The aftermath of Fengue's orgasm was not a soft, gentle peace. It was a crash. The tidal wave of sensation receded, leaving behind the jagged, desolate landscape of her grief, now littered with the fresh, sharp debris of guilt. The emptiness that had been filled for a fleeting, explosive moment came rushing back, a vacuum that threatened to implode her very soul.
She scrambled away from me, crab-walking backwards on the cold stone floor until her back hit the leg of the bench. She pulled her skirts down, trying to cover herself, to hide from what she had just done, from the undeniable, treacherous pleasure her body had experienced. The flush of ecstasy on her face was replaced by a deathly pallor of self-loathing.
"No," she whispered, the word a ragged, broken thing. "No, no, no… what have I done?" Tears, thick with shame and horror, began to stream down her face again. "I… I betrayed him. I let his killer… I enjoyed it." She wrapped her arms around herself, rocking back and forth, a lost child in a storm of her own making. "I'm a monster. I'm a filthy, disgusting monster."
My own arousal, a moment ago a raging fire, cooled to embers. The villain, the detached therapist, the sexual predator, all receded. The situation required a different tool from my psychological arsenal. It required the one thing no one in this world would ever expect from me: genuine warmth.
I slowly got to my feet and retrieved my discarded robes, wrapping one around my waist. I approached her not as a conqueror, but as a caregiver. I knelt before her once more, but this time, it was not an act of submission. It was a gesture of gentle humility.
"Fengue, look at me," I said, my voice soft, stripped of all its usual sarcasm and command.
She shook her head, burying her face in her knees. "Go away. Leave me alone."
"I can't do that," I said. "And you know why? Because my promise was not just to be your slave for a week. It was to help you heal. And this… this is part of it. The ugliest part."
I reached out and gently took her hand. It was ice-cold. "You did not betray Yang Kai. The dead cannot be betrayed, Fengue. They can only be remembered. What you did was betray the idea of who you are supposed to be. The eternally grieving lover. The tragic heroine. It's a role society loves to assign to women like you. It's a beautiful, poetic cage. And your body, your fundamental, biological need for life, for pleasure, for sensation… it just smashed a crack in the bars of that cage. You are not feeling guilty because you betrayed him. You are feeling guilty because, for a moment, you felt alive. And you think you don't have the right to."
I tugged her hand gently. "Come. You'll catch a chill on this floor."
I led her, unresisting, into the guest room's small antechamber, which had a basin of water and fresh towels. I wet a cloth with warm water and began to gently, tenderly, clean her face. I washed away the tears, the dirt, the lingering traces of our encounter. My touch was respectful, my movements slow and deliberate. I was not a lover; I was a nurse, tending to a deep, invisible wound.
When I was done, I wrapped a thick, warm blanket around her trembling shoulders and led her to a soft chair. I sat on a stool before her, taking both her hands in mine.
"Your anger will not vanish in a day," I said, looking her directly in the eye. "And your grief will not be erased by a single orgasm. It's a long, messy process. Yesterday, you vented the rage. Tonight, you experienced the guilt. These are steps on a path. Tomorrow, you might feel angry again. You might feel empty. You might even feel a flicker of something else. Whatever you feel is valid. My only promise is that I will be here to help you navigate it. I will be your anchor in this storm."
She looked at me, her eyes red and swollen, filled with a profound, weary confusion. I was the source of her pain, and yet, in this moment, I was also her only source of comfort. The cognitive dissonance was a powerful, disorienting force.
I held her hands for a long time, in complete silence, simply letting my own warmth seep into her, a steady, grounding presence. Slowly, the trembling subsided. Her breathing evened out. She did not pull her hands away.
The first day of her experiment was over. She had tried to use sex as a weapon of revenge and had discovered it was a double-edged sword. Now, she would have to find a new weapon.
The next morning, I found her in the courtyard, and she was transformed. The broken, weeping girl was gone. In her place was a woman of ice. Her hair was perfectly combed, her face was scrubbed clean, and she was dressed in a simple but severe black robe. Her eyes, when she looked at me, held no trace of tears or hysteria. They were cold, hard, and calculating. The anger had not gone away; it had simply crystallized.
"Experiment, day two," she announced, her voice flat and emotionless. "Today, your humiliation will not be physical. It will be spiritual."
She gestured to a low table on which she had placed an inkstone, a brush, and a stack of fine paper. Beside it was a set of plain, coarse servant's clothes. "You will change into those. Then, you will kneel at that table, and you will write. You will write your confession."
"A confession?" I raised an eyebrow, intrigued by this new psychological gambit.
"You will write, from your perspective, a detailed account of your actions, starting from the moment you first laid eyes on my mother, to the moment you slit Yang Kai's throat," she commanded. "I want every detail. Every lustful thought you had about my mother. Every calculated step you took to manipulate her. Every moment of your pathetic, cowardly attack on a man who was already defeated. You will not spare yourself. You will describe yourself as the villain you are. You will use words like 'despicable', 'parasitic', 'murderous'. You will write until I am satisfied that you have captured the true depth of your own depravity."
'Ooh, a forced autobiography from the villain's perspective,' the Author mused. 'It's like a deposition, but with more emotional flagellation. She's moved from physical torment to psychological warfare. This girl's a natural.'
"And when I am done?" I asked.
"When you are done," she said, a cruel, tight smile touching her lips, "you will read it aloud. To me. And then, you will read it aloud to my mother."
Ah. There it was. The true stinger. This wasn't just for her. This was an attempt to destroy the very foundation of my new life, to expose me to my allies, to turn them against me. It was a clever, vicious move.
"As you command," I said with a slight bow.
I changed into the rough, scratchy servant's clothes. They were demeaning, a deliberate stripping of my status. I knelt at the low table, the position forcing my back to bow in submission. I picked up the brush. It was a novel sensation, a far cry from the keyboards of my past life.
And I began to write.
I poured every ounce of my villainous persona onto the page. I did not hold back. I wrote of Barry Drake, the pathetic gym pervert, and his transmigration into the body of Lu Bing. I detailed my cold, calculated decision to use Mengue's desperation to my advantage. I described, in graphic, self-deprecating detail, my lust for powerful older women, framing it not as a philosophy, but as a sordid, pathetic fetish. I painted a picture of a man driven not by grand ambition, but by a twisted, desperate need to be dominated by the very women he sought to control. And then I wrote of Yang Kai. I wrote of my terror, of my cowardice, of the way I had hidden behind the clan's barrier and waited for him to be crippled by others before I, like a jackal, crept in to finish the job. I used a fruit knife. I described the look in his eyes. I spared no ugly detail.
I wrote for hours. Fengue sat on a bench opposite me, watching, her face an unreadable mask. She did not eat, she did not drink. She just watched.
It was late afternoon when a shadow fell over the courtyard entrance. It was Mengue. She carried a tray of food and tea. She stopped dead, her eyes widening as she took in the scene: me, kneeling in servant's clothes, hunched over a table, and her daughter, watching me with the cold, detached air of a prison warden.
"Fengue? Master?" she asked, her voice trembling. "What is this?"
"This is justice, Mother," Fengue replied, her voice like ice. "This is day two of his atonement. He is writing a confession of his sins."
Mengue looked from her daughter's hard face to my bowed head. Her own face, a canvas of conflicting emotions, was a painful sight. Maternal love warred with her devotion to me. Confusion warred with a dawning, horrified understanding.
"Atonement?" Mengue whispered, setting the tray down. "What are you doing to him?"
"What he deserves," Fengue retorted. She stood up and walked over to me, snatching the last page from under my brush. She began to read from the beginning, her voice clear and cold, ringing through the quiet courtyard.
She read my description of lusting after Mengue, of my cold calculations. She read of my perverse joy in being dominated, of my secret fetishes. Mengue's face grew paler with every word. This was not the powerful, confident master who had freed her. This was a twisted, pathetic creature.
"Stop," Mengue finally said, her voice shaking. "Fengue, stop it."
"Why?" Fengue challenged, her eyes blazing with righteous fury. "Are you afraid to hear the truth? To hear what the man you so willingly spread your legs for really thinks? He doesn't love you, Mother! He uses you! He's a parasite who feeds on women like us!"
"That's enough!" Mengue's voice was suddenly powerful, filled with a strength I hadn't heard before. She strode forward and snatched the pages from her daughter's hands. "You know nothing! You see a confession, you see weakness. I see a man who is willing to kneel, to endure anything, to help you heal a wound he did not even create! You think this humiliates him? You foolish girl! This is a display of his strength! A strength you are too blinded by your grief to see!"
The two women faced each other, mother and daughter, a chasm of pain and misunderstanding between them.
"He killed the man I love!" Fengue screamed, tears finally breaking through her icy composure.
"And he is the reason we are still alive!" Mengue screamed back. "He is the reason we are not starving in some back alley! He is the reason you are not the plaything of a spoiled brat like Zhao Wei! I have made my choice, Fengue. I have chosen to stand with him. I will not let you destroy him, or yourself, with this… this hateful poison!"
The raw, powerful confrontation hung in the air, thick and suffocating. It was in that moment that another figure appeared at the courtyard entrance. Zhao Lihua stood there, her presence instantly commanding the space. She had clearly been drawn by the shouting. She took in the scene with a single, sweeping glance: me kneeling in rags, the two women locked in a bitter standoff, the scattered pages of my "confession" on the ground.
Her sharp eyes landed on the pages. She glided forward, her movements silent and graceful, and picked one up. Her eyes scanned the text, her expression unreadable. She picked up another, and then another. She read my description of my "fetish," my desire to be dominated, my self-professed weakness for powerful women.
A long, tense silence descended. Mengue and Fengue both looked at the matriarch, their own conflict forgotten in the face of this greater power.
Finally, Zhao Lihua looked up from the pages. She did not look at Mengue or Fengue. She looked directly at me, still kneeling on the floor. A slow, dangerous, and utterly thrilling smile spread across her face. It was not a smile of contempt or disgust. It was a smile of pure, predatory understanding.
"A man who understands his own desires, and is not ashamed of them," she said, her voice a low, husky purr. "A man who sees a queen and instinctively knows his place is at her feet. And here I thought your intellect was your most intriguing quality."
She let the pages flutter from her fingers. "It seems my new partner is a far more complex and… accommodating… man than I had imagined." She turned her gaze to Fengue, and the warmth vanished, replaced by an icy command. "Your time for games is over, little girl. This man is now a strategic asset of the Zhao family. He is not your personal whipping boy. Your 'atonement' is finished."
She then looked at Mengue, and her expression softened, a flicker of something akin to female solidarity in her eyes. "You have a good heart. And you are loyal. A rare quality. Come. We will have tea. We have much to discuss about our mutual… investment."
She turned and glided out of the courtyard, leaving a stunned silence in her wake. She hadn't just interrupted; she had completely taken over, re-established the hierarchy, and, in a strange, terrifying way, given my perverse confession her stamp of approval. She didn't see it as a weakness; she saw it as a feature she could exploit.
Mengue, looking torn but resolute, gave me a final, worried glance before following the matriarch. Fengue was left standing alone, her weapon of shame having been turned into a tool of seduction, her righteous crusade dismissed as a childish game. Her humiliation was now complete, and her power over me had evaporated.
I remained kneeling, a faint smile on my own lips. The chaos, the emotional turmoil, the shifting allegiances… it was all going perfectly. The queens were beginning to circle each other, and I was the prize, the asset, the willing servant at the center of it all. The game was becoming more complex, more dangerous, and infinitely more fun.