Fanfiction: Mo Yuan and Shao Wan - Chapter 14 (Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms 三生三世十里桃花)
Chapter 14
written by kakashiEdited by JoAnne
Completely disoriented, Shao Wan regained her senses with horrible pain piercing her head like a red-hot iron. She wanted to throw up some more, but she only managed to retch with an empty stomach. Ice cold hands were cruelly pinching sensitive spots on her body. When her eyes flew open, she saw it was Cheng Yin, naked and fully aroused, face flushed purple with lust. He had hung her chained hands from a hook in the dungeon ceiling. How interesting … this was a first for her. From how much her body hurt and the rest of her tattered clothes looked, it seemed he had literally dragged her here.
When he saw that she was awake, he pinched her harder, moving one of his hands between her legs. That she did not respond in any way to his stimulation enraged him. He grabbed her hair and yanked her head back.
“I bet you hate feeling all helpless,” he snarled, his spittle hitting her face.
She had to think about this for a moment. It certainly wasn’t pleasant to be hurting so much, but that was mainly because of the poison in her system and had nothing to do with being chained up. In fact, being chained up might appeal to her, she thought, in certain circumstances and with the right man. Cheng Yin was not the right man. Luckily, she had learned in school about how to best deal with pain and as soon as she had pushed the awareness of it away so that it no longer disadvantaged her, she was ready to take on Cheng Yin.
“I am not helpless at all,” she said, and smiled her most toothy, feral smile.
Her lack of fear unsettled him, but only briefly. She waited for his big reveal - she knew him well enough to guess he had a reason for taking her to the dungeons (other than dungeons being good places for hurting people) - and she was right.
“Guess what I keep down here,” he continued, barely hiding his excitement.
“Your harem of cockroaches?” she answered, “Or your failed attempts at being a real man?"
Cursing violently, he backhanded her. It made her head ring like a bell and she almost blacked out again, but for now she just added it to her list of things for which she would pay him back.
“Open your eyes,” he whispered.
She did. He waved one of his hands and revealed her Demon Tongue Whip on the wall, incarcerated behind a powerful seal. Her weapon cried out to her in silent agony and Shao Wan could barely hold back a sob. Her Whip! Cheng Yin had taken her Whip!
“If you want it back, you'd better do what I tell you,” he chuckled, eagerly scanning her face for reactions. She graced him with none. "To start, I want you to beg me to enter every hole in your body until you scream in agony.”
“No. To start, I will smash your face and make you cry like a baby,” she said amiably, “and we’ll see about the rest.”
She smashed her knee into his groin first though - priorities. When he staggered, screaming in pain, she jumped up and kicked him in the face with both her feet, using the chains for more momentum. His nose broke with the most satisfying “crunch” and blood started to pour down his face as he fell backward. Before he could move again, she jumped once more and unhooked her hands.
At lightning speed, she tried to get to her Whip, but she couldn’t even get near before the seal hurled her back across the room. Cursing, she realized she would have to deal with this some other day - this was powerful magic. Swinging the chain between her hands, she kept Cheng Yin at bay, feeling a rush of satisfaction when she saw fear appear on his bloody face. He knew he had underestimated her. Indeed, he was not smart or cunning enough to play this kind of game with her, and anyone with more intelligence wouldn’t even have tried. Unfortunately however, the pain in her head was coming back as she lost her grip on shutting it out. She was not sure how much longer she could remain standing.
With a high-pitched scream, her mount Fong Hung appeared in the middle of the room. He spat venom into Cheng Yin’s eyes and grabbed Shao Wan by the hand, zapping both of them out of the palace and around the mountains to lay false tracks. He finally stopped in a cave, darker and smaller and more miserable than the one she had woken up in. After raging at him for saving her before she could hack Cheng Yin to pieces, Shao Wan collapsed to the floor. Before she passed out and slept for ten days and nights, she felt oddly proud that she’d put the skills she’d learned at Shuǐ Zhǎozé to such good use tonight.
***
The longer it stayed quiet in the Demon Realm, the more worried Mo Yuan got. As always, only his closest friends and maybe Die Feng knew him well enough to recognize the signs of his anxiety. Outwardly, he remained calm and collected.
However, the signs were strong enough to have Dijun and Zhe Yan come to Kunlun, to “drink some tea with him” as they declared.
“Stop fretting, Mo Yuan. No news is good news. I am sure she is frolicking around with pretty demon boys, enjoying her second life.”
“Shush, Dijun, can’t you see that he is missing her?”
That wasn’t exactly true, but not entirely wrong either. He had started dreaming of her, and those dreams were violent. They started off in different situations but always morphed into that last moment before she caught fire. She would look at him with pleading, terrified eyes that slowly filled with blood, and his desperate rush forward to save her would always end with him dying in the scorching, all-engulfing phoenix fire. He always woke from these dream-memories sweating and in pain from the mostly invisible scars he wore from the Demon War, and always had difficulties falling back asleep.
“She might be in danger,” Mo Yuan said quietly.
Dijun and Zhe Yan both turned their heads to look at him.
“You will scandalize the realms again,” Zhe Yan said. “First it was you running off with your favorite disciple to enjoy life in seclusion, and now it’s the most venerated Taoist Master pining after a Demon Goddess?”
“Very well, I will send Si Ming to find her.” Dijun said, arranging his purple robe in neat folds around him. “By the way, I hear from another contact that there is one Demon King to keep an extra eye on. His name is Cheng Yin.”
Mo Yuan remembered the name and, after a bit of reflection, the face. A young man’s handsome face, appearing on the battlefield in his father’s shadow. There had been stories about how Shao Wan had crushed the young man’s spirit after taking him hostage, but he had always known that was not true. A broken man did not look like Cheng Yin had looked back then. Mo Yuan had always refused to listen to rumors about Shao Wan’s male harem, but people’s imaginations had run particularly wild about the scandalous relations between her and Qing Jiang’s son. It still angered Mo Yuan to think about it.
“Yes, that Cheng Yin.” Dijun added after watching Mo Yuan scowl. “I hear Demon Ladies go crazy over his good looks. It so happens that we have a chance to meet him - the White Rock Festival in the Western Water Kingdom, which only takes place every 20’000 years. He is on the guest list. I will make sure we get an invitation for our Demon Goddess, too. You already have an invitation, Mo Yuan - and you should go, seeing how you used Prince Die Yong’s body to house you. Oh, and your jilted bride will attend - a perfect opportunity for you to renegotiate your wedding.”
For someone like Mo Yuan, who had no wish to go to these kind of gatherings at the best of times, this sounded very much like the sort of trial you wished on your worst enemy. But if this was what he had to do to reassure himself the Demon Goddess was safe, he would do it without hesitation.
Chapter 15