I woke up to fingers tracing along my jaw and the smell of something warm and floral that I would have recognized in my sleep.
"You look terrible."
I opened my eyes and Mei Lian was right there, sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning over me with that look she always had when she was about to make my life simultaneously better and more difficult. Her face was inches from mine. Heavy-lidded eyes that looked like they were always halfway to a thought she wasn't sharing. Full, soft lips curved into a smile that managed to be both sweet and dangerous at the same time. Her long dark hair fell over one shoulder in loose waves, brushing against my chest where my robe had come open during the night.
"When did you get here?" I asked, still half asleep.
"A while ago. You were sleeping like the dead. I let myself in."
She sat back and I got the full picture of her the way I always did, all at once, like my brain couldn't process Mei Lian in pieces. She had to be taken in whole. She was wearing a light training robe, the kind that was meant to be modest and functional, and on anyone else it would have been exactly that. On Mei Lian it was a lost cause. The fabric pulled across her chest where her breasts strained against it, big and round and heavy, the kind that made the robe gap slightly between the ties no matter how carefully she fastened them. The sash at her waist only made things worse, cinching the fabric tight enough to show the curve of her hips widening out beneath it, the thickness of her thighs pressing together under the hem. She was soft everywhere. Lush. A body that had no sharp edges, only curves that rolled into other curves, each one demanding attention. Her waist nipped in just enough to make the flare of her hips look almost obscene. When she shifted on the bed, everything moved. Everything.
I'd been with Mei Lian long enough that the sight of her shouldn't have hit me like it did every single morning. But it did. Every time.
"So," she said, tilting her head. "Are you going to tell me why you look like you didn't sleep, or do I have to guess?"
* * *
I told her about the lecture. Kept it brief. My father's disappointment, my mother's gentle pressure, the comparison to Jun and Wei, the instruction to go deeper in the library. Mei Lian listened without interrupting, which she only did when she knew the situation was serious.
"He told me to read everything," I said. "Even the techniques nobody wants."
"Your father's a smart man," she said. "Stubborn, but smart."
"He's not wrong. I've been going through the same family techniques over and over hoping something changes. Nothing's going to change."
Mei Lian reached out and took my hand. Her fingers laced through mine and she squeezed once. Not the pitying kind of squeeze that said she felt sorry for me. The solid kind that said she was here and she wasn't going anywhere.
"Then go find your technique," she said. And then, because she was Mei Lian, she grinned and added: "And if it turns out to be something embarrassing, I promise I'll only make fun of you a little."
I almost laughed. Almost.
She kissed me before she left. Quick, warm, her lips soft against mine for just a second. Then she pulled back, patted my cheek like I was a child being sent off to school, and walked out. I watched her go, because watching Mei Lian leave was its own experience. The sway of her hips, the way her robe couldn't keep up with the movement of her body underneath it, the curve of her ass shifting with each step. I watched until the door closed behind her.
Then I got dressed and headed for the library.
* * *
The Crimson Lotus Sect's library was one of the largest in the cultivation world. A building that stretched three stories high and deep into the hillside behind it, filled with tens of thousands of scrolls, manuals, jade slips, and bound texts covering every school of cultivation the sect had accumulated over centuries. The front sections were well-lit and busy. Disciples moved between shelves, pulling popular techniques, comparing notes, arguing over the merits of one fire art versus another. The scrolls here were well-worn from handling, their silk ties frayed, their cases polished smooth by a thousand hands.
I walked past all of it.
The back of the library was a different world. The light dimmed as the shelves stretched deeper into the building, the lamps spaced further apart, the air thickening with dust and the papery smell of scrolls that hadn't been touched in years. Maybe decades. The shelves here were crammed with techniques that had fallen out of fashion, methods that had been superseded by better versions, cultivation arts that were too niche, too strange, or too stigmatized to attract interest. Nobody came back here unless they were desperate.
I was desperate.
* * *
I started at the far left and worked my way across. Methodical. Patient. The way my father would have done it.
The first scroll was a fire-aspected body refinement technique that required the cultivator to bathe in volcanic ash for six hours a day. The Qi response when I opened it was flat. Nothing.
The second was a dual cultivation breathing method that synchronized two partners' heartbeats. Interesting in theory. My meridians didn't even flicker.
The third. The fourth. The fifth. Scroll after scroll, technique after technique. I opened each one, held it, waited for the feeling my father had described. The lightning. The instant recognition. The Qi moving on its own. None of them gave me anything. A few produced the faintest hum, barely perceptible, the cultivation equivalent of a polite handshake. Not the thunderbolt I was looking for.
Hours passed. The light shifted in the library windows. My back ached from sitting cross-legged on the stone floor. I'd worked through two full shelves and started on a third. The frustration was building in my chest, familiar and heavy, the same frustration I'd been carrying for months. The gap between effort and result. The space where something should be happening and nothing was.
I kept going. Because what else was I going to do?
* * *
I was aware of it the whole time.
Not consciously, not directly. More like the way you're aware of a sound you're trying to ignore. A scroll sitting on a shelf I hadn't reached yet, pushed to the very back, its case darker than the others. Not from age. From avoidance. Like even the other scrolls didn't want to be near it.
The Creampie Devouring Art.
Every disciple in the Crimson Lotus Sect knew about it. Not the details, not the mechanics. Just the name and the reputation. It was the punchline of a joke that had been told so many times it didn't even need a setup anymore. Someone would mention the back shelves of the library and someone else would snicker and say "careful, you might accidentally pick up the Creampie Devouring Art." Laughter. Disgust. Moving on. Nobody had ever checked it out. Nobody had ever wanted to. It was the technique that existed to make every other technique in the library look dignified by comparison.
I'd been skipping past it all day. Every time my systematic sweep brought me close to that section of the shelf, I'd find a reason to jump ahead. I told myself I was saving it for later. That I'd get to it. That there was no point reading it when I still had other scrolls to check.
But the truth was simpler than that. I was avoiding it. And I knew I was avoiding it. And every hour that passed with every other scroll failing to respond made the avoidance feel less like a choice and more like cowardice.
* * *
By late afternoon, I'd gone through nearly everything.
The shelves around me were picked clean. Scrolls I'd read and replaced, one after another, a graveyard of techniques that hadn't chosen me. My meridians felt the same as they had that morning. Sluggish. Dormant. Waiting for something that none of these scrolls had provided.
The Creampie Devouring Art sat in its place on the shelf. Patient. Unbothered by centuries of being ignored.
My father's voice in my head: Read everything. Even the ones nobody wants. Especially those. Don't let pride narrow your search.
I looked at the scroll. The dark case. The undisturbed dust.
I thought about three months of stagnation. I thought about my brothers climbing while I stood still. I thought about the look my parents had shared when they thought I wasn't watching. I thought about Mei Lian, who deserved better than a man whose cultivation had a ceiling at Qi Condensation.
I reached for the scroll.
The moment my fingers touched the case, the world changed.
* * *
It hit me like a wall of fire through every meridian in my body simultaneously.
Not pain. Not heat. Something beyond both. My Qi, the same Qi that had been sluggish and reluctant for months, that had barely responded to technique after technique, erupted. It surged through pathways I didn't even know I had, flooding channels that had been dry and dormant since I first started cultivating. My hands shook. My breath caught. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I could hear it in my ears.
This was it. This was what my father had described. Instant. Undeniable. My blood recognized this scroll before my brain did. My bones were singing. My Qi was moving on its own for the first time in my life, cycling through my meridians with a fluidity and hunger that I had never felt from any technique, not even close.
I hadn't even opened it yet.
I was just holding it. Just touching the case. And my entire body was screaming yes.
My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped the scroll twice before I managed to unroll it. The silk was old but perfectly preserved, the characters written in a hand that was elegant and precise. At the top, in bold strokes:
The Creampie Devouring Art
I read.
* * *
The technique required the cultivator to consume fresh sexual essence directly from a woman's body after another man had finished inside her. The yang energy left by the man, combined with the yin energy of the woman, created a unique alchemical reaction when absorbed through the cultivator's oral pathways. The essence had to be fresh. It had to be consumed directly from the source. The woman's body served as the vessel that blended the two energies into something the technique could convert.
The conversion produced a fire-aspected Qi of extraordinary rarity. Blue molten lava. Not ordinary flame cultivation. Something denser, hotter, more destructive. The scroll described it in clinical terms: a molten Qi that carried the viscosity of lava and burned at temperatures that exceeded standard fire arts by several magnitudes. Defensive applications included lava barriers and molten armor. Offensive applications included eruptions, rivers of blue fire that clung to targets and could not be extinguished by conventional means.
The technique scaled with volume, variety, and the cultivation strength of the man who provided the essence. More women, more partners, more frequent consumption meant faster cultivation. Stronger men meant more potent essence. The scroll noted, in the same clinical tone, that diminishing returns from repeated use of the same male partner incentivized the practitioner to seek variety.
I read all of it. Every line. Every detail. And the entire time, my Qi kept surging. My meridians kept singing. My body kept confirming what my mind was still trying to reject.
This was my technique. The one that had been waiting in this library for centuries, gathering dust, ignored and mocked by every disciple who had ever browsed these shelves. It had been waiting for me.
And somewhere beneath the shock, beneath the horror, beneath the desperate calculations about what this meant for my life and my family and everything I thought I knew about myself, something else stirred. Something I couldn't name and didn't want to look at directly. A warmth in my gut that had nothing to do with Qi and everything to do with what I'd just read. A flicker of something that wasn't revulsion.
I crushed it before it could fully form. Buried it. Refused to acknowledge it.
I rolled the scroll back up. My hands had stopped shaking but only barely. I sat there on the floor of the empty library, in the dust and the silence, holding a scroll that nobody had ever wanted, and I thought about my father's words.
The technique chooses you.
It chose me. And I wasn't ready to think about why.
* * *
I stood up. My legs felt unsteady but they held. I tucked the scroll under my arm and walked toward the front of the library, leaving the back shelves behind. The transition from dusty silence to the well-lit bustle of the main sections felt like crossing between worlds. Disciples browsed shelves, compared notes, lived their normal lives. None of them were carrying what I was carrying.
The checkout desk was near the entrance. A girl sat behind it, small and slight, almost swallowed by the desk itself. She had a round face, soft features, big eyes that darted up when I approached and then dropped back to the ledger in front of her. Cute. That was the word that passed through my mind briefly before being swallowed by everything else I was dealing with. She was cute in a quiet way, the kind of girl you'd walk past without noticing unless you happened to look directly at her and caught the sweetness in her face.
I set the scroll on the desk.
She picked up the ledger, opened the scroll case to check the title the way she'd probably done a thousand times for a thousand other disciples checking out a thousand other techniques.
She read the title.
Her face went red. Not gradually. Instantly. Like someone had poured hot water under her skin from the hairline down. Her eyes went wide and snapped up to me, then back to the scroll, then back to me. Her lips parted but nothing came out for a second.
"So," she said, and her voice cracked slightly on the word. "You're into this kind of thing?"
The words fell out of her mouth like she hadn't meant to say them. The moment they landed, her face went from red to crimson. She looked like she wanted the desk to swallow her whole.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"It's for cultivation research," I said, which was technically true and practically meaningless and we both knew it.
She nodded too fast, too many times, and pulled the ledger toward her with hands that weren't quite steady. She recorded the checkout with quick, shaky strokes, her eyes fixed on the paper like looking at me again might kill her. She pushed the scroll back across the desk.
"It's, um. Due back in thirty days," she said. To the desk. Not to me.
"Thank you," I said, because what else do you say to someone who just watched you check out the most humiliating scroll in the entire library?
I picked up the scroll and left. I could feel her eyes on my back the entire way to the door. I didn't turn around. I wasn't sure what I'd see on her face if I did, and I wasn't sure I could handle any more reactions today.
* * *
The walk back to my quarters was the longest walk of my life.
The sect moved around me the way it always did. Disciples training. Elders crossing the grounds with their entourages. The distant sound of someone sparring in one of the open courtyards. The low, constant hum of Qi that permeated every stone and every blade of grass in the Crimson Lotus Sect. Normal life. Normal people.
I held the scroll against my side like it was something that might bite me if I loosened my grip. Nobody looked twice at me. Nobody knew what I was carrying. To the rest of the sect, I was just Luo Chen, the average youngest son of the Luo family, walking home from the library with a scroll. Nothing unusual. Nothing worth noticing.
If they knew what scroll it was, that would change.
I reached my quarters. Closed the door. Set the scroll on my desk and stared at it.
My meridians were still humming. Hours later and they were still responding to the Creampie Devouring Art like a tuning fork that couldn't stop vibrating. The Qi wanted this. My body wanted this. Everything about my cultivation was telling me that this scroll, this technique, this path was the one I'd been searching for.
The cost of walking that path was something I hadn't even begun to process.
I sat on the edge of my bed, the same place I'd sat last night after my father's lecture, and I stared at the scroll on the desk. The same desk where I'd studied family techniques that never responded to me. The same room where I'd lain awake wondering if I'd ever find my path.
I'd found it. And now I had to tell Mei Lian.
That thought sat in my stomach like a stone.
Tomorrow.