lads. Acquiesce... or forfeit molars."
Hushed litanies swirled through onlookers:
"Another sacrificial lamb..."
"Last moon's phase saw Old Li's ribs fractured over peach saplings..."
"This youth's harvest silver shall line their liquor coffers..."
Xu Ling's lips arced coldly. His boot etched a challenge circle in the dust—an ancient pugilist's gauntlet. The alpha brute lunged, ham-sized fist cutting air toward his temporal bone.
Chronos stretched its threads.
Xu Ling's palm intercepted the strike, torque converted into a hip-toss, sending 90 kilograms of sinew crashing through sapling crates. Desiccated wood exploded. The second assailant found his humerus torqued in a lotus-armlock, radius creaking like drought-stressed bamboo.
When particulate matter settled, four forms lay mewling amidst arboreal wreckage. Xu Ling stood unblemished, extracting a persimmon sprout from the debris. "Authentic Fuyu cultivar," he proclaimed, flicking coins that embedded in the matron's trembling pouch. "Equitable recompense for genuine stock."
As his motorcycle's engine roared to life, the bazaar's illicit ledgers updated in real-time—a new folktale was born amidst splintered crates and shattered coercion.
The Sapling's Absolution
The colossus towered over Xu Ling, an anthropomorphic tempest casting umbral dominion. Bystanders suppressed shudders, their murmured benedictions for the ascetic youth drowned by the brute's primaeval growl.
"Fiscal destitution", Xu Ling proclaimed, selenic digits caressing a desiccated jujube. "But temporal abundance."
The goliath's ocular flutter proved fatal. The desiccated fruit impacted his temporal region with carillon resonance.
Bedlam ensued.
The brute's counterstroke cleaved vacant aether as Xu Ling pirouetted, his olecranon discovering the xiphoid process with lepidopteran precision. Ninety kilograms of myofiber yielded like mulberry parchment, concrete substrate keening beneath Newtonian verdict.
Tripartite aggressors advanced in choreographed ferocity. Xu Ling's calcaneus fragmented patella mid-assault. A Volar strike imploded coastal architecture. The final marauder arced retrograde into terracotta sapling mounds, with rhizomes and extremities entwining in dendrological symbiosis.
The nursery matron retreated, her coin-laden girdle chiming dishonourable profits. "This agora undergoes catharsis," Xu Ling decreed, brushing chimerical particulates from his sleeves—a gesture suffused with patriarchal finality.
Through dissevering spectators, a heliotropic stripling materialised. "Veritable cultivars, Honoured One! Tri-generational grafts!" His keratinous palms presented vitis vines whose roots undulated like draconic meridians. "Thirty yuan per specimen—logistics encompassed!"
Beyond the market's ferroconcrete labyrinth, a corroded tractor guarded arboricultural troves—serried saplings bearing quiescent potentiality. Xu Ling's fingertips traced a Cabernet vine's intricate phloem. "Centennial quantities per taxon," he ordained, depositing specie clattering into the youth's oscillating palm.
As crepuscular hues bathed the nursery in limonite veils, the vanquished extortionists receded into penumbral exile. Their dominion ceased not through edict but via a healer's phalanges and an agrarian's virtuous toil.
The tractor's diesel heart ignited at auroral break, its cargo of arboreal promissory notes clattering toward Xu Family Village. Concealed within burlap swaddling, a solitary jujube reposed—its ossified nucleus already envisioning vindication.
Lunar Requital
Twilight draped Yunshan County in violet veils as Xu Ling meandered through neon-fringed thoroughfares. His olfactory senses awakened to the fragrance of soy-glazed trotters emanating from a boisterous eatery, its flickering signage illuminating bare-chested men engaged in raucous drinking rituals.
"Maximus portion, if you would." Xu Ling deposited twelve yuan upon the Formica counter, retreating to a shadowed booth. Beneath oscillating fans churning humid air, he navigated his Da Mi smartphone's interface, peripheral awareness tracking a table's surreptitious photographic endeavours.
The matron wiped lard-glistened palms on her checkered apron. "Another feast absconded by those parasites," she murmured to her cleaver-wielding spouse, clearing carnage from abandoned seating.
Xu Ling savoured the braised delicacy—gelatinous pork shank adorned with star anise reduction, each mouthful a concerto of umami and spice. Satiated, he drifted toward the nursery market's confines, lunar radiance elongating his silhouette across weather-cracked pavements.
The trap sprang within a tenebrous alleyway.
"Engage!" hissed the familiar timbre—the drinking cadre's chieftain from the eatery. Fourteen-bladed shadows materialised from the void.
Xu Ling's lips arced sardonically. "The trotter purveyors shall reclaim their dues this nocturne."
The inaugural assailant's cudgel shattered against Xu Ling's radius with a report akin to splitting teak. Kinetic energy transmuted into weaponry as he pirouetted, employing the fractured haft to clothesline two adversaries. A spinning heel kick propelled a dagger-wielder into corrugated refuse, steel quivering in aged brickwork.
"Sorcerous technique!" howled a thug as Xu Ling's palm strike imploded his sternal plate.
When municipal luminaires stuttered to life, fourteen forms lay moaning amidst scattered armaments. Xu Ling adjusted his collar, extracting a gilded business card from the ringleader's breast pocket—*Aureate Growth Agrarian Consortium* embossed in vermilion foil.
The nursery market's predators would soon apprehend: rural apothecaries bore ancestral wrath within their sinews.
At the diner's threshold, proprietors gaped as Xu Ling's motorcycle thundered past, a bloodied sleeve fluttering from its carrier like a heraldic pennon. Their cash register chimed with fourteen untouched payments nestled beneath a ramekin of chilli-infused oil.
The moon resumed its celestial vigil, argent luminescence caressing persimmon saplings destined to chronicle this epochal nocturne.
Claws in the Moonlit Shadows
The alley's gloom thickened like spilled ink, yet Xu Ling observed the circling thugs with detached amusement—predator's eyes glinting in the void. Since awakening the Medical Immortal's legacy, darkness had become his spectral ally, rendering even starved moonlight sufficient to trace the twitch of a knuckle, the shift of a boot heel.
Two brutes lunged, cudgels whistling through damp air. Xu Ling's smile sharpened. A dancer's backward glide carried him beyond their reach as momentum betrayed the attackers. Wood cracked against bone, the wet crunch of fractured skulls punctuated by twin howls. Crimson ribbons unfurled down ashen faces.
He orchestrated their fury—a conductor of chaos. Retreats timed to millimetre precision, taunts woven through evasions until their snarls curdled to madness.
"I'll carve your ghost!" shrieked a blade-wielding assailant, steel flickering like a serpent's tongue. The lunge was pathetic. Xu Ling's palm intercepted the wrist, tendons flexing in a viper-strike twist. The knife burrowed into its owner's collarbone with a meaty schlick. The scream died beneath Xu Ling's palm, crushed into a whimper.
"Names". The command vibrated with glacial lethality, his grip transmuting jawbone to creaking porcelain.
Terror dilated the thug's pupils. This rustic-clad spectre exuded an aura denser than the Broadsword Gang's most sadistic enforcers—primordial, unyielding.
"Twenty seconds," Xu Ling murmured, thumb indenting the mandible's hinge. "Shall I gift you a serpent's unhinged maw?"
"Broadsword Gang!" The man gurgled, spittle flecking Xu Ling's sleeve. "Mercy, I beg—"
Recognition kindled cold fire in Xu Ling's gaze. These vermin had overstayed their welcome.
The gang lieutenant spat bloody phlegm, bristling at his underling's capitulation. "Bullying worms? Face a real man's steel!"
Xu Ling's hand became a raptor's talon. Fingers cinched the braggart's windpipe, hoisting him skyward. Toe-tips grazed filth as the thug's face purpled, veins bulging like drowned earthworms.
"Who. Pulls. Your strings." Each syllable dripped arctic venom.
Defiance crumbled. "T-Ten Blades..." the lieutenant wheezed upon release, palms scrabbling at bruised flesh. "Ambush… your head… bounty…"
Behind them, surviving thugs tensed. Xu Ling's heel became a piston—ribs snapped like kindling as bodies cannoned into mildew-caked walls. Agonised whimpers harmonised with rattling trash cans.
"Lead me," Xu Ling commanded, flicking gore from his nails. "Let us acquaint Ten Blades with regret."
The lieutenant blanched. "He'll flay our souls!"
Xu Ling's whisper slithered through the man's ear, colder than a grave's breath: "Your soul is already mine to kindle or extinguish. Choose."
Moonlight sculpted Xu Ling's profile—a wraith crowned in quicksilver, poised between shadow and slaughter. The lieutenant's knees struck pavement in surrender, forehead pressed to grime.
Midnight Confrontation at Devil's Den
The entrance of Devil's Den Bar glowed beneath neon constellations as midnight loomed.
Xu Ling crossed the threshold, ushered by the obsequious gang leader into his inaugural encounter with such pandemonium. Within, stroboscopic lights throbbed in sync with undulating forms—sparsely clad figures swaying hypnotically across the dance floor, their provocative silhouettes illuminated in flashes of crimson and cobalt.
His escorts evaporated into the human tapestry the instant Xu Ling's attention drifted toward the spectacle. As he moved to pursue, an inebriated siren materialized before him, clutching a perspiring cocktail glass.
"Darling," she purred, raven tresses cascading over alabaster shoulders. Her jewelled bralette strained against voluptuous curves, its neckline plunging toward oblivion. "Why waste energy dancing? Share a drink with your elder sister."
Xu Ling's nose wrinkled. Beneath layers of iridescent powder, her features paled against Shuxiang-jie's unadorned grace. He shifted sideways, only to find himself ensnared by perfumed limbs and silicone-enhanced softness.
"Don't be coy," she hissed, talon-like nails anchoring into his forearm. "For months I've prowled these shadows, yet you're the first morsel worth tasting." A lacquered finger tapped his lips, bourbon-laced breath enveloping him. "Twenty-four hours. Fifteen thousand yuan."
The cloying amalgam of jasmine and juniper berries assaulted his senses. "I don't peddle companionship," he retorted, attempting disentanglement.
Alarm surged through him mid-struggle. Beyond her shoulder, moonlight glinted off curved blades as a phalanx of brutes carved through the oblivious revellers.
"Madam," Xu Ling intoned, gaze hardening, "linger further and you'll become incidental carnage."
The intoxicated temptress reeled unsteadily. "Bloody hell! Forewarning might've been civil!" She propelled herself backward, stilettos clicking urgent staccatos across polished concrete.
Xu Ling observed her retreat with wry amusement. Thus evaporated transient ardour's promise.
The metallic shriek of drawn steel punctuated his reverie. A goliath marred by facial scarification shouldered through the closing circle, phlegm striking floorboards near Xu Ling's boots. "The Xu Village whelp, is it?"
A single nod answered, Xu Ling's posture fluidly transitioning into the serpent-and-crane stance.
Parley of the Honed Edge
"Compliance or arterial introduction to cold-forged iron?" The lieutenant twirled his falchion, lips contorting. "This sapling-limbed stripling reduced Bear to mewling? Twenty such whelps would shatter beneath my tread ere matins."
Xu Ling drifted wraithlike through coruscating passageways, enduring bombastic boasts until they breached an alcove where Bear—erstwhile chastened underboss—now supplicated before a chrome-domed hierarch draped in Byzantine chains. The penitent's countenance evoked overfermented hawthorn berries, bloated and bruise-discoloured, as he genuflected beside a brimming urn of partially combusted Montecristos.
"The Xu Ling." The plutocrat's ophidian regard undulated across the agrarian's physique, pudgy digits executing a staccato rhythm upon an obsidian console inlaid with nephrite felids. "Behold," he gestured toward the cowering mass, "Blade Consortium's hegemon—Ge Dadao."
Xu Ling inclined his cranium marginally. "Hegemon Ge. No vendetta intertwines us. Why engineer stratagems?"
The retinue member embedded his steel into teak, unleashing ligneous shrapnel. "Our sovereign's nomenclature from your humus-flecked maw? I'll reduce you to osseous filaments!"
Ge extended a carnelian-ringed extremity, ascending from his fenghuang-engraved rostrum. "Temperance. These fiscal exsanguinations require staunching prior to punitive measures." Quenching his cheroot in Bear's scalp lacunae, he orbited Xu Ling like a raptor assessing leporine prey. "Bucolic dullard consorting with Yu Mengna? What cretinous mettle emboldens interference in pomaceous dynasties?"
His cachinnation pierced nasally. "That frigid oligarch requires thoroughbreds, not chaff-stuffed manikins."
Xu Ling's smile assumed vulpine contours. "Apprehensive, I might illuminate your… constitutional inadequacies?"
The syndicate lord's narrowing frontal bone glistened—the libertine's physiognomy disfigured by periorbital oedema and icteric dermis. Xu Ling registered the pathognomonic triad: hepatic maculation, glabellar crevices, and engorged conjunctival vasculature. A monarch haemorrhaging both vigour and dominion.
"Defamations!" Ge's auric torques clanged as he convulsed erect. "I harbour five courtesans! Six!"
His jadeite sigil scintillated beneath Xu Ling's submaxilla. "Attend—one additional dispatch to Perpetual Harvest Groves, and your forebears will don funeral silks preceding Ancestors' Day."
Epiphany dawned. This atrophying crime sovereign indisputably commanded opposing arboricultural enterprises. Xu Ling's brow elevated in sardonic anticipation.
"Disgorge your terroir mysteries. Posthaste." Ge appropriated a subordinate's jian, its honed arcana grazing Xu Ling's jugular. "Or become humus for your saplings."
"Indubitably!" The lieutenant hawked phlegm. "Obeisance performed with decorum may preserve your agrarian servitude. Rustics coveting ascension?" His sneer distended. "A marinated bleak striving for aeronautic glory remains ichthyic sustenance."
Hilarity detonated as a crony bellowed, "Invert its orientation—'tis still brined sustenance!"
Xu Ling's metacarpals contracted microscopically, primordial energies converging within his palmar basins as mockery ricocheted through damask-swathed redoubts.
Patriarch's Disgrace and the Jade Viper's Intervention
"Hear this stripling—Daily Harvest's expansion chokes my Orchard Dynasty's arteries." Ge Dadao's distended visage quivered as he sprawled amidst crushed velvet. "Persist in Yu Mengna's service, and I'll prune your familial tree! That interfering rustic widow you cherish? I'll pluck her petals before..."
The obscenity transmuted into choked gargling as Xu Ling's instep met Ge's solar plexus, catapulting the syndicate lord into a champagne tower.
"Ge Dadao," Xu Ling crooned, elevating the spluttering magnate via bullion-stitched lapels, "does magnanimity clothe itself as frailty in your addled perception?"
Twin decades of palmar impacts resonated through the chamber—methodical, harmonic blows transmuting Ge's wattled dewlaps into sanguineous baozi. Blade Consortium acolytes formed a quivering steel perimeter, falchions catching laser light in prismatic shivers.
"Emancipate our sovereign!" they chorused, yet steel remained unstained. These "Blade" devotees knew only ceremonial melon dissection.
Ge's lachrymal glands wept involuntary tributes, his physiognomy now evoking a yeast-ravaged baguette. The tumult summoned voyeurs from neighbouring alcoves, smartphone flashes immortalising the tableau.
"Darling, behold!" A damsel in iridescent microshift trilled against her paramour's sternum. "That antique buffoon's phiz! A bee-stung blowfish hybrid!"
Merriment rippled through the assemblage. Even Ge's lieutenants gnawed buccal membranes, stifling mirth at their liege's transfiguration into anthropomorphic dango. Xu Ling relinquished his grasp with fastidious revulsion.
"Abhorrent."
Ge's rice-grain eyes smouldered beneath dumpling-fold lids. As derision swelled to cacophony, an obsidian-maned vision parted the crowd—thigh-high qipao slits revealing alabaster limbs, jadeite bangles clashing like temple wind chimes.
"Dadao!" The apparition knelt, lacquered talons hovering above Ge's fermentation-bloated cranium. "What vermin dared..." Her vermilion-tipped fingers petrified mid-gesture as ocular orbs met Xu Ling's gaze.
Cathartic recognition arced between them.
"Eldest Sister?"
"Agrarian Prodigy?"
Her peony-petal lips contorted. "You desecrated my Dadao?"
Xu Ling acknowledged with cervical inclination, indicating Ge's emerald-tinged tremulousness. "Regrettable exigency, given his... horticultural hyperbole."
Her antimony-lined oculars scanned the cringing enforcers. "This... sapling overpowered you all?"
"Absolution, Matriarch!" The bladesmen kowtowed. "We dishonoured our covenant!"
Male spectators exchanged anguished glances, mourning this lotus blossom grafted to a rotting quince. The woman ascended with glacial elegance, smoothing brocaded folds as telluric forces spiralled about her carnelian-adorned digits.
"A conundrum most piquant," she mused, hairpin's jadeite serpent coiling with venomic intent.
Elegy of Steel and Betrayal
"Noble warrior," the siren murmured, her jadeite adornments whispering as she entwined herself about Xu Ling's bicep, "I am Yaoyao. Our sanguine ballet concludes—shall we retreat to convalesce?"
Xu Ling disengaged from her orchid-scented entanglement, though the memory of her contours lingered like moonlit mist. "Regrets", he intoned, "Ge Dadao's insolence remains unpunished." His fist became a blacksmith's hammer, piston-striking Ge's distended abdomen with pneumatic precision.
"Menace my lineage anew," Xu Ling thundered, elevating the gasping mogul via perspiration-dampened lapels, "and I shall till your orchards with your splintered bones." A follow-up strike elicited porcine ululations, the audience recoiling in horrified fascination.
Blade Brotherhood neophytes orbited like hyenas, their falchions trembling in neon-lit uncertainty. "Emancipate our liege!" they incanted, edges tracing faltering mandalas in the haze.
"Cleft his cranium!" Ge screeched, visage resembling an overripe persimmon bursting with viscous fluids.
Argent death descended—a guillotine's kiss where Yaoyao's silhouette had shimmered instants prior. Xu Ling spiralled the courtesan to sanctuary, her qipao billowing like wounded egret plumage. "Take refuge," he decreed, already dissolving into the steel tempest.
The ensuing spectacle transcended brawling—Xu Ling's limbs became a calligrapher's brushes scripting defeat in crimson ink. A sweep here, a vault there, each motion punctuated by metallic dirges and basso profundo agony. Within three breaths, stillness reigned over a mosaic of groaning forms.
"Celestial phoenix dancing through mortal flames!" gasped a voyeur, clutching pearls.
Yaoyao materialised from shadowed wings, extracting an onyx card from her brocaded reticule. "Embrace my troth," she crooned, imprinting the gilded cypher into Xu Ling's palm, "and five hundred thousand celestial coins shall sculpt your ascension."
Ge Dadao's retch echoed through the sudden silence. "Serpent-tongued harlot! Last crescent moon, you swore undying fealty!"
Her mirth cascaded like shattered crystal. "To a withered stump incapable of nourishing saplings? Your strongbox numerals proved more arousing than your conjugal efforts." She blew phantasmal kisses toward the convulsing tyrant. "This paltry restitution scarcely compensates my plundered bloom."
The assembly erupted—gasps of scandal intercut with reluctant applause. Xu Ling contemplated the card as one might a scorpion's carapace, its mirrored surface reflecting fractured hierarchies: Ge's crumbled dynasty, the Brotherhood's dissolved mystique, the jasmine-scented asp now constricting his forearm.
"Your lucre", he pronounced, relinquishing the card to drift like autumn's last leaf upon sanguine tiles, "reeketh of blighted harvests."
As emergency luminescence etched geometric patterns across the carnage, Xu Ling trod upon broken oaths and shattered steel—a sage departing corrupted scrolls, his egress scored by Yaoyao's retreating pedal cadence and Ge Dadao's death-rattle curses.
Oathsworn in the Serpent's Lair
"Your proposition finds no harbor here." Xu Ling deposited the card upon Yaoyao's clavicular delta, retreating as from a blooming mandrake. This enchantress could've reigned as Wu Zhao incarnate.
His arctic gaze traversed Ge Dadao's cowering bulk. "Let my admonition take root," he thrummed, "lest I harvest bitter fruits." The syndicate lord's nod resembled marionette jerks, terror exuding through inflamed ocular slits. Xu Ling's brow quirked—such disproportionate trepidation from mere disciplinary pedagogy?
The requiem of battered mercenaries accompanied his egress. Yaoyao's kohl-rimmed eyes tracked his departure, carmine talons drumming cryptographic rhythms against purloined platinum.
"Jade-carved countenance veiling bestialian core," she murmured. "How exquisite to bridle such untamed wildfire."
Revelers resumed their bacchanal, mockery dripping like poisoned honey:
"Blade Consortium? More like Wilted Petiole Fraternity!"
"Were I their sovereign, I'd inter myself in rice wine vats!"
"Whispers claim he stuffs elevator oxfords with bok choy!"
Ge Dadao's final vestige of dignity ruptured. A carmine geyser baptized velvet drapes as consciousness granted merciful oblivion.
Emerging into carcinogenic neon glow, Xu Ling navigated human flotsam—inebriated nymphs supine upon asphalt, carrion-seeking males sniffing at compromised quarry. University recollections surfaced: nocturnal vigils observing this dance of desperation, predator and prey entwined in mutual degradation.
The lunar sentinel observed his accelerated stride. His rice-grain communicator glowed 23:57—Sister Shuxiang's imaginings would be simmering toward combustion.
From stygian depths erupted a human comet of disheveled silk—blouse ravaged, pupils dilated to event horizons. "Sanctuary..." she keened, pyretic digits scoring his pectoral armor. "Treasure... influence... claim your tribute..."
Xu Ling's clinical eye diagnosed the pharmacopeia coursing her veins before detecting jasmine-laced toxicity—flunitrazepam braided with methylenedioxymethamphetamine. His Hippocratic inheritance flared white-hot, overriding prudence.
Cradling this living furnace, he charted a course toward neon's false sanctuary. Pursuit's cacophony blossomed in their wake:
"Serpent-tongued harlot slipped her fetters!" A chrome-plated brute expectorated nicotine resin.
"The Golden Patron will flay us living!"
"Third Brother's concupiscence undid us—should've muzzled her viper tongue!"
The woman's incisors discovered Xu Ling's carotid in ersatz ardor, movements devolving into spasmodic hieroglyphs. His mandible hardened—beneath Asclepian vows, a warrior's instinct mapped approaching footfalls. Two city blocks to a temporary haven. Eighty-three seconds until collision.
Her tongue scripted obscene sonnets against his thyroid cartilage. Xu lengthened his stride, calculating pharmacokinetics against combat readiness. The night's second movement commenced—no synth beats now, only survival's arrhythmic percussion.
A Star in the Shadows
Beneath the sodium glow of streetlamps, the frenzied spectacle had already summoned a gathering of curious eyes.
Xu Ling struggled to disentangle himself, yet the woman adhered to his form like a succubus fused to its prey. When her teeth sank into his neck with feral desperation, he struck her cheek with an open palm.
"Cease this madness," he hissed through gritted teeth, "lest I abandon you to the gutter."
The impact momentarily fractured her delirium. Though her breath still escaped in humid, erratic bursts, the mindless assault on his person subsided.
"Where is your residence?" he demanded as flickers of cognisance returned to her glassy gaze.
"Molten... lava courses through me..."
Her whimper dissolved into another feverish assault, voluptuous contours grinding against him in torturous friction. The symphony of her choked whimpers sent pedestrians scurrying like startled mice. Resigned, Xu Ling cradled her against his chest and stalked toward the neon promise of a hotel's marquee.
Through palms thrumming with cultivated energy, he channelled arctic currents into her fever-ravaged meridians. The glacial touch gradually lifted the veils of intoxication from her consciousness.
Recognition of masculine fingers tracing her exposed spine sparked fury in her bloodshot eyes. Seizing her moment, she drove a stiletto heel toward his instep with murderous precision.
Xu Ling pivoted with practised grace, depositing her unceremoniously on rain-slicked concrete.
"Filthy degenerate!"
Barefoot now, she brandished her Louboutin like a gladiator's dagger, aiming for his ocular vulnerability.
"Must we deface the canvas?" He captured her wrist mid-arc, the crimson shoe clattering like a fallen gauntlet. "Is this courtly gratitude for salvation?"
"Unhand me, brute!"
Diamonds of humiliation glistened in her eyes as her free hand drummed futilely against his corded forearm. The amber light parted her tangled locks to reveal features that ignited dawning recognition.
"By the Nine Hells—Qiu Zhenzhen?"
He gaped at the constellation of fame before him—the teardrop-shaped eyes mirroring monsoon skies, the nose sculpted by Hephaestus' own hammer, lips that had launched a thousand cinematic fantasies. Yunshan County's prodigal daughter, the silver screen siren haunting every adolescent's midnight reveries.
Sobered by shame, Qiu Zhenzhen reconstituted her diva's armour. The click of restored stilettos punctuated her glacial decree: "This night never transpired."
From an Hermès clutch emerged vellum bearing a scrawled number and florid signature. "Contact this line at dawn," she intoned, "and a king's ransom shall seal your silence."
As she melted into shadow, Xu Ling studied the autograph. He mused whether this scrap might command six figures at Christie's avant-garde auction.
Before the thought could crystallise, manicured claws seized his wrist. The starlet tilted her face upward, streetlight etching vulnerability across features designed for billboards. The ice queen's mask had cracked, revealing tremulous humanity beneath.
Entangled Veils
"These... venomous flames still course through my veins," Qiu Zhenzhen murmured, her kohl-rimmed eyes reflecting fractured moonlight. "The nearest sanctuary, not some sterile clinic. Twenty thousand yuan seals your silence."
The glacial diva had transmuted into a trembling leveret, her regal poise dissolved in biochemical tempests. Xu Ling's principles disintegrated beneath the flutter of her distress—a moth capitulating to forbidden luminescence.
Their procession through concrete canyons became a dance of strained propriety, the actress preserving a decorous two-metre chasm until silk began rending beneath jewelled nails. "Phoenix fire devours my marrow..." Her dulcet torment wrapped around Xu Ling's resolve like strangler figs claiming a temple wall.
Resigned to celestial mockery, he gathered her against his thundering heartbeat. Her mouth found his collarbone, each searing exhalation eroding his ascetic convictions.
The ambush bloomed from inkblot shadows.
"Courting the reaper's embrace, boy?" A walking tapestry of gangland iconography spun a steel baton. His companion's scarred pate glimmered beneath streetlights as a cleaver knife whispered from its sheath. "Relinquish our merchandise in twenty breaths."
Xu Ling's gaze swept the newly barren avenue—citizens evaporated like morning mist before typhoons. "Must we suffer amateur theatrics?" His heel described a silver arc across the bald one's mandible.
The baton clattered as Xu Ling imprisoned Qiu Zhenzhen's wandering fingers, now tracing dangerous cartographies across his abdomen. "Your farcical interlude lacks polish."
Their retreating oaths hung like cheap theatre smoke: "The horde comes at dawn!"
But Xu Ling's true war now raged against scented artillery. Qiu Zhenzhen's lacquered talons scored his sternum, her aria of whimpers crescendoing into a banshee's ballad. Even his cultivated frost could not quell this alchemical conflagration.
At the hotel's neon-lit vestibule, the concierge's gaze dissected the squirming parcel in Xu Ling's custody. "Dual registrations required, sir."
"My... companion's documentation resides elsewhere." Crisp banknotes whispered across onyx countertops.
The clerk's smile bloomed into complicit warmth. "Regrettably, municipal statutes..."
"First light shall find us departed." Xu Ling's ocular gesture toward surveillance orbs cemented their silent compact.
"One hundred eighty yuan—cash facilitates discretion."
The ritual birthed unexpected sacraments—a foil-wrapped rectangle materialising beside jingling coins. "Modern romance demands... prudent observances."
Xu Ling contemplated the prophylactic enigma, cervical vertebrae aflame. Qiu Zhenzhen chose this moment to undulate against his iliac crest.
Elevator mirrors multiplied their chiaroscuro ballet—a celestial entity unravelling into maenad abandon, her digits charting territories beyond mortal sanction. "Desist this folly," Xu Ling ground through locked molars, "ere we breach civilisation's veil."
Room 307's threshold parted to the adjacent sighs. Qiu Zhenzhen's mouth claimed his in nectarous onslaught—a collision of lotus-petal delicacy and myrrh-infused urgency. He catapulted her onto goose-down altars like discarding live munitions.
"Flesh communion... imperative..." she keened, re-establishing contact with cephalopod persistence.
"By the Celestial Forge!" Xu Ling petrified as pearl teeth grazed his tragus. Epiphany struck like lightning across monsoon skies—"Cryogenic immersion!"
The bath chamber became their alabaster sanctum. Vapours coiled like jade serpents as he submerged her in liquid moonlight, the ruined qipao clinging to topography that mocked Bodhisattva vows. Xu Ling fixed his gaze upon steam-clouded tiles, mentally reciting sutras of medicinal purity. Beyond the fog-shrouded looking glass, karma's loom continued weaving its inexorable tapestry.
To be continuous…