The garden received them the way it always received him.

Instantly aware.

The pleasure palace’s garden — open to the sky, ringed by the palace’s outer walls, the jade holders still burning their slow incense along the stone pathways, the lanterns lit in the trees even in daylight because the trees had learned to keep them lit — was not empty.

It was never empty.

The Amazonian women were nearest the garden’s center path.

Dozen of them, thick-limbed, their tribal dresses doing what tribal dresses always did — covering the minimum with the maximum confidence, the fabric so tight across their chests that every nipple was outlined through it like something trying to make an argument, the skirts so short that standing still was already an invitation and bending forward was a declaration.

No panties.

This was not an oversight.

Their thick asses — full, heavy, the kind of cultivated density that came from years of warrior body refinement and looked like it — swelled the backs of those skirts into shapes that the fabric was clearly losing an argument with.

They turned when the group arrived.

As one.

Their eyes found him immediately, the way eyes find the thing they’ve been oriented toward even before the conscious mind has caught up.

"Lord."

The word from a dozen throats simultaneously, with the particular warmth of women who have been waiting and are not pretending they haven’t been.

They bowed.

Not the cultivator’s formal bow — spine straight, head inclined, the gesture of a peer acknowledging a peer.

Hip first.

Each one turning, bending forward at the waist, both hands on their knees, the short skirts riding up past the point of relevance, the full curves of their asses presented to him in a row like an argument that did not require words.

Pussies visible from behind.

Some with neat dark curls. Some shaved clean, the lips plump and already slightly flushed with the simple proximity of his arrival. The skin between their thighs already carrying the particular shine of bodies that had been thinking about this moment before he appeared.

The catkin women came from the garden’s east side.

Their clan colors — the greys and creams and amber-browns of the various bloodlines — moving through the lantern light as they bowed in the same way, the same hip-first declaration, their tails coming up with the automatic honesty of cat anatomy.

Each tail lifted, curled up and over, revealing the twitching of what it usually covered — the small, tight holes, the soft fur-framed pussies beneath, the anal of each one contracting once in the excitement of his arrival like a tiny involuntary hello.

Some clean.

Some with fine soft hair, the same color as their tails.

All of them flushed.

All of them waiting.

Tianlong looked down the row of them.

The shaved and the hairy and the neat and the flushed and the twitching and the already-wet.

Dozens.

All of it presented for him like a selection he was being invited to make.

He looked for approximately three seconds.

Then he chuckled.

And threw the butterfly.

It hit the garden stone and shattered outward — not like broken glass, like broken darkness, the void fragments scattering and dissolving — and from the center of it, Chulteka arrived.

Not gracefully.

On her hands and knees, the transition from butterfly-void to garden stone being the kind of transition that prioritizes delivery over comfort, her naked body hitting the garden path with the momentum of someone who has been compressed for travel and is now being decompressed in a hurry.

She was upright in an instant.

Three centuries of reflex.

"I will KILL—"

The hand came from her left.

Kira.

Tribal warrior, blind grey eyes, the body of someone whose cultivation had been conducted entirely through physical combat and showed every year of it — grabbed Chulteka’s wrist mid-reach, pivoted her weight, and twisted.

The ankle went with the wrist.

Not broken — Kira knew exactly where broken was and had stopped precisely before it — but wrong, the joint loaded in a direction it was not built for, and Chulteka went down with the involuntary urgency of a leg that has stopped cooperating.

"GHKK—"

She was already moving to recover.

The three cat queens arrived.

Crimson and grey, their hair in the combined colors of the royal tiger bloodlines, their bodies carrying the queen’s body cultivation — denser than the standard catkin, the refinement of a lineage that had been cultivating for three hundred years before Chulteka was born — and they came down on her from three directions.

One on each arm.

One across her back.

Chulteka pressed up.

All three of them lurched.

The queen on her back slid sideways. The two on her arms were lifted — their feet leaving the stone, their combined weight not enough to anchor her, her vitality-thief cultivation’s physical output overwhelming the queens’ positional advantage.

The queens exerted.

Every line of their bodies visible — the straining of arms, the bracing of feet finding new purchase on the stone, the tails going flat and rigid with effort.

Still moving. Barely.

They looked at him.

He was looking at them.

At Kira, whose blind eyes were angled toward him with the uncanny accuracy of someone who has never needed eyes for this.

At the three queens, their crimson-grey hair scattered across their faces from the exertion, their slave collars catching the garden light, their tails still somehow wiggling at the tips despite the fact that every other muscle they had was currently committed to containing one very angry demonic cultivator.

"Oh," he said.

The warmth in his voice was genuine.

"Long time."

The queens — still pressing — somehow found the ability to communicate through the expression of three women doing serious physical work.

You left us, the expression said.

And you’re calling it long time.

"It does not matter," Kira said.

Her blind eyes finding his face with the comfortable accuracy of long familiarity.

"Husband."

The word entirely level.

The slave collar at her throat catching light as she spoke.

One queen — the eldest, the crimson heavier in her hair — pressed Chulteka’s arm into the stone and looked at him over her shoulder with the expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and has chosen the single most effective word.

"You left," she said.

Her tail wiggled.

The wiggle was involuntary.

She was pretending it wasn’t happening.

Chulteka chose this moment.

"I WILL—"

"Torture her," he said.

The word landed and the garden moved.

The queens, who had been exerting, shifted — the specific reorganization of women who have been given a task they find satisfying.

The Amazonian women, who had been in their presentation row, straightened up and turned around with the cooperative efficiency of people who have done this before and have preferences about technique.

The catkin women’s tails went from welcoming to interested.

The chains arrived.

From storage somewhere in the palace walls — the chains the pleasure palace kept for reasons that had accumulated over the duration of Tianlong’s residence — brought by catkin hands, the links heavy, cultivator-grade, the kind that held things that didn’t want to be held.

The log arrived next.

A timber post, rounded, the surface worn smooth from use, the top edge narrowed to a ridge — not sharp, not meant to cut, meant to press, and the geometry of the ridge told anyone familiar with its purpose exactly how it was meant to be used.

They planted it in the garden stone.

The throne was already there.

It was always there — the garden’s central seat, carved stone with silk across it, the kind of seat that had been placed for someone who received things while seated.

He sat.