One Pill a Night to Keep the War God Alive novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Pill Three
The Hall Chief took her thunder-ginseng, the old keeper gave her his own, and the night became the first time he was held.
The Lower Kennels smelled of straw and old fur, and Elder Mu Heng met her at the gate with a bowl of porridge.
"Eat," he said. "Little tong, you look like a boiled leek."
Mu was short and round, and half deaf in his left ear.
He had kept the sect's sick and old beasts alive for a hundred and fifty years.
"I need one thunder-ginseng root by midnight," she said with her mouth full. "The Hall Chief's apprentices took mine for an audit."
Mu's eyebrows went up.
"Kuang has never audited a root in his life."
"I know."
"Come."
He took her behind the kennels to a small garden of red-leafed plants, hidden under a bamboo screen.
"I grow it for the ones with lightning in their bones," he said. "The Hall says it's too rare to waste on beasts."
He dug up a root as long as her hand and pressed it into her palm.
"Take two. Take three."
"One is enough."
"Take two," said Mu, and put the second one in her apron pocket himself.
She stayed a while, because the kennels were full of things that needed her.
A grey wolf cub with a limp pushed its head under her hand.
A crane with a bent wing stood on one leg in the straw and watched her.
In the last pen lay the old black ox, who had not eaten for a month, with his big head down.
Zhiyi scraped the dregs out of her pill furnace into her hand.
It was grey ash with a little silver in it, and she stirred it into the ox's mash.
"That's the pill," said Mu.
"The leftovers. They're no use to Lei Juehan. A pinch won't hurt a beast."
The ox lifted his head.
He sniffed the mash.
Then he ate every scrap.
Mu stood very still with his hand on the fence.
"I've never seen them this calm," he said at last, slowly. "All morning, since you came in."
"They like porridge."
"They like you," said Mu, and went to find a broom, which he did not need.
That night the war god was already sitting up when she came in.
He had not put his robe on.
He had put on nothing but the blanket across his lap.
His scarred chest rose and fell in the lamplight.
"I sent the guards away," he said. "I thought you'd rather not be watched."
"You thought I'd come."
"I hoped," said Lei Juehan, stiffly.
She laughed, and lit the furnace.
The third pill came out of the fire at the hour of Zi, silver and hot.
Her crumb tingled all the way up to her elbow this time.
The spark that jumped from her finger to the furnace leg was bigger.
She did not stop to think about it.
She crossed the floor, and he took the pill from her hand, and this time he caught her fingers with it.
"Thank you," he said.
Nobody had said that to her in the Thunder Hall.
He swallowed.
The third finger-width of black went pale on his ribs, and the fever hit.
She was already there.
She slid her hands over his chest, cool and slow, and he caught her wrists and drew her into his lap.
"I want to try this properly," he said, low. "I want you to tell me everything."
"Everything is a lot."
"I have until the twenty-first night."
She pulled the green ribbon out of her hair and let it fall.
She undid her robe slowly, because he was watching, and because it made him breathe harder.
He did not touch until she told him to.
"Now," she said.
His hands came to her bare waist, hot and careful, and he lowered his mouth to her shoulder.
He kissed his way slowly up her throat.
She tipped her head back and pushed him down onto the stone bed, climbing over him, and for a moment she simply looked.
The black fern flushed gold in the lamplight, and his eyes were dark and wide.
"Tell me what you want," she said.
"You," said the war god. "On top of me. Any way you like."
She reached between them, gripped his thick, hard cock, and guided the burning head to her wet pussy.
When she sank down onto him, he let out a rough groan.
His cock was hot and thick, stretching her wet walls so full that she shut her eyes and gasped.
His fingers dug into her hips as she took him to the hilt, then eased and waited.
"Zhiyi."
"Mm."
"I will not move unless you tell me."
"Then be quiet," she said, "and let me ride you."
She moved on his hard cock, rolling her hips and grinding her clit against his pelvis until his breath tore in his chest.
Sweat ran down his temples as her wet pussy clenched around him on every stroke.
Every time she circled her hips on his shaft, his fever rose a little hotter.
Every time she laid her cool hand on his heart, it steadied.
She learned that she could do it on purpose.
She rode him right up to the edge and slowed her hips until he groaned and arched beneath her.
"Please," he rasped finally, his voice cracked open. "Please. Let me fuck you."
"Say what you want."
"Let me turn you over and take you."
She leaned down and put her mouth against his ear.
"Yes," she whispered.
He rolled her beneath him onto the stone bed in a single motion, never slipping out of her.
He drove his cock deep inside her, slowly at first and then harder, his heavy body pinning hers to the mattress.
She wrapped her legs high around his waist and met every thrust as his thumb slid between them to rub her swollen clit.
The stone bed creaked and the lamp guttered as he fucked her deep and fast.
She cried out against his shoulder when she came, her pussy clamping hard around his shaft.
He followed a heartbeat later with his face buried in her neck, groaning her name over and over as he pulsed and filled her with hot cum.
The fever drained out of him as he came, and the room cooled.
Afterward he held her.
It was careful at first, as though she might leave, and then not careful at all.
"I have been alone in this hall for sixty years," he said into her hair. "I didn't know it was a long time until tonight."
She had nothing clever to say to that.
She kissed his collarbone, where the scar had been and now wasn't.
"Stay till morning," he said.
"I'm already here."
His hand went still in her hair.
"On the twenty-first night I go up Lightning Peak," he said. "Alone. You will not follow me, Zhiyi. I need you to promise."
She looked at the tiger sleeping across the end of the bed.
"Ask me again on the twentieth," she said.
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